Random Musings

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140824235337-22330283-the-three-qualities-of-people-i-most-enjoy-working-with

"You can't legislate against failure focus on fast detection and response" - Chris Pinkham

What then is this missing link for innovative creativity and accelerated success? Musk, some of the most brilliant minds of all-time — Aristotle, Euclid, Thomas Edison, Feynman and Nikola Tesla — use this missing link for accelerated learning, solving difficult problems and creating great work in their lifetime. This missing link has little to do with how hard they work. It has everything to do with how they  think. In layman’s terms, first principles thinking is basically the practice of actively questioning every assumption you think you  ‘know’  about a given problem or scenario — and then creating new knowledge and solutions from scratch. Almost like a newborn baby. On the flip side, reasoning by analogy is building knowledge and solving problems based on prior assumptions, beliefs and widely held ‘best practices’ approved by majority of people. STEP 1: Identify and define your current assumptions STEP 2: Breakdown the problem into its fundamental ...

Source:  https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/understanding-how-design-thinking-lean-and-agile-work-together

Story of the Ether Thief "Rather than moving bitcoin from one user to another, the ethereum blockchain hosts fully functioning computer programs called smart contracts—essentially agreements that enforce themselves by means of code rather than courts. That means they can automate the life cycle of bond payments, say, or ensure that pharmaceutical companies can authenticate the sources of their drugs. Yet smart contracts are also new and mostly untested. Like all software, they are only as reliable as their coding—and Gün was pretty sure he’d found a big problem. In an email sent to one of his graduate students, Philip Daian, at 7:30 p.m., Gün noted that the smart contract he was looking at might have a problem—on line 666. (They say the devil is in the details.) Gün feared the bug could allow a hacker to make unlimited ATM-like withdrawals from the millions, even if the attacker, who’d have needed to be an inves...