Nicholas Dwork

Palettes should be first class functionality provided by the operating system for any program.

Everything should be statically linked. Dynamic linking is idiotic

This is truly unfortunate: In 2022, JetBlue had agreed to merge with Spirit Airlines in a $3.8 billion transaction. This was intended to end Spirit's imminent bankruptcy and employ the majority of Spirit's 17,000 employees. One year later, in 2023, the US Department of Justice sued to block the merger, saying it would reduce competition and drive up fares. Fast forward another 2 years to today, and Spirit has officially gone bankrupt, ceased operations, and 17,000 people are now unemployed. And, tens of thousands of Spirit passengers are now "stranded." The worst part? The "reduced competition" that the DOJ thought they were avoiding by blocking the transaction has only gotten worse. There quite literally is no competition in the space anymore. This will go down as one of the biggest transactional failures in US history.

Stop voting for California Democrats. They completely rule the state.

"Blue cities are radical hellscapes that can't fix crime." Counterpoint: Baltimore. Baltimore had 334 murders in 2022. Last year it had 133, the lowest since 1977. The turning point was that voters defenestrated a Soros-backed prosecutor Marilyn Mosby who averaged 333 homicides a year across eight years and declined to use mandatory minimum sentences. (She was later convicted of mortgage fraud, so there's that too.) Her replacement, Ivan Bates, ran on the Democratic ticket with a simple message: repeat violent offenders belong in prison. Maryland law already allowed five years with no parole for convicted felons caught carrying a gun, but Mosby never used it. Bates used it a lot. In just two years, his office sent more than 2K repeat violent offenders to prison, double his predecessor's TOTAL. The city paired that with a precision intervention program that identified the small number of people driving most of the violence, which led to 631 arrests (94% haven't reoffended). Police also seized 2,480 firearms last year alone, including hundreds of ghost guns, while maintaining a 64% homicide clearance rate. When shooters know they'll get caught and actually prosecuted, behavior changes. Sandtown-Winchester, once the most violent neighborhoods in the city, just went a year without a killing! Carjackings (-51%) and robberies (-24%) are also down. Baltimore didn't change demographics, or its culture, its rules, or much of anything else in those years. It simply voted in a new Democratic prosecutor, who decided the city needed to finally put violent criminals in prison.

A mathematician who shared an office with Claude Shannon at Bell Labs gave one lecture in 1986 that explains why some people win Nobel Prizes and other equally smart people spend their whole lives doing forgettable work. His name was Richard Hamming. He won the Turing Award. He invented error-correcting codes that made modern computing possible. And he spent 30 years at Bell Labs sitting in a cafeteria at lunch watching which scientists became legendary and which ones faded into nothing. In March 1986, he walked into a Bellcore auditorium in front of 200 researchers and told them exactly what he had seen. Here's the framework that has been quoted by every serious scientist for the last 40 years. His opening line landed like a punch. He said most scientists he worked with at Bell Labs were just as smart as the Nobel Prize winners. Just as hardworking. Just as credentialed. And yet at the end of a 40-year career, one group had changed entire fields and the other group was forgotten by the time they retired. He wanted to know what the difference actually was. And he said it wasn't luck. It wasn't IQ. It was a specific set of habits that almost nobody is willing to follow. The first habit was the one that hurts the most to hear. He said most scientists deliberately avoid the most important problem in their field because the odds of failure are too high. They pick a safe adjacent problem, solve it cleanly, publish it, and move on. And because they never swing at the hard problem, they never hit it. He said if you do not work on an important problem, it is unlikely you will do important work. That is not a motivational line. That is a logical one. The second habit was about doors. Literal doors. He noticed that the scientists at Bell Labs who kept their office doors closed got more done in the short term because they had no interruptions. But the scientists who kept their doors open got more done over a career. The open-door scientists were interrupted constantly. They also absorbed every new idea passing through the hallway. Ten years in, they were working on problems the closed-door scientists did not even know existed. The third habit was inversion. When Bell Labs refused to give him the team of programmers he wanted, Hamming sat with the rejection for weeks. Then he flipped the question. Instead of asking for programmers to write the programs, he asked why machines could not write the programs themselves. That single inversion pushed him into the frontier of computer science. He said the pattern repeats everywhere. What looks like a defect, if you flip it correctly, becomes the exact thing that pushes you ahead of everyone else. The fourth habit was the one that hit me the hardest. He said knowledge and productivity compound like interest. Someone who works 10 percent harder than you does not produce 10 percent more over a career. They produce twice as much. The gap doesn't add. It multiplies. And it compounds silently for years before anyone notices. He finished the lecture with a line I have never been able to shake. He said Pasteur's famous quote is right. Luck favors the prepared mind. But he meant it literally. You don't hope for luck. You engineer the conditions where luck can land on you. Open doors. Important problems. Inverted questions. Compounded hours. Those are not traits. Those are choices you make every single day. The transcript has been sitting on the University of Virginia's computer science website for almost 30 years. The video is free on YouTube. Stripe Press reprinted the full lectures as a book in 2020 and Bret Victor wrote the foreword. Hamming died in 1998. He gave his final lecture a few weeks before. He was 82. The lecture that explains why some careers become legendary and others disappear is still free. Most people who could benefit from it will never open it.