I believe that getting good at habit formation is one of the most effective, high-leverage skills you can build. Almost any other skill or behavior follows from habits and so if you can understand how you build and fail to build and break and fail to break habits you can multiply your efforts in every […]
Author: Joe Hovde
Analyzing Twitter recommendation threads in R
There are a lot of high-quality recommendations floating around the internet. But these recommendations are mostly unstructured and can be difficult to internalize. One of my favorite applications of data analysis is structuring, aggregating and visualizing recommendations. I have gotten a lot of personal value out of it (every book from the Twenty Minute VC […]
Why Won’t I Buy a Beer on an Airplane?
I was thinking about buying a beer on a flight the other day. While I was pondering buying it or sticking to ginger ale, I noticed that I felt guilty about spending the money. It felt like a superfluous expense. I started to wonder why that was, especially when I often will have a drink […]
Predictions for 2019
I have seen lots of predictions about 2019 and I’ve enjoyed reading them. I’m not convinced that there’s much value in making macro predictions but it seems like fun and will be interesting to look back on in a year so I will make some of my own. I would love to hear feedback on […]
Learning Spanish with R and Tableau: The Most Common Spanish Words Visualized
I am trying to learn a bit of Spanish very quickly. I’m going to Peru in a few months and I think it would be fun to see how much I can learn for that trip. I have never formally studied Spanish but am familiar with Romance languages and so I feel like I’m learning […]
Square’s Cash App strategy
When you hear about a business on a podcast 30 or 40 times, you start to wonder about its business model. When I first heard about the Cash App, it seemed like a Lyft to Venmo’s Uber: a viable alternative, but a clear market follower. But Square (Cash App’s parent company) keeps adding new features […]
AI, China, and Apple’s weakness
I keep hearing about the astonishing pace of innovation in China. I’ve seen lots of tweets like this one, and they leave me feeling nervous but deeply curious about what will come of the Chinese tech explosion. What I learned from 5 weeks in Beijing + Shanghai: – startup creation + velocity dwarfs anything in […]
One Sentence Takeaways from Sixteen Books
I often wonder how much I retain when I read. I’ll think about a book a lot while I’m reading it, and for the next month or so afterwords, but then largely forget about it. There are a few books I think about a lot, even years afterward (The Black Swan, The Power of Habit […]
What are the Most Common Settings for Best-Selling Novels?
I was recently wandering a bookstore, looking through new arrivals in Fiction. I came upon a book with a summary that was something along the lines of, “a young woman finds herself thrown into the Upper East Side aristocracy, and must navigate this strange new world, where not all is at it seems.” I laughed, […]
Cognitive Biases in Apartment Hunting
I’m looking for an apartment and while it has been fun, it’s frustrating how irrational it makes me feel. Some of the irrationality has come from tactics used by the realtors; some of it has come purely from my brain. Here are some of the tactics I’ve noticed realtors using. Reciprocity effect: At each complex I’ve […]