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π Founder's Syndrome
Founder's syndrome (also founderitis) is the difficulty faced by organizations where one or more founders maintain disproportionate power and influence following the effective initial establishment of the project, leading to a wide range of problems for the organization. The passion and charisma of the founder(s), sources of the initial creativity and productivity of the organization, become limiting or destructive factors. The syndrome occurs in both non-profit and for-profit organizations. It may simply limit further growth and success of the project, or it may lead to bitter factionalism and divisions as the scale of demands made on the organization increases, or it may result in outright failure. There are ways in which a founder or organization can respond and grow beyond this situation.
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- "Founder's Syndrome" | 2020-05-25 | 70 Upvotes 66 Comments
π Bloom's 2 sigma problem
Bloom's 2 sigma problem refers to an educational phenomenon observed by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom and initially reported in 1984 in the journal Educational Researcher. Bloom found that the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students who learn via conventional instructional methods β that is, "the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class". Additionally, the variation of the students' achievement changed: "about 90% of the tutored students ... attained the level of summative achievement reached by only the highest 20%" of the control class. Bloom's graduate students J. Anania and A. J. Burke conducted studies of this effect at different grade levels and in different schools, observing students with "great differences in cognitive achievement, attitudes, and academic self-concept".
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- "Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem" | 2023-02-25 | 266 Upvotes 130 Comments
- "Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem" | 2020-08-24 | 54 Upvotes 15 Comments
- "Bloom's 2 sigma problem" | 2018-10-01 | 57 Upvotes 18 Comments
π Curry's paradox: "If this sentence is true, then Santa Claus exists."
Curry's paradox is a paradox in which an arbitrary claim F is proved from the mere existence of a sentence C that says of itself "If C, then F", requiring only a few apparently innocuous logical deduction rules. Since F is arbitrary, any logic having these rules proves everything. The paradox may be expressed in natural language and in various logics, including certain forms of set theory, lambda calculus, and combinatory logic.
The paradox is named after the logician Haskell Curry. It has also been called LΓΆb's paradox after Martin Hugo LΓΆb, due to its relationship to LΓΆb's theorem.
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- "Curry's paradox: "If this sentence is true, then Santa Claus exists."" | 2008-05-01 | 23 Upvotes 12 Comments
π Dude,Where's My Donations? Wikimedia gives another $1M to non-Wikimedia projects
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- "Dude,Where's My Donations? Wikimedia gives another $1M to non-Wikimedia projects" | 2023-08-18 | 128 Upvotes 117 Comments
π Wikipedia: Long-Term Abuse
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- "Wikipedia's LTA (Long Term Abuse) List" | 2025-04-29 | 30 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "Wikipedia: Long-Term Abuse" | 2022-07-17 | 195 Upvotes 86 Comments
π Hacker Koan
The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities, including Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Carnegie Mellon University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It was published in paperback form in 1983 as The Hacker's Dictionary (edited by Guy Steele), revised in 1991 as The New Hacker's Dictionary (ed. Eric S. Raymond; third edition published 1996).
The concept of the file began with the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) that came out of early PDP-1 and TX-0 hackers in the 1950s, where the term hacker emerged and the ethic, philosophies and some of the nomenclature emerged.
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- "Hacker Koan" | 2014-03-23 | 15 Upvotes 15 Comments
- "Hacker Koan" | 2010-07-31 | 50 Upvotes 7 Comments
π Kee Bird
The Kee Bird was a United States Army Air Forces Boeing B-29 Superfortress, serial 45-21768, of the 46th Reconnaissance Squadron, that became marooned after making an emergency landing in northwest Greenland during a secret Cold War spying mission on 21 February 1947. While the entire crew was safely evacuated after spending three days in the isolated Arctic tundra, the aircraft itself was left at the landing site. It lay there undisturbed until 1994, when a privately funded mission was launched to repair and return it. During the attempted recovery, a fire broke out, resulting in the destruction and loss of the airframe on the ground.
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- "Kee Bird" | 2015-09-28 | 28 Upvotes 2 Comments
π Perpetual Stew
A perpetual stew, also known as hunter's pot or hunter's stew, is a pot into which whatever one can find is placed and cooked. The pot is never or rarely emptied all the way, and ingredients and liquid are replenished as necessary. The concept is often a common element in descriptions of medieval inns. Foods prepared in a perpetual stew have been described as being flavorful due to the manner in which the foodstuffs blend together, in which the flavor may improve with age.
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- "Perpetual Stew" | 2025-02-06 | 53 Upvotes 63 Comments
- "Perpetual Stew" | 2024-03-27 | 14 Upvotes 5 Comments
- "Perpetual Stew" | 2022-03-13 | 18 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "Perpetual Stew" | 2019-08-16 | 13 Upvotes 7 Comments
π Datasaurus dozen β Different datasets with the same descriptive statistics
The Datasaurus dozen comprises thirteen data sets that have nearly identical simple descriptive statistics to two decimal places, yet have very different distributions and appear very different when graphed. It was inspired by the smaller Anscombe's quartet that was created in
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- "Datasaurus dozen β Different datasets with the same descriptive statistics" | 2024-12-14 | 14 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Apple owns the world's largest hedge fund
Braeburn Capital Inc. is an asset management company based in Reno, Nevada and a subsidiary of Apple Inc. Its offices are located at 6900 S. McCarran Boulevard in Reno.
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- "Apple owns the world's largest hedge fund" | 2016-09-21 | 16 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "How Apple avoids paying taxes in CA" | 2010-06-28 | 110 Upvotes 118 Comments