May 2013
14 posts
“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
“This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and...”
– Yahoo! to Acquire Tumblr
“My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son...”
– Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the founding father of Dubai (via maxistentialist)
“Full verification is the next step. Airbnb’s attempt to push all 4m of its users...”
– Inside Business: Online anonymity to be confined to virtual history - FT.com, via @welovebold (via new-aesthetic)
Experience: I was swallowed by a hippo →
Paul Templer: ‘There was no transition at all, no sense of approaching danger. It was as if I had suddenly gone blind and deaf’
Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Start-Up Machine →
At an entrepreneurial boot camp in Silicon Valley, they’re churning out billion-dollar ideas – whether we need them or not.
Manso: Companies and Countries →
From Kate Losse’s excellent critique of Lean In:
I worked at Facebook from 2005 to 2010 in a series of roles culminating in a position as Zuckerberg’s speechwriter, and had an opportunity to observe the development of Facebook both as a social media platform and as what it increasingly aims to become: a global leader on par with nations. “Companies over countries,” Zuckerberg often said in...
WatchThe Siva Cycle Atom on Kickstarter
A lightweight generator to charge your phone, lights, and removable battery pack as you ride. Pedal power by you, for now or later.
April 2013
18 posts
Coding, Fast and Slow: Developers and the... →
by Dan Milstein
“In Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman explains a great deal of psychology as the interplay between two “systems” which govern our thoughts: System I and System II. My far-too-brief summary would be “System II does careful, rational, analytical thinking, and System I does quick, heuristic, pattern matching thinking”.
And, crucially, it’s as if evolution designed the whole...
“There is no difference, from the attacker’s point of view, between gross...”
– Maciej Ceglowski on security
The snake singularity has arrived.
“There are nine or so principles to work in a world like this:
Resilience...”
– Joi Ito on Resiliency, Risk, and a Good Compass
“You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley...”
– Steve Jobs
“You are what you think about all day.”
– Allen Ginsberg
March 2013
26 posts
“I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out...”
– Jack London
On Being a Senior Engineer →
by John Allspaw
Dizzying but invisible depth →
by Jean-Baptiste Quéru
“Once you start to understand how our modern devices work and how they’re created, it’s impossible to not be dizzy about the depth of everything that’s involved, and to not be in awe about the fact that they work at all, when Murphy’s law says that they simply shouldn’t possibly work.
For non-technologists, this is all a black box. That...
“Start where you are,
Use what you have,
Do what you can.”
WatchAtoms for Peace – Ingenue
David Foster Wallace's 2005 Kenyon Commencement... →
youmightfindyourself:
The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.
By way of...
The Virtues of "Staying Up Late" by Michael Beirut →
youmightfindyourself:
One week after I graduated from college in Ohio, I moved to New York with my new wife Dorothy and began working as a design assistant at Vignelli Associates. It was 1980, and I was the lowest employee on the totem pole. Working in a design office in those days was different. I never touched a computer. As I recall, the office didn’t even have a computer. In fact, we didn’t...
“The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that...”
– Nikola Tesla, “Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World” in Modern Mechanics and Inventions (July 1934)
“Capitalism means that there is much more research into male baldness than there...”
– Bill Gates
Just a bit tired of the Build a Clone in a Day HN... →
tonyhschu:
tl:dr; Cloning the engineering/code is not the same as cloning the value provided by a network, but you knew that already, right?
I mean, it’s awesome that with off-the-shelf components that you can build an AirBnB-like app in a day. It’s wonderful, and it is important that the community makes the tools known. It is also wonderful that our tools have advanced so much that such feats...
