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"This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 08:04:55 -0700

“This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties concerning Yahoo!’s proposed acquisition of Tumblr (including without limitation the statements contained in the quotations from management in this press release), as well as Yahoo!’s strategic and operational plans. Actual events or results may differ materially from those described in this press release due to a number of risks and uncertainties. The potential risks and uncertainties include, among others, the possibility that the transaction will not close or that the closing may be delayed; and that the anticipated benefits to Yahoo!, including projected growth in audience and traffic, and benefits to users and advertisers may not be realized.”

- Yahoo! to Acquire Tumblr

nevver: This is my favorite song

Fri, 17 May 2013 09:18:39 -0700

nevver:

This is my favorite song

"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover,..."

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:01:16 -0700

“My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.”

- 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 to show hard..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 01:14:48 -0700

“

Full verification is the next step. Airbnb’s attempt to push all 4m of its users to show hard evidence of who they are, like a passport or driver’s licence, is designed to give it a leg-up over less-trusted sites where ordinary people transact with strangers.

If Airbnb is right and people crave reassurance about real-world identity, a race to the top will follow. One of the early hopes of the internet visionaries – that the virtual world could exist separate from and in parallel to the real one – will have been disproved.

There are drawbacks to the pursuit of verification. One is that it stands to make the costs of online identity theft much greater. When verified accounts are hacked, the higher level of trust invested in them can make the costs all the greater – as when the officially sanctioned Twitter account of news service AP was taken over by a group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army.

Another potential drawback is the impact that the increase in verified traffic will have on the shrinking amount of truly anonymous communication. The ranks of the unknown will be made up largely of political dissidents, criminals and anyone paranoid about online surveillance. Particularly in politically repressive parts of the world, freedom of expression could get squeezed out along with other forms of illicit activity.

”

- Inside Business: Online anonymity to be confined to virtual history - FT.com, via @welovebold (via new-aesthetic)

Experience: I was swallowed by a hippo

Wed, 08 May 2013 11:02:20 -0700

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

Wed, 08 May 2013 10:56:00 -0700

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

Tue, 07 May 2013 23:49:00 -0700

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 meetings. “If you want to change the world, the best thing to do is start a company.” Thinking about it, I could see how this could work out: companies have potentially more money and fewer structuring rules than countries, while countries remain a respected model of social organization to which citizens feel loyalty.

From Henry Hansmann’s The Ownership of Enterprise:

[…]since a firm that has numerous owners must employ some form of collective choice mechanism through which those owners can exercise control, all such firms necessarily have a strongly governmental, or political, character. Examining the forms and performance of these collective choice mechanisms allows us to acquire important knowledge about political institutions in general. In fact, because collectively owned firms are so numerous and so varied, and because they are subject to the forces of market selection, for many purposes they provide a better means of studying political institutions than do the governmental entities that are the usual focus of work in political science.

While it might sound creepy for Zuckerberg to talk about “companies over countries,” I think it’s important to recognize the value of commercial firms as governing bodies. Commercial firms are significant drivers of innovation and culture, and their success depends upon their ability to organize people and direct those people’s efforts – and by people, I mean owners, managers, staff, suppliers, and customers. Getting such varied groups of people to act in concert is hard. Any student of public policy should look to companies for inspiration.

However, it’s equally important to recognize how any democratic country needs to differ from a company. Specifically, countries must – to borrow a phrase from Anil Dash – care about poor people. What’s more, they need to find compromises between groups that are entirely at odds with one another.

While companies play an important role in governance (whether they lobby for policy or not), and while they provide many useful examples of governing structures, it’s naive to think they can govern everyone.

The Siva Cycle Atom on Kickstarter A lightweight generator to...

Tue, 07 May 2013 15:27:00 -0700

The 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.

I’ll leave you with this jaw-dropping machine from Tom Donhou,...

Fri, 03 May 2013 08:18:05 -0700

I’ll leave you with this jaw-dropping machine from Tom Donhou, which he will be attempting to ride to 100mph using the huge 17inch diameter, 104-tooth chainring. (which has already propelled him to 60 mph on the open road).

Letter to JFK from Kurt Vonnegut

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:04:09 -0700

Letter to JFK from Kurt Vonnegut

Radical Cartography

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:01:53 -0700

Radical Cartography

nevver: Landscape Palettes

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:23:37 -0700

nevver:

Landscape Palettes

björk: hidden place (biophilia tour projection) (by bjorkchile)

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:40:27 -0700

björk: hidden place (biophilia tour projection) (by bjorkchile)

Coding, Fast and Slow: Developers and the Psychology of Overconfidence

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:12:07 -0700

Coding, Fast and Slow: Developers and the Psychology of Overconfidence:

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 thing with a key goal of keeping System II from having to do too much. Which makes plenty of sense from an evolutionary perspective — System II is slow as molasses, and incredibly costly, it should only be deployed in very, very rare situations. But you see the problem, no doubt: without thinking, how does your mind know when to invoke System II? From this perspective, many of the various “cognitive biases” of psychology make sense as elegant engineering solutions to a brutal real-world problem: how to apportion attention in real time.”

Photo

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 23:03:51 -0700

"There is no difference, from the attacker’s point of view, between gross and tiny errors. Both..."

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:58:21 -0700

“

There is no difference, from the attacker’s point of view, between gross and tiny errors. Both of them are equally exploitable. In at least three challenges, the mere fact of getting distinguishable error messages was enough to recover the entire message.

This lesson is very hard to internalize. In the real world, if you build a bookshelf and forget to tighten one of the screws all the way, it does not burn down your house

”

- Maciej Ceglowski on security

Video

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:06:02 -0700

Vincent Talleu has a passion for making bread.

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 10:24:00 -0700

Vincent Talleu has a passion for making bread.

cnrlw: Wired Space Photo of the Day: Enceladus is a Rocket Moon...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:46:33 -0700

cnrlw:

Wired Space Photo of the Day: Enceladus is a Rocket Moon http://bit.ly/ZGdsw9

The snake singularity has arrived.

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:44:00 -0700

The snake singularity has arrived.

View Source

"This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties..."

nevver: This is my favorite song

"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover,..."

"Full verification is the next step. Airbnb’s attempt to push all 4m of its users to show hard..."

Experience: I was swallowed by a hippo

Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Start-Up Machine

Manso: Companies and Countries

The Siva Cycle Atom on Kickstarter A lightweight generator to...

I’ll leave you with this jaw-dropping machine from Tom Donhou,...

Letter to JFK from Kurt Vonnegut

Radical Cartography

nevver: Landscape Palettes

björk: hidden place (biophilia tour projection) (by bjorkchile)

Coding, Fast and Slow: Developers and the Psychology of Overconfidence

Photo

"There is no difference, from the attacker’s point of view, between gross and tiny errors. Both..."

Video

Vincent Talleu has a passion for making bread.

cnrlw: Wired Space Photo of the Day: Enceladus is a Rocket Moon...

The snake singularity has arrived.

Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Start-Up Machine