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Weekly Roundup
My favorite links this week: An excellent post on how Eden has pivoted several times Watch a zygote become a tadpole in 6 minutes Have empathy. Startups are hard. How should we think about, and talk about, wealth? James Hamilton (of AWS): Collision at Sea: USS Fitzgerald A harmful fallacy: affirming the consequent HBR: The…More
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Bill & Melinda Gates on the Future
When we’re feeling overwhelmed by negative headlines, we remind ourselves that none of us has the right to sit back and expect that the world is going to keep getting better. We have a responsibility to do everything we can to push it in that direction. From their 2019 Annual letter (read it!)More
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Weekly Roundup
My favorite links this week: VCs are less amibitous than PE or hedge fund managers I agree with this take on Privacy vs. Control Comparing Super Mario Odyssey vs. Zelda Breath of the Wild Laws and Sausages: How and Why of the electoral college Fred Wilson on Capitalism and Inequality Starting a new startup is…More
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Food: SF and South Lake Tahoe
A friend sent me an excellent article this morning entitled Why SF Restaurants are Suffocating. It’s great. You should read it. I think over the next several years, these folks will realize the opportunity to bring their skills out of the SF pressure cooker to more accessible places, without really sacrificing much. I moved away…More
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Weekly Roundup
My favorite links from this week: Steve Jobs Didn’t Fun read: Anonymous random thoughts sent to this twitter user What happened to Apple? Some UIUC engineers have hacked photosynthesis Looking ahead: what to watching Russian in 2019 A cool blog post about building menus in iOS for complex apps How to Fuel for a Solo,…More
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Weekly Roundup
My favorite links from this week: Semil Shah on Opportunity amid Volatility Highly recommended: Ray Dalio’s excellent post on what’s happening in the markets right now and how it’s related to politics This made my eyebrows go up but it makes sense: Why the Democrats Should Offer Trump a full pardon Populism is not good…More
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SpaceX and Bureaucracy
In November, NASA announced it would be conducting a “cultural assessment study” of SpaceX and Boeing to ensure the companies were meeting NASA’s requirements of “adherence to a drug-free environment.” The Washington Post reported that officials had indicated “the review was prompted by the recent behavior of SpaceX’s founder, Elon Musk.” Boeing is good at…More
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Weekly Roundup
My favorite links from this week: “Our results reveal that biographies remain in our communicative memory the longest (20–30 years) and music the shortest (about 5.6 years).“ An excellent business case for adopting serverless architecture There’s a petrified jeffrey pine tree forest at the bottom of fallen leaf lake Remastered film footage of 1890s Paris We, the…More
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Beep generation
“No student argues from a position of strength anymore,” said Timothy Burke, 34, a history professor at Swarthmore College and the author, with his brother Kevin, of “Saturday Morning Fever,” about cartoons. “Nobody says, ‘I’m with the winner.’ There’s an atmosphere of neurotic cheerlessness on campuses. They all have a sense of their relative marginality.…More
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Weekly Roundup
My favorite links from this week: A comic explaining The Federalist Papers About the macOS Character Viewer ISIS is still around, but just barely I agree with the assessment that ElectronJS is a scourge A fairly brutal assessment of Elon Musk How hermit crabs line up from largest to smallest to exchange shells The “Waterfall”…More
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Antifragile
Stability is important for effective execution so providing stable environments is an admirable goal for leadership. But that only holds as long as the stability is genuine and not manufactured. In periods of heightened risk and uncertainty I find it much more effective to be earnest about the situation with the team and help them…More
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Weekly Roundup
My favorite links this week: In coworking, the market is diversifying, not consolidating. How commercial real estate has misunderstood coworking. Interesting post on the constancy of the rate of GDP growth Why don’t more cs professors use the results of cs education research? Tim Bray, now at Amazon, is working on a universal language of…More
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A new Cretacious, not a new normal
If we are to avoid coming to grief on the road to a New Cretaceous, this awareness needs to extend way beyond the geologists and biologists who have taught us where we came from and where, unless we change, we are headed. From We are heading for a New Cretaceous, not for a new normalMore
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Weekly Roundup
My favorite links from the week: Bill Gates weighs in on HBO’s Silicon Valley Socialism is really not a great idea Online learning is still growing at a rapid clip A day in the life of an indie coworking space manager Great piece on WeWork’s pivoting business model A massive crater hidden under the ice…More
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New Evidence on Fostering Productive Startup Communities
The research takes a case study approach, studying in extensive detail the startup community networks in Nairobi and Bangalore. To do this, the authors collected information on the individuals and organizations involved in the startup communities in each of these two cities, and mapped the relationships among them. The main result: Bangalore’s startup community is…More
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Weekly Roundup
My favorite links from this week: Li Jin: 5 Things to Look for to Make E-commerce Startups Work. I’d call these mostly common sense, but good to be reminded. Why one man votes no on ballot initiatives (this makes a lot of sense to me) Chevron Deference: Administrative Law (starts with a boring subject and…More
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Weekly Roundup
My favorite links this week: Why Design Patterns failed (and why you should care) The Suffocation of Democracy and Rock Bottom accurately, depressingly describe our politics today. I wonder how these will read in a decade. Walt Mossberg interview w/ Jeff Bezos (2016) – 1h20m An important difference between political views online vs. reality The tyranny of…More
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Weekly Roundup
My favorite links from this week: Upgrading GitHub from Rails 3.2 to 5.2 The Rise and Demise of RSS A video about how to accelerate a ping pong ball past the speed of sound (3m) An excellent collection of questions from Patrick Collison Slides from the Sorbet talk at Strangeloop (Ruby type checker from Stripe) Cloud…More
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Stripe Elements and Turbolinks 5
I was having a hell of a time getting Stripe Elements to work with Turbolinks 5, specifically the Turbolinks iOS wrapper. Hopefully others who see the same issues can benefit from what I learned. The symptoms were: Stripe Elements worked in the desktop browser, in mobile safari, but not in the Turbolinks-enabled iOS app What…More
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Steve Jobs on Education
These are from an excerpt from an interview Steve did in 1995, before he had sold NeXT to Apple, before his famous Apple turnaround. I’m a little surprised this interview isn’t more popular. Excerpted are my favorite quotes (nearly a transcript). Skip to the bottom for links to a video of the excerpt and the…More
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Weekly Roundup
Short week this week: Airbnb asks SEC to let it give hosts equity SSC: The Omnigenic Model As Metaphor For Life The NY government report on cryptocurrency exchanges (it’s long, if you want the synopsis just read the “Key Findings” section) Secret Service warns of surge in ATM wiretapping attacks Working my way through A Gentleman in…More
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Weekly Roundup
My favorite links from the week: Russian Cyberwarfare Is Much Worse Than You Think A layman’s primer to Activity Pub (with some hyperbole) A review of Shenzhen I/O (a new game) Fred Wilson on The unbundling of healthcare A bloomberg post about why China is not America’s next great enemy A neat 5m video about…More
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James Madison’s Nightmare
I think this might be my favorite article on the topic I’ve read, ever. My excerpts: Exacerbating all this political antagonism is the development that might distress Madison the most: media polarization, which has allowed geographically dispersed citizens to isolate themselves into virtual factions, communicating only with like-minded individuals and reinforcing shared beliefs. Far from…More
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Weekly Roundup
My favorite links from this week: The Global Middle Class A chilling description of future cyber warfare Aristotle’s Wheel Paradox NPR says that 2/3 of reported school shootings never happened Amazon responds to Bernie Sanders Amazing: Frank Klepacki Plays Redalert 1 2 & 3 On Guitar When travelling, avoid the algorithmic trap (I try to do this…More
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Gridlock
While reading Bureaucracy As Active Ingredient it struck me that there is a parallel here with the design of our federal government. The article essentially explains that the cost of working through a bureaucracy is part of the design of a system that requires a high cost. Makes sense. A different kind of cost perhaps better…More