May 2012
4 posts
If Money Doesn't Make You Happy, Consider Time |... →
(via Instapaper)
1 tag
The only (and obvious) takeaway is to build an app that delivers long-term value. Something that people use every day… People are less forgiving of apps that don’t deliver long-term value. Don’t worry about getting featured. That’s a second-order effect. Getting featured can get asses in the seats. But it’s no good if those asses leave.
April 2012
9 posts
Your parents don't want what is best for you.
Your parents don’t want what is best for you. They want what is good for you, which isn’t always the same thing. There is a natural instinct to protect our children from risk and discomfort, and therefore to urge safe choices. Theodore Roosevelt—soldier, explorer, president—once remarked, “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.” Great quote, but...
1 tag
“Competition can make for better learning and education. Sometimes credentials do...”
Be Hated
Be hated.
It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.
One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s...
How to Fail: Mark Pincus
I’m sometimes called a serial entrepreneur, but that’s only because, before Zynga (ZNGA), I failed to create a sustainable company. After starting two companies in the ’90s, I had a social networking startup, Tribe.net, in 2003. One of the things I try to instill at Zynga is to fail fast, look at the data, and move on, and at Tribe I failed to do that. We came up with ideas purely based on...
“I think failing is the best way to keep you grounded, curious, and humble....”
– Mark Pincus: How to Fail
1 tag
The Two American Economies
There are two interrelated American economies. On the one hand, there is the globalized tradable sector — companies that have to compete with everybody everywhere. These companies, with the sword of foreign competition hanging over them, have become relentlessly dynamic and very (sometimes brutally) efficient.
On the other hand, there is a large sector of the economy that does not face this...
“Web 2.0 Ends With Data Monopolies”
March 2012
9 posts
Getting Older
“It’s harder to remember ‘what’s really important’. I don’t just feel lucky just to be alive and happy. I want more. I think about what I don’t have. I treat everything in my work life with a seriousness and anxiety that’s not appropriate to the real stakes involved.”
Mad Men, Honestly So
“Mad Men” distinguished itself by depicting not just the fashion of the 1960s but also the attitudes that are now so unfashionable. The show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, found a sly, satirical way to revive the crudest forms of sexism and prejudice that were typical then but are nowadays carefully airbrushed out of television.
Old attitudes about race in particular are so distasteful that it’s...
An elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value. It’s been said that what those tests really...
1 tag
February 2012
19 posts
Kickstarter On Track To Be More Important than the...
Kickstarter is having an amazing year, even by the standards of other white hot Web startup companies, and more is yet to come.
One of the company’s three co-founders, Yancey Strickler, said that Kickstarter is on track to distribue over $150 million dollars to its users’ projects in 2012, or more than entire fiscal year 2012 budget for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), which was $146...
Over Regulated America
Complexity costs money. Sarbanes-Oxley, a law aimed at preventing Enron-style frauds, has made it so difficult to list shares on an American stockmarket that firms increasingly look elsewhere or stay private. America’s share of initial public offerings fell from 67% in 2002 (when Sarbox passed) to 16% last year, despite some benign tweaks to the law. A study for the Small Business Administration,...
“Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you...”
– http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.
It’s wrong to...
Smarter Woman = Better Sex
In a forthcoming paper from the Council on Contemporary Families, Oriel Sullivan, a researcher at Oxford University, reports that the higher a woman’s human capital in relation to her husband — measured by her educational resources and earnings potential — the more help with housework she actually gets from her mate. The degree to which housework is shared is now one of the two most important...
Trend: Men Are Starting to Like Educated Women
Studying national surveys on mate preferences,David M. Buss, a psychologist at the University of Texas, and his colleagues found that in 1956, education and intelligence were together ranked 11th among the things men sought in a mate. Much more important to them was finding a good cook and housekeeper who was refined, neat and had a pleasing disposition. By 1967, education and intelligence had...
“Almost anything you build on the web has already been tried in one form or...”
2 tags
Human Learning, Machine Learning
The fundamental mode of learning of human beings is experiential. Book learning is a layer on top of that. Most knowledge, especially that having to do with physical, perceptual, and emotional experience is not explicit, never written down. It is tacit. We cannot say all we know in words or how we know it. But if human knowledge, especially knowledge about human experience, is largely tacit, i.e.,...
1 tag
The New Renaissance
Silicon Valley is more of a state of mind than a physical location. It has no large monuments, magnificent buildings or ancient heritage. There are no tours of companies or venture capital firms. From Santa Clara to South San Francisco it’s 45 miles of one bedroom community after another. Yet what’s been occurring for the last 50 years within this tight cluster of suburban towns is nothing short...
1 tag
Humanoid: Accuracy and Fraud on mTurk (Case Study) →
gethumanoid:
Through algorithmic analysis, Humanoid’s software identified 61 workers (8% of the workforce) engaged in fraud and banned them as a result. Once fraudsters were weeded out, mTurk workers generated 78% “per data field” accuracy.
Through applying various quality assurance and improvement techniques, Humanoid ultimately delivered an accuracy of 98% to Fooducate.
1 tag
Organization Man, 2012
This seems to be a moment of fervent protest movements that are ultimately vague and ineffectual.
We can all theorize why the intense desire for change has so far produced relatively few coherent recipes for change. Maybe people today are simply too deferential. Raised to get college recommendations, maybe they lack the oppositional mentality necessary for revolt. Maybe people are too...
January 2012
8 posts
“For tech news, I’ve tried pretty much everything new that comes along, and...”
“Foxconn has managed to make a leviathan manufacturing company as nimble and...”
– Sarah Lacy,
Why China Wins
In Support of SOPA
SOPA and PROTECT-IP offer hope in returning to the golden age of telecommunications, and to the days before the Information Superhighway polluted the online culture with this domain name nonsense. Let the Domain Name System a natural death and prepare yourself for the Internet Protocol Number (IPN) renaissance. All you need to do is start a notebook that lists electronic resource names and their...
Humanoid: "Return of the Human Computers," The... →
gethumanoid:
“Over the past few years, human computing has been reborn. The new generation of human computers carry out different tasks, but they mirror their predecessors in many other ways. They are being drafted in to perform tasks that computers cannot. They are employed in large numbers and are…
“One of the things I try to do when I build software is to find a balance between...”
– Caterina Fake for GigaOm (via cacioppo)
“Building a profitable small-market company is difficult and carries a high risk...”
– http://gigaom.com/2012/01/07/desantis-startups-crime-boss/
December 2011
23 posts
