N ewly elected Democrats in the House of Representatives spent June 27 with the sinking feeling that it was happening again: Their party was going to cave to President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on a viscerally emotional issue. Just after a searing photo circulated of a…

“Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to. Alice: I don’t much care where. Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go. Alice: …So long as I get somewhere. Cheshire Cat: Oh, you’re sure to…

There’s countless information on search ranking – creating ranking functions , and their factors such as PageRank and text . Query rewriting is less conspicuous but equally important. Our experience at eBay is that query rewriting has the potential to deliver as much improvement to search as core…

I struggle to descend the stairs leading to the sandy beach at Half Moon Bay, California, awkwardly hefting the 60-pound solar-powered boat SeaCharger atop my shoulder . Amid the numerous “what-the-heck-is-that?!” stares of the beachgoers, I perform some last-minute checks of the boat’s propeller…

Hatewatch How the Myth of the "Irish slaves" Became a Favorite Meme of Racists Online Propaganda is cheap to produce on the web. And a purposeful lie in an age of "viral content" not only can race around the world in a day but resurface time and time again with surprising resiliency. Such is the…

Photo by John Sciulli/Getty Images for Budweiser "Really good cooks never learn how to be great chefs. The road is littered with bodies and bodies of great, great cooks who could never become great chefs. Cooking is about failure — over and over and over again. ... For me , the right amount of…

April 21, 2016: Why the Unicorn Financing Market Just Became Dangerous…For All Involved In February of last year, Fortune magazine writers Erin Griffith and Dan Primack declared 2015 “ The Age of the Unicorns ” noting — “Fortune counts more than 80 startups that have been valued at $1 billion or…

The Consumer Electronics Show, universally known as CES, is a riot of technology. Held annually in the bleak Nevada desert town of Las Vegas, it is a great blinking din, jammed with screens, speakers, automobiles, whirling drones, blooping robots, e-cigs and e-cigs and ever more e-cigs, plus some…

Don’t use Go’s default HTTP client Writing Go programs that talk to services over HTTP is easy and fun. I’ve written numerous API client packages and I find it an enjoyable task. However, I have run into a pitfall that is easy to fall into and can crash your program very quickly: the default HTTP…

Last week Facebook announced that they will be shutting down Parse . I have so, so many feelings. But this isn’t about my feelings now. This is about what I wish I had known when we got acquired. When they told us we were getting acquired, it felt like a wrecking ball to the gut. Nothing against…

Mike Curtis may not have the typical background of someone dedicated to vanquishing bureaucracy. AltaVista, AOL, Yahoo, Facebook — he’s a veteran of some legendary Silicon Valley behemoths. Now VP of Engineering for Airbnb , he's at the helm of a small but rapidly growing team. With nearly two…

Notation Capital — 1 Year In TL;DR — We just posted our 2015 Advisory Board Deck . One year has passed since we raised and launched Notation Capital. It’s been a humbling, thrilling twelve months…we’ve learned a lot. A few weeks ago, we sat down with a few of our LPs and ran them through a 2015…

A fistful of euros. EyesWideOpen/Getty Images The reality is a little less wild. Finland is definitely not close to paying "everyone in the country" or "every citizen" — not yet, anyway. What it is doing is weighing a proposal for a basic income : an approach to welfare in which residents would get…

I stopped dead on Broadway, in the middle of the sidewalk, and stared, not up at the beautiful wrought-iron SoHo buildings, as would befit someone who’d moved to New York in the past month, but at an ordinary sign advertising a small clothing shop. The logo, a casual cursive scrawl with both E’s…

First Timers Only A suggestion to Open Source project maintainers… I’ve started doing something recently that’s been really rewarding. I’m the maintainer of angular-formly a fairly popular library for forms with AngularJS . I’ve committed a lot of code and the library has 33 contributors right now.…

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and…

17299 105 In 2025, in accordance with Moore's Law, we'll see an acceleration in the rate of change as we move closer to a world of true abundance. Here are eight areas where we'll see extraordinary transformation in the next decade: 1. A $1,000 Human Brain In 2025, $1,000 should buy you a computer…

How MOO coupled product innovation with mass manufacturing Hardware, as they say, is hard. In helping develop the concept of Business Cards+ into a fully realised, mass manufactured product that ships worldwide, we faced a series of engineering challenges of which needed some clever thinking to…

I wrote a book on using OKRs called Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results Get it on Amazon or Gumroad As well, I run OKR workshops to get you started if you want to adopt this powerful technique. Contact me. Cwodtke eleganthack.com The OKR approach to…

How Spotify’s Discover Weekly cracked human curation at internet scale In the ‘90s, Aby Ngana Diop was the queen of taasu, a practice of ritual poetry performed by female griots in Senegal. Diop’s distinctive vocals made her a sought-after performer at the weddings and funerals of the rich and…

In 2006, i was 50 —and I was falling apart. Until then, I had always known exactly who I was: an exceptionally fortunate and happy woman, full of irrational exuberance and everyday joy. I knew who I was professionally. When I was 16, I’d discovered cognitive science and analytic philosophy, and knew…

Doing Data Science at Twitter A reflection of my two year Journey so far. Sample size N = 1 Motivation On June 17, 2015, I celebrated my two year #Twitterversary @Twitter. Looking back, the Data Science (short for DS) landscape at Twitter has shifted quite a bit: Machine Learning has played an…

Google ’s ambitions and investments have increasingly broadened beyond its digital origins in Internet search and online advertising into the arena of physical objects: self-driving cars, Internet-connected eyeglasses, smart thermostats and a biotech venture to develop life-extending treatments. Now…