I think Die Hard might be a fairy tale. Let me back up and offer context. At Boskone this weekend—which was amazing by the way, had a great time and thanks to everyone who came out and said hello—I participated in a panel about fairy tales with Theodora Goss, Miriam Weinberg, and Craig Shaw…

Shopping at Walmart is one of the world’s most common activities. Each week, more than 245 million people visit a Walmart store. By comparison, Apple stores receive fewer than 400 million visits a year. More and more, Walmart has found, the hands attached to that foot traffic are thumbing…

A couple of days have passed since the news of the monster acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook broke. More people have written about it already than I can possibly link to so I won’t even try. My immediate reaction just based on financial metrics was that Facebook massively overpaid but I wasn’t…

Here on Continuations I have covered a lot of seemingly disparate topics such as the end of work , government surveillance and the digital balkans . They are, however, all part of my fascination with the transition from the industrial age to the information age. While that latter term was coined all…

Whistleblowers and national security JOSH BARRO of Business Insider argues that Edward Snowden ought not to be allowed to return to America " without serving a long prison sentence". Mr Barro writes: For America's intelligence and diplomatic apparatus to work, it needs to be able to do secret things…

The future that everyone forgot Some of the work we did at Danger I came across a website whose purpose was to provide a super detailed list of every handheld computing environment going back to the early 1970's. It did a great job except for one glaring omission: the first mobile platform that I…

There is a lot of hype around distributed data systems, some of it justified. It’s true that the internet has centralized a lot of computation onto services like Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn (my own employer), and other large web sites. It’s true that this centralization puts a lot of…

Kendall Clark is the founder and chief executive of Clark & Parsia , a 10-person software product and service firm that does development and R&D in enterprise semantics. He has worked for and with several federal agencies, including NASA and the National Cancer Institute. After my essay in this…

When was the last time you read an online review about a local business or service on a platform like Yelp? Of course you want to make sure the local plumber you hire is honest, or that even if the date is dud, at least the restaurant isn’t lousy. A recent survey found that 76 percent of consumers…

on Sep 5th, 2013 | in Editorial Last week, Etsy announced a big change to their feedback system. Renamed to Etsy Reviews , the new feedback uses a five-star rating system and does away with buyer feedback entirely. It has a host of features designed to build a stronger platform for feedback and…

Is it true that living in America has become riskier? In 2006, the political scientist Jacob Hacker published The Great Risk Shift , a progressive tract that appropriated the vocabulary of wealth management to show how thirty years of privatization and deregulation had abraded the security of the…

It is a well-known fact that as you move through adulthood, you will either have kids or not, and your friends will either have kids or not. It is an apparently obscure fact that when you don't have kids, and your friends do have them, the split does not have to signal the death of your friendships.…

Neil Roseman is downright tired of hearing Silicon Valley companies say they “hire only the best and the brightest.” No matter how many times they say it, most still make decisions based on gut feel, basic credentials, GPAs, ivy league educations, flashy company names — even SAT scores. Roseman…

Quinn Norton Bradley Manning and the Two Americas (5-21-14, author’s note: This was written and published before Chelsea Manning announced her transition. I respect her decision, and have properly gendered her in all my writing/speaking since. This article remains as it was published, but as a…

Last week, I figured out that I am a part-time locust. Here’s how it happened. I was picking the brain of a restauranteur for insight into things like Groupon. He confirmed what we all understand in the abstract: that these deals are terrible for the businesses that offer them; that they draw in…

We yearn for frictionless, technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way that norms and standards change. Credit Illustration by Harry Campbell Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly? Consider the very different trajectories of surgical anesthesia and…

The 30-terabyte storage drawer Enlarge / The "Open Vault" storage sled, with one of its two drawers of drives extended. The drawers bend down for easy access to individual drives. Sean Gallagher The disk storage demands of Facebook's applications—at least those that have relatively low input and…

I’m increasingly realizing that many of my gripes about applications these days are triggered by their failure to understand my context in the way that they can and should. For example: Unruly apps on my Android phone , like gmail or twitter, update messages in the background as soon as I wake up my…

Contrary to recent reports, I am not the story of self-publishing. The story of self-publishing is Jan Strnad, a 62-year-old educator hoping to retire in four years. To do so is going to require supplemental income, which he is currently earning from his self-published novels. In 2012, Jan made…

"In cognitive science, we only use the lambda-calculus model of computation," says Dr Philipp Koralus (Phd, Philosophy & Neuroscience, on his way to be a lecturer at Oxford). "We want to talk about what the system is doing, and abstract the how." Two models of computation: lambda calculus and the…

The Next Facebook Beyond the Address Book It has now been six months since I documented my tenth grade sister’s technology habits . Intrigued by what I learned, I’ve gone on to ask many more “normal” people, of all ages, about the products that they use on a regular basis. This post is an attempt to…

By Jeffrey Dean, Luiz André Barroso Communications of the ACM, Vol. 56 No. 2, Pages 74-80 10.1145/2408776.2408794 Software techniques that tolerate latency variability are vital to building responsive large-scale Web services. The full text of this article is premium content No entries found Log in…

When HTML first appeared, it offered a coherent if limited vocabulary for sharing content on the newly created World Wide Web. Today, after HTML has handed off most of its actual work to other specifications, it’s time to stop worrying about this central core and let developers choose their own…

In 2010, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff released a paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt.” Their “main result is that…median growth rates for countries with public debt over 90 percent of GDP are roughly one percent lower than otherwise; average (mean) growth rates are several percent…

One of my favourite recurring tropes of AI speculation/singulatarian deep time thinking is mediations on how an evil AI or similar might destroy us. Here’s a recent example, Ross Anderson on human extinction as quoted/linked by Kottke . It’s a discussion about how a benign AI might be poorly…

Discount retailer Target ( NYSE:TGT ) has made a name for itself by collaborating with some of fashion's most admired designers. However, it hasn't been easy. Brick-and-mortar chains including Target, Wal-Mart and Best Buy ( NYSE:BBY ) have suffered lately because of increased competition from…

Tesla in a Teapot I've been following — as who hasn't been? — the fight between the New York Times and Tesla Motors. A recap: First, New York Times journalist John Broder reviewed the Tesla Model S electric car and had a problem with it — namely that it couldn’t hold a charge. Second, Elon Musk,…

In this post, we would like to talk about a simple data structure we designed for an approximate membership filter with probabilistic time decay. It doesn’t sound simple, but the filter is easy to implement and is highly concurrent while achieving a very low memory overhead. In our system there are…

As they pursued hang gliding history on a July day over Texas, Jonny Durand, foreground, and Dustin Martin were often in sight of each other. Courtesy of Jonny Durand T HE CLOUDS stretched across the Texas sky like a highway. And soaring along those lanes, lofted nearly 8,000 feet by the hot air…