RSS and the Open Web This post is not about the day to day operations of The Old Reader or anything of that nature. It’s about how our team came to get involved with RSS and how we see the future of t
By John Allspaw May 22, 2012 Last week, Owen Thomas wrote a flattering article over at Business Insider on how we handle errors and mistakes at Etsy. I thought I might give some detail on how that actually happens, and why. Anyone who's worked with technology at any scale is familiar with failure.…
April 08, 2018 · 2 minute read (After trying to shine on a light on some inconsistencies of Apple’s doing, it seems only fair to give Google the same treatment.) Like most of you (I presume), I’ve used Gmail for many years. In an industry where products can too often feel fleeting or unreliable, I…
In this op-ed, Lauren Michele Jackson tackles the recurring use of black people as reaction GIFs and its implications in terms of broader “digital blackface.” Adore or despise them, GIFs are integral to the social experience of the Internet. Thanks to a range of buttons, apps, and keyboards, saying…
Lessons learned on how to shape the next generation of leaders Tom Sommer 4 min read· Feb 19, 2018 -- The move into management is an often discussed topic. We all want to climb the career ladder, yet some dread the day where the only way up is to join management. This is especially true in…
What may seem like a benign park only two hours from L.A. became the landscape for a high-endurance detective operation to find a missing hiker. Doba with his kayak in Police, Poland. Joakim Eskildsen for The New York Times Why He Kayaked Across the Atlantic at 70 (for the Third Time) March 22, 2018…
On the list of leadership merit badges, “Successfully deliver hard news” is one the hardest badges to acquire. It’s not just that you have news, it’s hard news. It’s an honest something the human sitting across from you does not want to hear. Not only do you need to deliver it, but you need to…
While not definitively saying yes, Mark Zuckerberg says he’s “open” to testifying before members of Congress regarding Facebook’s recent privacy scandal involving Cambridge Analytica . The data firm,
Op-Ed Contributor I used to have this one-liner: “If you want to emasculate a guy friend, when you’re at a restaurant, ask him everything that he’s going to order, and then when the waitress comes … order for him.” It’s funny because it shouldn’t be that easy to rob a man of his masculinity — but it…
Congratulations - you’re a new manager! No, really, I’m being sincere. You can hear the sarcasm in my voice? Sorry, I tried, but I know that along with some excitement, there’s plenty of doubt and angst. You have likely followed a path that’s similar to mine and many others. You‘ve been a software…
Del Harvey, Twitter’s resident troll hunter, has a fitting, if unusual, backstory for somebody in charge of policing one of the Internet’s most ungovernable platforms. As a teenager, she spent a summer as a lifeguard at a state mental institution; at 21, she began volunteering for Perverted Justice,…
Share this article Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Subscribe to our newsletter The world is disturbingly comfortable with the fact that women sometimes leave a sexual encounter in tears. When Babe.net published a pseudonymous woman's account of a difficult…
Patrick Griffin was high from shooting up as he hugged his sister, Betsy. Their father, Dennis, right, and his ex-wife had spent the afternoon trying, unsuccessfully, to convince Patrick to check into a treatment program.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times Drug deaths draw the most notice, but…
Ryan Hoover 5 min read· Jan 30, 2018 -- Press enter or click to view image in full size Since Product Hunt’s beginning, people have asked, “How will you make money?” Some startups choose to make money on day one while others choose to prioritize things differently. There’s no right way to startup…
My new year’s resolution was to give up on reading Twitter and Facebook. I gave up on the feeds because they were making me angry. A lot of times I was angry because of politics, but even on non-political things, the feeds seemed like they were full of conflict and stress. I can’t tell you how much…
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About once a month, on a Friday or Saturday night, the Silicon Valley Technorati gather for a drug-heavy, sex-heavy party. Sometimes the venue is an epic mansion in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights; sometimes it’s a lavish home in the foothills of Atherton or Hillsborough. On special occasions, the…
Laurie Penny | Longreads | October 2017 | 15 minutes (4,185 words) “Man fucks woman. Man: subject. Woman: object.” —The Fall, Episode 3, “Insolence and Wine” The first thing you need to understand about consent is that consent is not, strictly speaking, a thing. Not in the same way that…
Alan Diaz/AP Photo AT&T’s lust for Time Warner traces a business impulse we’ve seen in action a dozen times in the past half-century. Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer. The Department of Justice has just done AT&T a big favor by filing a lawsuit to block as anticompetitive the internet…
This estimate is conservative. The math only works out to 78 hours if you assume that you never incorrectly reject a trendy candidate and that you don't have to interview candidates that you “correctl
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power, a book about Barack Obama’s presidency and the tenacity of white supremacy, has captured the attention of many of us. One crucial question is why now in this moment has his apolitical pessimism gained such wide acceptance? Coates and I come from a…
Two mountain climbers died near the top of Mount Everest in 2016. Their bodies lay frozen there for a year. Then a journey began to bring them home. In 2016, three Indian climbers died trying to summit Mount Everest. Two of them were abandoned near the top. This is the story of the quest, a year…
News Analysis Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker, in a Florida courtroom before a jury awarded Hulk Hogan damages for Gawker’s posting of a sex tape.Credit...Pool Photo by John Pendygraft The trial involving Gawker and Terry Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan, over the publication of a sex video…
Here’s the scenario. A company raises $2m of seed money from angels in a convertible note with a $6m cap. Assuming equity is raised at or above that cap, the total dilution, before the new money, is 3
Opinion Credit...Lilli Carré Americans are not good readers. Many blame the ubiquity of digital media. We’re too busy on Snapchat to read, or perhaps internet skimming has made us incapable of reading serious prose. But Americans’ trouble with reading predates digital technologies. The problem is…
Suggested background reading music There’s a War Going On Bonnie and Clyde cannot simply rob First National Block Chain. They can hack servers and unencrypted wallet files or scan low-entropy brain wallets. But the costs of obtaining bitcoins hoarded on a high-entropy, password-protected paper…
James Bridle 21 min read· Nov 6, 2017 -- I’m James Bridle. I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want what I’m talking about here anywhere near my own site. Please be advised: this essay describes disturbing things and…
This story is part of OUTER LIMITS, a Motherboard series about people, technology, and going outside. Let us be your guide . The disappearance of Stacy Ann Arras has a cultish online following. On doz
Almost as long as I have been working to make the lives of software engineers better, people have been asking me how to measure developer productivity. How do we tell where there are productivity problems? How do we know if a team is doing worse or better over time? How does a manager explain to…
The Future Sucked Jacob Silverman , October 5, 2017 Reinventing the Wheel Moguls and the media companies they love—right into the ground Chris Hughes, dashing off to a more profitable venture. / aisletwentytwo Word Factory W o r d F a c t o r y You could grow old waiting for an enlightened…
Illustration: Greg Mably Bitcoin “miners” are electromagnetic alchemists, effectively turning megawatt-hours of electricity into the world’s fastest-growing currency. Their intensive computational activity cryptographically secures the virtual currency, approves transactions, and, in the process,…
During this crazy and bizarre week—one in which we learned that Donald Trump was briefed by intelligence chiefs that the Russian government had kompromat on him (and then later what said kompromat might comprise)—an interesting fantasy has been circulating around Silicon Valley. On the face of it,…
America’s Long-Overdue Opioid Revolution Is Finally Here Thanks to advances in neuroscience, researchers are beginning to disentangle powerful pain relief from addiction, overdose and death Jon Kelvey Morphine is extracted from opium, a compound found in the seeds of the opium poppy. Scenics &…
Bill Donahue Updated March 25, 2025 04:14PM Charles Chesnutt leads a double life. In one, he works as a costumed historical guide on a cruise ship plying the Mississippi through the Big Easy. He’s 37, bearded, and used to be a lawyer, which becomes clear whenever he opens his mouth. But in this…
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Alan Kay grins beneath his gray mustache and leads me through his Brentwood home. It’s a nice place with a tennis court out back, but given the upper-crust Los Angeles neighborhood it sits in, it’s hardly ostentatious. He shares it with his wife, Bonnie MacBird, the author and actress who penned the…
He was one of cinema’s biggest stars, but Marlon Brando behaved like a “monster” and seemed “hell-bent on sabotaging” The Island of Dr Moreau, one of his last films, according to its screenwriter. When Ron Hutchinson was asked to work on a film with The Godfather star in 1996, he could not believe…
“It’s been hard for me to share my story. I’m a pretty private person,” she said. “I felt like I wanted to help other people who might be going through something. I don’t want people to give up. It seems like people are taking away my integrity and changing the story in a way that it won’t help…
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