awaldstein Aug 26, 2014 I wonder whether ‘opting in for the kids’ isn’t a different twist.I asked my mom a few weeks ago a similar question about her choices, abt leaving school to help pay rent for t
Android Phones Hit by ‘Ransomware’ Nicole Perlroth, reporting for the NYT: You are guilty of child porn, child abuse, zoophilia or sendingout bulk spam. You are a criminal. The Federal Bureau ofInvest
Published in the September 2014 issue The use of the word bro is reaching epidemic levels. Now, after The Fast and the Furious and How I Met Your Mother and Breaking Bad, if a show contains more than
For those of us with a fondness for profanity, testing the bounds of cursing in the workplace can feel at once satisfying—and fucking terrifying. But fear not, there’s reason to believe that indulging
In the mid 1990s, when America Online was synonymous with the web, the Internet had not yet achieved its destiny as a place where people gather to share memes, troll articles written by members of an opposing political party, and pursue the Sisyphean goal of inbox zero.
Later today, Y Combinator will host its demo day for the summer 2014 batch. I know exactly what those founders are feeling, because I was in the exact same position five years ago, when my co-founder
Secret dinner party , said the intriguing post on Secret, an anonymous sharing app. Invitations were application only, the host wrote in the comments. As instructed, I used an anonymous account to sub
Ignore what you’re reading about the current investment climate. Yep, there is plenty of VC money out there and it’s aggressively looking for a home. But that doesn’t mean it’s so much easier to raise
Published in on startups · 4 min read · Aug 21, 2014 -- Product Hunt: from experiment to VC-backed startup When you look back at yourself six months from today and don’t feel embarrassed by your naive
The move from desktop to mobile brought with it a shift in how we consume information. Instead of using a browser, we utilize dozens of apps that are each designed to complete a specific task. The result is that we have tons of great apps, but we’ve ended up with a disjointed user experience when…
I was born in 1980, and I still remember the days when “bringing in six figures” was a sign of extreme wealth and success. It was more than enough to buy the perfect house with a white picket fence, after all, and achieving that sort of income implied a certain level of status that nearly everyone…
5 min read · Apr 9, 2013 -- Designers love to sweat the details . Much time is spent pixel-fucking buttons, form styles, setting type, & getting those icons as sharp as a tack. A+, great job, don't st
The end of the printed newspaper. 9 min read · Aug 19, 2014 -- The Roanoke Times , the local paper in my family home, is a classic metro daily, with roots that go back to the 1880s. Like most such pap
“A lot of people ask what’s different this time,” said Sam Altman, who took over Y Combinator from Paul Graham at the beginning of the year. “But the main thing I’m trying to do is keep things running
Scott Olson Above you'll see a picture of Scott Olson, the Getty photographer who's brought us many of the most striking images of protests and police crackdown that followed the shooting of Michael B
This is my avatar: I’ve used this photo on Twitter and other services for the past five years and have no intention of changing it despite my increasing age (I just turned 27). I often see people chan
There's something creepy in this Washington Post piece about Penguin's new "adult" cover for the 50th anniversary edition of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Well, something else creepy, beyond th
U.S. TECHNOLOGY SECTOR MERGER AND ACQUISTION DEALS Selected deals made with no adviser to the buyer ANNOUNCED ACQUIRER TARGET VALUE, IN BILLIONS Microsoft Skype $8.5 MAY 10, 2011 Oracle Micros Systems
T he shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown is an awful tragedy that continues to send shockwaves through the community of Ferguson, Missouri and across the nation. If I had been told to get out of the
God, what a mess, on the ladder of success Where you take one step and miss the whole first rung - Paul Westerberg I was in a board meeting the other day at a company we have been investors in for a b
X’s are everywhere in user interface (UI) design. A powerful symbol, [x] is capable of closing windows and popups, toolbars and tabs and anything else that might otherwise be cluttering up your screen
Published in Building Bowery · 3 min read · Jul 30, 2014 -- When measuring developer performance, it’s hard to find an appropriate metric to use that doesn’t rely too heavily on anecdotal evidence. Th
Most businesses believe that technology can dramatically improve the way they operate. But they embrace technology with varying levels of enthusiasm. The lowest level of enthusiasm is to adopt technologies made by other companies – email…
Today, I’m excited to announce that Andreessen Horowitz is investing $50 million in BuzzFeed. As part of the investment, I’ll be joining the company’s board. Many of today’s great media companies were built on top of emerging technologies. Examples include Time Inc. which was built on color…
Which is exactly what is special about it. It’s a little spot of green that hugs a creek and some train tracks under a commuter town filled with gently aging Victorians, massive and occasionally letha
Two summers ago, it was "Blurred Lines." This summer it was "Fancy." These days, it's "Blank Space" by Taylor Swift. Every year, there's a new song that we all hate until we don't anymore ( see : playcounts ). And it turns out that's because we were brainwashed to like them. Research suggests that…
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An article came out today in Businessweek about arroganceand Silicon Valley. I thought it was good, but there was one more point I wanted to make. People often accuse people in Silicon Valley of worki
I want you to think about what you’re doing right now. I mean really think about it. As your eyes move across these lines and funnel information to your brain, you’re taking part in a conversation I s
Photographer David Slater wants Wikipedia to remove his photograph of a monkey taking a photo of itself but Wikipedia has refused, saying that as the photographer, the monkey owns the copyright to the photo. The Gloucestershire-based photographer…
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Swift (-taylor) is the exciting new language Apple debuted at WWDC in 2014. It took pretty much all of us in the developer community by surprise. We’re now in August, 5 beta builds into Xcode and I fe
Published in Secret Den · 4 min read · Aug 5, 2014 -- When we created Secret six months ago, we first gave it to our friends and family. We watched how they shared every day and believed Secret could
Earlier this year we sat down as a company and looked at all the amazing pieces of technology we had built. Foursquare then had two distinct use-cases — keeping up and meeting up with friends, and fin
I’ve come to the conclusion that, for me, ORMs are more detriment thanbenefit. In short, they can be used to nicely augment working with SQLin a program, but they should not replace it. Some backgroun
social networks and the art of personalizing propaganda It’s hard to shake away the utterly depressing feeling that comes with news coverage these days. IDF and Hamas are at it again, a vicious cycle
Benedict Evans asks a good question: If you were running this business, why would you slow down to take profits? pic.twitter.com/mbMNfbyZT4 — Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) July 28, 2014 The growth c
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