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…

Need help? Contact us We've detected unusual activity from your computer network To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot. Why did this happen? Please make sure your b

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 feel like I've started to form an opinion about the language itself. First the good parts: It looks a…

Secret 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 be something special. The posts and conversations were unlike anything we’d seen on any other social network: raw,…

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 finding places to go — and we’d tried just about every way possible to have them live together in a…

I’ve come to the conclusion that, for me, ORMs are more detriment than benefit. In short, they can be used to nicely augment working with SQL in a program, but they should not replace it. Some background: For the past 30 months I’ve been working with code that has to interface with Postgres and to…

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 of violence, but this time it feels much more intense. While war rages on the ground in Gaza and…

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 curve is impressive enough, even before you notice that the scale is logarithmic. And to be sure,…

Paul Ford 12 min read· Jul 30, 2014 -- Behind the nation’s closed doors, with YouTube. The first time I noticed the room was in the Numa Numa video of 2004, circulated pre-YouTube, in which a New Jersey man named Gary Brolsma danced in his chair to a Moldovan pop song called “Dragostea din tei.” The…

This post expands on a question I recently encountered at a midtown bar. It revolves around what types of data I had worked with in the past and which ones turned out to be most challenging in study. Admittedly, the conversation wasn't ideal…

Kim Kardashian: Hollywood , the celebrity role-playing game from the Seinfeld of reality stars, is currently the fifth most popular free iPhone app on Apple's charts. It's also the fifth-highest gross

Jared Sinclair Discusses Unread's Earnings 28 July 2014bzamayo.com/unread-s-earnings Jared Sinclair: Unread for iPhone has earned a total of $32K in App Store sales. Unread for iPad has earned $10K. After subtracting 40 percent in self-employment taxes and $350/month for health care premiums (times…

AI News

An American woman in a crowded London bar asks the American man she's just met: "Where are you from?" He sips his drink and replies, "Boston." They are far from the U.S., after all, so specifics don’t really matter. But the woman presses: Where in Boston? She loves Boston. Her mom grew up in Newton,…

A Candid Look at Unread’s First Year To my knowledge, indie developers don’t publish the kind of numbers that you’ll find in this post. My sales records are none of your business , as the saying quite literally goes. The question in your mind will no doubt be why am I writing this at all? It’s a…

The structure of the VC industry is changing. This matters not only to entrepreneurs raising capital — but it also impacts the finance industry overall, because companies are staying private longer (fewer IPOs) and public investors (including hedge funds, mutual funds, publicly held corporations)…

When I started my first company, Moped, I didn’t think the day would come that I’d have to close it down. I was as naive as I was ambitious. Our vision was to revolutionize communication, making messa

And its challenge to the rest of us Robin Sloan 7 min read· Jul 21, 2014 -- It’s almost inevitable: I encounter Minecraft somewhere online—it’s easy to do, because there’s a lot of Minecraft out there—and I end up convinced I’m doing the wrong thing with my life. Let me explain. Briefly, for the…

One advantage of being a professor is that you can ramble about your eccentric theories to a captive audience. For example, I often grumble to my graduate students that every time a new iPhone comes out, my existing iPhone seems to slow down. How…

Sunrise. Evernote. Feedly. Wunderlist. Mailbox.* Those apps are all an integral part of my personal productivity suite, the tools that I use on a day-to-day basis. Without a desktop version, those mobile clients are useful but not transformative.

Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 1985 when almost any dot com name you wanted was available? All words; short ones, cool ones. All you had to do was ask. It didn't even cost anything to claim. This grand…

The Greeks had a word for this, I thought, as I worked my way through Marc Andreessen’s most recent epic tweet storm. The venture capitalist — who has suddenly begun treating Twitter as his own personal pulpit for delivering Silicon Valley’s version of the Sermon from the Mount — was explaining to…

WHERE does creativity come from? For centuries, we've had a clear answer: the lone genius. The idea of the solitary creator is such a common feature of our cultural landscape (as with Newton and the falling apple) that we easily forget it's an idea…

Jonathan Zdziarski Forensic scientist and author Jonathan Zdziarski has posted the slides (PDF) from his talk at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE/X) conference in New York called Identifying Backdoors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices. The HOPE conference started in 1994…

Ken Norton is a product partner at Google Ventures where he advises startups on product management and also helps organize workshops. Congratulations, a product has found its product manager. Perhaps you’re joining a small startup, or maybe you have a new project in a big company. How you approach…