Why Golfers Buy Hole In One Insurance Priceonomics Photo credit: New Brunswick Tourism The goal of insurance is usually to protect us from life’s least happy circumstances: the loss of a family’s primary breadwinner, the theft of one’s car, the onset of an illness requiring expensive treatment. We…

July 23, 2014 Mistakes You Should Never Make I was walking to a team meeting where I was going to announce that we would likely have to lay off nearly all of our employees because we unexpectedly had

DESIGN Russia is using a World War I camouflage design to try and fool Ukrainian drones Dazzle camouflage worked on 20th century warships, but 21st century drones are another story. DESIGN The U.K.’s next banknotes might feature cute foxes and prismatic butterflies Better than scowling historic…

It’s so simple, right? Anil Dash 10 min read· Jul 24, 2014 -- Someone could make off with all your garbage that’s put out on the street, and carefully record how many used condoms or pregnancy tests or discarded pill bottles are in the trash, and then post that information up on the web along with…

The Thin Blue Line in the Big Apple (Andrew Burton/Getty Images) There is nothing conservative about government violating the rights of citizens. I magine if I were to tell you there is a large group

The most interesting things I learned at HOPE X. I attended 2600’s Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference this past weekend at the Hotel Pennsylvania. This is my third time going – and their tenth

The Media Equation Media companies and readers with numerous other options are increasingly passing by print products like magazines, regardless of quality.Credit...Yana Paskova for The New York Times Even if you aren’t one of those people worried about media consolidation — there are many in that…

Colorado is the self-described “vanguard” of innovation. But that’s not really how it felt to me on Friday after the Denver police stopped the UberX I was riding in. Here’s the full story, with all of the bizarre twists and turns. On Friday afternoon, I selected Uber to transport me from a meeting…

Tech Explaining Continuity: The tech tying iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite together Handoff, AirDrop, and more will bridge the device gap—if your hardware is up to it. Andrew Cunningham – Jul 20, 2014 8:00 pm | 163 Continuity changes how your iPhones, iPads, and Macs interact with one another. Let's look at…

Have you used Yo yet? I’m getting pretty into it. It’s a silly little app that literally just sends the word “Yo” to a friend’s phone. If you have audio alerts turned on, a hyperactive little man also yells Yo at you, which is adorable and terrible all at once. Yo is surprisingly popular and growing…

I want to talk and compare an app that most of you don’t have access to: Facebook Mentions and compare it to the Pages App that anyone who has a Facebook page can download and use. I found out about F

Making introductions is one of the most rewarding things we do as backers and builders of startups, and as affiliates of Bloomberg — where we love bringing promising startups to the attention of a company we admire. If you ask me for an…

“Real quick, whole squad on that real sh*t 0 to 100, n***a, real quick” I am a giant advocate for technical founders running their own companies, but one consistent way that technical founders deeply harm their businesses is by…

Hey founders, want to hear something incredibly frustrating about seed financing? I don’t believe the forecast you show me. You know the one that inevitably has you at $100 million in revenue by Year Three? Yeah, that one. It’s a great discussion point to understand how you think of your business’…

If you think “Yo” has two characters, you’re not counting in binary. Yo is your mailman putting up the mailbox flag. Yo is a buzzer going off letting you know your table is ready. Sure, person-to-person Yo’s can be fun and playful — I have a few friends I Yo just to let them know I’m thinking of…

Read this first The Ghost of Swift Bugs Future Update: I wrote this with Xcode 7 β1, and playgrounds crashed a lot at the time. As a result, I gave up on testing all the cases, and a lot of errors creeped into the snippets. They are now corrected, thanks to (among others) @CalQL8ed_K_OS and @IanKay,…

The Big Winner from Y Combinator’s Success? Sequoia Capital Priceonomics Yesterday, Y Combinator’s president, Sam Altman, announced that the seed investment firm had funded 716 companies that were currently valued collectively at around $30 billion. TechCrunch and Antonio Garcia-Martinez did some…

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Earlier this year, Tool guitarist Adam Jones told a group of fans that the prog-metal heavyweights’ next record was not only done but would be coming out the next day – then he waited a beat and tacked on “just kidding.” The fans groaned and laughed, but the next day a website reported Jones’ joke…

Premium Not Freemium: iPad Game Monument Valley Passes 1M Downloads Natasha Lomas 9:08 AM PDT · July 18, 2014 Going against the freemium gaming grain, Monument Valley, the sumptuously designed, premium priced iPad game which launched back in April and snagged its makers an Apple Design Award at this…

Bitly began in 2008 by solving a simple problem for consumers: Links were too long for Twitter’s 140-character limit. So it shortened them. As far as technical solutions go, building a link shortener

Marc Andreessen Investing Team About Marc Andreessen is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion people and one of the few to establish multiple…

The rise and fall and rise of Upcoming.org Andy Baio 9 min read· May 28, 2014 -- You haven’t made it until someone calls you a sellout. My moment was October 5, 2005, the morning after we announced that Yahoo! acquired my side project, a collaborative events community called Upcoming.org. “Pffft.…

Published in Monday Note · 6 min read · Jul 13, 2014 -- Satya Nadella’s latest message to the troops — and to the world — is disquieting. It lacks focus, specifics, and, if not soon sharpened, his wor

Here’s a tiny confession. I’m bored. Yes; I know. I’m a sinner. Go ahead. Burn me at the stake of your puritanical Calvinism; the righteously, thoroughly, well, boring idea that boredom itself is a moral defect; that a restless mind is the Devil’s sweatshop. There’s nothing more boring than that;…

I am excited to announce that betaworks is participating in the seed round of Yo . I wanted to share a few thoughts on how I see Yo fitting into the ecosystem of services on, and beyond, phones. Over

“Deep linking” is a topic that is still simmering below the general conversation around mobile, but is due to have a major impact on mobile apps, ads, and commerce. As much as mobile dominates the conversation today, it’s still fairly raw compared to the web we’ve grown accustomed to on desktop…

On Saturday, a Twitter account appeared that perfectly predicted the outcome of the final World Cup game, down to who scored the winning goal for Germany. It was a con—and a classic one. (We’ll talk about how the con works in a moment.) But it also felt like a missed opportunity, and immediately…

Who wins? Users or Growth? Micah Baldwin 3 min read· Jul 13, 2014 -- Aaron Batalion and Arin Sarkissian are obsessed with podcasts. Last week, over a donut, they were suggesting podcasts and apps to me like the proverbial drug dealer. “Try just one, Micah. What’s it going to hurt?” They would say.…

Knewton isn’t an easy product to explain. Analyzing hordes of data, it adjusts lesson plans for students in real time across subjects, determines how they learn, and suggests the best way to help them. It’s one of those technology experiences that takes on something huge and makes it effortless as…

YC Portfolio Stats July 16, 2014· We get asked a lot for statistics on the YC portfolio. Even though some of these aren’t that helpful [1], here is the latest update on the numbers we get asked about the most. As always, all the credit goes to the founders. Total market cap of all YC companies: >$30…

Learning from the things we make over and over Paul Ford 7 min read· Jul 14, 2014 -- Did you ever notice, wrote my friend Finn Smith via chat, how often we (meaning programmers) reinvent the same applications? We came up with a quick list: Email, Todo lists, blogging tools, and others. Do you mind…

Josh Elman 3 min read· Nov 2, 2012 -- I've been lucky to be part of the early growth of several really interesting and now important networks including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. One of the things that I felt working on each of these is that we never looked at numbers or metrics in the…

Six months into growing and evolving Secret, our community has shown us how much demand there is for a social network centered around honest conversations. Whether it’s reporters in Moscow using Secret to interview Linkin Park, friends giving each other advice about their salaries or people…