What's cooler than a Girl Scout selling cookies? A business-savvy Girl Scout who sets up shop outside a cannabis clinic to rev up her sales skills.

“I have more botox in me than any ten people,” Dr. Seth Matarasso told me in an exam room this February. He is a reality-show producer’s idea of a cosmetic surgeon—his demeanor brash, his bone structure preposterous. Over the course of our hour-long conversation, he would periodically fire questions…

Fly Or Die: Whisper Jordan Crook 2:05 PM PDT · March 23, 2014 Anonymity is all the rage these days, and so we bring our attention to Whisper. This week, we’re joined by Leena Rao, who has some mixed feelings about the craze around anonymous social sharing apps, like Whisper and competitor Secret.…

It is almost 9 AM on St. Patrick's Day, and he is on the Metro North train to Manhattan from some grassy, forgettable Westchester suburb. When he boarded the train he was carrying a case of light beer

President Obama and senior administration officials huddled with top technology executives Friday to discuss progress on the president’s proposed reforms to electronic government surveillance program,

“Raise your hand if you’d like to be in my will.” Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images This post originally appeared in Business Insider. Google CEO Larry Page has an unusual idea about what should happen to his billions should he die. Instead of giving it to a philanthropic organization, he’d…

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…

Your support helps us to tell the story Support Now From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which…

A New York man who says he was scammed by an OKCupid user is now suing the online dating site for not properly warning him that he could be duped. In February 2013, 65-year-old Michael Picciano of Queens, N.Y., met a man on OKCupid who went by the username "genuineguy62," according to a complaint…

It’s not crazy for Sam Altman’s phone bill to rack up 6,000 talking minutes in a month. He talks a lot, to a lot of people. If you ask anyone who knows Altman, from former employees to investors to me

A new study partly-sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution. Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often…

Relatives of passengers who were traveling on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 watched a news conference at a hotel in Beijing on Monday. SEPANG, Malaysia — When hijackers took control of four airplanes on Sept. 11, 2001, and sent them hurtling low across the countryside toward New York and Washington,…

“Do you ring a doorbell with a finger or a thumb?” That’s the kind of question Alice Rawsthorn, design critic for The International New York Times, asks when she thinks about design—all design—and the major role designers have in altering our lives. Her answer, however, reveals a lot about how she…

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…

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A frantic text from a male friend read, “Are you familiar with Lulu… Can you try checking Lulu on me? If something is on there, can you snapshot and send it to me?” Since its launch in February 2013, Lulu, the mobile dating app for women to anonymously review guys and their romantic capacities (or…

The Bitcoin community has been angrily pressing for details on what the Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox has described as a massive hacker attack that stole hundreds of millions of dollars worth of its users' bitcoins and left the company bankrupt. Mt. Gox's staff isn't talking. So another group of hackers…

The inventor of the world wide web believes an online "Magna Carta" is needed to protect and enshrine the independence of the medium he created and the rights of its users worldwide. Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the Guardian the web had come under increasing attack from governments and corporate…

THE SQUAD OF FBI agents rolled up to the Houston town house in full arrest mode. They broke into pairs, fanning out to cover three doors and several windows that looked like escape routes. With everyone in place, the lead agent took a deep breath, gripped his service Glock and whispered into a tiny…

January 23, 2014 Saying No v. Hearing No I haven’t written a new post in quite some time. So this seems as good a forum as any to say that I’m officially going to run Alphaworks full-time as CEO, a product (and company) I recently co-founded with betaworks. I have much more to say about Alphaworks,…

danah boyd’s SXSW keynote is sold out. When it’s over, a dozen fans rush the stage. These fans aren’t young groupies hoping to get a closer glimpse at their favorite rock star, but full-grown adults hoping to hear one more word from boyd. She’s one of the world’s sharpest authorities on how teens…

For the past 7 years I have been on an ongoing search to present the best new sites, services & apps to my readers. Every week I find at least one site that blows my mind. I get excited about how this service could evolve into something big, it’s potential to grow into a billion dollar business, and…

The praise being lavished on CVS in response to its promise to stop selling cigarettes is as profuse as it is predictable. When the drugstore announced last week that it plans to pull tobacco products as it continues to expand into the health care market, doctors, journalists and even the president…

Christoph Niemann When an industry has a hold on the public imagination, it's easy to forget just how fickle that imagination can be. By 1946, when women were nearly rioting to get their hands on scar

Find out what’s new and what’s next for AI and tech on the new Signal blog More from AI Microsoft’s advancements in AI are grounded in our company’s mission to help every person and organization on the planet to achieve more — from helping people be more productive to helping solve society's most…

(This post is inspired by a question I received on producthunt.co (original link). A few people found it valuable, so I thought I might repost it with more context.) Edit: some conversation on hacker news Sendwithus is a startup, 11 months in, and (like any startup), our primary challenge is growth…

The Wikipedia entry for the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died this month, is edited on an iPhone. Wikipedia has been especially slow to adapt to a mobile world.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times The Internet behemoths Google and Facebook have proved they can still attract users and…

For much of the past 50 years or so, voicing any serious skepticism toward Alcoholics Anonymous or any other 12-step program was sacrilege—the equivalent, in polite company, of questioning the virtue of American mothers or the patriotism of our troops. If your problem was drink, AA was the answer;…

June 5, 2013 Tie Your Ego to the Product, Not the Process I was beginning to design my first big feature at Etsy a few months ago and had a kick-off meeting with Andrew , the engineer who would be building it out with me. We talked about design goals, problems to be solved, etc. and everything was…

All illustrations by Ole Tillmann My friend Kevin, who majored in philosophy at Berkeley and is now a civil rights lawyer, and who supports all sorts of good causes (economic equality, gun control, ga

Nicolas Wittenborn Mar 13, 2014 Are we in a bubble? Matt A. Myers Mar 13, 2014 I just read a good post that tries to answer this question: http://avc.com/2014/03/the-… Nicolas Wittenborn Mar 13, 2014 Thanks, mate. I will ask him! Matt A. Myers Mar 13, 2014 Link to Nicolas’ question for the lazy:…

Millions and millions of people use iMessage every day. But how many people know exactly what's going on behind the scenes, or what happens to a message once you send it? Maybe a handful. Up until now, the vast majority of what we knew about iMessage's inner workings came from reverse engineering…

On Tuesday, March 11th, GitHub was largely unreachable for roughly 2 hours as the result of an evolving distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. I know that you rely on GitHub to be available all the time, and I’m sorry we let you down. I’d like to explain what happened, how we responded to it,…