Smuggling Afghan heroin or women from Odessa would have been more reprehensible, but more logical. You know you’re a fool when what you’re doing makes even the post office seem efficient. Everything I was packing into this unwieldy, 1980s-vintage suitcase was available online. I don’t mean that when…

If two new women’s websites are to be believed, women want to read about boys, cute animals, their periods, and they want to read it in a Valley Girl accent. Oh, girls, they just wanna have fun. The two sites in question are Jane Pratt’s xoJane.com and actress Zooey Deschanel’s HelloGiggles.com.…

This week, the writers of this site have all agreed to participate in an obnoxious, but worthwhile exercise. Each day, a different staff writer will be forced to break their usual routine and offer up posts they feel would garner the most traffic. While that writer struggles to find dancing cat…

05. Oct / Essays / There comes a moment when you are sitting by yourself in a steel cage suspended underwater waiting for your smell to attract a great white shark when you start wondering what exactly you are doing with your life. This is a direct quote from a startup founder I’m friends with. He’s…

How did Silicon Valleys bigwigs react when their favorite trade publication adopted strict new conflicts of interest policies? They banded together to pay someone else to cover them. Former TechCrunch reporter Sarah Lacy today launched PandoDaily, and it has quite an impressive roster of investors,…

Theft or fair use? A collection of pieces by artists who appropriate images created by others. A key to the works above is available here . ONE recent afternoon in the offices of the Midtown law firm run by David Boies and his powerful litigation partners, a large black clamshell box sat on a…

MONTCLAIR, N.J. — For weeks, Justin Canha, a high school student with autism, a love of cartoons and a gift for drawing, had rehearsed for the job interview at a local animation studio. As planned, he arrived that morning with a portfolio of his comic strips and charcoal sketches, some of which were…

How to interview a designer with the perfect design exercise Now that we’re past hunting for unicorns , and we know what design roles are needed at a startup , it’s time to get into the gritty details: the design interview. I wasn’t really good at interviewing designers until I had a few dozen…

"Well, it's a start , but basically it stinks," said Steve Jobs, telling early Apple engineer Chris Espinosa exactly how he felt about the company's first calculator application. Iteration after iteration, Jobs continued to be dissatisfied with the calculator. Espinosa continued to code, slowly…

Eames Office Ray and Charles Eames selecting slides for an exhibition I first met the designer Ray Kaiser Eames in 1977, when she showed me, my wife, and our son around the renowned Pacific Palisades house she and Charles Eames built between 1947 and 1949 from off-the-shelf industrial components. As…

Editor’s note : Guest contributor DJ Patil is the Chief Data Scientist at Greylock Partners. He previously worked for LinkedIn as their Chief Scientist and Chief Security Officer. DJ can be followed on Twitter @dpatil. One of the questions most founders always ask is about the key secrets to hiring.…

Dear Lifehacker, I've done lots of research about my Internet Service Provider's relationship with my uTorrent activity, but I still don't feel entirely confident in my knowledge about what they see. What does my ISP see when I'm torrenting? What if I'm encrypted, or under a VPN? Many of your…

Brooks: There is no Steve Jobs figure...insisting that the designers keep government simple, elegant and user-friendly http://t.co/VB6lx0fH

this is fascinating. mothers carry parts of their babies in them (in form of cells) after birth: http://t.co/wwRcLEUJ

First par is amazing MT @oliverburkeman Probably the coolest article I will post about female sanitary products all day http://t.co/FqNSUlV3

Javier Grillo-Marxuach, creator of The Middleman television series and a former producer on Lost, spent a whole year without Star Wars. Why would he do such a thing? And what did he learn from going cold turkey on Star Wars? Thirteen months ago, during a prolonged bout with depression, I was visited…

A decade ago, before iOS vs. Android, there was one of the bloodiest wars of attrition of the early web: online music stores. Microsoft, Real and myriad others tried to dethrone Apple’s iTunes through bare-knuckle competition, press battles, lawsuits and hacking…all in vain. As we enter the…

There’s a saying I love: “a camel is a horse designed by committee.” A variation is “a volvo is a porsche designed by committee.” Some of the best product advice I’ve ever heard goes something like “damn what the users want, charge towards your dream.” All of these statements are, of course, saying…

The subject is old, but this is possibly a new — or at least a different — perspective on it. The issue is what I call the “e-mail effect.” It relates to the words you use or the reaction you elicit when e-mailing on a sensitive (or even a not-so-sensitive) subject. Recommended by Forbes Here is an…

The New England Journal of Medicine report on how the authors of key screening test, the Mini–mental state examination, have initiated a take-down of an open, validated and freely-available equivalent due to it also asking test-takers to recall three words, a string of numbers and some basic…

IN The ‘trouble’ with Android , Stephanie Rieger points out the ludicrous number of Android screen sizes on a typical UK client’s website and comes to this conclusion: If … you have built your mobile site using fixed widths (believing that you’ve designed to suit the most ‘popular’ screen size), or…

Mobile broadband caps might not be putting the hurt on most mobile subscribers yet, but data usage is going to keep creeping up. And that’s without people doing any more actual browsing. The HTTP Archive charted the growth of the average web page and found that average web pages have grown from 726…