Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . March 2012 One of the more surprising things I've noticed while workingon Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startupideas are. In
Apple CEO Tim Cook announcing the newest iPad Imagine you run a large technology company not named Apple. Let’s say you’re Steve Ballmer, Michael Dell, Meg Whitman, Larry Page, or Intel’s Paul Otellin
tuaw.com is for sale This domain name may be available for sale Your search for the perfect domain name ends here Drive relevant leads to your business A right domain name helps boost your online pres
Though most of our stack at Simple is based on open source software, we occasionally try commercial software. Mostly, we don’t end up buying it. A big reason why is the incredibly time-consuming, aggravating sales process that most commercial enterprise (that is, non-consumer) software vendors…
In the last half decade, magic—normally deemed entertainment fit only for children and tourists in Las Vegas—has become shockingly respectable in the scientific world. Even I—not exactly renowned as a
A year is almost 365 days long...almost, but not quite. For millennia, people have tried to create calendars that account for that "not quite" bit. It's why we have leap days and why, just once, there was a February 30.
By Tom Downey Updated January 27, 2012 THE REAL DEAL | Americana collector Hitoshi Tsujimoto, founder of high-end workwear brand the Real McCoy's, in his Kobe headquarters among a few of his approxima
23 Feb 2012 “That’s a nice database you have there, but how does it compare to Oracle?” A fair question. On the one hand we have an open source database, with a core development community of a few doz
He kicked dirt over two distinct fantasies and made me stare down two very hard truths. The first: My friends had, in fact, noticed that I wasn't white. The second: I could stalk Rasheed Wallace around Chapel Hill, memorize KRS-One lyrics, rock Timberland boots, and read Eldridge Cleaver and Cornel…
A couple of weeks ago Matt Long was having a problem with an app running out of memory. He had a ginormous data file he needed to load up and process, and that memory hit was more than the app could bear. It would load just fine, into an NSData, but before he could finish with it the app would run…
In 1953, a tiny publishing house called Ballantine released The Space Merchants , a novel-length adaptation of "Gravy Planet," a Frederik Pohl short story that had taken the SF world by storm. That st
Over the course of my career to date I’ve worked at companies of various sizes, and have been situated at commensurately varying distances from the concerns of running a business: funding, sales, forecasting and planning, marketing, payroll, legal matters, and so forth. In that time, I’ve developed…
Why haven't we cured cancer yet? It seems like almost every day, we hear about another miraculous advance in cancer treatment. Drugs that cause tumors to shrink , gene therapies , and even a possible
Over a century ago, Dr. Maria Montessori discovered through scientific observations of children that they are not empty vessels to be filled -- they are intrinsically motivated doers. She saw that providing a hands-on learning environment that valued choice, concentration, collaboration, community,…
The explosion ripped through Building A5 on a Friday evening last May, an eruption of fire and noise that twisted metal pipes as if they were discarded straws.
Sopa and Pipa might be on hold for the time-being, but there is a greater threat looming. It's called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and it's an international agreement that aims to establish multinational standards on intellectual property rights enforcement.
Whether you like it or not, NoSQL is changing the world. Granted, it's not even clear what NoSQL means sometimes, but there is no doubt that, for better or worse, we are in a renaissance of non-relati
Most Recent Today’s Picks Author's Note Confessions of a Viral AI Writer Despite my success with AI-generated stories, I'm not sure they are good for writers—or writing itself. Vauhini Vara In Memoria
When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.
A writer’s EULA
Posted January 21st, 2012
(Photo by Michael Coté )
This week Apple announced their new Author tool which is designed to make it easy for you to write books for the iBookstore.
The tool is free to everyone and apparently – at least from the tweets and the blogs that I’ve read – Apple…
This was a new feeling for George Lucas. He made a movie about a plucky band of freedom fighters who battle an evil empire — a movie loaded with special effects like no one had seen before. Then he showed it to executives from all the Hollywood studios. And every one of them said, “Nope.”
This will be a very short diary. It will not contain any links or any scholarly references. It is about a very narrow topic, from a very personal, subjective perspective.
The topic at hand is what Martin Luther King actually did, what it was that he actually accomplished.
Follow the Murdoch succession drama’s final act. Subscribe now for unlimited access ⇛ Media In the AI Age, NYT Wants Reporters to Tell Readers Who They Are The paper is rolling out enhanced bios as “p
Perhaps no single member of Congress deserves as much credit for slowing the advance of the aggressive online-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA as Sen. Ron Wyden, who for much of last year fought a one-man battle to keep the Senate version of the legislation from moving through on a unanimous vote. Now, on…
In place of these, the French Academy of Sciences proposed in 1791 to create an entirely new system that would govern all of France and eventually the world. Fittingly, the new unit of length would derive from the size of the world itself, specifically its circumference. “It was an incredibly astute…
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene…
The door opened and into the room walked the most dangerous person I’ve ever met. He reached towards his belt and slowly pulled out his .45 caliber handgun, raised it and paused to evaluate my expression. “No disrespect, but it’s been pressing into my hip all day.” He placed the gun on the coffee…
Opinion My Guantánamo Nightmare Nice, France ON Wednesday, America’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 10 years. For seven of them, I was held there without explanation or charg
In today’s paradoxical world of maximizing shareholder value, which Jack Welch himself has called “the dumbest idea in the world”, the situation is the reverse. CEOs and their top managers have massive incentives to focus most of their attentions on the expectations market, rather than the real job…
It will be viewed by the Washington punditocracy as a tough-minded executive act defying Senate Republicans, playing to a worried liberal base, and raising a possible legal challenge with constitutional ramifications.
The 2012 presidential race officially begins today with the caucuses in Iowa, and we all know what that means …
Nothing.
The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe. Just as even the non-British were at least temporarily…
Photo: Alcatel-Lucent Key Figures: Ken Thompson [seated] types as Dennis Ritchie looks on in 1972, shortly after they and their Bell Labs coll They say that when one door closes on you, another opens. People generally offer this bit of wisdom just to lend some solace after a misfortune. But…
When Fincher announced he’d next be doing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo some grumbled that it was going to be a “paycheck movie” for “fuck you money” — a crowd-pleaser, not a “Fincher film.” Not a Fight Club. Not a Zodiac. And no, not a Social Network.
[ This is the 100th Item we've shared with you in the two years this blog has been around. We deserve a holiday and we're taking it, so read us next year! Happy Holidays.]
Perl 5.10 added rudimentary grammar support in its regular expressions. You could define many subpatterns directly in your…
theory