We were tucked away in the corner room of a damp, musky basement. A walking cliché, really: a handful of basically kids, working on The Next Big Thing, getting paid practically nothing, in a startup on University Ave in Palo Alto. We’d see the Facebook kids across the street dress up for their toga…
Tyson Mote
Photo Credit Chris Gash The Well Column Tara Parker-Pope on living well. The scientific research on the benefits of so-called expressive writing is surprisingly vast. Studies have shown that writing about oneself and personal experiences can improve mood disorders , help reduce symptoms among cancer…
In the weeks since I started talking about the need to clean up our architecture, I’ve noticed a surprising resistance to the idea. Apparently the notion that it’s a good idea to hide the framework, UI, or database from the application code is not universally accepted. I first blogged about this…
Brian Rea UPDATED: You can now hear this essay read by the actress Gillian Jacobs in Modern Love: The Podcast. Look for the “play” button below or subscribe on iTunes or Google Play Music . You can also try “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love” here or by downloading our free app for your phone,…
November 10, 2014 The Founder’s Guide To Selling Your Company For most founders, selling a company is a life changing event that they have had no training for. At Y Combinator , one big thing we help our startups with is navigating questions around the acquisition process. Originally, I wrote this…
The Silent Benefits of PR I’ve been having this PR discussion with three separate portfolio companies at once so I thought I’d just publish my thoughts more broadly. I have written many times about PR so if you want a deep dive on the “how” of PR you may enjoy reading some of these posts. PR is an…
Laura June Topolsky Staff Writer at New York Magazine’s The Cut. Writing a memoir for Penguin. I love you! The Awl Be less stupid.
The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-computing Networks Without Networks 1/10 Emulation Fever Over the last few days I’ve been crazy for emulation—that is, simulating old, busted computers on my sweet modern laptop. I’ve been booting up fake machines and tearing them down, one after the other, and not…
Three Things Little Girls Need From Their Fathers Although it isn’t usually talked about, a little girl needs her father’s support in her unfolding sexual development, and for reasons far beyond just the quality of her future sex life. She’ll need it because it will help her secure three hugely…
September 14, 2014 The laws of shitty dashboards Disclosure: I have been responsible for building shitty dashboards. I personally made most of the errors below. I heretofore apologize to my users and pledge not to do it again. Hopefully, these anti-patterns can help PMs, designers and engineers…
Dear Frito-Lay, Inc., I recently had the pleasure of using your distinctive Doritos Baked Crusted Salmon recipe. Needless to say, it was a rousing success at my dinner party. As soon as I set the casserole dish on the table I had to quickly pull my hands away to protect myself from being bitten or…
08.13. 2014 It was a dark day when Islam met the loudspeaker. All travelers to the Middle East discover that this normally self-assured religion gets insecure in the small hours of night and feels it has to rehearse its foundational beliefs, in public, at 190 dB. Hey, wake up. God is great.…
Bill (not his real name, and I’ve fuzzed some details to protect his identity) is a software engineer on the East Coast, who, at the time (between 2011 and 2014) of this story, had recently turned 30 and wanted to see if he could enter a higher weight class on the job market. In order to best assess…
One of the best parts about being a freelancer (or “Running a One-Person Studio” as I prefer to say) is having a flexible schedule. Yes, client deadlines impose some structure to your calendar, but for the most part (if you’re willing to work strange hours) work and life can blend smoothly…
During a very famous moment, Krishnamurti asked the audience if they wanted to know his secret. The lecture hall went silent, and everyone leaned forward. “You see,” he said, “I don’t give a shit.” I’m paraphrasing. By most accounts he said “You see, I don’t mind what happens,” but he could have…
It’s wednesday. Hump day. Last week we planned our first son’s 5th birthday party. This week we plan the remembrance of our second son’s birth and death. He was born dead. They call it a “stillbirth.” He was alive about 8 hours before he arrived. Two hours later we couldn’t find the heartbeat. 30…
I think we’ve all encountered men who have a knack for good conversation. They can talk to anybody about anything in a laid-back, casual manner that sets people immediately at ease. A complete stranger can walk away from these conversational maestros feeling like he’s known known them for years.…
In the ceremonious dismissal of formal organizational structure — which many startups claim as their defining cultural value — HR at startups has long been categorically broken. HR is often effectively absent from tech companies even as they balloon into hundreds of employees, banished perfunctorily…
Tags: Dating The tech boom in Seattle is bringing in droves of successful, straight single guys. And as any woman will tell you: You don't want to date any of them. EMAIL SHARE Written by I sat across from him and listened. He was trim, tall, bearded (as they all seem to be), a recent transplant,…
E very friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: "Bro, 1 you don't work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver." They…
Who will win the U.S. presidential election? How David Rothschild and others at Microsoft are forecasting with prediction and polling tools. The next milestone in Microsoft’s AI journey Harry Shum to lead Microsoft AI and Research Group Building the first AI Supercomputer Read more about Project…
This is the text version of a talk I gave on February 14, 2014 , at Webstock in Wellington, New Zealand. There's some material here that I skipped over during the actual talk, for lack of time. You can read the thing straight through or just skip to the . OUR COMRADE THE ELECTRON In 1952, an…
Destruction of silos is all the rage in DevOps and has been since the beginning of the movement. Patrick Debois wrote a very intelligent piece on why silos exist and how they came about as a management strategy. While the post explains why hierarchy style of management came about in the US (General…
I’d gone through a few droughts as a freelancer, but this one was bad. Each day, the stress mounted. The magnitude of every new client meeting ballooned greater than ever before. Before each meeting, I went in knowing one thing; “I need this job.” It’s the nature of being a freelancer. By…
John Aldridge on the deck of the Anna Mary. Daniel Shea for The New York Times Looking back, John Aldridge knew it was a stupid move. When you’re alone on the deck of a lobster boat in the middle of the night, 40 miles off the tip of Long Island, you don’t take chances. But he had work to do: He…
It was Griffin Wilson who proposed thetheory of de-evolution. He sat two rows behind me in Organic Chem, the verydefinition of an evil genius. He was the first to take the Great Leap Backward. Everybody knows because Tricia Gedding wasin the nurse's office with him. She was in the other cot, behind…
Talk given by Matthew Butterick at TYPO San Francisco, 11 April 2013 mb@mbtype.com The Bomb in the Garden Photo © 2013 Amber Gregory It’s now or never for the web. The web is a medium for creators, including designers. But after 20 years, the web still has no culture of design…
The trouble with timestamps: http://aphyr.com/posts/299-the-trouble-with-timestamps
This is a written version of a talk I gave on September 21, 2013 , at the XOXO conference in Portland. This is a picture of me in 2009, right around when I started Pinboard . I'm standing on a balcony in Botosani county, Romania, in the poorest county in the European Union. I'm smiling in this…
When you start out as an entrepreneur, it’s just you and your idea, or you and your co-founders and your idea. Then you add customers, and they shape and mold you and that idea until you achieve the fabled “product-market fit.” If you are lucky and diligent, you achieve that fit more than once,…
The Misconception: You should focus on the successful if you wish to become successful. The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisible. Illustration by Brad Clark at http://www.plus3video.com In New York City, in an apartment a dozen…
Originally by sean10mm, modified and updated by Liam Rosen Questions? Suggestions? E-mail me: CONTENTS I don't want to become some huge bodybuilder freak, I just want to get in better shape and look better. Should I read this? That's what this guide is for. It's a basic guide to diet and fitness for…
Ask a CEO if they want to spend a pile of money on an analysis of their company’s story, and they’ll probably throw you out of their office. But if you tell them that you have a powerful insight that can help them raise the prices on all of their products, they might ask you over to their house for…
Francesc Campoy Flores Gopher at Google Best practices From Wikipedia: "A best practice is a method or technique that has consistently shown results superiorto those achieved with other means" Techniques to write Go code that is simple, readable, maintainable. Some code type Gopher struct { Name…
As I round the corner towards the still youngish age of 42, I’ve had some time to reflect upon what’s worked and what hasn’t in my life. Periodically, I feel the need to share some of this wisdom. Usually this happens when I haven’t been drinking much and my brain wants to dump information. Here we…
There’s this great moment in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) when the world’s most celebrated sushi chef turns to his son, who is leaving to start his own restaurant, and says: ‘You have no home to come back to.’ Which, when you think about it, isn’t harsh or discouraging but is in fact…
May 19, 2013 The startup scene today, and by ‘scene’ I’m sweeping a fairly catholic brush over a large swath of people – observers, critics, investors, entrepreneurs, ‘want’repreneurs, academics, techies, and the like – seems to be riven into two camps. On one side stand those who believe that…
(This story first appeared in the Quarterly #FTW03 package.) I finished the whole bottle before I started writing. If I’m going to get any empathy for my father I should at least try to see the world the same way he did. He was a man of few words, but the ones he chose to use left memories. You…
A week ago today, Aaron gave up. And since I received the call late Friday night telling me that, like so many others who were close to him, I have not rested. Not slept, really. Not connected with my kids, at all. Not held my wife except to comfort her tears, or for her to comfort mine. Instead of…
technology 2 hours ago Hillary Clinton’s Lead Grows In Post-Video Poll markets Updated 25 minutes ago markets 3 hours ago technology 3 hours ago See All See Less Subscribe
No articles.