Consumer Electronics, an Origin Story Sometime in late 1971, Peter Nelson, from Hewlett-Packard’s Corporate Relations Department in Palo Alto, enlisted Karen Cambria, from the Automatic Measurement Division (conveniently, in the same building), to pose with their new electronic device, a scientific…

You and Kara are designers of a product at a mid-size company. Kara wants to add an icon to your product. You think the icon is wrong. You’ve added similar icons in the past and they were complete failures with your customer. You feel responsible for preventing Kara from making the same costly…

Small tweaks to incentivize engaging with a book’s content. I’ve been using Kindles on and off ever since they launched. Our relationship has been contentious but I’ve always been seduced or re-seduced by their potential. At their best, they are beautiful devices. At their worst, infuriating. They…

Guys and videogames. There they sit: asses glued to the couch, eyes transfixed, their attention leaving the screen only for as long as it takes to tell you about their latest achievements — how no, you don’t understand, their Madden team traded for Tom Brady and that unlocked a better sniper rifle…

Press Herald via Getty Images For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend—or maybe a myth. They wondered how he…

I don’t remember a version of me that isn’t anxious. There is no point in my memory where I can look back and sense a calm, unburdened mind — certainly I have a thousand happy memories, but all of them come with the understanding that I remained anxious. A mild panic overlaying the recollection of…

Photo-Illustration: Stevie Remsberg/Getty Images Self/Reflection is a week of stories on the Cut about how we feel, versus how we look. Here, a woman in her late 50s tells Alexa Tsoulis-Reay how being beautiful affected her life, and how she feels about her looks today. Around eighth grade people…

Rick and Morty is a cartoon for adults that airs as part of the Cartoon Network’s after-dark Adult Swim lineup. If you have an incredibly high IQ , maybe you’ve watched it. Otherwise, you may have first heard about the series when a tantrum-prone subset of its hardcore fans rioted at McDonald’s…

Hi, welcome to the team. I’m so glad you are here at $COMPANY. It’s going to take a solid quarter to figure this place out. I understand the importance of first impressions, and I know you want to get a check in the win column, but this is a complex place full of equally complex humans. Take your…

At some point in your leadership career, you’ll need to care about performance management. My first bit of advice is the hardest: don’t ever let yourself think or say the words “performance management.” This is impossible, but aspirational. I will explain. My hard earned definition of performance…

At Apple, design is the driving force, with manufacturing and engineering fully dialed in to support that vision. In practice, that means that Apple’s designers make choices nobody else would be able to make. The amount of custom CNC milling that goes into Apple’s unibody laptops is incredibly hard…

Yesterday, Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page let investors know that he wouldn't be able to attend every single earnings call as he has made a habit of in the past. Some speculated that it's because of an increasingly difficult medical condition that makes it hard for Page to speak. Regardless,…

Tim Wu, writing for The New Yorker “News Desk”, has done us all a grand favor by penning a sort of grand unified theory on how the “open beats closed” axiom can be true in the face of Apple’s decade-long success: “ Does a Company Like Apple Need a Genius Like Steve Jobs? ” Wu’s conclusion: yes,…

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” — Max Planck, German quantum theorist and Nobel Prize winner There are two primary mental shifts that occur in the lives of all highly successful people. Many make the first, but very few make the second. Both of these…

The following was shared as a twitter thread. Here’s the medium version. Screenshot from twitter (by author) 1/ Apple has a software problem. Here’s how it plans to fix it. via @markgurman // Let’s take a step back and talk about the broader context and product development at scale. Lots follows……

Punctuation, largely invisible and insignificant for normal people, as it should be, is a highly personal matter for writers. Periods, commas, colons, semi-colons: in their use or non-use and in their order and placement, can represent elaboration, conjecture, doubt, finality. And in aggregate, over…

Programming sucks https://t.co/Wz93uGJrht

Never smooth enough--a modern addiction https://t.co/cdCO8rpCcg

Who decides what men are? Is it decided by decree? By popular vote? Or is it decided by you, individual men? A little while back I was talking with a man I knew about consent. He was commenting on an article I had shared earlier that day on men who get women drunk in the hopes that it will increase…

New blog post: "Network latencies and speed of light" https://t.co/ETlI4keBp1 they aren't as good as it gets, but they're closer than you probably think

tl;dr: Having swap is a reasonably important part of a well functioning system.Without it, sane memory management becomes harder to achieve. Swap is not generally about getting emergency memory, it’s about makingmemory reclamation egalitarian and efficient. In fact, using it as“emergency memory” is…

My new year’s resolution was to give up on reading Twitter and Facebook. I gave up on the feeds because they were making me angry. A lot of times I was angry because of politics, but even on non-political things, the feeds seemed like they were full of conflict and stress. I can’t tell you how much…

If you haven't seen https://t.co/iQrL4qiEHs it's also worth a read. https://t.co/rr2WEgRWKl

Still miss Goose. When we can listen to literally anything, what do we choose, why, and who — or what — decides? Good post by Om Malik yesterday on the notion that music in our current day and age may have lost that loving feeling . It’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit myself recently…

Those of us with the means to do as we pleased drove our vast resources into monumental construction. My grandest project was a Chinese city, tragically cut short by server reset. View from the north, inside the outer wall. The first game I ever outsmarted was Final Fantasy 6. I was eight or nine.…

JACOB HARRIS What if Mos Eisley wasn’t really that wretched and it was just Obi Wan being racist again? TIM CARMODY What do you mean, “these blaster marks are too precise to be made by Sand People?” Who talks like that? JACOB HARRIS also Sand People is not the preferred nomenclature. TIM CARMODY…

I have so many thoughts about this, especially the question "are humans just not psychologically able to handle a global internet?" https://t.co/reRA5SiUaC

“Now I’m in my mid-forties and I’m trying a new thing with my depression. I have no idea if it’ll work any better than all the others, but here it goes.” Derek Powazek - Depression is a Loaded Gun https://t.co/QspK96a96f

The more popular a computer platform becomes, the more of a bind in which it inevitably finds itself. A platform is only “finished” when it is abandoned. It needs to evolve to remain relevant, but it’s difficult to change in unfamiliar ways without angering the base of active users. Adding new…

Dealing with surprising human emotions is one of the most challenging aspects of being a manager. Generally, when someone appears triggered, or angry, or some other strong emotion that’s surprising, it’s likely that their amygdala has been hijacked , which I’ve written about before . Our amygdalas…

Photograph by Elinor Carucci for The New Yorker Audio: Kristen Roupenian reads. Margot met Robert on a Wednesday night toward the end of her fall semester. She was working behind the concession stand at the artsy movie theatre downtown when he came in and bought a large popcorn and a box of Red…

I wrote some initial iPhone X impressions “The Breakthrough Internet Communications Device Turns X” https://t.co/nYUHBCmxHE https://t.co/9YIMfhp3uG

You are what you read: https://t.co/6s8mrASiyS

The Real Value of Money. Good read. https://t.co/Ge4jDTZN7m

And then when you've read that, check out this reaction piece: "You fired your top talent. I hope you're happy." https://t.co/fv9I1RyPy0

A few months before I decided to try to gain employment with Microsoft back in late 1983, I read about Microsoft Word, which was in its first version for MS-DOS back then. The feature I read about that fascinated me the most, even more than the idea that you could select text that you wanted to…

A short story about apartment living, Saint Mark's Cathedral, and hearing your neighbors having sex. https://t.co/g7qk1gMRG0

This story begins, as they so often do , when I noticed that my machine was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48 hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM and that was less than half used. It has a fast SSD that was mostly idle. And yet, as I moved the mouse…

In the binary world of online communications, companies like Apple and Google are either valorized for their highly influential products and actions or vilified for the same reasons. Take the iPhone, which turns 10 years old this week, as the most obvious and polarizing example. You can either think…

Scrum is a suboptimal development methodology that will make developers less intelligent, less disciplined, and more forgetful. Scrum is the least-worst methodology you can adopt in a dysfunctional enterprise. This does not mean that it is something we should encourage. Continuously delivering the…