Complicated process like sailing a boat require well oiled teams to operate technology. Recruiting a team requires automation so you can keep your eyes on the horizon. Modern technology has empowered companies with new capabilities beyond their dreams. Unfortunately, in some respects, they're often…

A Few Hundred Messaging Enthusiasts Expand My Perspective Last week at Jeff Keni Pulver ’s Monage conference in San Jose, I was fortunate enough to be both an organizer of the chatbot track and eager attendee for the rest of the conference. Being embedded with a few hundred messaging enthusiasts and…

In this post, I will try to explain a method of machine learning called Evolving Neural Networks through Augmenting Topologies (NEAT). Introduction: I love to learn. It is really exciting to open up a book or a paper about a topic I have not encountered yet, and to try to understand it. Some people…

The United States has debated immigration since the country's founding, and the Statue of Liberty—a potent symbol for immigrants—is often invoked as an argument for why we should usher in those who seek safety and opportunity with open arms. A little-known fact about Lady Liberty adds an intriguing…

O ne day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We…

America’s most recent Unraveling was the Long Boom and Culture Wars, beginning in the early 1980s and probably ending in 2008. The era opened with triumphant “Morning in America” individualism and drifted toward a pervasive distrust of institutions and leaders, an edgy popular culture, and the…

The mindfulness frenzy has also been fueled by generational change. For Boomers, who pioneered mindful lifestyles in the ‘70s, the practice was meant to be intrinsically rewarding. While G.I.s spent their lives in a constant state of doing and always looking forward to “progress,” Boomers flocked to…

This is part four of a seven-part series examining the rising (or falling) living standards of successive U.S. generations. Read part one here . Boomers (born 1943-60) today comprise 65 million adults mostly in their 50s and 60s. As a social generation, in my opinion, Boomers are a bit older than…

In 2013, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley walked into a bakery and bought a cake. Almond, with meringue on top. It was sweet—but the milestone was sweeter. For more than a decade—since his grad school days—he’d been pursuing one big idea: a product that understands how users move through the…

Outcome from a study originally designed in 1984 stretching over an 18 year period, based on concern that running was likely to accelerate OA due to repetitive trauma to the joints (Chakravarty et al, 2008). Over the period of 18 years, a group of middle aged people took part in an ongoing study…

INDY LIFE Is your desk overflowing with scraps of paper, coffee cups, envelopes and wilted plants? Well, far from being idle, it turns out you might just be a creative genius. In world where ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’ is a well-valued idiom, being a messy person can often be mistaken as a…

It's finally adrift. When the Larsen C Ice Shelf calved yesterday, it sent one of the largest icebergs ever recorded slipping into a sea frosted with smaller chunks of ice. It marked the end of a decadeslong splintering first seen by satellites in the 1960s. The crack stayed small for years until,…

https://en-us.janushenderson.com/advisor/curveball/

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/10/527794495/mexico-is-called-worlds-second-most-violent-country

Jeff Hawkins is best known for bringing us the Palm Pilot, but he’s working on something that could be much, much bigger. For the past several years, Hawkins has been studying how the human brain functions with the hope of replicating it in software. In 2004, he published a book about his findings.…

https://mondaynote.com/three-slides-then-shut-up-the-art-of-the-pitch-85221afe993a

A recent ad for Bank of America stated "Life is Mobile. So is your bank." B. of A. isn’t selling their product—they’re selling their customer experience. You could even say that customer experience is the product. This example underscores a significant trend in the last few years: customer service…

Below is an excerpt from Mark Yuskos quartlery outlook. Read the full piece on the Morgan Creek website . The first time I heard the name Babson was in 1980 when I was a senior in high school in Weston, Connecticut (serendipitous given some of the themes of this letter and coinciding with Reagan’s…

After pink noise was delivered in short bursts during sleep, older people showed better cognitive function. Photo: iStockphoto/Getty Images Can’t remember where you left your cellphone? Totally forgot about that dentist appointment? If you’re past middle age and really want to hang on to your…

https://startupboy.com/2014/04/01/the-fifth-protocol/amp/

The pop culture view of startups is that they’re all about coming up with a great product idea. After the eureka moment, the outcome is preordained. This neglects the years of toil that entrepreneurs endure, and also the fact that the vast majority of startups change over time, often dramatically.…

Share 9 Share 33 Reddit Buffer 1 Shares 46 It was only last week that we saw a new AI unicorn birthed alongside speculation that this AI unicorn had also confidentially filed for an IPO. This led us to pontificate a bit about how AI is not the next dot-com because this time it’s different. This…

It is a wonderful accident of history that the internet and web were created as open platforms that anyone — users, developers, organizations — could access equally. Among other things, this allowed independent developers to build products that quickly gained widespread adoption. Google started in a…

Frankie Sanders Munoz, second from right, works with Linda Flick, left, a volunteer for Foundry United Methodist Church’s I.D. Ministry. Scores of low-income Washingtonians face an often months-long road toward gaining or regaining their government identification. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington…

Tokens are early today, but will transform technology tomorrow. The exponential rise of non-Bitcoin tokens prior to the coming correction. Data from coinmarketcap.com/charts In 2014, we wrote that “Bitcoin is more than money, and more than a protocol. It’s a model and platform for true crowdfunding…

Crypto Tokens and the Coming Age of Protocol Innovation HTTP as the underlying protocol of the web allows for decentralized publishing. Anyone can operate a web server and publish their own content. And anybody with a web browser can access that content (subject to governments and ISPs imposing…

USV recently made two investments in hedge fund managers. You might gather from that fact that we are moving away from venture capital. But that would be an incorrect assumption. What we are doing is finding new ways to invest in technologies that we think are interesting. These would be…

Tokens are selling at valuations which imply they’ll have millions of users. But can the blockchain support it? If not, how far away are we? Requirements to building scaled decentralized applications (dApps) There are two requirements to building scaled dApps: Having all of the necessary parts of…

Below you’ll find the complete, unedited transcript of my interview with Naval Ravikant on The Tim Ferriss Show . You can listen to the entire episode here or stream it below: NOTE: You are welcome to share up to 50% of the below transcript on your own site or social, as long as you: 1) Include…

When Reid Hoffman — who is rightly called “the Oracle of Silicon Valley” by many tech giants — returned to the podcast , I figured it would be popular, but it exploded. Many of you have asked for the transcript of our conversation , so you can find it below. More accurately, it’s a draft script, so…

Life Needs “Noise” In a game world of traditional Newtonian physics calculations, time generally flows as a smooth continuum. When attempting to simulate complicated collision physics this way one often gets annoying “trapped” states where objects get trapped between or partially inside one another…

Reflecting on the ritualization of creativity, Bukowski famously scoffed that “air and light and time and space have nothing to do with.” Samuel Johnson similarly contended that “a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.” And yet some of history’s most successful and…

Constant interruptions are the bane of life in today’s open-plan offices . And a Swedish-Swiss industrial engineering company, ABB, says it has a solution: It has given some of its employees a kind of automated “do not disturb” sign: custom-designed traffic lights for their desks. The FlowLight…

Steelcase CEO Jim Keane, right, in his prototype office pod, where he now retreats when he needs to focus. Photo: David Chandler The lofty building Jordan Hamad moved his tech-advisory firm into four years ago had the trappings of a startup idyll: open floor plan, polished concrete floors,…

I got a lot of comments about the two videos I posted last week suggesting that I have nailed the art of public speaking. I don’t know about that, I am my harshest critic. But I do believe that writing regularly makes it so much easier to speak publicly in unscripted situations. Writing forces you…

You may already trust algorithms, or mathematical formulas that reduce the need for human judgment, more than you realize. Commercial airliners fly largely, and safely, on autopilot; Netflix Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. recommend purchases that can seem uncannily attuned to your tastes. Why not let…

Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen was a guest on Masters in Business hosted by Barry Ritholtz . The content is timeless, so listen with a pen and paper. That way, you can refer back to it from time to time. For transcripts delivered straight to your email, subscribe here . Or for my favorite…

Charles Lindbergh in Germany, in 1937. Philip Roth’s novel “The Plot Against America” imagines the aviator’s election to the Presidency in 1940 and the widespread persecution of Jews that follows. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY AP Philip Roth’s novel “ The Plot Against America ” is a masterwork of…

Reuters/ Brian Snyder “I’m telling you right now, the US is going to have a crash and it will be massive,” asserted Mark Yusko at Mauldin Economics’ Strategic Investment Conference. In his keynote speech, Mark Yusko, CIO of Morgan Creek Capital Management, outlined where he sees the biggest…

Translated by Geoffrey James Book 1: The Silent Void Thus spake the Master Programmer: “When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave.” 1.1: The Tao of Programming Something mysterious is formed, born in the silent void. Waiting alone and…