Showing all posts tagged #clipping:

Making is Show Business now – alexdanco.com clipping

October 12th, 2020

Nadia Eghbal’s new book, Working In Public: the Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, may not have been on your short list of books to read this year. It’s admittedly a nerdy topic: it’s about open source projects, roles and responsibilities; the rise of GitHub as a developer platform; and how developer culture is evolving around the new power of creator platforms. I recommend you get it. It is mostly about software development, bu...

Situated Software clipping

March 14th, 2020

Written by Clay ShirkyFirst published March 30, 2004 on the "Networks, Economics, and Culture" mailing list. Subscribe to the mailing list. I teach at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where the student population is about evenly divided between technologists who care about aesthetics and artists who aren't afraid of machines, which makes it a pretty good place to see the future. Part of the future I believe I'm seeing is a ...

Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours clipping

October 29th, 2019

Back in 2015, I wrote a blog post called Dropbox: the First Dead Decacorn. At the time, it was the most widely shared take I’d ever written. I learned several things from writing this piece, and none of them had to do with Dropbox: I learned, for instance, that a great way to get people to click on your blog post is to make them mad. I also learned about a company called Social Capital, after my soon-to-be-colleague Ray reached out to me about...

Creating Passionate Users: Attenuation and the suck threshold clipping

September 23rd, 2019

Attenuation and the suck threshold How long do your users spend in the "I suck" (or "this product sucks") zone? Once they've crossed the suck threshold, how long does it take before they start to feel like they kick ass? Both of those thresholds are key milestones on a users path to passion, and it's often the case that he-who-gets-his-users-there-first wins. Our O'Reilly editor Mike Loukides says our goal -- whether it's for product design o...

A Big Little Idea Called Legibility clipping

September 18th, 2019

July 26, 2010 By Venkatesh Rao James C. Scott’s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examines how, across dozens of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning and census-taking, a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring. The pictures below, from the book (used with permission from the author) graphically and literally illustr...

Argentina On Two Steaks A Day (Idle Words) clipping

September 16th, 2019

04.13.2006 Argentina On Two Steaks A Day The classic beginner's mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to drink water in the early parts of a marathon. That first steak has to get you through the afternoon and ...

Greater Los Angeles clipping

September 16th, 2019

I got back from Los Angeles last night and my head is still spinning. I’d move there again in a heartbeat. There are three great cities in the United States: there’s Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York – in that order. I love Boston; I even love Denver; I like Miami; I think Washington DC is habitable; but Los Angeles is Los Angeles. You can’t compare it to Paris, or to London, or to Rome, or to Shanghai. You can interestingly contrast it to...

No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization? clipping

June 29th, 2019

At Doist we believe that open and sincere communication improves our decision-making process. That’s why we’ve built a culture that encourages feedback at all levels of decision-making: from purely technical solutions to team and product management. We built our team communication app, Twist, around public threads to make that level of transparency and engagement possible for both ourselves and other remote workplaces. Initially, we thought t...

The Hard Parts of Open Source, by Evan Czaplicki clipping

January 25th, 2019

Speaker: Evan Czaplicki Meeting: Strange Loop 2018 - September 2018 Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4EX4dPppA Slides: https://prezi.com/oowcpzsnwp-8/the-hard-parts-of-open-source/?webgl=0 [ References to videos, books, and articles mentioned in this talk: https://gist.github.com/evancz/b29d1ce4166a557d03474278b2b44514 ][Time 0:00:00] slide title: The Hard Parts of Open Source Evan Czaplicki Elm / NoRedInkWelcome, everybody. Thanks f...

Fallacies - Ambiguous Collective clipping

January 25th, 2019

by David King To commit this fallacy is to use a collective term without any meaningful delimitation of the elements it subsumes. "We", "you", "they", "the people", "the system", "the general public", and "society as a whole" are the most widely-used examples. This fallacy is especially widespread and devastating in the realm of political discussion, where its use renders impossible the task of discriminating among distinctively diff...

[python-committers] Transfer of power clipping

January 25th, 2019

[python-committers] Transfer of power Guido van Rossum guido at python.org Thu Jul 12 10:57:35 EDT 2018 Previous message (by thread): [python-committers] A different way to focus discussions Next message (by thread): [python-committers] Transfer of power Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] ...

Kinky Labor Supply and the Attention Tax clipping

January 22nd, 2019

This essay was written by Andrew Kortina and Namrata Patel. Kinky (S1) vs classical (S0) labor supply curve.Over the past few decades, labor force participation has sharply dropped for men ages 20-34. Theories about the root cause range from indolence, to a lack of skills and training, to offshoring, to (perhaps most interestingly) the increasing attractiveness and availability of leisure and media entertainment. In this essay, we propose th...

The Supply Chain Africa Needs clipping

January 2nd, 2019

Chuma Asuzu · December 22, 2018 Comparing product development stories across the continentAt a conference in Nairobi two years ago, an engineer visiting from Rotterdam stunned me with how easy it was for his team to order electronic components: an order for a BLE chip placed on Thursday evening would be fulfilled by lunch on Friday. Only a month before that, my colleague and I had spent two weeks waiting for a Bluetooth module for a prototype ...

How to Use Evernote for Your Creative Workflow clipping

December 30th, 2018

By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs Let’s imagine how you would use Evernote if you had a brain. I previously explained how the standard tag-based approach basically contradicts everything we know about creativity and how the human brain works. After a few months of tinkering, I’m ready to attempt an answer to the reverse question:What would it look like to use Evernote as the basis for a creative workflow, in line with known neuroscience principle...

Productivity for Precious Snowflakes clipping

December 29th, 2018

January 28, 2016 By Tiago Forte We’ve been told for years now that what our parents and kindergarten teachers told us is not, in fact, true — we are not each and every one of us special unique snowflakes destined for greatness. In this essay I want to offer a new theory of productivity for those of us who, despite all the evidence to the contrary, still believe there is something valuable about our particular point of view. I will argue that...

How Argentina became white clipping

December 27th, 2018

By Razib Khan | December 17, 2009 1:42 pm Apropos of my skepticism of Census projections of 2050 demographic balances, there’s a new paper out on Argentina which is relevant. Here’s Wikipedia on Argentina’s self-conception: As with other areas of new settlement such as Canada, Australia and the United States, Argentina is considered a country of immigrants. Most Argentines are descended from colonial-era settlers and of the 19th and 20th ce...

Two Malthusian scares clipping

December 27th, 2018

Carter lectures the U.S. on energy, 1978 In 1798. the Reverend Thomas Malthus wrote his influential essay on population, arguing that population grows exponentially while the supply of food, energy, and other commodities only grows linearly. As a result, the vast majority of humankind is doomed to be mired in poverty unless some even grimmer reapers than starvation (war, disease, etc.) are brought to bear, or births are moderated. In 1978 U...

Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution clipping

December 27th, 2018

Subcultures are dead. I plan to write a full obituary soon. Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why? One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death. Eventually—around 2000—everyone understood this, and gave up hoping ...

The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species - Lightspeed Magazine clipping

November 13th, 2018

by Ken LiuAuthor spotlight Published in Aug. 2012 (Issue 27) | 2735 words © 2012 Ken Liu There is no definitive census of all the intelligent species in the universe. Not only are there perennial arguments about what qualifies as intelligence, but each moment and everywhere, civilizations rise and fall, much as the stars are born and die. Time devours all. Yet every species has its unique way of passing on its wisdom through the ages, its way...

Learning Economics From Walt Disney World clipping

October 10th, 2018

By David M. Levy, reason.com October 1st, 1975 Libertarians who are no doubt accustomed to meeting their ideas in caricature have probably been told that in a libertarian world—one with private streets, private mass transit, private utilities of all descriptions, private ownership of redwood trees and alligators—everything would have an explicit price to it. To walk on the streets, to visit the parks, individuals would be required to make an ...

The Chengzhongcun: Urban Traces of the Village clipping

September 15th, 2018

The Chengzhongcun Urban Traces of the Village Villager going about daily life in the alleyways of Xiasha Village, Shenzhen, 2011 © John Joseph Burns Essay by John Joseph Burns ‘To get rich is Glorious’ Much of modern China stems from the economic reforms brought in by Deng Xiao Ping in the late 1970’s and since that time an unimaginable and unprecedented expansion has occurred in its urban areas. The vast majority of the urban developme...

The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang — Subterranean Press clipping

November 26th, 2015

When my daughter Nicole was an infant, I read an essay suggesting that it might no longer be necessary to teach children how to read or write, because speech recognition and synthesis would soon render those abilities superfluous. My wife and I were horrified by the idea, and we resolved that, no matter how sophisticated technology became, our daughter’s skills would always rest on the bedrock of traditional literacy. It turned out that we an...