February 2012
“Today’s sysadmin todo list:
0. Get corporate membership with EFF.
1. Identify...”
– foxylad on hacker news
Today’s sysadmin todo list:0. Get corporate membership with EFF.1. Identify all … | Hacker News (via fred-wilson)
Stone IPA
This is the most honest one line review of Stone IPA yet.
onesentencebeerreview:
Brewer: Stone Brewing Co. ABV: 6.9 percent Review: “Serve this beer at your next dinner party to loosen up your guests before you start talking orgy.”
The Weakening of Nations: How Tax Work-Arounds... →
Loopholes, poor regulations, and off-shore havens allow corporations and the very wealthy to draw on the benefits of a strong nation-state without fully paying back in, eroding a system that’s less tested than we might think.
What is Zynga making per paying user? Nobody, not... →
Good insight on the difficulty on nailing models and how, at the end of the day, you have to stop trying to get the perfect model and go with the best you’ve got.
In the end, for the purposes of arguments about how much money a company is making, the only numbers that matter are: how much money is coming into the company each month? How much money is leaving the company each month?...
Services I Can't Live Without (and Some I Can)
(edit: added in “Dead” as a last category. hat tip @dromano)
I was just thinking about this the other day and wanted to break down what services I use and love and those that I only begrudgingly continue to use.
I’ve broken it down into three groups: services that are here to stay (i.e. I’m not leaving them unless you pry them from my cold dead hands), on the border...
Our Favorite Typefaces of 2011 →
9-bits:
Excellent selection. Bookmarked. (via Typographica)
Which School Has Better Programmers? UCLA or USC?... →
Come on UCLA! The hackathon this weekend in LA; wish I were down there to attend.
January 2012
The Zynga Abyss - The Atlantic →
“I’ll reiterate this in plainer language, just in case the quote wasn’t clear: Detsaridis said that one of the most compelling parts of playing Zynga’s games is deciding when and how to spam your friends with reminders to play Zynga’s games.”
Best explanation I've ever seen of why... →
Best part:
“I continue, “if you can commit to walking 16 hours a day, we can make up the difference! It will be hard, but this is crunch time. Suck it up!” My friend yells back, “I’m not the one who told our friends we’d make it by Sunday in the first place! Don’t blame me for this!”
Love it.
Why Not Try An Infinity-Day Window? →
The 56 day window is just the latest of the stupid moves made by Hollywood. I’ve learned to live with these arbitrary windows with my subscription to Netflix, appreciating new stuff whenever it does finally get on there but not everyone has that kind of patience.
I have plenty of friends who were once hardcore music piraters who now buy music legit from Apple/Amazon because it’s...
How Much Do Music and Movie Piracy Really Hurt the... →
parislemon:
Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman of Freakonomics discuss the claims that piracy leads to $250 billion a year in loses and 750,000 American jobs lost:
The good news is that the numbers are wrong — as this post by the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez explains. In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced...
venomous porridge: The Unprecedented Audacity of... →
dwineman:
Apple just released iBooks Author, a free Mac app for creating digital books for the new version of iBooks. I haven’t played with it much, but so far it looks like a very good tool. However, a curious thing happens when you go to export your work in iBooks format:
This restriction — that…
“I want them to remember that lawmakers and lobbyists who don’t understand the...”
– Erik Martin, reddit general manager, telling us what he thinks you should take away from today’s Internet blackouts. (via newsweek)
How to Land Your Kid in Therapy →
By trying to spare our children the discomfort of failure and unhappiness by artificially propping up their self-esteem and self-worth, are we doing more harm than good? A very interesting article.
“The clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those...
“I talked with Nancy Pelosi about SOPA the other day, and she said that the...”
– Tim (via brycedotvc)
Which is better for users, scrolling or clicking? →
“Nowadays, a candidate must believe not just some but all of the following...”
– American politics: The right Republican | The Economist (via fillup)
The Cordray Crisis →
“This latest episode over the Cordray appointment may be the most extreme example. But it’s surely not the final example.
It is instead an ominous milestone in the deterioration of the US political system into ever more intense acrimony and paralysis.”
“Taking vacation at Red Frog is encouraged (and even celebrated). And it’s not...”
– Give Your Employees Unlimited Vacation Days
Some look at business management techniques like this and think they are pipe dreams or flat out silly. I disagree: I think it’s a shift in our culture and a necessary one. Just as sales commissions train salespeople to focus on the wrong results, so do...
Revisiting my 2011 resolutions and my 2012 edition
Since it’s newly 2012, I felt it was time to revisit my 2011 resolutions (found here: http://johanlieu.com/post/2548438695/my-new-years-resolutions-for-2011), see if I kept them and grade myself like I said I would (I said I would do it on a monthly basis, but I didn’t, so you can probably guess how well this going to go for me):
Resolution #1:
1. I am going to commit to writing one...
December 2011
How Fox News is helping Barack Obama's re-election... →
Frum: “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us – and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.”
The Big Lie: Wall Street has destroyed the wonder... →
“I have lived what now, at 75, is starting to feel like a long life. If anyone asks me what has been the great American story of my lifetime, I have a ready answer. It is the corruption, money-based, that has settled like some all-enveloping excremental mist on the landscape of our hopes, that has permeated every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we live...
National Geographic: The Bible of King James →
Fascinating history of the influence, both good and bad, of the King James Bible.
How to Actually Make Text Look Interesting →
Nice intro to text design.
When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality? →
“It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by...
The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing... →
Must read.
“It is not healthy for companies to trade at prices well beyond what they are...”
– A VC (via bijan)
Another great post from Fred.
(via dpstyles)
Gimmicks and Patterns in Interface Design →
Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design →
9-bits:
In particular, this passage does a fantastic job at articulating the hardest part of my job:
Removing dark patterns from any site involves a leap of faith. A company has to shift from a short-term quantitative measurement mindset to one that values relatively slow, steady growth of “warm fuzzy” qualitative things like brand image, credibility, and trust.
daniel sinker: I'm starting to think Lego is evil →
sinker:
Well, maybe not evil, but “highly problematic.”
First, let’s remove what we all *think* Lego is (i.e. our own nostalgic memories, our aspirational beliefs, or $250 robot sets), and instead concentrate on what Lego today is, for the most part: It’s movie-tie-in model sets marketed pretty much…
Horseshit | The Verge →
Great article by @joshuatopolsky on the ridiculousness of fanboyism.
Obama Enrages Civil Liberties Groups By Dropping... →
“When he took office, President Obama told the American people that he would restore the nation’s commitment to the rule of law and the protection of human rights,” Human Rights First President and CEO Elisa Massimino said in a statement. “Today’s announcement proves that he is unwilling to put his full power behind those presidential promises. The American people need a leader whose commitment...
I Work For The Internet →
staff:
We work for the Internet. And we’re guessing many of you do too. Whether it’s researching, selling, coding, supporting, designing — so many of our careers depend on the Internet.
One argument that’s been made to Congress is that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is needed to protect American jobs. In truth, the new liabilities this bill would impose on startups could stop American...
“But so if I make 8 million, which all goes through paypal right into Pig Newton,...”
– i am so hoping that you make 8 million Louis C.K.
Hi I’m Louis C.K. and this is a thing (via mattlehrer)
The Day I Saw Van Gogh's Genius in a New Light →
john:
Pretty incredible post
This is just insane.
“Two high level Congressional staffers who have been instrumental in creating or...”
– Masnick
No one is wondering anymore.
(via brycedotvc)
How the iPad changed my reading habits
And it’s probably not what you think.
Ever since getting my first iPad back in April 2010 I’ve begun to notice something odd; reading on a computer screen totally sucks. And when I say computer screen, I mean the display that is attached to your laptop or connected to your PC and is perpendicular to the Earth. I’ve never noticed it before, but reading on a screen that is...
November 2011
John Ciancutti's answer to Is there a better... →
Super insightful response from the VP of Engineering at Netflix.
Also loved this bit: “The more work you make each decision, the fewer decisions you will get.”
Design is becoming a competitive advantage for... →
“User experience-driven innovation will most likely bring large-scale change (and financial success) to the evolving startup landscape. With lower startup costs and a vastly expanded global market for online and mobile services (almost 2B people on the Web and billions using smart phones) combined with cheaper online distribution, building better user experiences will become the way of the...