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The Electric Car
The electric car is going to take over the world. Soon. Let me explain. 75% of US consumers and over 85% of US millennials own smartphones. Perhaps more amazing is that 1/4 of people in the...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,981 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
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Lessons from Airbnb's Rejections
I am so happy Brian Chesky shared these rejection emails from Airbnb's early days. I am constantly reminded how most every successful startup began small and faced various types of rejection early...
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Is Kickstarter covering up a scam? An open letter to CEO Yancey Strickler
Dear Yancey, I love Kickstarter. When I backed my first project in 2012, I was happy and excited to be given the opportunity to support creators with my pledge. Since then, Kickstarter has been an …
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Why is finance so complex? (2011)
Lisa Pollack at FT Alphaville mulls a question : “Why are we so good at creating complexity in finance?” The answer she comes up with is the “ Flynn Effect “, basically the idea that there is an uptrend in human intelligence. Finance, in this view, gets more complex over time because financiers get smart enough to…
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Minister No More
The referendum of 5th July will stay in history as a unique moment when a small European nation rose up against debt-bondage. Like all struggles for democratic rights, so too this historic rejection of the Eurogroup’s 25th June ultimatum comes with a large price tag attached. It is, therefore, essential that the great…
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Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.”
My translation of DIE ZEIT’s interview with Thomas Piketty is now hosted by TheWire.in. Read it here.
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This Industry is Fucked
My least favorite topic in the world is 'Women in Tech', so I am going to make this short but I think it's something that needs to be said.
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Bitcoin: A flawed currency with a useful application for the Eurozone (2014)
The responses of many to my post on Bitcoin reveal a powerful tendency to underestimate the ill-effects of deflation on a social economy. This tendency to underestimate deflation’s deleterious impact matters beyond debates on Bitcoin per se. For example, in Europe the incapacity of the European Central Bank (ECB) to…
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Energy
I think a lot about how important cheap, safe, and abundant energy is to our future. A lot of problems—economic, environmental, war, poverty, food and water availability, bad side effects of...
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Project Fi Review: Cell Service from Google
Mostly a visual journalist, I love tech and building things. I am an award winning photographer who has captured life through the lens in Central Pennsylvania for over 40 years. I also enjoy writing stories to blend with my visuals. On my off time, I am usually busy with construction projects on my rental properties…
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What happens when you stop relying on resumes
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I’ve come to rely quite heavily on data. I’ve counted typos on resumes, I’ve sifted through a corpus of engineering offers, and I’ve skimmed thousands of recruiting messages to tag them by personalization level. This post, however, is going to be a bit of […]
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Profits vs. Growth
One of the things I’ve always struggled with as an investor in high growth tech companies is the tension between getting profitable vs growing more quickly. It has become a central tenet of tech growth investing (in both the public and private markets) that growth is more valuable than profitability and you can always…
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Losing 80% of mobile users is normal
Exclusive data on retention curves for mobile apps In a recent essay covering the Next Feature Fallacy , I explained why shipping “just one more feature” doesn’t fix your product. The root cause is that the average app has pretty bad retention metrics . Today, I’m excited to share some real numbers on mobile…
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Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs
These policies are not just dumb in retrospect; typically there were people who understood a lot about such policies and who had good reasons to disapprove of them beforehand. It seems hard to imagine such policies being adopted nearly as often if everyone knew what such "experts" knew about their consequences. Thus…
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Greece’s Proposals to End the Crisis
The only antidote to propaganda and malicious ‘leaks’ is transparency. After so much disinformation on my presentation at the Eurogroup of the Greek government’s position, the only response is to post the precise words uttered within. Read them and judge for yourselves whether the Greek government’s proposals…
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Who Do You Trust?
Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The
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Why Greet Apple's Swift 2.0 With Open Arms?
Apple announced last week that its Swift programming language — a currently fully proprietary software successor to Objective C — will probably be partially released under an OSI-approved license eventually. Apple explicitly stated though that such released software will not be copylefted. (Apple's pathological hatred…
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Algorithmic surrealism: A slow-motion guide to high-frequency trading
Please note: Part 1 of this essay appeared in the Feb 2015 edition of Contributoria . It is published and modified here under a...
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Software has its own Gresham's Law
I recently found myself reading a few of Gregor Hohpe's blog posts and came across Design Patterns: More Than Meets The Eye . In it, Hohpe repeats a message that needs to be repeated every so often even now, twenty years after the publication of the GoF book: software patterns are fundamentally about human…
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