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Stop Freelancing
I've been "freelancing" part time for the better part of the past 4 years and full time for the past 8 months, and if there's one thing I've learned it's that…
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Ten Years of Bootstrapping: Lessons Learned
Note: I was holding off on posting this because I wanted to wait for our redesign to be finished…but alas, it is taking much longer than we thought it would…so as promised a while back, here is our story. Our Story: 10 Years of Bootstrapping In 2002, after several years of running a small but […]
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Our Newfound Fear of Risk
We’re afraid of risk. It’s a normal part of life, but we’re increasingly unwilling to accept it at any level. So we turn to technology to protect us. The problem is that technological security measures aren’t free. They cost money, of course, but they cost other things as well. They often don’t provide the security…
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Stupid, Stupid xBox
I was a founder of the original xBox project at Microsoft and gave it its name. Almost 14 years after the painful, pointless, and idiotic internal cage-match to get it started and funded, the hard …
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Thousands dead, millions deprived of civil liberties? (2001)
If we are not careful, the deadly attacks on New York and Washington will lead to far worse secondary damage, if the U.S. Congress adopts "preventive measures" that take away the freedom that America stands for.
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The power of the RSS reader
With the decreasing use of RSS readers over the last few years, which will probably be accelerated by Google Reader’s shutdown in July, many are bidding good riddance to a medium that they never used well.
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Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps
[Translations: Japanese] New media technologies often cause an allergic reaction when they first appear. We may find them painful before we find them indispensable. I watched the movie The Hobbit. Twice. First I saw it in its “standard” mode. A … Continue reading →
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Go Pro on a soaring eagle [video]
What does it feel like to soar majestically like an bird? Maybe something like this video, shot with a camera strapped to the back of an eagle flying near Chamo
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LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
The primary reasons LinkedIn is the mustached, trench coat and wire frame glasses wearing mouth breather of the internet are the “People You May Know” and “People Also Viewed” features.
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Progressive Enhancement Is Dead
I've got bad news: Progressive enhancement is dead, baby. It's dead. At least for the majority of web developers.
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Startup advice
In honor of the new YC batch starting tomorrow, here is some of the best startup advice I’ve heard or given (mostly heard): 1. Make something people want. 2. A great team and a great...
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Four Hours of Concentration
As I've blogged about before, and mentioned again in my previous post, the great mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré put in two hours of work in the morning and two in the evening. Apparently this is a common pattern. Cal Newport mentions this in his interview with Todd Henry. Now we also know that if
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You commit three felonies a day
In a book called Three Felonies A Day, Boston civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate says that everyone in the US commits felonies everyday and if the governmen
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Thoreau 2.0
This is a written version of a talk I gave on September 21, 2013 , at the XOXO conference in Portland.
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A horrifying startup accelerator story
Recently, I wrote a post called “Entrepreneurs Deserve Full Transparency” for my WSJ series. Several entrepreneurs wrote me, but this story really stands out as a warning to do your diligence and demand full transparency. Not all accelerators are created equal. I’ve posted the following email by permission of the…
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Improving the security of your SSH private key files
Update (July 2015): This post is now rather outdated, and the procedure for modifying your private key files is no longer recommended. A better solution is to use ssh-keygen -o .
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My Experience in the Educational Apps Market – 2013 report
So after my 2011 and 2012 reports. Here's my 2013 report about my sales and experience as an indie educational iOS app developer. I hope yo...
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Thorium Reactors
My last article about thorium as an alternative nuclear reactor fuel drew way more readers than I expected. I intentionally glossed over the complexities of specific reactor designs for the sake of simplicity, but in this article I want to go deeper. This article explains some of the differences between traditional…
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Cisco to release BSD-licensed H.264 stack
As I noted last year , one of the biggest challenges to open source software has been the patent status of video codecs. The most popular codec, H.264 , is patent-encumbered and licensed by MPEG LA , under terms that prevent distributing it with open source products including Firefox. Cisco has announced today that…
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How to Get Good at Chess, Fast
Edit: This article on chess improvement was unexpectedly popular, reaching #2 on Hacker News and being linked to on LifeHacker. Thanks for your patience as I work through all the comments and emails I receive. There are many misconceptions about rapid chess improvement. In this post I’m going to lay out a simple but…
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Fertile Ground
One of my favorite patterns in our industry is when the old and established are wiped out by disruption, irrelevance, or changing fashions. Like a forest fire, clearing out the old is very destructive and shouldn’t be taken lightly. But what’s left behind is a clean slate and immense opportunity.
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Learning JavaScript - my experience and advice
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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I wish I’d thought of that. Operation Starbucks
I should have thought of it first. I walked into Starbucks one afternoon. Ok. Ok. I do this every afternoon, but something was different this time. Something really neat was going on.