This post has been re-written several times, so please forgive me if it does not come across as coherent as I would like to. The main reason for the re-write was this post by Martin Wedge . Originally I planned to scrap the whole thing but maybe having a different perspective will help, I’ve deleted those parts that…
An article came out today in Businessweek about arrogance and Silicon Valley. I thought it was good, but there was one more point I wanted to make. People often accuse people in Silicon Valley...
This post describes how to implement a DSL for pricing financial contracts in Scala
Most bugs are straightforward, but occasionally one comes up which is not so clear in its impact. Such is the case with a bug which is fixed in tarsnap 1.0.36 . This bug causes the NUL string termination byte to overflow the heap-allocated buffer used for paths of objects examined as tarsnap traverses a directory…
If you’re a startup company founder with a technical background (or a design or product management background), building a sales team for…
It’s time to finish the “HFT in my backyard” series. The last week was intense here and around me, and I think at some point it’s good to keep silent. What’s more, this Part V abo…
On a Universal Basic Income, full employment and avoiding libertarian traps It's the summer of 1986. T...
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…
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…
Everyone complains about web pages that suck, but the reality is that it is advertisers who call the shots. This should, at a minimum, put Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple’s News a…
When you think about it, it really is one tangled, small cottage industry. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody knows what everybody is doing, and nobody talks. One of my informants. This is the f…
You have probably never written a significant piece of correct software. Neither have I. Here's why that's not quite as bad as it sounds.
Finding work as a software person kind of sucks sometimes. Actually, let me strike the "kind of" from that sentence. …
Last January the Steve Jobs movie came to town and called me up. I was leaving work one day when I got a phone call from a guy named Todd ...
Twitter has had a rough stretch, and most are pessimistic about its chances. I was previously, but I think the upside is looking much brighter than it did before this week.
Ah the good old days. Stocks up $25, $50, $100 more in a single day. Day trading was all the rage. Anyone and everyone you talked to had a story about how they had made a ton of money on such and such a stock. In an hour. Stock trading millionaires were being minted by the week, if not sooner.
I just spent a day working with Bob, the Chief Innovation Officer of a very smart large company I’ll call Acme Widgets. Bob summarized Acme’s impediments to innovation. “At our company we have a cu…
