The Price of Free Is Actually Too High
I loved this quote by Tristan Harris in the New York Magazine article The Internet Apologizes … “We cannot afford the advertising business model. The price of free is actually too
The death of Google
Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com/the-death-of-google PDF: https://lauren.vortex.com/google-death.pdf Google Docs: https://lauren.vortex.com/google-death.gdoc
TinySeed – A Startup Accelerator Designed for Bootstrappers
When you hear the term startup accelerator you likely think of YCombinator, TechStars or 500 Startups. Accelerators traditionally cater to "unicorns" – companies that have the potential to be worth at least a billion dollars. This focus has made them successful in launching startups l
Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from
Recently I saw some rather surprising conversations on Reddit’s /r/cscareerquestions which is generally a great place to talk through different CS Career issues people are having and try to h…
Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (113 Models Explained)
The smartest people in the world use mental models to make intelligent decisions, avoid stupidity, and increase productivity. Let's take a look at how ...
How not to replace email: lessons from Google Wave
As of a month ago, the ApacheWave project is“retired”. Few people noticed; in the seven years that Wave was anApache Incubator open source project, it never ...
Why I Don't Sign Non-Competes
My first job out of University was in the IT department of a payment processing and debt collection company. My desk was juxtapose to a call center w...
To become a software consultant, avoid letting clients pay you for code (2017)
I get a lot of questions from software developers about consulting and being a consultant. In this post, I talk about the key to being a software consultant
The case for ending Amazon’s dominance
It should not be difficult to love Amazon. To consumers, it offers choice and convenience. Countless internet ventures have relied on its cheap, flexible cloud computing services to start and scale…
Personalisation Is Asymmetric Psychological Warfare
Another privacy nightmare. An airline wants its cabin crew to know your birthday and favourite drinks order, to better personalise its service to you. My first instinct is to recoil in horror. It sounds like every dystopian sci-fi epic. But why do I feel this way? Partly it is the lack of genuine personality behind…
At least it wasn't Oracle
What it was like for relatively new Red Hat employee, Chris Short, during the IBM acquisition announcement and the week that followed.
New US Tariffs are Anti-Maker and Will Encourage Offshoring
The new 25% tariffs announced by the USTR , set to go into effect on July 6th, are decidedly anti-Maker and ironically pro-offshoring. I’ve examined the tariff lists ( List 1 and List 2 ), and it taxes the import of basic components, tools and sub-assemblies, while giving fully assembled goods a free pass. The USTR’s…
Growing from 0 to 4M users on our fashion app with vertical machine learning
My name is Gabi (my bio), and I’m the CEO and co-founder of Chicisimo. We launched three years ago, our goal was to offer automated outfit…
Credit card fraud warning signs
Avoid accepting fraudulent credit card orders by paying attention to these warning signs.
My professional opinion as a blockchain researcher: I don’t see the point (yet)
I’ve spent the last 15 months researching the implications and possibilities of blockchains and related “distributed trust technologies” from a business and societal point of view…
The Uncharity of College: The Big Business Nobody Understands
How Colleges Make More Money Than God By Giving It Away