Category: technology
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The Anthropology of YouTube
I personally find the examples given in this article quite uninspiring (even quaint), but the following quote from Clive Thompson’s look at the anthropology of YouTube is rather piquant: What’s happening to video is like what happened to word processing. Back in the ’70s and early ’80s, publishing was a rarefied, expert job. Then Apple’s WYSIWYG interface…
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Overnight Success Takes Years
Paul Buchheit—original developer of Gmail and Google AdSense, founder of FriendFeed—discusses how projects can obtain ‘overnight success’. This notion of overnight success is very misleading, and rather harmful. If you’re starting something new, expect a long journey. That’s no excuse to move slow though. To the contrary, you must move very fast, otherwise you will…
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Inauguration Roundup
The Internet is bustling with news of yesterday’s inauguration of President Obama (it feels strange writing that) and I feel somewhat guilty adding to the overabundance of news. As a compromise I’m going to limit myself to this single roundup post. One intrepid soul has compiled a collection of videos of every inauguration speech from the…
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The Anatomy of a Hit Song
Two great articles on current research into how artists and songs become hits: Group Think looks at research predicting musical hits using “geo-aware query strings” from file-sharing networks such as Gnutella. The geographic location of an emerging artist is the key to predicting their success […]. “If an artist has the potential to be successful,…
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Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors and Why the List Doesn’t Work
CWE/SANS have released a list of what they are calling the 25 most dangerous programming errors and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror gives a great overview of each error. However security consultant and author Gary McGraw gives a number of reasons why such lists don’t work (via Schneier), and I must admit that a lot of his concerns…
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Trends in Counterfeit Currency
Bruce Schneier comments on the growing prevalence of low-tech currency counterfeiting: “Counterfeits are becoming easier to detect while people are becoming less skilled in detecting it”. Part of the problem, Green said, is that the government has changed the money so much to foil counterfeiting. With all the new bills out there, citizens and even…
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Debating Cryonics
Cryonics: the low-temperature preservation of humans and animals that can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine until resuscitation may be possible in the future. When one discusses cryonics, topics as diverse as futurology, medicine, technology and philosophy are debated. A few weeks ago a number of high–profile bloggers, headed by the excellent Overcoming Bias, have been…
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Conducting Technical Interviews
Eric Ries, ex-CTO and current tech startup advisor, offers advice on how to conduct a thorough and effective technical interview. Just one of many methods, obviously, but some good information nonetheless. Finding great engineers is hard; figuring out who’s good is even harder. The most important step in evaluating a candidate is conducting a good…
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The Future of Education
Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, talks to The Telegraph about his views on the future of learning. The old-fashioned model of education still prevalent in today’s schools, involving remembering facts ‘off pat’, was designed for the industrial age. […] This might have been good for the mass production economy, but it doesn’t deliver for the…
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Google Interviews
Stories abound of bloggers going for interviews at Google and writing up their experiences (as a cursory search will show), but I’ve never felt the need to bookmark or share any of them: they’re all rather lacklustre affairs. However, Peteris Krumins’ account of his interview at Google is informative, indepth and unflinching. In short: worth a…