April 2010
1 post
Most of you will graduate and still have no idea... →
March 2010
2 posts
The cost of progress? Your privacy.
20 years ago, you might have thought that if there was ever as much as information as there is now, personal information would be more secure owing to the fact that it would be hard to find. That, of course, has been proven wrong, but it is not because there isn’t a lot of information out there.* Rather, it’s because we have extremely good tools for organizing and accessing that...
Having trouble finishing projects? Let me guess:...
On February 21 2010, a distressed user posted an open question to Hacker News: ”I am a horrible finisher,” he wrote. “I consider myself reasonably smart […] but the one thing holding me back is my [in]ability to finish a project.” ”Help me,” the title of his post reads. “Please.”
One day (and 150 responses) later, Hacker News had more...
February 2010
6 posts
Speed matters. A lot.
Some years into the company’s life, Google’s Sergey Brin told the VP in charge of user experience that they had picked the 10-result default search page because it seemed reasonable. “But we don’t actually know the answer,” he said. So he sent her to figure it out.
Even at this point, Google had millions of requests a day. It is relatively easy to change the...
Your users are very stupid. (Maybe.)
There are relatively few moments in internet history that you can really and genuinely say have a shot at being the funniest ever. One of the moments that might actually be up there began on February 12, 2010 at 8:25 AM. Here’s the timeline, as far as I can piece it together:
8:25 AM - Mike Melanson, a writer who’s been with a site site called ReadWriteWeb since December...
Luck is an easy skill to learn. →
A link to an interesting post by Richard Wiseman, in which he argues that much of what we call “luck” is more or less the up to power of suggestion — and how you can change that for yourself.
The biggest reason you will or will not succeed in...
There are arguably more obstacles to CS-ers than there are to participants in pretty much any other field out there. Consider, for example:
There are literally millions of really, really smart people who not only do this for a living, but also for a hobby. In fact, more than any other profession, CS-ers are notorious for replacing friends, food, and even family, with computers.
Many of them...
Why does Google put a copyright line at the bottom...
Pop quiz: why does Google put a copyright notice at the bottom of their homepage? No, it’s got nothing to do with legalese. In fact, when they first put it up, their lawyers told them that copyright was implied and they didn’t strictly need it, so they didn’t have to put it up if they didn’t want to.
Give up?
It’s a placeholder. If you didn’t know, Google is obsessive about user tests; in...
How to fail more with a lot less work.
In the old days, it used to be that if you wanted to start a company, you’d find a venture capital firm (call them VC’s: it will impress any entrepreneurship dorks you know) to give you millions and millions of dollars for rows upon rows of servers and hundreds of engineers/developers/IT guys/salespeople/etc. Then you’d rent the most extravagent building you could find, order...