Why is YouTube terrible?

Interesting:

Check out some of the following videos, selected from top channels, all made within the last few months. Videos like KIDS in JAIL!!, How Guys Sleep, This was the FASTEST selling video game of 2006, Epic Epic Stunt, Ambercrombie & Fitch CEO Is A Dick, TWERKSANITY!!!, all have millions of views and subscribers but about $20 of production value and content investment between the lot of them. Even the best one, from The Young Turks network, could have been ...

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When does entrepreneurship on the web end?

Every industry eventually consolidates. And the web is less open than it was 10 years ago. When does the current era end? When does capital regain the upper hand?

In the second tier, the hustler class of new-money industrialists produced a first generation of Robber Barons, and then an asymmetric balance of power between bankers and second-generation hustlers who aspired to Robber Baron level fortunes (egged on by Horatio Alger narratives), but ended up as the tame new middle class. How ...

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Homophobes for fiscal constraint

It makes sense to me that a man who hates all gays also is in favor of fiscal restraint, as fiscal restraint during a recession is simply a ways of expressing hatred for the poor and working classes. This guy hates everyone is not already part of one of society’s favored groups.

Harvard Professor and author Niall Ferguson says John Maynard Keynes’ economic philosophy was flawed and he didn’t care about future generations because he was gay and didn’t have ...

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Do intellectuals have any influence?

Paul Krugman writes:

But will any of this make a difference? The story of the past three years, after all, is not that Alesina and Ardagna used a bad measure of fiscal policy, or that Reinhart and Rogoff mishandled their data. It is that important people’s will to believe trumped the already ample evidence that austerity would be a terrible mistake; A-A and R-R were just riders on the wave.

The cynic in me therefore says that after a brief period of ...

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Real entrepreneurs are ready to go to jail

This question occurs to me a lot. If the government never threatens to arrest you, then how do you know if you are really pushing against the limits? If you play it safe, and avoid any government threats, then are you really being innovative? Here is a guy who was willing to take big risks:

My first startup landed me in prison. Imagine a company that allowed people to eliminate the financial burden of paying for a luxury or ...

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Why is it so difficult to estimate time on software projects?

I just went through something just like this. Interesting:.

It was the , and I was a young developer 1. In college, I had aced coding exercises, as a junior dev I had cranked out code to solve whatever problems someone specified for me, quicker than anyone expected. I could learn a new language and get productive in it over a weekend (or, so I believed).

And thus, in the natural course of things, I got to run my own project. ...

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Github finally gets my money

I have been a fan Subversion for a long time, and I have been a fan of Springloops, through which I bought my hosted subversion. But I’ve been working a lot with git, which for a long time I have hated, but I have slowly grown used to it. And so, beginning a new project, I find that I finally pulled out my credit card and signed up for Github, so I can keep my private code there.

Programming and boredom

Interesting

As the allure of programming starts fading away, we try to discover new sources of inspiration. This quest leads us to different programming languages, frameworks, fads and technologies, and, as decades pass, maybe even to the theoretical depths of programming and computer science. In the end though we have to accept that programming is a repetitive activity. We feel that we have reached a state of mastery, that we cannot, may not or probably will not surpass, out of tiredness, ...

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Mutiny is good for us

Interesting:

When mutiny occurs, the leader involved usually sees it as a sudden flash that is obscene. But the members involved in the action see it differently. Like an entrepreneurial team, they formulate a strategic plan for mutiny in secret, execute it tactically, and face the risks with a sense of justice and purpose. And here is the real surprise of our research: the mutinies are usually for the better. Given the connotations of the term mutiny, and the images it ...

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Austerity and feeling old

I recall that when I turned 28 years old, I felt old. My youth was behind me. It was time to become an adult. I had responsibilities now, I needed to be serious, play time was over, I had to grow up. I felt depressed and a little directionless, full of ambitions I had no idea how to fulfill. I was disappointed with my career so far. I felt like my options were beginning to narrow.

At that time, some ...

Thank you industrialization. Thank you steel mill. Thank you power station.

Interesting

“My mother explained the magic with this machine the very, very first day. She said, “Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry; the machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.” Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines, children’s books. And mother got time to read for me. She loved this. I got the “ABC.” This is ...

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If you sell your company then you have failed

Interesting

With a fat bank account, I was pretty set to do whatever I wanted for a long time. The sale afforded me the ability to make art, invest in other companies, and unwind. But it didn’t take long to realize that my new life was a hell of a lot less exciting than running an independent company had been.

I typically refer to the IAC sale as “the worst business decision of my life.” I’m not sure IAC is worse than ...

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Good management is not a control freak

I am reading Brad Garlinghouse 2006 memo at Yahoo. . Can anyone make a coherent argument about why a small startup is focused, and can grow, but when a big company like Yahoo buys that company, then suddenly the startup is a deadweight that is threatening the very existence of the parent company, because it make the parent company too complex, unfocused, spread too thin? One moment the startup represents innovation, growth, success, entrepreneurial vision, and then it is ...

Marissa Mayer and change

Change is hard. Yahoo needs to change or it will die. I am surprised that Mayer is personally interviewing new engineers, but that might be needed — possibly she distrusts all of the hiring managers, and possibly that distrust is well justified. I suspect that if Yahoo dies she will be cursed as a control freak, and if Yahoo turns around she will be hailed as a great visionary leader, but in the end, as with any of us, the ...

Oakland is the next Brooklyn

Time goes by, and things change. The generations have their memories, places as they were. My mom grew up in the Bronx, remembers Brooklyn as a dirty working class suburb, much like the Bronx.

This year I got my mom a subscription to TimeOut magazine. A few weeks later she calls me up, amazed: “Lawrence, do you realize there is almost as much happening in Brooklyn as in Manhattan?” She says this in the tone of voice I would reserve ...

Embedding legit sites within iframes to run an advertising fraud scheme

Clever. If you run ads, and want to click on the ads yourself, to get more money, most of the time the ad companies will detect your ad fraud, and your ad account will be suspended: no money for you. So how could you run an advertising fraud scheme that looked like real users, from all over the world, were clicking the links? Here’s an idea: show legit sites in frames, but every time a user clicks, have a hidden ...

Yahoo overpays to acquire new companies

Interesting. I can not fathom what is driving the big tech companies nowadays. Microsoft has an incompetent CEO and yet no one complains. Google has given up trying to own the future. Yahoo overpays to acquire new companies. Why?

I think Yahoo shareholders deserve an explanation. It’s not clear at all to me that they are getting their money’s worth.

Summly raises $1.5 million in total funding, launches to significant fanfare.

Yahoo comes knocking, asks for their download numbers, revenue, technology ...

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In the USA, real wages decline again

Interesting and sad:

Below are the gory details. The data source is Appendix Table B-47, “Hours and Earnings in Private Non-Agricultural Industries, 1966-2012.” The table has been completely revised since last year’s edition of the report. The data is for production and non-supervisory workers in the private sector, about 80% of the private workforce, so we are able to focus on what’s happening to average workers rather than those with high incomes.. I use weekly wages rather than hourly because there ...

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Does business strategy exist?

I strongly doubt that business strategy exists. I think nearly all cases that seem like brilliant strategic decisions were instead just luck. What does exist is inventors who are close to demographic or a technology and are therefore able to realize the potential that exists in the circumstances that they see. But even when the opportunity is real, finding the best way to exploit the situation comes down to trial and error — its all luck, and anyone pretending otherwise ...

Some people learn by doing

Interesting:

Many companies in Germany take on apprentices, much like North American companies accept interns and co-op students. If a company decides to take you on as an apprentice, the position is guaranteed by the state. Should the company go bust, you are placed with another company the next day. There is a web of companies guaranteeing the positions for each other, spread all across the country.

Unlike interns in North American companies, apprentices in Germany are treated like normal junior employees ...

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Men who know neither theory nor the history of previous crises are utterly convinced that they know what to do

Leaders are often stupid. These last few years I have been amazed at how often I have seen this in the world of business: people in leadership positions expressing very strong, entirely undeserved, confidence. And often being proven painfully wrong.

The amazing thing is the way men who know neither theory nor the history of previous crises are utterly convinced that they know what to do in our current crisis; and how their confidence in their prescriptions has been unaffected ...

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Does a lack of diversity help a new company?

What’s needed in a new, small company is different than what is needed in a big company. And I’ve read that managers often have success, early in their careers, by acting like dictators and giving a lot of orders, but that tactic only works while the manager can see the people they are managing — if they want to rise to a higher level, where they manage many thousands of people whom they will never meet, they need to change ...

Frustrated with Adobe and Omniture

I am venting my discontent over on the forums and blogs at Adobe. I have wasted days trying to figure out the API, and many of the code samples seem to be out of date, or they focus on SOAP instead of REST. I am thinking, in particular, between the actively supported developer forums at PayPal, versus the empty developer forums at Adobe.

Anyway, I found a code sample, and wrote:

This would be exciting, but when I downloaded it, ...

Why the “Agile” method fails

I like this very much:

As far as the Agile Manifesto goes, we’re in total agreement that the priority of software development is to ship working software, but we disagree on two key aspects:

Invest heavily in automation vs. “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”

Treat your makers as asynchronous threads. vs. “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.”

The agile manifesto was written years before the modern automation and DevOps ...

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The main problem with Microsoft is its cultureG

Great insights about the failures of Microsoft:

Having lived in Seattle for a couple of years, and knowing many Microsoft employees during that time, my outsider’s view is that MS’s consumer-side failures are largely geographical and cultural.

Redmond, or even Bellevue, is extremely isolated from Seattle, which in and of itself is not exactly deeply intertwined with the cultural centers of the US. Locals know this – Microsoft employees who move from Seattle across the lake to the east side often joke ...

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