Thijs Niks

"The big change that “experience” causes in your brain is learning that you need to solve people’s..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:30:30 +0200

“The big change that “experience” causes in your brain is learning that you need to solve people’s problems. Once you grasp that, you advance quickly to the next step, which is figuring out what those problems are. And that takes some effort, because the way software actually gets used, especially by the people who pay the most for it, is not at all what you might expect. For example, the stated purpose of Powerpoint is to present ideas. Its real role is to overcome people’s fear of public speaking. It allows you to give an impressive-looking talk about nothing, and it causes the audience to sit in a dark room looking at slides, instead of a bright one looking at you.”

- Paul Graham: Hiring is Obsolete

Square e-mail payment

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:40:03 +0200

Square e-mail payment

"If you are in a traditional engineering discipline and are not programming computers to do what you..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:30:37 +0200

“If you are in a traditional engineering discipline and are not programming computers to do what you were taught to do, your days are numbered. I recall my computer science peers from college creating a t-shirt for themselves with the slogan, “I’d rather write programs to write programs than write programs.” That ethos of going meta now affects every technical discipline. It now makes more sense for the mechanically talented to write programs to do mechanical engineering than do mechanical engineering.”

- Venkatesh Rao: Entrepreneurs are the New Labor

"In 1959, the Netherlands found petroleum on the shores of the North Sea. Money gurgled into the..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:30:22 +0200

“In 1959, the Netherlands found petroleum on the shores of the North Sea. Money gurgled into the country. To general surprise, the flood of cash led to an economic freeze. Afterward, economists realized that salaries in the new petroleum industry were so high that nobody wanted to work anywhere else. To keep employees, companies in other parts of the economy had to jack up wages, in turn driving up costs. Meanwhile, the surge of foreign money into the Netherlands raised the exchange rate. Soaring costs and currency made it harder for Dutch firms to compete; manufacturing and agriculture faltered; unemployment climbed, except in the oil industry. The windfall led to stagnation—a phenomenon that petroleum cognoscenti now call “Dutch disease.””

- Charles C. Mann, The Atlantic: What If We Never Run Out of Oil?

"About six months ago I was in a UN agency and I saw a North Korean watch list. And the watch list..."

Sat, 18 May 2013 11:30:25 +0200

“

About six months ago I was in a UN agency and I saw a North Korean watch list. And the watch list was very instructive. You looked at it, and you could see where it was believed the North Koreans were trying to finance and ship [nuclear components] from.

The watch list had three ports in the UAE. Malaysia was on it. Cayman Islands. Cyprus, Lichtenstein, Greece, Taiwan, China, Philippines, Vietnam, Turkey, Mauritania, Thailand, Singapore.

The North Koreans are all over the world, trying to figure out ways to fool export controllers, and export controllers are trying to stay a step ahead of them…

”

- Mark Hibbs

How Blogger Begat the Push-Button Publishing Revolution At the...

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:30:38 +0200

How Blogger Begat the Push-Button Publishing Revolution

At the close of 1998, there were 23 known weblogs on the Internet. A year later there were tens of thousands. What changed? Pyra Labs launched Blogger, the online tool that gave push-button publishing to the people. It was a revolutionary web product made by a revolutionary web of people who went on to build much of the modern net. Here’s how Pyra propagated.

"When it comes down to it, the Dutch heart instinctively beats in a transatlantic rhythm. This has..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:30:47 +0200

“When it comes down to it, the Dutch heart instinctively beats in a transatlantic rhythm. This has always been the case—logically, perhaps, for a seafaring nation. So doing business across the Atlantic is much more natural for The Hague. It immediately went to war in Iraq, for instance, alongside the United States and the UK. In those days, the Dutch ambassador to the UN often had one instruction: “Follow London.” I once asked how “London” was going to vote. He replied: “Oh, I don’t know.””

- Caroline de Gruyter: The Dutch Are Trapped in Europe

"A visionary is an implementer of visions, not an acquirer of dollars. And if you consider yourself a..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 11:30:46 +0200

“A visionary is an implementer of visions, not an acquirer of dollars. And if you consider yourself a visionary, the only honest response to your own acquisition is to admit your failure, dust yourself off, and start building your next company.”

- Jake Lodwick: An acquisition is always a failure

"Today, we falsely assume that our conversations and our images are not by default recorded by other..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:30:25 +0200

“Today, we falsely assume that our conversations and our images are not by default recorded by other people in proximity. Not having a persistent record allows us to present a nuanced identity to different people, or groups of people; it provides the space to experiment with what we could be. The risk that what we say will be broadcast, or narrowcasted, to people we don’t know, or may bubble up at some point in the future in the hands of someone serving up ads, fundamentally changes what we want to talk about. The challenge for Glass is that the costs of ownership fall on people in proximity of the wearer”

- Jan Chipchase: Reflections On Google Glass

Jason Kottke: Cars were moving too fast through an intersection...

Mon, 13 May 2013 11:30:44 +0200

Jason Kottke:

Cars were moving too fast through an intersection in the town of Poynton in England, so they took out the stoplights & walk signals and replaced the intersection with an unusual double roundel design. The result is a mixed-use space with slower moving car traffic and safer pedestrian traffic.

"Since the 1930s, with the introduction of Social Security, the United States has constructed—slowly,..."

Sun, 12 May 2013 11:30:36 +0200

“

Since the 1930s, with the introduction of Social Security, the United States has constructed—slowly, haphazardly, often painfully—a welfare state. Pensions, public housing, health care—piece by piece, the government created protections for citizens that the market doesn’t always provide. Child care is the major unfinished part of that project. The lack of quality, affordable day care is arguably the most significant barrier to full equality for women in the workplace. It makes it more likely that children born in poverty will remain there. That’s why other developed countries made child care a collective responsibility long ago.

This year, President Barack Obama has put forward what he calls a “universal pre-kindergarten” proposal. It would provide states with matching funds, so that they could set up their own programs for three- and four-year-olds, while modestly increasing subsidies for infant and toddler care. This plan would cost $75 billion over ten years, financed by higher cigarette taxes, which means it will meet serious political resistance. But the concept has support from key Democrats like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who has spoken of “doing for child care what we did for health care.”

”

- Jonathan Cohn: The Hell of American Day Care

4.5 m tall bike

Sat, 11 May 2013 11:30:34 +0200

4.5 m tall bike

"In the startup world, closing is not what deals do. What deals do is fall through. If you’re..."

Fri, 10 May 2013 11:30:18 +0200

“In the startup world, closing is not what deals do. What deals do is fall through. If you’re starting a startup you would do well to remember that. Birds fly; fish swim; deals fall through.”

- Paul Graham: How to fund a startup

"The second major category of investments involves assets that will never produce anything, but that..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 11:30:28 +0200

“

The second major category of investments involves assets that will never produce anything, but that are purchased in the buyer’s hope that someone else – who also knows that the assets will be forever unproductive – will pay more for them in the future. Tulips, of all things, briefly became a favorite of such buyers in the 17th century.

Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.

Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?

A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16 Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything. You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.

”

- Warren Buffett on speculating with gold vs investing in companies (PDF)

"Figure out which people rely on you and how you can help them be self-sufficient. You may feel..."

Wed, 08 May 2013 11:30:32 +0200

“Figure out which people rely on you and how you can help them be self-sufficient. You may feel important having a monopoly on salmon provisions, but if the whole village learns how to fish, it’ll free you up to do something else. Like figuring out how to grow wheat. Or how to domesticate those cute wolf-pups.”

- Julie Zhuo

Durex Fundawear technology

Tue, 07 May 2013 11:30:46 +0200

Durex Fundawear technology

"What I find interesting is that the “people first” interface of Facebook Home follows a trail blazed..."

Mon, 06 May 2013 11:30:33 +0200

“

What I find interesting is that the “people first” interface of Facebook Home follows a trail blazed by Microsoft with Windows Phone. But Facebook’s ads promoting Home are 180 degrees apart from Microsoft’s for Windows Phone.

Microsoft’s ads promoted the idea that with Windows Phone, you would — and should — spend less time looking at your phone. Facebook’s ads take the opposite approach, and flat-out encourage you to tune out of your surroundings — at home, at work, everywhere — and pay attention only to what’s going on in Facebook on your phone.

”

- John Gruber

Nijmegen music record store on Google Maps Via Nout van Deijck

Sun, 05 May 2013 11:30:32 +0200

Nijmegen music record store on Google Maps

Via Nout van Deijck

"We work a 4-day week (Monday-Thursday, 9am-6pm) because we think that information work isn’t like..."

Sat, 04 May 2013 11:30:32 +0200

“We work a 4-day week (Monday-Thursday, 9am-6pm) because we think that information work isn’t like manufacturing. Another hour at the MacBook won’t yield another $1,000 in profit. We believe that smart folks can get five days of work done in four days. Simple as that.”

- Ryan Carson, CEO of Treehouse

"There wasn’t a place for people who wanted to write something more substantive than a tweet. Blogs,..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 11:30:32 +0200

“There wasn’t a place for people who wanted to write something more substantive than a tweet. Blogs, while better for long-form, required a certain savviness to get up-and-running. Successful ones required constant care and feeding and typically focussed on a single subject matter. New ones lacked an audience. He went on to say that people sometimes just have one thing to say about a subject, not something every day or week. This is what Medium would solve for.”

- Evan Williams describes Medium, according to Teehan+Lax