Blog AF

• Startups are Risk Bundles
  Leo Polovets - Coding VC
  
• Inside the GOP Implosion and the War to Stop Trump
  Josh Marshall - Talking Points Memo
  

  An analogy between building software, and building a country’s political system. Trump is a symptom of technical debt, accrued over time.

• Marrying Age
  Nathan Yau - FlowingData
  
• Four pitfalls of hill climbing
  Chris Said - The File Drawer
  

  Fun, and very well thought out, application of computer science/artificial intelligence concepts to building a business and decision making. Biggest caveat? The space is high dimensional.

• What Startup Accelerators Really Do
  Ian Hathaway - Harvard Business Review
  
• Partisan Classiness
  Paul Krugman - The New York Times
  
• GitHub Repository Map
  Jared Samet
  

An old collection of walks around Muir Woods, Mt. Tamalpais and Alcatraz. More...

• Snapchat is going to reach a billion users thanks to "Gen-S" — the smartphone generation
  Jason Calacanis
  

  Not understanding the appeal of Snapchat makes me feel old.

• The Voters Decide
  Ben Thompson - Stratechery
  

  In an unusual article, Ben relates the current political environment to his own Aggregation Theory. Quoting one of Clay Shirky’s tweetstorms, he explains how technology continuously changes the political landscape, and what this means going forward in an After Web world.

• Montaigne on 'Curation,' the Illusion of Originality, and How We Form Our Opinions
  Maria Popova - Brain Pickings
  

  Another one that made me think of Szabo’s “book consciousness”, and to some extent Hidalgo’s personbyte theory.

• An Open Letter to the Republican Establishment
  Robert Reich
  
• An iPhone Is an Extension of the Mind
  Matthew Noah Smith - Slate.com
  
• Versioning Software
  Donald Stufft
  
• Cryptography Pioneers Win Turing Award
  John Markoff - The New York Times
  

As you know, I am reading Gary Kamiya’s Cool City of Gray Love, which talks about all sorts of amazing places in the city. One of the first few he describes, in chapter 6, was Glen Canyon:

… not only the most peculiar geographical anomaly in San Francisco -a concave feature in a convex city- it is also the least known. In any other city, a deep, wild, rocky canyon with a creek flowing through it, in almost the exact geographical center of town, would be celebrated far and wide. But even most San Franciscans have never set foot in Glen Canyon. In a city of Mystery Hills, it is the Mystery Gorge. Glen Canyon is literally a tear in the city’s fabric.

-Gary Kamiya, Cool City of Gray Love

I am happy to say, I have set foot in it. More...

• Toolkits for the Mind
  James Somers - MIT Technology Review
  

  Languages, both artificial and natural, define how you think. Since I speak three natural languages, and I am trying to learn a fourth, it is somewhat strange how fixated I am on refining one, and only one, programming language. This article might have some clues as to why.

• The Computer in the Basement: Learning to Code, Then and Now
  James Somers - The Atlantic
  
• The Majestic Monolith
  David Heinemeier Hansson - Signal v. Noise — Medium
  

  It would be amazing if DHH could back this up with more than a sample of n=1. How much of their success is the monolith, and how much is the culture, process, and care that Basecamp has refined over the years?

• Slack, I’m Breaking Up with You
  Samuel Hulick - Better People — Medium
  
• The Instagrams of Food Deserts
  Julie Beck - The Atlantic
  
• London vs San Francisco - back and forth
  Jamie Henson
  
• Pipelines
  Randall Munroe - XKCD