Some interesting thoughts on the past and future of Bitcoin and digital currency systems from Felix Salmon of Reuters.
Startups are run by people who do what's necessary at the time it's needed. A lot of time that's unglamorous work. A lot of times that's not heroic work. Is that heroic? Is that standing on a stage in a black turtleneck, in front of 20,000 people talking about the future of phones? No. But that's how companies are built. That person who did that for the iPhone launch at Apple, we don't know who he is. All we know is that Steve Jobs came up with the iPhone. But he didn't ship it. The person who bought the donuts did.
— Jason Goldman, The Silent Partner (via buzz)
This is an amazingly humble perspective on what makes startups succeed, what makes a good program manager, and what it takes to ship.
Great post from a Chrome engineer on the underlying goal for the Blink transition - go faster.
That decision-making model might not work in your company if some of your coworkers are worthless. There's always the one person in every meeting who keeps changing the topic, or doesn't understand the issue, or insists he knows more than he does, or is bluffing to cover his ass, or is jockeying for a promotion, and so on. To put it in clearer terms: Management exists to minimize the problems created by its own hiring mistakes.
Scott Adams comes at this from the perspective of a small startup, but once the group of people involved have differing visions, I would say having a hierarchy makes someone accountable for having the right vision.
Though I'm still not sure if I actually disagree with his point...
The Laplacian of a graph is a matrix that describes that graph, turning a graphical abstraction into a set of linear equations that describes the graph's connectivity in exactly the same way. It's useful in many areas of, naturally, graph theory, which in turn contributes to various fields from computer science to electrical engineering to mathematics.
Apparently it was only in 2004 that "researchers first proposed an algorithm that solved graph Laplacians in 'nearly linear time,' meaning that the algorithm's running time didn't increase exponentially with the size of the problem." The proof was also hundreds of pages long.
The breakthrough here? According to the researchers: "We were able to replace it with something that would fit on a blackboard."
Seth Godin on our important and other people's important, and urgent.
Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen!
— Luke 24:5-6
A journey from Facebook to MIT to Anonymous.
Google has proven to be one of the few companies capable of creating, popularizing, and supporting a platform. ... This power can only be negated by another company that's willing and able to match Google's Android efforts on all fronts: OS development, app store, developer tools, evangelism, the works. That's a tall order.
— John Siracusa, Hypercritical: Self-Reliance
It's a tall order, but if there's one thing I have faith in Microsoft being committed to, it's throwing money at things until we win. We have all the pieces otherwise.
This is only a test. But it's not a test:
The engineer's computer was compromised using a real zero-day exploit targeting an undisclosed piece of software. It allowed a "red team" composed of current and former Facebook employees to access the company's code production environment. The PHP code on the Facebook site contained a real backdoor.
They went to some crazy lengths to test their security teams and security response and did so publicly. Props to them.