Onwards!: Archive

December 2012

1 post

Brianne Garcia: How I Hacked The Job Hunt and Ended Up With The Start of a Career → briannegarcia.tumblr.com

Want to +1 most of the paragraphs

Let’s be serious: no one really wants a job. A job is a place where you clock in everyday, check some tasks off of a checklist, grab lunch at 1:00pm to escape your cubicle, curse the commands in your Excel spreadsheet, and keep an eye on the prize: 6 o’clock. That sounds like purgatory with a…

Dec 2, 201218 notes

November 2012

1 post

“discrepancy between action and online discussion is that the growth in social media has paralleled a new behavioral trend in young voters: the rise of non-voting civically engaged citizens.” —Premature Facebook Election Hype, A Response To The Atlantic | TechCrunch

Nov 11, 2012

October 2012

5 posts

Oct 28, 2012

“suspending the gender segregation might lead to men dominating certain disciplines and women establishing themselves as leading in others. This would be similar to what we can now observe with regard to black and white sportspeople. Blacks athletes tend to dominate Running, whereas whites tend to dominate Swimming. However, people do not propose to segregate disciplines by skin colour – with good reason.” —Should Men and Women be segregated in professional Sports? | Practical Ethics

Oct 14, 2012

“An amateur gunsmith has already used a 3-D printer to make the lower receiver of a semiautomatic rifle, the AR-15.” —How to Make Almost Anything | Foreign Affairs

Oct 12, 2012

September 2012

3 posts

“we might be nervous about people being able to homebrew their own car firmware” —The coming civil war over general purpose computing - Boing Boing

Oct 1, 2012

“Without visual cues (e.g. the horizon) you can’t distinguish between gravity and acceleration. Which means if you’re flying through clouds you can’t tell what the attitude of the aircraft is. You could feel like you’re flying straight and level while in fact you’re descending in a spiral. The solution is to ignore what your body is telling you and listen only to your instruments. But it turns out to be very hard to ignore what your body is telling you. Every pilot knows about this problem and yet it is still a leading cause of accidents.” —Black Swan Farming

Oct 1, 2012

“cast Japanese priorities into your western morals. Devotion to work is devotion to family. Selflessness is expressed via success, not conspicuous gratification. Joy is found in greatness, not triviality or distraction. Speaking of oneself in terms of happiness is very different that speaking on fulfilment.” —Jiro’s Dream | Hacker News

Sep 9, 2012

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Sep 4, 20121 note

“McLuhan’s insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that “a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.”[52] More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society—in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children’s shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example—the effect of television on society would be identical.” —Marshall McLuhan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sep 1, 2012

August 2012

2 posts

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Aug 15, 20121 note

INCURABLE DATA GEEK: The Spreadsheet – Exposing my tracking madness → samiinkinen.com

samiinkinen:

Most of my friends know that I have a tracking spreadsheet and diary that covers many areas of my life from happiness to body and brain performance for the last 10+ years, but no one really knows what’s in it. Which is probably a good thing. And since the Triathlete magazine re-published…

Aug 4, 20128 notes

June 2012

1 post

“Super weird: corporations push governments to require “green” reporting. “That is much flimsier than Aviva’s coalition wanted—having been watered down, in last-ditch negotiations, due to objections from America, India and Kazakhstan, who feared it would put an onerous regulatory burden on their companies.” —Rio 20 summit: Green business | The Economist

Jun 25, 2012

May 2012

1 post

Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 11 Notes Essay

blakemasters:

Here is an essay version of class notes from Class 11 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are mine. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s.

Class 11 Notes Essay—Secrets

I. Secrets

Back in class one, we identified a very key question that you should continually ask yourself: what important truth do very few people agree with you on? To a first approximation, the correct answer is going to be a secret. Secrets are unpopular or unconventional truths. So if you come up with a good answer, that’s your secret.

How many secrets are there in the world? Recall that, reframed in a business context, the key question is: what great company is no one starting? If there are many possible answers, it means that there are many great companies that could be created. If there are no good answers, it’s probably a very bad idea to start a company. From this perspective, the question of how many secrets exist in our world is roughly equivalent to how many startups people should start.

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May 17, 2012105 notes

April 2012

7 posts

“If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less immediate threat than a gigantic multinational with revenue of $48 Billion in 2011 (more than the entire global publishing industry) that has expressed its intention to “disrupt” them, and whose chief executive said recently “even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation” (where “innovation” is code-speak for “opportunities for me to turn a profit”).” —What Amazon’s ebook strategy means - Charlie’s Diary

Apr 20, 2012

Blake Masters: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 2 Notes Essay → blakemasters.tumblr.com

The telecoms followed in 2001. If you had to pick what sector of economy was at absolute lowest in March 2000, it might have been be military defense companies. The NASDAQ was soaring. No one believed there would ever be another war. But then things reversed. The military defense industry would rise for most of the next decade.

blakemasters:

Here are my class notes, typed in essay form, from Class 2 of CS183: Startup. Errors, omissions, and/or poor phrasing are my own. Credit for good substance and wording is Peter’s entirely.

CS183: Startup—Notes Essay—April 4—Party Like It’s 1999?

I. Late to the Party

History is driven…

Apr 17, 2012118 notes

Blake Masters: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 3 Notes Essay → blakemasters.tumblr.com

blakemasters:

Here is my notes essay for Class 3 of CS183: Startup. Errors, omissions, and/or poor phrasing are my own. Credit for good substance and wording is Peter’s entirely. Please note that I actually missed this class (I was on my honeymoon!). Thanks to @erikpavia and @danrthompson for sending me…

Apr 17, 201257 notes

“Genba adds 10 points to your lean manufacturing buzz skills ;)” —Gemba - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Apr 17, 2012

Blake Masters: Peter Thiel's CS183: Startup - Class 1 Notes Essay → blakemasters.tumblr.com

Quite a few places worth quoting. Need to find more Peter Thiel thoughts somewhere.

blakemasters:

Here are my class notes, typed in essay form, from Class 1 of CS183: Startup. Errors, omissions, and/or poor phrasing are my own. Credit for good substance and wording is Peter’s entirely.

CS183: Startup—Notes Essay—April 2

Purpose and Preamble

We might describe our world as having…

Apr 11, 2012334 notes

“Instagram. Then along comes Facebook, the great alien presence that just hovers over our cities, year after year, as we wait and fear. You turn on the television and there it is, right above the Empire State Building, humming. And now a hole has opened up on its base and it has dumped a billion dollars into a public square — which turned out to not be public, but actually belongs to a few suddenly-very-rich dudes.” —Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out — Daily Intel

Apr 10, 20121 note