Category: Net Culture

5 Things I Learned From Chris Dixon | The Waiter’s Pad

Source: 5 Things I Learned From Chris Dixon | The Waiter’s Pad

The 3rd way to use Twitter well.

Twitter can be a great tool if you use it well. Here’s what others have said:

The first way to use Twitter well is to be inspired and collaborate.Austin Kleon, John August, and Nicholas Megalis talked about the value of connnecting with other people.

The second way to use Twitter well is to check your conclusions. Jason Zweig, Tadas Viskanta, and Tren Griffin all suggested we generate conclusions from multiple perspectives, of which Twitter can be one.

The third way to use Twitter – courtesy of Dixon – is to have it work for you. “Essentially I have two thousand of the smartest people in the world finding information for me and telling me what to read,” Dixon says.

The problem with letting Twitter be Twitter is that Twitter took money on the pr… | Hacker News

The problem with letting Twitter be Twitter is that Twitter took money on the pr… | Hacker News

The problem with letting Twitter be Twitter is that Twitter took money on the promise of being something other that just Twitter.

Or to put it in analogy form. You give me $500,000 to buy you a Ferrari and I give you a Toyota Corolla.

You complain that I haven’t held up my end of the bargain and I point out that the Corolla is a perfectly fine car that can get you from point a to point b and even has some strengths when compared to the Ferrari, so why are you complaining?

That’s the point Twitter is at right now. They took the money to be something other than what they are right now. If Twitter wants to be just Twitter, that’s fine, but you’ll need to cut their 20 Billion market cap down to somewhere around a 3-4 Billion market cap, I don’t have a model with me right now.

having said that, Twitter has some good things going for it.

  - Mobile Advertising numbers are up Year over year

  - Data licensing revenue is up

  - monthly active users are up

IMHO, twitter just needs to shrink in size or find a way to really start growing revenue.

EDIT to the child comment, you are confusing revenue and earnings. There is a huge difference between the two:)

HTTPS: the end of an era — Medium

HTTPS: the end of an era — Medium

Mozilla, the foundation that maintains Firefox, has announced that it will effectively deprecate the insecure HTTP protocol, eventually forcing all sites to use HTTPS if they hope to use modern features.

This essay explains why this was such depressing news to me, why this shift marks the death of a way of life.

…

Part 0: HTTP vs HTTPS

If you know the difference between HTTP and HTTPS, you can probably skip this part.

But for those of you not into tech acronyms, HTTP is the hypertext transfer protocol that your browser uses to talk to web servers bringing you data. It is relatively simple, to the point that if you have a way to inspect the packets of data as they come down the wire, you could read the web page right off of them. Those packets are being sent down a long series of routers between you and the web server, and there is a not-insignificant chance that somewhere along the way they are being inspected or stored by criminals, overly aggressive advertisers, the US National Security Agency, or some bored creep somewhere.

Thus HTTPS, the secure version. Via HTTPS, the site you are connecting to (herein https://example.com, because I don’t feel like inventing something clever) has some associated encryption codes, and your PC (or phone or watch or whatever contraption you are connecting with) uses the codes to encrypt all data before sending it, and the other side sends encrypted data back. So all of the packets are basically illegible to any of the many parties that handle those packets, but are legible to you and the web server at example.com.

But what if the NSA intercepts your connection, tells you it is example.com, and tells your PC to use NSA’s preferred encryption codes? You send data encrypted with NSA keys over the wire, the NSA decrypts and records your data, then passes it on to example.com, and passes example.com’s requests back to you after recording those. You think nothing is wrong, but the man-in-the-middle (the NSA) has read all your communications, rendering all that encryption useless.

So you can’t trust the data until you get the right keys, but you can’t trust the keys as being from example.com until you get some other verification, but then how do you trust that other verification? The solution is a signed certificate registering the identity of example.com. There are a small number of certificate authorities providing such trustworthy certificates, and your browser knows them by name.

Remember Facebook Notes? It’s Back With a Vengeance | WIRED

Remember Facebook Notes? It’s Back With a Vengeance | WIRED

In all, the new Notes looks quite a bit like wunderkind blogging platform Medium, which may be because Notes and Medium appear to have been designed with input from the same design team. Teehan + Lax worked on both early prototypes of what would evolve into Medium as well as the final product.

Live Like a Hydra: Thoughts on how to get stronger when things are chaotic. #2 The Chaos Monkey — Medium

Live Like a Hydra: Thoughts on how to get stronger when things are chaotic. #2 The Chaos Monkey — Medium

Netflix has a server architecture that currently serves a pretty high percentage of all of the internet’s traffic, due to their streaming video service.

One of the most interesting things about their server architecture is that they routinely attack their own systems. They have a tool called Chaos Monkey that randomly disables their own production instances to make sure they can survive that common type of failure without any customer impact.

Because there are several ways in which servers can fail, they’ve also employed a fleet of monkeys that attack all manner of servers — some that are too slow, some that aren’t connected up to the proper server groups, some that just look weird, etc. And finally, there’s a Chaos Gorilla that doesn’t just turn off individual servers, but occasionally wipes out an entire availability zone, as if Godzilla had destroyed an entire portion of the country.

The philosophy is simple: by building a server architecture that expects failure, the system as a whole can learn how to withstand bigger and tougher obstacles even if they don’t know exactly when or how they will occur in real life.

Meet Margaret Hamilton, the badass ’60s programmer who saved the moon landing – Vox

Meet Margaret Hamilton, the badass ’60s programmer who saved the moon landing – Vox

In the early days, women were often assigned software tasks because software just wasn’t viewed as very important. “It’s not that managers of yore respected women more than they do now,” Rose Eveleth writes in a great piece on early women programmers for Smithsonian magazine. “They simply saw computer programming as an easy job. It was like typing or filing to them and the development of software was less important than the development of hardware. So women wrote software, programmed and even told their male colleagues how to make the hardware better.”

“I began to use the term ‘software engineering’ to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering,” Hamilton told Verne’s Jaime Rubio Hancock in an interview. “When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline.”

Hamilton is now 78 and runs Hamilton Technologies, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company she founded in 1986. She’s lived to see “software engineering” — a term she coined — grow from a relative backwater in computing into a prestigious profession.