There are people who stand every morning outside the Carroll Street station in Brooklyn staring dead-eyed into the middle distance. They stand still in ones and twos, clearly strangers to one another,

If there’s one unifying theme of this blog, it’s that distributed systems are riddled with trade-offs . Specifically, with distributed messaging, you cannot have exactly-once delivery . However, messa

One of the most profound consequences of the information age is the ability to do so many things while ignoring location. I no longer need to visit most shops, libraries, or travel agents. (I'm lookin

8 min read · Oct 28, 2015 -- Stephen was a hired gun at my first start-up. His contract started a year before I arrived, but he was long gone before I walked in the door. The story goes that when Step

Think back to when you learned how to ride a bike. You probably didn't master this skill by listening to a series of riveting lectures on bike riding. Instead, you tried it out for yourself, made mist

A new research paper from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a worker advocacy group, finds that caretaking costs have become so exorbitant that in most parts of the U.S., families spend more on chi

Self-driving cars are utterly inevitable, and that's a good thing. @mat takes a test drive in the Google clown car: https://t.co/7QZeVOgryH

A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak at the XOXO Festival in Portland Oregon. The Andyies asked me to talk about our Indie.vc experiment and I was more than happy to oblige. A video of th

Kickstarter Inc is no more. We’re now Kickstarter PBC — a Public Benefit Corporation. We’re thrilled to share this news, and we’d love to take a minute to tell you exactly what it means. Until recentl

What is Kafka? Imagine the following conversation. You: What is Apache Kafka? Me: Apache Kafka is publish-subscribe messaging rethought as a distributed commit log. You: … What? Me: Yeah, it’s a distr

Published in Chrysaora Weekly · 6 min read · May 5, 2015 -- Last week, Gary Chou, Leland Rechis and I wrapped up our Entrepreneurial Design class, in which we asked our students to work on a 10 week p

Several months ago, I described my intention to leave a happy job in the law and join the emerging government technology office known as 18F . Today, 6 months after starting at 18F, I want to give an update about how it’s going. tl;dr It’s better than I could have ever imagined. Before I begin, I…

Published in Signal v. Noise · 4 min read · Sep 8, 2015 -- This is the first post about the upcoming major release of Basecamp 3 . We’ve been working on Basecamp 3 for over a year now, and some of the

The Sunniest Climate-Change Story You’ve Ever Read This is the year humans finally got serious about saving themselves from themselves. Photographs by Ralph Smith Here on planet Earth, things could be

There are roughly ten thousand bajillion (to the nearest bajillion) merchants registered with Stripe. We recently finished a Very Big Migration of Large Amounts Of Data between several database tables

I do not think that the world is in any danger of running out of people who believe winning is the only thing worth feeling good about. I think the world has absorbed Vince Lombardi’s deranged ethic q

Do it yourself You don’t need to find the right partner to work on your start-up with you. In fact, you might never need a partner or even any employees. You might think otherwise, especially when authorities like Paul Graham say so. He spells out his reservations in the ‘Single Founder’ section of…

Tim Wagner, AWS Lambda General Manager Bryan Moffatt, AWS Lambda Software Developer AWS Lambda’s Java support also makes it easy to write Lambda functions in other jvm-based languages. Previously we l

Of all the sour grapes conservatives chewed this past weekend over the same-sex marriage ruling, perhaps Ross Douthat’s was the sourest. While other conservatives moved on to incoherent babbling about

I recently finished a story I’d spent several months obsessing over. When I pitched the piece to my editor, I knew that I’d found a worthy subject, but I couldn’t quite articulate what the story was a

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Photo-illustration by David Herbick Phyllis Rose recorded a version of this piece, in which she brings her mother’s Yiddish to life. Listen below. My mother grew up in a Yiddish-speaking family and sp

By Hossein Derakhshan Illustrations by Tim McDonagh S even months ago , I sat down at the small table in the kitchen of my 1960s apartment, nestled on the top floor of a building in a vibrant central

Derek Thompson has a 10,000 word cover story for The Atlantic , “ A World Without Work ,” about the possibilities of “post-work” in an economy where technology and capital has largely displaced labor. Though Thompson is clear to argue that this isn’t certain, as the “signs so far are murky and…

Published in HACKERPRENEUR · 20 min read · Jul 7, 2015 -- This is an embellished transcript of a talk I gave at Eyeo Festival on June 2, 2015. A video of the presentation is available on Vimeo . This

written by Benny Lewis Full disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. ? What is iTalki? italki is a website that connects language students with private tutors for 1-1 lessons. Language lessons

When we first moved to Paris , I did a few posts about all the stuff we went through to move here. I thought it would be interesting or helpful to people thinking about doing something similar. Before

“What if everyone figures out that I don’t really know what I’m doing?” In my decade-plus career as a freelance writer and blogger, I’ve probably had this exact thought—or a similar one—approximately

forum What the U.S. and Japan didn’t win in the women’s soccer final. The U.S. women's soccer team celebrates their World Cup victory, July 5 | EPA By July 6, 2015 7:18 am CET 6 minutes read Share on

And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. —James Baldwin Son, Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body. The host w