All of these questions are variations on "Why did Yahoo! spend one-third of their cash on hand to buy a company that by all accounts is about to run out of money?" Read this post, and hopefully these questions will... | Continue »

I can't call myself a buddhist, but we are the sum of what our peers are. My dad used to say that even if you think you aren't a bad person, if who you call your friends are bad people... | Continue »

At my work, Say Media, we have a group shepherding tasks and plans in the 'devops' style. Franck and myself are this group, with input and assistance from others. As a starting point we’re assuming that tools must already exist, and that we should only rebuild them from scratch if... | Continue »

"Lady Grantham, your skeleton is looking especially bleached today. How do you do it?" | Continue »

Back when I worked at LiveJournal, Brad Fitzpatrick commented: Our standards are continually being raised, so by definition any old code is ugly because new best practices have emerged in the meantime. This has always stuck with me in the back of my mind, but it came up again in a conversation earlier this week. In trying to find the right way to manage a backlog of technical debt -- a whole topic in itself -- I pointed out that the discussion conflated two issues: one was technical debt, and I called the other "technical depreciation". Your code may have... | Continue »

I spent many, many years caring about and caring for LiveJournal. One of our biggest challenges was figuring out how the site should evolve. Its age almost guaranteed that we had some sizable portion of the userbase using any given feature, which made it harder to retire features; our extraordinary ability to botch major announcements made us even more scared to do it. And the new stuff we were shipping didn't generally have a cohesive vision behind it. If it did, we'd be able to establish momentum behind that vision, and a better way of talking about it. Anyway. That... | Continue »

statsd to carbon, flushInterval 10s, data is fine. carbon writes the value then overwrites with zeros. what the what?— Abe Hassan (@burr86) January 10, 2013 I'm so mad at myself right now. We're getting statsd and graphite deployed, and we've been feeding some counters into statsd. We've generally found this to be fairly straightforward, except that one of our counters has been a bit schizophrenic. Sometimes it reports correctly, and sometimes it reports zero (rather than null). In fact, watching the whisper files directly, I sometimes see the timestamp and the value written to the file, and then immediately overwritten... | Continue »

The hottest new app is The Awl: Weekend Companion. It's got voting machines by Maria Bustillos, cooking for Sandy refugees by Emily Gould, original artwork, the guy who wrote the OTHER Cloud Atlas, the Y2K bug, the backstory of the... | Continue »

Are New Yorkers entirely disconnected from nature as Via Media suggested? My vote is a hearty Ain't No Way, Hon. Couldn't we argue that New Yorkers are more in touch with nature than folks who never put a foot outside... | Continue »

**Don't use it**. I mean it. Do not use auto-reply vacation email setting because there is no effective way to use it. Getting "OOO I'm on vacation" email from a guy who has a desk next to me is just ridiculous. I can visually see his empty desk now and he told me he will be on vacation before he left. Vacation auto-reply email function is not smart enough to determine if recipient knows sender's vacation schedule or not because there is no such a technology to look into my brain from any mail exchange servers delivering the shit. What... | Continue »

Here are a subset of thoughts that happened as my flight was delayed, until the current moment, where I have about four remaining hours until we touch down in San Francisco. Bring back the Live Blog, I say! Can't keep... | Continue »

Apple bloggers are all atwitter over the apparently significant amount of unannounced ("TBA)" conference sessions at Apple's annual dorkapalooza (WWDC) next week. I am attending this year1 and so I too have wondered, what is TBA? I have some ideas.... | Continue »

On the one hand, Facebook is mired in the same relentless downward pressure of falling per-user revenues as the rest of Web-based media. The company makes a pitiful and shrinking $5 per customer per year, which puts it somewhat ahead of the Huffington Post and somewhat behind the New York Times' digital business. (Here's the heartbreaking truth about the difference between new media and old: even in the New York Times' declining traditional business, a subscriber is still worth more than $1,000 a year.) via www.technologyreview.com That's a pretty amazing number. A big difference, of course, is that home delivery... | Continue »

Friends and colleagues have asked me my opinion about the coming Facebook IPO. Here it is, as the first post in Hello, TypePad's new series, "If you tell a story or have a conversation twice you should have blogged it."... | Continue »

I saw The Avengers yesterday since everyone I know has been raving about it for weeks saying it was better than every other big budget comic book summer blockbuster (because it had a good script and good cinematography). I thought... | Continue »

I’ve been very fortunate in my career. In 1999 I got to intern at Macromedia on a product that introduced a lot of early designers to the web. At the height of the first bubble I had the opportunity to... | Continue »

[Chris Dixon](http://cdixon.org/) tweeted something the other day I liked. We need someone to standardize privacy policies and terms of service a la Creative Commons.— chris dixon (@cdixon) May 1, 2012 It received a lot of retweets and favorites but I... | Continue »

Surveymonkey: Password rejected Me: Password! Surveymonkey: Password rejected Me: Password! Surveymonkey: Password rejected Me: Hmm....nothing in the LastPass vault....tried all my go-tos....Oh, wait! MailChimp: Password accepted! THERE ARE TOO MANY MONKEY BASED MARKETING PLATFORMS | Continue »

Our goal is to get back to our core purpose – putting our users and advertisers first via techcrunch.com Since users and advertisers are distinct groups whose needs and desires are not completely aligned, this statement is invalid. | Continue »

I've had this conversation several times, so I will blog it and hopefully never have it again, or have it go on forever, or both! Here are my iPad 3 thoughts: The screen is as fantastic as advertised, and considering... | Continue »