The Slow Hunch

Grocery shopping

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:38:20 -0400

Grocery shopping

via brad feld

Fri, 24 May 2013 09:15:29 -0400

"It is not about building a smoother version of what already exists in the market. That is a..."

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:45:00 -0400

“It is not about building a smoother version of what already exists in the market. That is a transient advantage as existing companies adopt technology. If you want to build something big and lasting you have use the internet/mobile to do something that simply was not possible before.”

- Continuations: Reminder: Net Native Means Previously Impossible

Nikola Tesla Pitching Silicon Valley VCs (by...

Wed, 22 May 2013 13:47:27 -0400

Nikola Tesla Pitching Silicon Valley VCs (by NorthernImagination)

"These are not illegal hotels. These are amazing stories within a core community of hosts and..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 10:56:53 -0400

“These are not illegal hotels. These are amazing stories within a core community of hosts and travelers adding to the diverse fabric of New York.”

- New York today: the real story

"As so many of those same legislators have made clear since then, the target of the laws was never..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 10:56:06 -0400

“As so many of those same legislators have made clear since then, the target of the laws was never intended to be these individual residents. These are not illegal hotel operators trying to make a quick buck. These are people like Maria, who has used her income to work less and spend more time with her husband. Or Emmett, who still keeps in touch with the friends he’s met from Europe, Asia, and Africa. Or Evelyn, who saved her home from foreclosure with the money she makes from Airbnb.”

- New York today: the real story

Nice video from IOBY on how to make a play street in your...

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:29:50 -0400

Nice video from IOBY on how to make a play street in your community.

How to Make a Play Street (by ioby)

"If other people can’t use pull-to-refresh, they can never build on top of it either."

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:27:05 -0400

“If other people can’t use pull-to-refresh, they can never build on top of it either.”

- Loren Brichter -

Twitter granted patent on pull-to-refresh, promises to only use it defensively | The Verge

The new daft punk album is so good.

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:02:55 -0400

The new daft punk album is so good.

Amazing!

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:19:47 -0400

Amazing!

dear-photograph: Dear Photograph, For most of my childhood, my...

Tue, 14 May 2013 17:55:00 -0400

dear-photograph:

Dear Photograph,

For most of my childhood, my maternal grandparents lived only a few minutes away, and my sister and I spent countless days and nights with them. Family gatherings generally took place at their house - a constant throughout my childhood, and the place I felt the most safe. My grandfather passed away almost four years ago, after a long battle against a variety of diseases. He was on hospice care in his home, and it was a horrible last few months. After, I found it difficult to go back to the house that meant so much to me, even to visit my grandmother. The rooms that once filled with laughter seemed oddly still, and filled with unhappy memories. Watching my grandmother without her husband of 53 years was hard as well. In four years it hasn’t gotten any easier. But then, on Mother’s Day, as we gathered with my aunts and uncles and cousins in my grandparents’ home, I decided to use the box of photos on the living room table for a Dear Photograph project. This experience of creating a new picture by placing my grandfather back in the kitchen he loved, was the most therapeutic way of dealing with his death I’ve found so far.
Eden

Dear photograph is so beautiful

"in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 13:07:59 -0400

“in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly,
and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier’s antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals.”

- Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, Cesar A. Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen & Vincent D. Blonde, Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility (PDF)

Riding on Services

Tue, 14 May 2013 12:28:00 -0400

I’ve been working on an internal web app for the past few weeks.

I’m not a “real” programmer, so as usual I just figure things out as I go along and make lots of mistakes, but I always learn new stuff. This is how I learned programming in the first place, got my first gigs building websites, then ended up at OpenPlans, Code for America and now USV. My favorite thing about the web is how it makes it possible to just pick a direction and learn as you go. It’s amazing, really.

My background is that I’m good with front-end development (html/css/js) and decent with PHP (have built a ton of wordpress websites, plugins, themes), but I quickly trail off from there. So I’m very comfortable in some places, and not so much in others (linux admin, deploying python apps, etc).

But for this project, I decided to try something new. I’m using tornado (a python web framework), paired with mongodb. The app is hosted at Heroku and my mongo database is running in the cloud at Mongolab. I’m using twitter auth for log-ins, and I’m also using the hackpad API to embed editable documents in the app.

What’s so cool about this is that pretty much everything is a cloud-hosted service, wired together in a really light way to make the app. There is a tiny amount of application-specific code. If we had used Brubeck instead of Tornado, there’d be even less.

It’s been a joy to develop in this environment. I like programming in python, and mongodb is a breath of fresh air. And being able to simply wire in things like hackpad (with some really great help from Igor) has been amazing. Deploying updates is as simple as git push heroku master and heroku does all the heavy lifting.

Much of the starter code for this came from Zach, our hacker-in-residence at USV, who’s been working on an update for USV.com. I don’t think I’d have been able to do it without his starting point — but looking at the Brubeck docs, which are quite good (kudos, James), perhaps that’s not true.

All of this reminds me of a post my friend Ian Bicking wrote a few years ago about What PHP Deployment Gets Right. For those who don’t know Ian, he is a rockstar python developer who understands the low level stuff better than anyone I’ve been around — among other things he wrote pip and virtualenv, which are primary tools for anyone developing in python. Anyway, the point of Ian’s post is that PHP deployment is, and always has been, so easy that it’s possible for people (like me, until recently) who are afraid of going deeper than the file system, to program and deploy apps.

Ian’s post is 5 years old now, and a lot has changed. It’s pretty sweet how the hurdles for developing web apps keep getting lower and lower.

Stream to the entire new daft punk album for free on itunes. I...

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:58:04 -0400

Stream to the entire new daft punk album for free on itunes.

I love daft punk.

Here’s the link

Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter on Samples, Creating Samples, and Studio Production

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:55:10 -0400

Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter on Samples, Creating Samples, and Studio Production:

jedsundwall:

It’s really hard to say. The whole starting point of that record was to somehow question the magical powers of recorded audio at a time when pop music is mostly recorded on laptops with a small microphone and a pair of headphones in airport lounges and hotel rooms. We’re not really part of that generation. We’re part of the previous generation, where a studio was a collection of hardware and electronic components assembled in a discreet way to try to create a unique global system in a home environment; somehow a distinctive system.

The idea was really having this desire for live drums, as well as questioning, really, why and what is the magic in samples? Why for the last 20 years have producers and musicians been extracting these little snippets of audio from vinyl records? What kind of magic did it contain? Because harmonically the samples are just an F minor or a G flat, something not so special. It occurred to us it’s probably a collection of so many different parameters; of amazing performances, the studio, the place it was recorded, the performers, the craft, the hardware, recording engineers, mixing engineers, the whole production process of these records that took a lot of effort and time to make back then. It was not an easy task, but took a certain craftsmanship somehow cultivated at the time.

We started to say, “OK, let’s see from a production standpoint, also in terms of performance, whether we could create records that embed this level of production and craftsmanship, and see whether the culture would allow for records like this to be produced. ”So it’s true that we decided to try to recreate these circumstances and really select a team of firsthand actors in witness of that golden age, that era and in the same time go back to the places where that magic had happened. We really think, we feel the walls can speak, and at the same time there’s really this idea that these are magical places.

This reminds me of how Portishead pressed their own vinyl just to be able to scratch it and sample it.

It also sheds light on the name, Random Access Memories. They’ve made an album explicitly to be referenced (sampled) in the future.

"But it’s a mistake to equate peer production with anticapitalism. This isn’t amateurs versus..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:26:00 -0400

“But it’s a mistake to equate peer production with anticapitalism. This isn’t amateurs versus professionals; it’s each benefiting the other. Companies aren’t just exploiting free labor; they’re also creating the tools that give voice to millions. And that rowdy rabble isn’t replacing the firm; it’s providing the energy that drives a new sort of company, one that understands that talent exists outside Hollywood, that credentials matter less than passion, and that each of us has knowledge that’s valuable to someone, somewhere.”

- Chris Anderson, Wired 14.07: People Power

an oldie (2006) but a goodie, and as relevant today as ever.

Wantrepreneur vs. Entrepreneur

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:09:17 -0400

Wantrepreneur vs. Entrepreneur:

The Wantrepreenur, the Glory getter Wannabe-Steve-Jobs’. They want the admiration, the envy, the success. They’re just not willing to do anything to jeopardize that dream. Mounting an all out effort for revenue and failing would kill that dream. So don’t ask those users who say they will pay to pay. Don’t knock on doors. Keep playing in the pitch contests and keep talking to the press.

The Entrepreneur are more like Job from the story of Job in the Bible. They’re in it for their faith in the product, for thier belief in their vision. They’re willing to endure without the need for instant gratification. They know that they’re faith will be affirmed when they generat profitable revenue. When they can prove they’ve built a real living thing…. a business…. a revenue generator.

They’re not play acting. They’re the real thing. They’re willing to suffer without glory in the faith that they’re hard work will persevere.

— Driven Forward, via @fakegrimlock

"This is a problem that is unique to software. We wouldn’t permit in any other area of..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 09:11:00 -0400

“This is a problem that is unique to software. We wouldn’t permit in any other area of technology the sorts of claims that appear in thousands of different software patents. Pharmaceutical inventors don’t claim “an arrangement of atoms that cures cancer,” asserting their patent against any chemical, whatever its form, that achieves that purpose. Indeed, the whole idea seems ludicrous. Pharmaceutical patent owners invent a drug, and it is the drug that they are entitled to patent. But in software, as we will see, claims of just that form are everywhere.”

- Professor Mark Lemley of Stanford Law School, on the problem of “functional claiming”, or “patenting the problem, not the solution.”

from The Patent Quality Improvement Act on usv.com

Schumer Taking a Whack at Patent Trolls

Thu, 09 May 2013 09:09:00 -0400

Today I’ve got a post up on the USV blog about Senator Chuck Schumer’s Patent Quality Improvement Act, and the problem of software patents and patent trolls in general.

The PQIA would make it easier and cheaper to defend against frivolous patent infringement suits. This isn’t everything we need to fix the problem, but it’s a step.

Let’s give Schumer some twitter love for making this a priority and taking a crack at it.

Powered by Us

Tue, 07 May 2013 07:10:00 -0400

The week before last, I attended the Mesh Conference in SF, which brought together a big group of folks working at the intersection of the web and the “new economy”: i.e., the “sharing economy”, “peer economy”, “connection economy”, “collaborative consumption”, “the mesh”, etc. As you might imagine, a large part of the discussion focused on the lexical problem that this “movement” faces, with all of these overlapping and somewhat competing terms that attempt to describe it.

I’ve written about this problem before — and it’s true that any discussion with folks working around this space has to struggle to avoid falling into the “what do we call this?” trap. Which is annoying, but I do think necessary. It’s clear that there’s an unfulfilled need to try and describe what we see happening here in a way that really connects. While the words we’ve tried so far do make sense, I don’t think they yet create an appropriately wide tent, and I definitely don’t think they resonate with folks outside the tech community bubble.

As I was thinking about this on my way home from the Mesh, it struck me that maybe there is a common theme that runs through all of this. At the heart of all of these platforms and communities is the fact that they are people-powered. They exist to super-charge people — to turn them into superheroes. They empower people and are powered by people.

They are powered by us.

At USV, we talk a lot about how “networks” are a fundamentally new kind of entity. Whether you’re talking about marketplaces like Etsy, Zaarly, or GoodEggs, communities like Tumblr or Indaba, or funding platforms like Kickstarter or Kiva, they all share a common theme: that they are people-powered. The platform is simply a lightweight architecture which allows people to connect and transact directly with one another on top of it.

Of course, you would be correct to note that all companies and industries are powered by people, whether you’re talking about school teachers, auto workers, or movie executives. But there’s a difference between traditional companies and these new people-powered networks. Buying a car from GM is about buying something from a company. Buying a lamp on Etsy is about buying from a person. Getting a record deal with a label involves people, but building a music career on a network like Indaba and getting your album funded on Kickstarter is powered by us.

In each of these cases, the companies and organizations (nonprofits like Wikipedia or the Freelancers Union) at the center of this aren’t traditional bureaucratic hierarchies — they are networks, and what they do is help people connect with one another directly in new, exciting, and groundbreaking ways. The connection is the service, and what’s being connected is us.

Nicco Mele calls this “the end of big” — and argues (correctly, I think) that this is not just a passing fad (like “social networking”), but a fundamental shift in society. And for all the opportunity it brings, it also presents new challenges as we work to hold on to the most fundamental societal values (safety, accountability, freedom, privacy). He’s right, and part of the puzzle here is to create a policy environment that honors and protects those values while leaving ample room for us to explore “powered by us” approaches that have never been possible before now.

After two centuries of de-personalization through industrialization, we’re now flooded with new ways to both re-discover individuality and community, while simultaneously tackling huge social and economic problems (education, health, energy, transportation). And just to make sure I include the word “awesome” in this post at least once, I’ll end by saying that this is all pretty awesome and exciting.