the gist

Cunninlynguists - My Habit (I Haven’t Changed)

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:00:06 -0500

Cunninlynguists - My Habit (I Haven’t Changed)

Gil Scott-Heron - Running

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 09:00:05 -0500

Gil Scott-Heron - Running

The Streets - Cinema Barz (ft. Jammer) “Why would I be...

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 09:05:06 -0500

The Streets - Cinema Barz (ft. Jammer)

“Why would I be hungry for a younger year? I’m 1978 years younger than the current year.”

"You know what’s great about New York? The threshold for citizenship as a New Yorker is actually..."

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 09:01:05 -0500

“You know what’s great about New York? The threshold for citizenship as a New Yorker is actually pretty short. Like, if you come to New York and you still like it two years after you arrive here and you still think its great and you’re having a good time and you haven’t been totally ground down and go limping back to wherever the fuck you came from…you know what? You’re in.”

- Anthony Bourdain in his new show, “The Layover“ (via alittlespace)

Reks - Limelight

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 09:01:06 -0500

Reks - Limelight

"For great is the power of arguing and the faculty of persuasion, and particularly if it should be..."

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 09:05:05 -0500

“For great is the power of arguing and the faculty of persuasion, and particularly if it should be much exercised, and also receive additional ornament from language: and so universally, every faculty acquired by the uninstructed and weak brings with it the danger of these persons being elated and inflated by it. For by what means could one persuade a young man who excels in these matters that he ought not to become an appendage to them, but to make them an appendage to himself? Does he not trample on all such reasons, and strut before us elated and inflated, not enduring that any man should reprove him and remind him of what he has neglected and to what he has turned aside?”

- Epictetus, Why Not Sophistry?

"For 30 years now, he has lived a monkishly regimented life, each facet of which has been precisely..."

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 09:00:06 -0400

“For 30 years now, he has lived a monkishly regimented life, each facet of which has been precisely engineered to help him produce his work. He runs or swims long distances almost every day, eats a healthful diet, goes to bed around 9 p.m. and wakes up, without an alarm, around 4 a.m. — at which point he goes straight to his desk for five to six hours of concentrated writing. (Sometimes he wakes up as early as 2.) He thinks of his office, he told me, as a place of confinement — “but voluntary confinement, happy confinement.””

- The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami

"…inspections are a cheaper method of finding bugs than testing; according to Basili and Selby..."

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 09:01:05 -0400

“…inspections are a cheaper method of finding bugs than testing; according to Basili and Selby (1987), code reading detected 80 percent more faults per hour than testing, even when testing programmers on code that contained zero comments. This went against the intuition of the professional programmers, which was that structural testing would be the most efficient method.”

- Kevin Burke, Why code review beats testing: evidence from decades of programming research

Lil Wayne - 6 Foot 7 Foot (Feat. Cory Gunz) “Woman of my...

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 09:03:06 -0400

Lil Wayne - 6 Foot 7 Foot (Feat. Cory Gunz)

“Woman of my dreams, I don’t sleep so I can’t find her”

Pains me to hear it.

"What’s the potential power of the entrepreneur’s simple leap of faith? The success of a..."

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 09:36:05 -0400

“What’s the potential power of the entrepreneur’s simple leap of faith? The success of a single business has a significant payoff for the economy. Looking back over the 25 years since our company went public, Schwab has collectively generated $68 billion in revenue and $11 billion in earnings. We’ve paid $28 billion in compensation and benefits, created more than 50,000 jobs, and paid more than $6 billion in aggregate taxes.”

- Charles Schwab, Every Job Requires an Entrepreneur

"Dr Bartels and Dr Pizarro then correlated the results from the trolleyology [studying ethics using..."

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 09:36:06 -0400

“Dr Bartels and Dr Pizarro then correlated the results from the trolleyology [studying ethics using contrived life-or-death scenarios] with those from the personality tests. They found a strong link between utilitarian answers to moral dilemmas… and personalities that were psychopathic, Machiavellian or tended to view life as meaningless. Utilitarians, this suggests, may add to the sum of human happiness, but they are not very happy people themselves.”

- The Economist, Moral philosophy: Goodness has nothing to do with it

"According to Global Trade Alert, a database of restrictions on international commerce, Argentina now..."

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 09:41:06 -0400

“According to Global Trade Alert, a database of restrictions on international commerce, Argentina now imposes more trade limitations deemed “harmful” than any country save Russia”

- The Economist, Protectionism in Argentina: Keep out

I have trouble reconciling reports like this with the high marks Buenos Aires receives from everyone I know who has traveled there. A great place to visit, a terrible place to live?

pieratt: “When you’re done telling jokes about airplanes and...

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 10:06:05 -0400

pieratt:

“When you’re done telling jokes about airplanes and dogs, and you throw those away, what do you got left? You can only dig deeper. You start talking about your feelings, and who you are, and then you do those jokes and they’re gone. and you gotta dig deeper. So you start doing jokes about your fears and your nightmares, and you’re doing jokes about that, and then they’re gone. And then you just start going into weird shit, I mean, eventually just you just get to your balls.”

Louis CK honors George Carlin

Louis CK’s comedy is ballsy, sometimes disgusting, but usually insightful. GQ wrote a nice profile of him in August.

"Outsider, non-founder CEOs are often overvalued because many corporate boards think the answer to..."

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 09:41:05 -0400

“Outsider, non-founder CEOs are often overvalued because many corporate boards think the answer to their problems is a superstar CEO with an outsized reputation. This leads them to overpay for people who are good at creating outsized reputations through networking, interviewing, and taking credit for other peoples’ achievements—all bad indicators of future success.”

- James Kwak, Steve Jobs’s Law: Why Founders Make the Best Leaders

"Foursquare uses Scala’s difficulty as a filtering mechanism. You’ve gotta be good enough to be able..."

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 09:00:06 -0400

“Foursquare uses Scala’s difficulty as a filtering mechanism. You’ve gotta be good enough to be able to learn Scala to succeed at Foursquare.”

- David Pollak, Yes, Virginia, Scala is hard

"The only person with the credibility to helm Apple in the long run is a person who can do [design]..."

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 09:01:05 -0400

“The only person with the credibility to helm Apple in the long run is a person who can do [design] critiques. And for all Cook’s brilliance, I’ve seen no evidence he’s a master of great taste. His creativity is at achieving a predetermined goal, not about deciding what goal to achieve.”

- Aaron Swartz, How Apple Works

"…Heroku is a polyglot platform. Techniques for deployment, logging, and scaling are applicable..."

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:01:05 -0400

“…Heroku is a polyglot platform. Techniques for deployment, logging, and scaling are applicable to all app deployments, regardless of language. A common deployment infrastructure reduces language choice to just a question of syntax and libraries. Reduced coupling between app and infrastructure enables picking the right language for each job.”

- Adam Wiggins, Heroku for Java

"For six generations, the same family has run Hermès. That has given this company something no other..."

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 09:01:05 -0400

“For six generations, the same family has run Hermès. That has given this company something no other company has. Our combat with LVMH is not an economic fight, it’s a cultural fight. We try to do poetry and we get excellent economic results. We must protect that.”

- Patrick Thomas, Hermès’s CEO, via WSJ

"German-style games avoid direct conflict. Violence in particular is taboo in Germany’s gaming..."

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 08:31:05 -0400

“German-style games avoid direct conflict. Violence in particular is taboo in Germany’s gaming culture, a holdover from decades of post-World War II soul-searching. In fact, when Parker Brothers tried to introduce Risk there in 1982, the government threatened to ban it on the grounds that it might encourage imperialist and militaristic impulses in the nation’s youth. (The German rules for Risk were hastily rewritten so players could “liberate” their opponents’ territories, and censors let it slide.)”

- Wired, Monopoly Killer: Perfect German Board Game Redefines Genre

"One of the best, unattributable quotes from Social Foo last year was the data point that Facebook..."

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 08:31:06 -0400

“One of the best, unattributable quotes from Social Foo last year was the data point that Facebook was at one point losing up to 80% of messages across their update bus. As someone whose expectations are shaped by the five nines style promises of Twitter, its a loss at scale which I can’t possibly fathom. And it wasn’t even an issue in the Facebook community. And when they expire updates out of hot storage to less accessible stores, you don’t notice, because they never offered you the option to page back forever. Contrast again to Twitter whose design (if not content) encourages you to page back forever until you smack up against an arbitrary and surprising limit. (whose exact location has changed over the years)

That is designing with affordances. Don’t let your design make promises you can’t keep.”

- Kellan Elliott-McCrea, Streams, affordances, Facebook, and rounding errors