Technology
“The future is better than you think” is the message of Peter Diamandis’s and Steven Kotler’s book. Despite a flat economy and intractable environmental problems, Diamandis and his journalist co-author are deeply optimistic about humanity’s prospects. “Technology,” they say, “has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman, and child on the planet.... Abundance for all is actually within our grasp.” READ MORE >>
The Case for Entrepreneur Visas
Tech startups want a seat next to Facebook at the table of immigration reform
Alejandro Muther has been trying to create jobs in the United States for more than a year now. READ MORE >>
A little over a year ago, the social blogging platform Tumblr dipped its toe into journalism with a new site called Storyboard. READ MORE >>
Want to Read the Law? It'll Cost You.
The fight to make building regulations truly free
Say you live in Rhode Island and want to upgrade the ancient plumbing in your kitchen. You figure you should be able to save some cash and do it yourself, but want to make sure you're on the up-and-up with all applicable codes and regulations. So you head over to the state’s website to read the plumbing code. READ MORE >>
How Much for That Startup?
What Amazon's Purchase of Goodreads Tells Us About the Content Wars
In the aftermath of Amazon's purchase of the social book website Goodreads last week, the tech press went into a speculative tizzy: How much did the retail behemoth pay for the platform and its 16 million bookworms? The question isn’t motivated purely by envy. While acquisition prices tell us how rich a company’s founders have just become, they also signal what to expect from the new union and serve as benchmarks for future investments. READ MORE >>
MOOCs of Hazard
Will online education dampen the college experience? Yes. Will it be worth it? Well...
In the spring of 2011, Sebastian Thrun was having doubts about whether the classroom was really the right place to teach his course on artificial intelligence. READ MORE >>
Every week, it seems, there’s another gender-related dustup in the technology world. The leader of a hacker movement quits over misogyny. A person in charge of recruiting Web developers is fired after publicly calling out sexual comments at a conference. READ MORE >>
The Tech Community Needs to Grow Up
How one woman's tweets exposed the industry's boys club
Ten days ago, a programmer named Adria Richards was attending PyCon, the foremost conference for the popular computer language Python, when she heard the two gentlemen sitting behind her engaged in ungentlemanly conversation. They were talking about "forking," and "big dongles," and other crude and sexually explicit things. That made Richards uncomfortable. She turned around, snapped a photo of the guys, and tweeted it. READ MORE >>
“She told him that she loves me, which is an important data point.” I overheard those words a few months ago, and they stopped me in my tracks. I did not know the smitten and empirical young man who spoke them well enough to offer a correction of his way of talking about desire, but I was pleased to have stumbled upon such a blunt formulation of one of the shibboleths of the day. I refer to the messianic conception of data, or Big Data. READ MORE >>
Cat Photos on Ice
Welcome to the Node Pole, the near-Arctic location that wants to house a good chunk of the Internet
It’s easy to forget that what we see on the Internet doesn’t just show up on our screens magically. It’s a representation of immense quantities of data that have to be physically stored somewhere, most often in gigantic, Super Walmart–sized warehouses with rows upon rows of servers. And the machines need to be kept below 80 or so degrees, lest they malfunction. READ MORE >>
