maxprogram

And the same thing in "book" version ready to print/read:

http://img.atlastory.com/PeterThielOnStartups.pdf

And at least they are in good company.

At a Berkshire Hathaway board meeting: http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Bill-Gates-...

Not sure if I understand why real-time tile rendering on servers doesn't work.

Googly clearly does not pre-render tiles and it looks like it works fine for them. Request is made, data collected, relevant tiles rendered, returned to client-side. Yes, I know, Google has $billions in computing resources, but does it really take that much server-power to render tiles? (even for 1,000s of requests/second?)

Is it a matter of data transfer or processing capacity? A screen sized 2048x1536 would need to load 48 tiles at a time. Google's tiles for a city avg about 14KB/tile, so 672KB. 5,000 of these a second is 3.4GB. (I'm a front-end guy so this is a little out of my league.)

I think that's exactly what they're doing -- except in this case I think Instagram was more of a direct threat to Facebook's core business than, say, YouTube was to Google's.

Google was like a big castle with a moat protecting it. YouTube was just a moat -- no economic castle yet. Google bought them to add to their moat and further protect the castle.

No way Instagram is worth $1bb as a standalone, going-concern -- but as a defensive play for FB it might be.

All back to Clayton Christensen: modular systems disrupt integrated systems. Microsoft, Intel disrupt Apple, IBM. Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest disrupt Facebook.

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

I think this report is incredibly misleading. It may be a fact that the avg. reading level of the top 40 high school books is 5.3, but that doesn't really mean much. The most important sentence in the article is glazed over:

"While readability formulas can't say much for the depth of literary aspects within a text, they offer objective measures of vocabulary and sentence complexity."

So, in other words, the less "readable" a book is, the higher the competency of the person reading it. Doesn't make much sense.

As a big reader myself, I think it's this kind of cargo-cult thinking (higher readability level > better readers) that leads people, and teenagers in particular, to dislike reading. I know that was the case with me when I went to school. Now I read all the time, but hate books with complicated writing (aka high readibility scores).

"Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making", Gary Klein

"Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies", Charles Perrow

"Chaos: Making a New Science", James Gleick

"Filters Against Folly", Garrett James Hardin

"Judgment in Managerial Decision Making", Max Bazerman

"Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity", John Gribben

Completely agree. I'd personally love something like that. But then again, I'd think it would be a very VERY niche product. I have trouble enough convincing people I know to watch an episode of Charlie Rose.

Would also suggest to anyone interested in this topic to check out anything written by Nassim Taleb. Both of his main stream books are good ("Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan"). Black Swan is more general while Fooled slants towards finance. Peter Bernstein's "Against the Gods" about the history of risk is also great and a little less wordy than Talebs.

Lapham's is a great publication. Especially for anyone who loves history (through the words of those living it, without the benefit of hindsight).

Though, you definitely have to love reading also to make it worth your while. Some of it can get pretty dense. I usually end up reading only 2 or 3 of the articles but still get a lot out of it.