Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.

Barack Obama explaining what it is to be President to Michael Lewis. His predecessor put it less articulately and more succinctly when he said, “I’m the decider.”

Ferguson’s critics have simply misunderstood for whom Ferguson was writing that piece. They imagine that he is working as a professor or as a journalist, and that his standards slipped below those of academia or the media. Neither is right. Look at his speaking agent’s Web site. The fee: 50 to 75 grand per appearance. That number means that the entire economics of Ferguson’s writing career, and many other writing careers, has been permanently altered. Nonfiction writers can and do make vastly more, and more easily, than they could ever make any other way, including by writing bestselling books or being a Harvard professor. Articles and ideas are only as good as the fees you can get for talking about them. They are merely billboards for the messengers.

Stephen Marche explains the economics of hack punditry in Niall Ferguson Newsweek Cover – Culture of Public Speaking

The changes to the v1.1 API requiring authentication won’t affect Tweetbot, all current API calls are already made using authentication. The new rate limits that are part of the v1.1 API will likely end up being a good thing, instead of having a fixed block calls that can be made across the entire API the limits will be based on specific actions. We actually expect this to minimize the chances of being stuck in “Twitter Jail”. As an example, if you refresh your timeline over 60 times in an hour, you’ll still be able to post or DM. In general assuming the numbers listed on Twitter’s side remain consistent this should make for an overall better user experience.

Paul Haddad of Tapbots (makers of the popular Tweetbot Twitter client) comments on the Twitter API 1.1 announcement. The post title is “Don’t Panic.” It’s good to get the perspective of someone in the business of creating a Twitter client.

I know how it was done now. Confirmed with both the hacker and Apple. It wasn’t password related. They got in via Apple tech support and some clever social engineering that let them bypass  security questions.

Mat Honan explains how his iCloud password was obtained. Humans, always the weak link.

How many bugs and wasted CPU cycles and instances of human frustration (not to mention bad design) have resulted from that one small shortcut about  40 years ago?

Keep that in mind next time you want to cut a corner in your code.

Unix pioneer Rob Pike explains how dot files originated from a mistake. Most interesting thing I read today.

But we now live in a world where counter-intuitive bullshitting is valorized, where the pose of argument is more important than the actual pursuit of truth, where clever answers take precedence over profound questions. We have no patience for mystery. We want the deciphering of gods. We want oracles. And we want them right now.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on the conditions that created Jonah Lehrer. I’ve certainly been guilty of fetishizing the counter-intuitive over the years.

Real-time interactions happen as they happen. Timely ones, on the other hand, happen as you need them to happen. Some real-time interactions, like breaking news about an earthquake, can be timely. But not all timely interactions are real-time. I’d argue that most are not. And where the Fast Web is built around real-timedness, the Slow Web is built around timeliness.

Jack Cheng explaining The Slow Web. More on this subject later.