Posts

Tyler Cowen’s Unusual Final Exam I think I’m going to give this a shot next time I interview someone. I’ll ask them what question they wish people would ask them and then have them answer it.

Andre Torrez wrote today about a lesson that I was lucky enough to learn fairly early in life. It’s that he’s not busy, and neither is anybody else: So the final piece I have been working on is never telling people I am busy. Because no, I am not busy. Yes, I have a lot of stuff to do, but I leave it at the office after work and on the weekends. I have many things I am interested in, but I can always make room for something if it is worth doing. ...

Hear, All Ye People; Hearken, O Earth (Part One) Errol Morris investigates how fonts affect whether people believe what they’re reading. Whoa.

Two-Step Verification Dances Around the Issue Andrew James for PandoDaily on weaknesses of two-factor authentication. I have two nits to pick with his article. First of all, Google has an app you can use to furnish your authentication code on your smart phone. There’s no need to rely on receiving a text to get your code. Secondly, human factors will always be the greatest security weakness. The goal is to minimize their impact. ...

The source code for TextMate 2, the Duke Nukem Forever of text editors, has been released under the GPL on GitHub. (Here’s a link to the repository.) I switched to TextMate when Ruby on Rails was just released and I switched back to OS X, and the editor has hardly progressed since then. (That was back in the summer of 2005, I think.) For the past couple of years, I’ve been using Vim for pretty much everything but Java. ...

Steve Balmer’s performance review, and ours Larry White argues with the idea that performance reviews are even a good idea. I tend to think that they are useless at best and destructive at worst. Good management involves giving constant feedback all year, not bundling it all up for one incredibly awkward process that takes pace annually.

How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking Mat Honan’s latest piece on being hacked. The important lesson here is in the explanation of how interlocking relationships between your accounts can make your online accounts much more vulnerable.

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.

Interestingly, however, there is one last bastion of economic activity that proved remarkably resistant to the triumph of the market: firms, companies and, later, corporations. Think about it: market-societies, or capitalism, are synonymous with firms, companies, corporations. And yet, quite paradoxically, firms can be thought of as market-free zones. Within their realm, firms (like societies) allocate scarce resources (between different productive activities and processes). Nevertheless they do so by means of some non-price, more often than not hierarchical, mechanism! ...

Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for and how does Valve’s management structure fit into today’s corporate world? Yanis Varoufakis, Valve’s in-house economist, analyzes Valve’s non-management structure. Here’s a link to my earlier post on Valve’s approach to management.