Candy Chang has created a fantastic project called “Before I Die”. She took a derelict building and painted a wall with blackboard paint. There are spaces where people can write down one thing they want to do before they die. Very cool.
Here is a great presentation given by Jason Yan and David Cramer of Disqus fame about how their site was architected in order to scale to handle 75 million comments. DjangoCon 2010 Scaling Disqus View more presentations from zeeg.
I read two articles on a similar theme this morning. Firstly there was Scott Adams’ post Startup Country, about creating a small, elite, light-weight country inside another country and using it to bootstrap the economy of the larger country. Secondly I read The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ending Poverty, published by The Atlantic. This article [...]
I read Paul Graham’s essay on the acceleration of addictiveness this morning, and it really struck a chord. I feel as though it is almost impossible to become bored these days, there is so much to do. Is this because the world is getting more addictive, or just because I have gotten older and have [...]
The Economist recently had an article on social media’s impact on blogs, especially how sites like Facebook have meant the death of a large number of blogs. I have been thinking recently about this myself. I haven’t posted on my own blog for over 6 months, partly because Facebook’s status updates has fulfilled part of [...]
Daniel Tenner has written an interesting post on how to make you application viral. The core model for viral growth is the following: viral coefficient = (average number of users invited by each active user) x (proportion of invited users that actually join or become active) x (proportion of such users that invite others). Daniel [...]
Here is a video showing how badly Detroit has been affected by the collapsing housing market. Towards the end of the video you can see some amazing mansions in the worst-hit areas of Detroit that you can supposedly buy at a massive discount.
This is a rehearsal for the bar fight scene in the move “Serenity” (found via Reddit). I think this is actually better than the final scene in the movie.