A Unicorn Lost in the Valley, Evernote Blows Up the 'Fail Fast' Gospel - The New York T... - 0 views
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He published an unusually frank blog post aimed at Evernote’s users in January. The company’s foundation was not strong, he wrote, and its products had developed a “unique collection of bugs and undesirable behaviors.” It would take most of the year to get all that fixed, he wrote, adding that “undoubtedly we will still disappoint some of you.”
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Evernote has a different, more mature goal. It expects to reach positive cash flow this year, with annual revenue of nearly $100 million. “We used to be a movement,” Mr. Small said. “When we were a movement, we weren’t a business.”
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“The core business of Evernote is what most companies outside of Silicon Valley would look on with envy,” said Vincent Toolan, Evernote’s former chief financial officer. “The problem is it’s in Silicon Valley.”
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Why Rafsanjani's death offers the US a unique opportunity to reshape its Iran policy | ... - 0 views
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Why Rafsanjani's death offers the US a unique opportunity to reshape its Iran policy
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Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the founding fathers of the Iranian regime, died last week on January 8. He served as President, Speaker of Parliament, Deputy Commander of the Armed Forces, head of the Assembly of Experts--the 88-member body of clerics tasked with nominating the Supreme Leader, and head of the Expediency Council, a body adjudicating disputes over legislation between the parliament and the Guardian Council.
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“Now, the regime will lose its internal and external equilibrium,” opposition leader Maryam Rajavi said, suggesting the clerical regime is “approaching overthrow.”
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What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right' | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views
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Gamergate
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The 2014 hashtag campaign, ostensibly founded to protest about perceived ethical failures in games journalism, clearly thrived on hate – even though many of those who aligned themselves with the movement either denied there was a problem with harassment, or wrote it off as an unfortunate side effect
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ure, women, minorities and progressive voices within the industry were suddenly living in fear. Sure, those who spoke out in their defence were quickly silenced through exhausting bursts of online abuse. But that wasn’t why people supported it, right? They were disenfranchised, felt ignored, and wanted to see a systematic change.
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Bernie Sanders's Political Revolution Nears Its End - The Atlantic - 0 views
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This is Sanders’s last stand, according to the official narrative of the corrupt corporate media, and if there is anything we have learned in the past year, it is the awesome power of the official narrative—the self-reinforcing drumbeat that dictates everything.
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Sanders continued: “I believe that if we win here in California, and if we win the other five states that are voting on June 7, we’re going to go marching to the Democratic convention with a hell of a lot of momentum. I believe that if we do well here in California, we’ll march in with momentum and we’ll march out with the Democratic nomination!”
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Sanders and his people have their own sets of rules. All you have to do is unskew the delegate counts, they explain, take out the superdelegates, imagine they all vote for Sanders, imagine certain primaries had been conducted according to different rules.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates - Authors - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The genre of Obama race speeches has always been bounded by the job he was hired to do. Specifically, Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America. More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people.
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But black people, the community to which both Michael Brown and Barack Obama belong, have the distinct fortune of having survived in significant numbers. For a creedal country like America, this poses a problem—in nearly every major American city one can find a population of people whose very existence, whose very history, whose very traditions, are an assault upon this country's nationalist instincts. Black people are the chastener of their own country. Their experience says to America, "You wear the mask."
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What clearly cannot be said is that American society's affection for nonviolence is notional. What cannot be said is that American society's admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. increases with distance, that the movement he led was bugged, smeared, harassed, and attacked by the same country that now celebrates him.
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May's desperate pitch for cross-party unity is a leap into the dark | Rafael Behr | Opi... - 0 views
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The specific challenge that posed for Northern Ireland was identified and baked into the commission’s negotiating mandate in May 2017. But in February 2019 Dominic Raab, a man who briefly led Brexit negotiations, and fancies himself as a potential prime minister, admitted he had not read the Good Friday agreement. It is only 35 pages long.
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The prospect of Britain ending up in a customs union with the EU has been at the forefront of Brexit argument for nearly two years. On Monday around 50 Tory MPs attended a training seminar organised by colleagues on what a customs union is and how it works. At least they were curious. Breathtaking, wilful ignorance of facts has been a routine feature of the debate
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Last week Boris Johnson told Telegraph readers that May should “drop the deal” and, in the next line, that she should “extend the implementation period to the end of 2021”. The implementation period is part of the deal. Drop one and you lose the other. Johnson is not stupid, but he has affected stupidity for so long that the difference no longer matters.
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Are Defenses of Free Speech Just Coded Arguments for Innate Differences? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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What attributes define intellectuals on the right and left in the strange era of Donald Trump? That’s the question Paul Krugman raised in a column attempting to explain ideological imbalance among commentators at elite U.S. media organizations. While his account betrayed dubious assumptions about civil society and the value of opinion journalism, it sparked illuminating responses.
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Three claims most struck me:One of the right’s consensus positions is that innate differences explain and justify the persistence of traditional gender roles. Another consensus position is that racial outcomes are due to “group differences” that are likely innate. One-hundred percent of the free-speech debate is a proxy for people on the right to covertly say that races and sexes are inherently different without fear of censure.
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Even on transgender issues, where Republicans seem most united in public opinion polls, 19 percent say that whether a person is a man or a woman can be different from their sex at birth. Nothing close to consensus exists on this basket of issues.
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Silicon Valley Powered American Tech Dominance-Now It Has a Challenger - WSJ - 0 views
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Asian investors directed nearly as much money into startups last year as American investors did—40% of the record $154 billion in global venture financing versus 44%,
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Asia’s share is up from less than 5% just 10 years ago.
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That tidal wave of cash into promising young firms could herald a shift in who controls the world’s technological innovation and its economic fruits, from artificial intelligence to self-driving cars.
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How China's Tencent Avoided an Antitrust Push, For Now. - The New York Times - 0 views
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There’s no company in the world like Tencent. It’s a true monopoly on many levels. It wields the kind of influence in China that Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google can only aspire to.
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Tencent is a mega entertainment platform. It is the world’s largest online game company, owning stakes in Riot Games and Epic Games. It owns China’s biggest online video, music and online literature businesses, too.
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Tencent is a venture capital investor. In 2020, it lagged only Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley investment firm, in terms of the number of unicorns — start-ups valued at over $1 billion — it has invested in, according to the Hurun Report, a Shanghai research firm.
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Schumpeter - Big Oil has a do-or-die decade ahead because of climate change | Business ... - 0 views
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Without the oil industry’s balance-sheets and project-management skills, it is hard to imagine the world building anything like enough wind farms, solar parks and other forms of clean energy to stop catastrophic global warming.
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The question is no longer “whether” Big Oil has a big role to play in averting the climate crisis. It is “when”.
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To cynics, all the climate-friendly noises amount to little in practice, since few people are ready to make carbon-cutting sacrifices that would force oil firms’ hand. But noises are sometimes followed by action. Should they be this time, the 2020s may be do-or-die for the oil industry.
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G.O.P. Coronavirus Message: Economic Crisis Is a Green New Deal Preview - The New York ... - 0 views
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As President Trump struggles for a political response, Republicans and their allies have seized on an answer: attacking climate change policies.
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“If You Like the Pandemic Lockdown, You’re Going to Love the Green New Deal,” the conservative Washington Examiner said in the headline of a recent editorial
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Elizabeth Harrington, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, wrote in an opinion article in The Hill that Democrats “think a pandemic is the perfect opportunity to kill millions more jobs” with carbon-cutting plans.
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(39) BuzzFeed and the Death of Social Media News - 0 views
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Charles Fishman’s book, The Wal-Mart Effect, you should. Like, right now. It’s an incredibly powerful story not just about the specific power of Wal-Mart, but about the general power of aggregation in networks.
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If you are a company that sells pickles, and Wal-Mart comes to you and offers to sell your pickle jars, that seems very good for your business.
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The problem is that Wal-Mart is an activist retailer—they are constantly pressuring their suppliers to lower prices. Sometimes their demands of suppliers lead to helpful innovations:
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Opinion | A Tech Overlord's Horrifying, Silly Vision for Who Should Rule the World - Th... - 0 views
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Mr. Andreessen outlines a vision of technologists as the authors of a future in which the “techno-capital machine” produces everything that is good in the world.
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In this vision, wealthy technologists are not just leaders of their business but keepers of the social order, unencumbered by what Mr. Andreessen labels “enemies”: social responsibility, trust and safety, tech ethics, to name a few.
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this view is already enshrined in our culture. Major tent-poles of public policy support it.
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Start-up investors issue warnings as boom times 'unambiguously over' - 0 views
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Y Combinator said companies have to “understand that the poor public market performance of tech companies significantly impacts VC investing.”
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Slow your hiring! Cut back on marketing! Extend your runway!The venture capital missives are back, and they’re coming in hot.With tech stocks cratering through the first five months of 2022 and the Nasdaq on pace for its second-worst quarter since the 2008 financial crisis, start-up investors are telling their portfolio companies they won’t be spared in the fallout, and that conditions could be worsening.
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It’s a stark contrast to 2021, when investors were rushing into pre-IPO companies at sky-high valuations, deal-making was happening at a frenzied pace and buzzy software start-ups were commanding multiples of 100 times revenue. That era reflected an extended bull market in tech, with the Nasdaq Composite notching gains in 11 of the past 13 years, and venture funding in the U.S. reaching $332.8 billion last year, up sevenfold from a decade earlier. according to the National Venture Capital Association.
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The new tech worldview | The Economist - 0 views
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Sam Altman is almost supine
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the 37-year-old entrepreneur looks about as laid-back as someone with a galloping mind ever could. Yet the ceo of OpenAi, a startup reportedly valued at nearly $20bn whose mission is to make artificial intelligence a force for good, is not one for light conversation
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Joe Lonsdale, 40, is nothing like Mr Altman. He’s sitting in the heart of Silicon Valley, dressed in linen with his hair slicked back. The tech investor and entrepreneur, who has helped create four unicorns plus Palantir, a data-analytics firm worth around $15bn that works with soldiers and spooks
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