PreludeIf you are a professional writer – i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed – Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.Neal StephensonIn the Beginning … Was the Command LineI’m an Emacs user and I’m proud of the fact. I know my reasons for using it (and loving it) for many years now. But many people don’t. I often get asked by various people the same qu...

We’ve all experienced it: The frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do. Or get. Or find.New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology ProfessorGabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses.“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” Radvansky explains.“Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.â...

When I was in business school 25 years ago, I don't recall the term sustainability used. Maybe it was, but it certainly didn't register in my brain. The mantras that I recall were return on investment, shareholder value, revenue growth, and driving efficiencies in the business.But as I look at many of the challenges facing businesses today, it seems to me that the focus on performance and efficiency often comes at the cost of sustainability. This talk by Clay Christensen really drives that point home. The recent history of the steel industry in the US is a case study in managers doing everythi...

This past week, I was interviewing a candidate for a VP role along with two of our engineering leads. Everyone in the room excluding myself was classically “technical” – they could write code, had experience solving hard software problems and a background in computer science. I wrote my last line of PHP in 2004, and it had to be rewritten by a real programmer within 6 months.During the interview, we had the following exchange (due to an imperfect memory, I’ll paraphrase):Thomas, one of the engineering leads: How would we design an efficient system to he...

Stuff we startups do that doesn't delight users:Office spaceLaunch partiesHealth insurance plansSalary negotiationsFounder equity splitsSeries F stockOffice Food Team-building activitiesCRM systemsBookkeepingHead countWorking in SOMAConvertible debt capsValuationsTechCrunchKarma scoresISOsPowerpointBusiness CardsBanksLawyersDesks1099sBug TrackersAgile ProcessesAdvisory BoardsHiringCap TablesPayrollMeetupsMeetingsOf course, much of this stuff still needs to get done.  At some point.  And some of it really is important to the process that eventually creates delight for users. ...

People get paid less than their employers' "reservation price" (the most they would ever pay), and more than their "marginal product" (the least they would ever work for). Your actual pay on that spectrum is based on your bargaining power, relative to your employer.Say your services to your company are worth $1000 a day. Under the gun, he would pay you that if he had no other choice. Say you would work for $100 a day if you had no other options. That's your range.Say you're new and independent and unknown, and your boss is Google. Google has more bargaining power, because they can just wait an...

Hot data: An IT technician checks the network servers at a data farm. Alamy Photograph: Juice Images/AlamyPhysics has Newton's first law ("Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed"). The equivalent forinternet services is simpler, though just as general in its applicability: it says that there is no such thing as a free lunch.The strange thing is that most users of Google, Facebook, Twitter and other "free" services seem to be only dimly aware of this law. F...

Gapminder WorldIt’s no secret that technology is changing the world. Unfortunately, there are a surprising number of people who don’t get it. Many of them, even more unfortunately, are important leaders in business, other powerful instutitions, and governments. To meet the challenges that face us—whether as leaders of organizations, as leaders of countries, or as the global community addressing our collective challenge—we will only be successful if we unreservedly embrace technology and innovation as essential tools. The Techonomy conference, which begins in Tucson ...