Every now and then, this crops up in the west: Indian coders are bad. The typical reaction is to tell them off. Go write your own F***&$g code. It is then followed by a gazillion comments and counter arguments. This weeks SunnyMag has one such story which talks about the latest bout of Indian coder bashing. The profile on Jack Dorsey by the New Yorker is a must read. So is the story of Indian sex tourists in The Open. And you really don’t want to miss Niel Gaiman’s lecture. This curated weekly magazine is dedicated to beautifully written stories that the otherwise busy web ignores. Do not miss the two articles under Big Picture. Have a good read!
New New World
The Chive’s Smut With a Smile: The guy applying to be an intern is locked in the conference room. “Leave him in there for a while. I want him to sweat,” says John Resig, 35, co-founder and president of the Chive, a website based in Austin, Tex. Resig doesn’t mean he wants the guy to be nervous—that’s already been accomplished—he means he literally wants the kid to sweat through his shirt. “I want a big sweat mark right here,” Resig says, gesturing to his belly. More here.
Mining your information for big brother: Big Bro is watching you. Inside your mobile phone and hidden behind your web browser are little known software products marketed by contractors to the government that can follow you around anywhere. No longer the wide-eyed fantasies of conspiracy theorists, these technologies are routinely installed in all of our data devices by companies that sell them to Washington for a profit. More here.
Two hit wonder: Jack Dorsey, the tech entrepreneur, takes the No. 1 bus to work, and he likes to catch the 7:06. It carries him nearly from one side of San Francisco to the other—down California Street almost to Market. A ride costs two dollars, but Dorsey has a monthly pass, so the actual price, he told me on a recent commute, is closer to a dollar seventy-five. “If you buy it in bulk, it saves you a little bit of money,” he explained. As we got on, he added, “I love the bus. More here.
Why Pierre Omidyar decided to join forces with Glenn Greenwald for a new venture in news: Yesterday word leaked out that Glenn Greenwald would be leaving the Guardian to help create some new thing backed by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay. I just got off the phone ith Omidyar. So I can report more details about what the new thing is and how it came to be. More here.
Our Interview with Bill Watterson! For the December issue of mental_floss magazine, Jake Rossen managed to do something we thought was impossible—he snagged an interview with the legendary Bill Watterson! Since we’re guessing there are a few Calvin and Hobbes enthusiasts in the audience, we thought we’d provide a glimpse of the e-mail exchange. For our full story on the comic strip, be sure to pick up the print magazine. More here.
Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming: A lecture explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens. More here.
Entrepreneuring
LinkedIn’s Series B Pitch to Greylock: Entrepreneurs often ask me for help with their pitch decks. Because we value integrity and confidentiality at Greylock, we never share an entrepreneur’s pitch deck with others. What I’ve honorably been able to do, however, is share the deck I used to pitch LinkedIn to Greylock for a Series B investment back in 2004. More here.
Artist Draws Nine Portraits on LSD During 1950s Research Experiment: During the 1950s, a researcher gave an artist two 50-microgram doses of LSD (each dose separated by about an hour), and then the artist was encouraged to draw pictures of the doctor who administered the drugs. More here.
Lifehack
The seven worst types of Facebook statuses and how you can avoid them: Maybe you’re in a rush and typing a frantic update into your smartphone? Maybe you don’t see what you’re posting the way others will? Still, there’s no excuse. So if you want to keep your Facebook friends, take heed! Once you’ve read this article you’ll be analysing every Facebook status you see, we guarantee it. More here.
3 Little Tricks to Deal With People Who Offend You: Something that we struggle with daily, that eats us up and causes stress and anger: annoying people. You know those people: they cut in line, are rude to you in the office or at the restaurant, cut you off in traffic, talk loudly about obnoxious things, play loud music when you’re trying to concentrate, interrupt you, and so on. More here.
Hard Code
What will ‘cloud computing’ mean in 10 years?: In a decade, cloud computing will encompass pervasive services, public and private data — but will be rarely discussed. More here.
Behind the ‘Bad Indian Coder’: “Code from India can be truly awful if you work with most companies,” another Redditor said. “A lot of them treat programming as a task to be completed with numbers and fire those that can’t work fast enough, rather than a task requiring quality where people are educated to avoid mistakes and fired only as a last resort.” More here.
Gadget Vice
Inside the fall of BlackBerry: How the smartphone inventor failed to adap: Shortly after the release of the first iPhone, Verizon asked BlackBerry to create a touchscreen “iPhone killer.” But the result was a flop, so Verizon turned to Motorola and Google instead. In 2012, one-time co-CEO Jim Balsillie quit the board and cut all ties to BlackBerry in protest after his plan to shift focus to instant-messaging software, which had been opposed by founder Mike Lazaridis, was killed by current CEO Thorsten Heins. More here.
Indyeah!
Nights out in a New Town: ‘Dekho,’ he tells the leader, preliminary to a logistical conversation, ‘hum poora enjoy karne aaye hai. Look, we’ve come to enjoy fully.’ Which makes for as good a statement of our agenda as any. Almost to the man, we are a plane full of Indian men, and we are sex tourists bound for Uzbekistan. More here.
Chakra, the Indian Superhero
Stan Lee’s New Superhero Fights for Truth, Justice, and the Indian Way: Stan Lee, the comic book legend who co-created such enduring superheroes as Spider-Man and the X-Men, shared plans this week for his latest creation: an Indian superhero named Chakra. More here.
Big Picture
What We’ve Learned from the Financial Crisis: Five years ago the global financial system seemed on the verge of collapse. So did prevailing notions about how the economic and financial worlds are supposed to function. More here.
How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses: José Urbina López Primary School sits next to a dump just across the US border in Mexico. The school serves residents of Matamoros, a dusty, sunbaked city of 489,000 that is a flash point in the war on drugs. There are regular shoot-outs, and it’s not uncommon for locals to find bodies scattered in the street in the morning. To get to the school, students walk along a white dirt road that parallels a fetid canal. On a recent morning there was a 1940s-era tractor, a decaying boat in a ditch, and a herd of goats nibbling gray strands of grass. A cinder-block barrier separates the school from a wasteland—the far end of which is a mound of trash that grew so big, it was finally closed down. On most days, a rotten smell drifts through the cement-walled classrooms. Some people here call the school un lugar de castigo—“a place of punishment.” More here.
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