Ben Horowitz:
Despite Instagram’s awesome performance and our monstrous return, a number of articles have come out criticizing us for not making even more money on our investment. Ordinarily, when someone criticizes me for only making 312 times my money, I let the logic of their statement speak for itself.
Zing.
Anna Laurent:
The Claude glass was a sort of early pocket lens without the camera and it was held aloft to observe a vista over one’s shoulder. The technology was simple: A blackened mirror reduced the tonal values of its reflected landscape, and a slightly convex shape pushed more scenery into a single focal point, reducing a larger vista into a tidy snapshot.
Beautiful images. I would love to get my hands on one of these. Via Jason Kottke.
Good reviews from Rui Carmo. He omits PlainText because it does not fulfill his Markdown support criteria, but it’s my editor of choice. I can’t preview Markdown in it, but it’s okay because I rarely use the more advanced features of it (I only really use links and block quotes).
Carmo recommends Textastic, which I find far too heavy for my needs. I don’t mind additional features that I’ll never use, provided they don’t impede the basics that I will. Alas, it’s much too complicated for my writing needs. It’s probably the closest we’ll get to Coda for iPad, for a while at least.
Quentin Hardy, for the New York Times:
[Google] has been accused of flouting copyrights, leveraging other people’s work for its benefit and violating European protections of personal privacy, among other things. “Don’t be evil” no longer has its old ring. And Google, an underdog turned overlord, is no humble giant. It tends to approach any controversy with an air that ranges somewhere between “trust us” and “what’s good for Google is good for the world.”
But ascribing what’s going on here solely to the power or arrogance of a single company misses an important dimension of today’s high-technology business, where there are frequent assaults, real or perceived, on various business standards and practices.
I’m not sure the direction in which these tech companies are headed is a generally positive one. There has been a fair amount of backlash for these incidents, and it’s going to continue. But that’s okay because we’re in uncharted waters. Things will change.
