Business, Spoken

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How to Win Founders and Influence Everybody Jan 22, 2018

Show notes

In May 2015, The New Yorker published a profile of the Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen. In it, writer Tad Friend joined Andreessen in his living room to watch an episode of Halt & Catch Fire, the AMC drama chronicling the rise of personal computing in the early 1980s. The scene provided an intimate window into the billionaire’s home life.

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YouTube's Latest Shake-Up Is Bigger Than Just Ads Jan 22, 2018

Show notes

Thomas M. Wagner has uploaded over 300 science fiction reviews to YouTube since 2013. He’s not a major star, but his content has attracted an audience of around 4,400 bookworms who subscribe to his channel. In return for their attention, Wagner likely receives less than $100 a month in advertising revenue, according to the analytics company SocialBlade. The vast majority of YouTube comprises niche channels like Wagner’s.

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The Lightning Network Could Make Bitcoin Faster—and Cheaper Jan 19, 2018

Show notes

In 2014, Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja were bitcoin-obsessed engineers hanging out at pizza-fueled meetups in San Francisco. Their conversation often turned to the central problem of bitcoin: How to make it more useful? The bitcoin network’s design effectively limits it to handling three to seven transactions per second, compared with tens of thousands per second for Visa. Poon and Dryja recognized that for bitcoin to reach its full potential, it needed a major fix.

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AI Beat Humans at Reading! Maybe Not Jan 19, 2018

Show notes

News spread Monday of a remarkable breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Microsoft and Chinese retailer Alibaba independently announced that they had made software that matched or outperformed humans on a reading-comprehension test devised at Stanford. Microsoft called it a “major milestone.” Media coverage amplified the claims, with Newsweek estimating “millions of jobs at risk.” Those jobs seem safe for a while.

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Why a $38 Billion Tax Payment Is a Good Deal for Apple Jan 18, 2018

Show notes

Apple has faced mounting criticism in recent years for avoiding taxes in the US and Europe. Wednesday, it offered critics 38 billion replies. More precisely, Apple said it would pay an estimated $38 billion in tax to bring back to the US some of the cash it has stashed overseas over the years. Apple says the payment would be the largest tax payment of its type in history. But it’s also a pretty good deal for the company.

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Anthony Levandowski Faces New Claims of Stealing Trade Secrets Jan 18, 2018

Show notes

The engineer at the heart of the upcoming Waymo vs Uber trial is facing dramatic new allegations of commercial wrongdoing, this time from a former nanny. Erika Wong, who says she cared for Anthony Levandowski’s two children from December 2016 to June 2017, filed a lawsuit in California this month accusing him of breaking a long list of employment laws.

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Why Cloudflare Let an Extremist Stronghold Burn Jan 17, 2018

Show notes

In the fall of 2016, Keegan Hankes, an analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, paid a visit to the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. This was not unusual; part of Hankes’ job at the civil rights organization was to track white supremacists online, which meant reading their sites.

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It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech Jan 17, 2018

Show notes

For most of modern history, the easiest way to block the spread of an idea was to keep it from being mechanically disseminated. Shutter the newspaper, pressure the broadcast chief, install an official censor at the publishing house. Or, if push came to shove, hold a loaded gun to the announcer’s head. This actually happened once in Turkey.

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This Startup Wants to Neutralize Your Phone—and Un-change the World Jan 16, 2018

Show notes

Late last fall, in the gleaming white lobby of Madison Square Garden, uniformed attendants were posted at security stations to make thousands of smartphones stupid. Chris Rock was playing his 10th show in a 12-city international tour, and at every stop, each guest was required to pass through the entryway, confirm that his or her phone was on vibrate or silent, and then hand it over to a security guard who snapped it into a locking gray neoprene pouch—rendering it totally inaccessible.

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A Child Abuse Prediction Model Fails Poor Families Jan 16, 2018

Show notes

It’s late November 2016, and I’m squeezed into the far corner of a long row of gray cubicles in the call screening center for the Allegheny County Office of Children, Youth and Families (CYF) child neglect and abuse hotline. I’m sharing a desk and a tiny purple footstool with intake screener Pat Gordon. We’re both studying the Key Information and Demographics System (KIDS), a blue screen filled with case notes, demographic data, and program statistics.

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