Arach Tchoupani

Some links and some thoughts

Fire - cdespinosa's posterous

Amazon is performing astonishing jujitsu on Google.

The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the privacy and data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.

Interesting. Wish I could repost the whole thing. Go read it.

Screw New York! « Thought Catalog

Screw New York for housing the most emotionally unavailable, career-obsessed and attractive people.

How GitHub Works: Hours are Bullshit

Code is a creative endeavor. You need to be in the right mindset to create high-quality code.

Think back to the last time you were depressed or angry. How productive were you? Now think back to the last time you were truly productive. Code flying from your fingertips. Not just the sheer quantity- the sheer quality of that code. When you’re in the right mindset, your best day of coding can trump weeks of frustrated keyboard-tapping.

I tend to agree. A lot.

Ask the Harvard MBA » How does a successful, beautiful lawyer meet an educated, successful, normal man?

I’ve written a piece for one of my other blogs where I detail the fall of men.  One of the telling statistics is that for every 100 college-educated 23-year-old men in America, there 164 college-educated 23-year-old women.  Another is that single young men earn 8% less than their female counterparts–a sharp contrast with the historical income advantage that men held.