I understand why Town & Country shoehorned three techies into their "Sexiest Bachelors 2014" list. If coders are the new bankers, and bankers were the new imperial vassal lords (or something), it fits. To a regressive glossy, powerful parvenues are the best bachelors—but try not picking the creepiest in Startupland.

The denial phase is over. In his speech about NSA spying tactics, President Obama just said: "We will also enable communications providers to make public more information than ever before about the orders they have received to provide data to the government."

Never, ever forget: the Silicon Valley insider crowd is exempt from the rules and norms of the rest of the citizenry. TechCrunch excitedly reports on a new app called "Fixed," which will help San Franciscans automatically kill parking tickets, whether or not they deserve it.

There's nothing worse than getting married, then realizing you could have done so much better. Such was the dilemma of tech media's preeminent naif, Farhad Manjoo, is ditching the Wall Street Journal to place David Pogue's crown upon his head at the New York Times, and is now the most coveted writer of our era.

There's now a layer of corporate muscle standing between window-smashers and Google's soft, fleshy staffers: Reuters reports San Francisco's highly controversial campus shuttles are now being guarded.

Popular culture may have turned its gaze westward, toward the mirage of wunderkind coders, open floor plans studded with perks, and suddenly ubiquitous apps that make their makers insta-millionaires. But the competition to get Silicon Valley right has been flaccid. I was burned by Bravo, bored by Bloomberg, and avoided The Internship like a sticker pack. However Betas, Amazon's original series about social awkward 20-somethings building a social app called "brb," gets some details surprisingly right.

Tech investors said Viddy, an Instagram clone with video, was worth $370 million. The tech press parroted the "Instagram for video" line until their lips chapped, assuming it was true—since when is app hype wrong? Turns out it was! The startup just sold itself for an itty bitty percentage of that figure, because no one used it.

Venmo is a little app for your little phone that makes it easy to beam money from your bank account to someone else's. It's very handy! It's also seen terrific success through word of mouth. So why, why oh why, is the company plastering New York with these universally hated ads?

Where you see sick patients, venture capitalists see off-the-charts consumer engagement. Since the Affordable Care Act, investment has "skyrocketed," like First Opinion, which raised $1.2 million from Greylock Partners and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner for "a way to text message doctors anytime of day or night."

This guest post originally appeared on Symantec.com. A few weeks after our blog post about porn and secret admirer spam targeting Snapchat users, a new spam campaign using sexually suggestive photos and compromised custom URLs is circulating on the photo messaging app.

How do you know your startup is bombing? It's so unpopular, even when users are getting unsolicited messages from robots saying "Make me cum now," there are so few of those users, it's like it didn't even happen.

Henrique De Castro has been pushed out of Yahoo on a plank lined with RSUs. The chief operating officer, whom insiders described as a "dead man walking," is leaving with a $20 million stock bonus after working at the company for a little more than a year.

"After the thermostat, we're going to reimagine every unloved product in people's lives." That's the "key" single line in Nest's pitch deck that got Kleiner Perkins to invest. Four years later, Google acquired the company for $3.2 billion. Keep spinning that carousel, Don Drapers.

Twitter wasn't always Marc Andreessen's jam. His recent bout of 140 character logorrhea came after a lengthy 983 day silent period. But the venture capitalist is back with a vengeance and recently launched a diatribe dismissing people who question the NSA as naive and possibly illiterate.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and internet poet laureate, has officially been high off the fumes of his own shit for too long. Today he took the stage at the National Retail Federation expo in New York, and preached nutso visions about sales receipts.

Late yesterday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals "paved the way" for a class action lawsuit from tech workers against Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel, and Systems Inc. for "conspiring to drive down pay by not poaching each other's staff." Around 60,000 workers will be allowed to sue as a group and pursue "what the defendants said could exceed $9 billion of damages."

Rap Genius is a terrifically helpful website with the misfortune of being run by evasive wackball Yale dudes. Interviews with the crew rarely go beyond goofing around and bizarre outbursts—which is why this very un-TechCrunch podcast Q&A, that doesn't allow horse-shitting answers, is so nice to hear.

What's the opposite of a lifehack? Paying for whatever this is supposed to be: TechCrunch alumnus Jason Kincaid is going all-out in the pursuit of flackdom, charging rates usually charged by powerful lawyers for less than an hour of his time.

When Path sprayed a cheap bottle of champagne in its own face over the weekend, touting a new, loathsome investor, it ended on a positive note. Not only is the superfluous social network staving off death a little longer, it's hiring! But will anyone fall for this dreck?

Sources tell Valleywag that after housing and transportation, the latest slice of public infrastructure to get the VIP, front-of-the-line treatment is healthcare. We hear Oscar Salazar, the founding architect for Uber who helped design and implement the e-hailing prototype, is working on a startup that will offer personalized house calls from doctors. It plans to launch imminently.