Today's Startup Cult Meeting Is Completely Incoherent

Sam Biddle · 10/18/13 04:41PM

Most crazed collections of likeminded nuts have something you could call an agenda. Maybe it's "startup assholes drinking wine on a mountain," or "lizard people are real," or something. But I have absolutely no fucking clue what "Camp Mighty" is about.

Like Everyone Else, Twitter Hides from U.S. Taxes in Ireland

Sam Biddle · 10/18/13 12:08PM

If Twitter's transformation from "that micro-blogging service" to publicly traded advertising titan works out, it's going to have a painful tax bill. But there's good news! Twitter is already pulling an Apple and setting itself up with Irish money loopholes.

NIPS and the Zuckerberg Visit

Sergey Feldman and Alex Rubinsteyn · 10/17/13 07:07PM

This past weekend, several hundred researchers, students, and hobbyists streamed into Lake Tahoe to attend a conference called Neural Information Processing Systems. NIPS is one of the two machine learning conferences of note (the other is ICML). Acceptance rates are low; prestige is high. Anyone interested in machine learning, statistics, applied math, or data can come to the conference but do expect to be bombarded by 10,000 terms that you don't know, even if you have a PhD.

This Asshole Misses the Shutdown

Sam Biddle · 10/17/13 04:44PM

Someday, we'll be able to replace the public good with some sort of app or Twitter-connected mug—but for now, tech's strategy seems to be just ignoring notions of "society" and "cooperation." For many powerful figures in Silicon Valley, the federal shutdown was proof they don't need to care about you.

Leaked Emails Show How Palantir Founder Recruits for Global Domination

Nitasha Tiku · 10/17/13 11:15AM

The world-changing aspirations of Twitter and Facebook are a drop in the bucket, a single bloom in an Arab Spring, compared to what former Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale wants to do with Formation 8, a venture capital firm that raised $448 million to modernize and disrupt all of Asia's power centers, basically. The leaked emails (below) show how Lonsdale intends to recruit engineers to his cause: by making them “feel special because they think they've been identified by technology [i.e. Palantir] that helped locate bin Laden.”

UNC Student Startup Fakes School Shooting to Advertise

Sam Biddle · 10/16/13 05:39PM

I'm no marketing wizard, but if you try to trick your classmates into believing there is a violent criminal act occurring on campus, the stunt might just blow up in your face. The crew at Bevii is learning this the very hard way.

Why Are Sheryl Sandberg's DC Meetings Secret?

Sam Biddle · 10/16/13 10:26AM

The next stop on Sheryl Sandberg's Sheryl Sandberg Publicity Tour: our shuttered nation's capital, where the shutdown means government officials are happy to meet you, but unable to explain to anyone why.

Twitter: Still Losing Even More Money

Sam Biddle · 10/15/13 05:38PM

Twitter tossed out a little update to its pre-IPO disclosures, and the soon-to-be-public company is still far, far away from profitable.

Dave Morin Laid Off 20 Percent of Path Employees Today

Nitasha Tiku · 10/15/13 03:53PM

Dave Morin's social networking app Path laid off 13 employees today, which represents 20 percent of the company's staff. A spokesperson for the company confirmed the layoffs, saying, "We're working to realign the company to support continued innovation and Path 4.0."

Steve Jobs' Ex: "Our lovemaking had been sublime"

Sam Biddle · 10/15/13 10:04AM

Chrisann Brennan became involved with Apple's founding tyrant when the company and he were both very young—they went on to have a daughter, who he abandoned for a large part of her childhood. But at least, according to a new tell-all, "Steve and I still shared nights of lovemaking so profound that...fifteen years later, he called me out of the blue to thank me for them."