After 14 years running my own businesses, I’ve failed a lot. I haven’t kept count thankfully, but I’d say I’ve started at least 50 businesses / ideas and out of those, 3 have worked. And when I say worked I don’t mean staying in business, I mean resulting in either a decent income for me at the time or a decent asset that’s worth something to me or someone else. With all the risks you take as an entrepreneur, I don’t see replacing your job and getting to work from home as a significant enough reward to count as success.

The startup community likes to glorify failure but I don’t. Failing sucks. Failing slow sucks infinitely more. That’s why it’s OK sometimes to give up, to free you up to move onto an idea that could bring you something that the startup community doesn’t talk about near as much: actual fulfilment and success.

Summary:

1. You are completely clueless about what you are getting yourself into
2. You are working on more than 1 thing
3. You are the wrong person for the job
4. It’s not a business it’s a charity
5. You can’t build a story / brand around it
6. You are trying to change buying habits
7. You are operating mainly on assumptions
8. Your offering isn’t interesting enough
9. You are getting bad advice

Once lauded for its sane defaults, the latest Ubuntu release has usability issues.

written by Walter Bright

My career has been all about designing programming languages and writing compilers for them. This has been a great joy and source of satisfaction to me, and perhaps I can help others with some observations about what you’re in for if you decide to design and implement a professional programming language. Of course, this is a book length topic, so I’ll just hit on a few highlights here, and avoid topics well covered elsewhere.

As tech conference organizers ramp up for the fall season, you may be seeing calls for papers (CFP) landing in your email box or social media feeds. We at All Things Open (ATO) have seen a lot of presentation proposals over the years, and we've learned a few things about what makes them successful.

A comprehensive, technobabble free explanation of how Bluetooth contact tracing (doesn't) work and why simple solutions are often not that simple, if not outright dangerous, when applied in real life.

In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: "I've got nothing to hide." According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.