Techmeme
February 9, 2019, 10:20 PM

Top News

Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
Spotify's bet on Gimlet and Anchor gives it a foothold into podcasting to apply its listener monetization skills without worrying about sending money to labels  —  Credit Spotify CEO Daniel Ek with honesty; in a blog post announcing a major move into the podcast space, Ek wrote:
Tim O'Reilly / Quartz:
Hoffman and Yeh's “Blitzscaling” offers practical advice for startups but presents a lot of revisionist history and ignores the perils of VC-fueled hypergrowth  —  The pursuit of monopoly has led Silicon Valley astray.  —  Look no further than the race between Lyft and Uber to dominate the online ride-hailing market.
Victor Luckerson / The Ringer:
Following major tech scandals, a look at how Stanford University is reevaluating its role in shaping Silicon Valley's future employees and leaders  —  Stanford has established itself as the epicenter of computer science, and a farm system for the tech giants.
Eric Newcomer / Bloomberg:
DoorDash says it stands behind its pay policy, which uses tips to help cover what it owes delivery drivers, similar to the policy Instacart reversed this week  —  Startups like to test boundaries.  At their best, they push technological ones.  At their worst, they breach legal or ethical limits.
Jeff Bezos:
Jeff Bezos publishes letters from National Enquirer owner AMI that he says show threats to publish his nude photos unless he stops probing AMI's reporting  —  Something unusual happened to me yesterday.  Actually, for me it wasn't just unusual—it was a first.  I was made an offer I couldn't refuse.
More: New York Times, Bloomberg, The Intercept, The Verge, Observer, Bloomberg, Washington Post, The Verge, Fortune, FutureSin, Financial Times, USA Today, CNET, Wired, The Seattle Times, New Yorker, Infosecurity.US, The Hill, Errata Security, Business Insider, GeekWire, TechCrunch, Threatpost, CNBC, The Guardian, Bloomberg, Socialnomics, Android Authority, Politico, The Hill, CNN, Recode, VoIPWatch, Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Inquirer, Mashable, YouTube, New York Times, Dictionary by Merriam-Webster, The Daily Beast, Vox, Adweek, Geek.com, Newser, Boing Boing, Bloomberg, Digital Trends, SiliconANGLE, WRAL TechWire, Neowin, BBC, AOL, The Atlantic, Firstpost, Fox News, Associated Press, Fossbytes, Telegraph, TechSpot, BostonGlobe.com, HuffPost, Pocketables, The Register, Gizmodo, Android Central, Ars Technica, WGN-TV, and Above the Law
Nate Oh / AnandTech:
AMD Radeon VII review: at $699, the first 7nm gaming GPU is good value when used as a high-VRAM prosumer card but for pure gamers there are better options  —  For AMD's Radeon Technologies Group, 2018 was a bit of a breather year.  After launching the Polaris architecture in 2016 …
Tweets: @ismhThanks:@iancutress
Tony Romm / Washington Post:
Hasty adoption of California's privacy law left many unresolved issues and privacy advocates fear industry lobbying will lead to revisions that weaken the law  —  SACRAMENTO — A landmark law adopted in California last year to rein in the data-collection practices of Facebook …
Kashmir Hill / Gizmodo:
What it's like to get by without using or accessing a single product from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, blocking all five at once for one week  —  Reporter Kashmir Hill spent six weeks blocking Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple from getting her money, data, and attention, using a custom-built VPN.

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
Run payroll in batches using Pay Groups, now with Zoho Payroll  —  Learn how Pay Groups in Zoho Payroll lets you process, approve, and run multiple pay runs independently for different employee groups within the same pay period.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Hard Fork:
The A.I. Trade Secrets War + Economists Say 'We Must Act Now' + HatGPT
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Pigment's Eléonore Crespo: Building France's Next Unicorn With AI Agents And Tom Cruise
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Access:
This AI will push back if you're rude to it
A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.
Subscribe to Access.
Big Technology Podcast:
AI Pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber: AI Already Feels Pain, Loves, and Is Self-Aware
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Inside Podcasting's Fight Over Netflix, YouTube, and Creator Control
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 10:20 PM ET, February 9, 2019.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Earlier Picks

Roger Parloff / Yahoo! Finance:
Washington Post:
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Dami Lee / The Verge: