Techmeme
May 12, 2019, 9:00 PM

Top News

Campbell Robertson / New York Times:
Non-profit Mined Minds came into West Virginia promising to teach miners and others coding skills and get them well paid jobs, but left many of them worse off  —  Mined Minds came into West Virginia espousing a certain dogma, fostered in the world of start-ups and TED Talks.  Students found an erratic operation.
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
As it ponders Facebook fines, FTC must seek regulation forcing Facebook to make its social graph truly portable, letting users export friend lists to other apps  —  FTC must pave the path to competition  —  Choice for consumers compels fair treatment by corporations.
Leigh Cuen / CoinDesk:
Satoshi's Treasure scavenger hunt has 60K people signed up in less than a month, with teams as large as 600, searching for clues to access $1M worth of bitcoin  —  Nothing brings bitcoiners together like a quest peppered with cryptographic clues.  —  According to Satoshi's Treasure co-creator Eric Meltzer …
New York Times:
Researchers link a network of far right, far left sites and social media accounts trying to manipulate EU elections to the infrastructure Russia used in 2016  —  LONDON — Less than two weeks before pivotal elections for the European Parliament, a constellation of websites and social media accounts linked …
Andreessen Horowitz:
Enterprise startups should not rely on data network effects as a defensive moat and should focus on and invest in long-term defensibility from other areas  —  Data has long been lauded as a competitive moat for companies, and that narrative's been further hyped with the recent wave of AI startups.
Joshua Rivera / Kotaku:
A developer of cinematics for Mortal Kombat 11 says the violent content of the game and reference materials used to create it led to a PTSD diagnosis  —  Mortal Kombat 11 is a brutal game.  That's what you come for—sensational, over-the-top violence that's inventive and gratuitous on a level that doesn't exist anywhere else.
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Life360, an SF-based developer of a family tracking app, went public in Australia on Friday because, CEO says, late-stage US investors don't offer “clean terms”  —  KEY POINTS  — Life360, a San Francisco social company backed by Silicon Valley venture capitalists …
Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica:
At I/O, Google killed the Nest platform and shattered the Google/Nest privacy firewall, saddling many existing users with a dead-end ecosystem of products  —  The Nest ecosystem is dead.  Nest accounts are dead.  Nest's privacy firewall is dead.  —  MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. …
Tiffany Hsu / New York Times:
Loyalty programs, which are collecting vast amounts of personal data, are easy to join and often have flimsy passwords, making them very attractive to hackers  —  The punch cards stuffed in your wallet know next to nothing about you, except maybe how many frozen yogurts you still need to buy to get a free one.
Tweets: @felixsalmon
Spencer Soper / Bloomberg:
Amazon's recent pledge of $800M to make next-day delivery the new standard is pressuring rivals to increase their investments in logistics startups to compete  —  - Flexe and Dolly are lining up backing for national expansions  — Several of the upstarts are led by former Amazon executives

Sponsor Posts

Google:
Try Gemini 3 Pro  —  Google's newest and most intelligent AI model that helps you bring any idea to life
Shopify:
Transform ML Experimentation with Tangle  —  Save months of compute time with Tangle, built by Shopify.  Try this open-source platform to simplify ML workflows, ensure reproducibility, and seamlessly share with collaborators.
Zoho:
Top shortcuts to work your way through Zoho Cliq  —  The debate between mouse and keyboard users has been around for years.  Whether it's about efficiency, speed, or productivity, there's always this question …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Box data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Grit:
The Pull to Build: Joubin Mirzadegan on Grit and Starting Roadrunner
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
AI Device Wars Heat Up, RIP Metaverse?, Netflix Acquires Warner Brothers
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:
"Hollywood is Truly Freaked Out." Inside the Netflix/WBD Deal with Lucas Shaw
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.
Hard Fork:
OpenAI Calls a 'Code Red' + Which Model Should I Use? + The Hard Fork Review of Slop
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.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 9:00 PM ET, May 12, 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

Dan Primack / Axios:
Nick Clegg / New York Times:
Heather Somerville / Reuters: