248: TZ Discussion - MinMax

Justin and Jason discuss why they like recording discussion shows on Friday afternoons, PayPal dispute resolutions, Jason’s friend who lost his business and is now teaching himself how to code, how to determine whether your programmers are lazy,

Justin and Jason discuss why they like recording discussion shows on Friday afternoons, PayPal dispute resolutions, Jason's friend who lost his business and is now teaching himself how to code, how to determine whether your programmers are lazy, how Fog Creek compensates their developers, why Treehouse is eliminating managers, how to inspire developers to hit deadlines, using the minmax algorithm as a game strategy, why there's so much hate for Soylent, Bitcoin and Tesla, why Justin only bought 0.01 Bitcoin and 1 share of TSLA, a method for identifying asymmetric investments, why Jason thinks Soylent haters are thinking about it all wrong, why Justin is worried about GMOs and why Jason just can't seem to get worried about it, some Christmas present ideas for Colby – like a programmable quadcopter, an heirloom chemistry set or maybe some synthetic biology, how coaching Colby's 4th grade math team is going and how the Catalyst kids are about to start programming their own games, a La Critique of CastFeedValidator and JustAddContent, the first 3D commercial game powered by asm.js, a map of the best medical prices, the new science show Futurescape with James Woods, the Neurogrid analog computer that can simulate one-million neurons using only 5 watts of power, the new SciFi show Almost Human, the British show The Wong Mans, the awesome video show This Week in Engineering, how Google has started caching email images, and how a 6,000-page report on CIA torture has been suppressed for 1 year by the Obama administration.

247: TZ Discussion - Death by Bitcoin

Justin and Jason discuss getting the show back on a weekly schedule, how listener Ben Reyes gave Jason a Bitcoin, China’s stance on crypto currencies and why it’s been to their geopolitical advantage to pin the renminbi to the US dollar,

Justin and Jason discuss getting the show back on a weekly schedule, how listener Ben Reyes gave Jason a Bitcoin, China’s stance on crypto currencies and why it's been to their geopolitical advantage to pin the renminbi to the US dollar, how Bitcoin's inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, is now a billionaire and whether Satoshi is really Nick Szabo, whether Amazon’s drone delivery initiative is real or a cynical public relations ploy, whether drone delivery and self-driving cars are likely to become a reality in the near future, how easy it is to remotely hack into and gain control over a modern car, the fear mongering of mainstream news, the 5K MVP, the Heyday journaling iPhone app, the Pluggio update, Jason's various secret projects – Vortex, Cryptonite, Givetronic and SnapLearn, using an S-corp to minimize consulting taxes, the prospect of building games in Catalyst, Colby's day at Uber and the RC helicopters that Justin and the guys at MightyHive bought for him, how Jason and Sandy are going to co-coach the 4th grade math team, how Soylent has hit its 1.0 formula, the creation of XNA – a synthetic DNA that’s stronger than the real thing and the fact that there are likely billions of planets in our galaxy that could support life, the show Alphas, the Mindy Project, the Goldbergs, Defiance, The Black List, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and Treme, how the NSA slapped malware on 50,000+ networks, is tracking cellphone locations worldwide and how the NSA’s surveillance is having a chilling effect on American Writers, the new Bitcoin funded Assassination Market and the shocking news that men with attractive wives report higher levels of marital satisfaction.

246: TZ Interview – Rob Walling / Drip

Justin and Jason talk with Rob Walling about the rollout of his new project, Drip, as well as a few other assorted topics.

Justin and Jason talk with Rob Walling about the rollout of his new project, Drip, as well as a few other assorted topics.

245: TZ Discussion - The Two-Sigma Problem

Justin and Jason talk about bringing on a potential marketing partner for AnyFu, why Justin may buy some Twitter shares, Jason’s investment thesis and why he believes Apple is reverting to the mean, Google’s mystery barges,

Justin and Jason talk about bringing on a potential marketing partner for AnyFu, why Justin may buy some Twitter shares, Jason's investment thesis and why he believes Apple is reverting to the mean, Google’s mystery barges, Jason's post on teaching kids how to code, Nitrous.io, the audio book Masters of Doom, the movies WarGames, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Enders Game, the surprising momentum of the Jason's posts How to Increase Your Luck Surface Area and Why I Quit Algorithmic Trading to Do Web Startups, motivations for contributing to open source projects, how listener James Jensen taught himself electronics and designed his own circuit board on Upverter, dark silicon, memristers, Darpa's analog computer initiative and spintronics, how IQ doesn’t appear to be set in stone and why watching TV probably doesn’t make you dumber, the Flynn effect and James Flynn’s TED Talk, the relationship of working memory to IQ, how Jason embedded Sandy's voice into a trading system's audible alerts, wireless devices powered by ambient backscatter rather than batteries, how US hypocrisy has come to light as a result of the Manning and Snowden revelations, combining mastery learning with the flipped classroom approach and Bloom’s two-sigma problem.

244: TZ Discussion - The Walking Debt

Justin and Jason discuss the debt ceiling and the government shutdown, the upcoming Limitless television show, a theory on what made Einstein so clever and the difficulty in finding a genetic map for IQ, how the Arsenic DNA paper exposed flaws in the p...

Justin and Jason discuss the debt ceiling and the government shutdown, the upcoming Limitless television show, a theory on what made Einstein so clever and the difficulty in finding a genetic map for IQ, how the Arsenic DNA paper exposed flaws in the peer review process and The Reproducibility Project, the television shows Breaking Bad, Falling Skies, Revolution, Defiance, The Agents of Shield and The Walking Dead, how to make Star Wars great again, the first two sessions of Catalyst's second year, how kids differ in the way their brains work, training Colby to play quarterback and his Uber birthday party, using evolutionary strategies to solve Uber's worker allocation problem, how Jason got to take pitches in a major league baseball stadium, installation problems with Kerbal Space Program, how Justin is looking to hire someone to do devops at Digedu and how Hired.com’s business model compares to what Mecruit was going to try.

243: TZ Discussion - The Impossibility Engine

Justin and Jason discuss the emergency emails that Justin received from Digedu while on vacation and why he selected Sifter as a project management tool, how Uber and Digedu use Git, Git rebase vs Git merge and general GitHub bureaucracy,

Justin and Jason discuss the emergency emails that Justin received from Digedu while on vacation and why he selected Sifter as a project management tool, how Uber and Digedu use Git, Git rebase vs Git merge and general GitHub bureaucracy, how Digedu makes use of NodeJS and how Uber leverages the NodeJS profiler that Jason and Guyon created, the rising importance of system administration <wbr />expertise, Jason's idea of teaching the Catalyst kids basic command line skills and why it may make sense to abandon the Catalyst IDE, the incredible rise in the Telsa stock price and the Tesla autopilot project, the self-driving car intersection simulation, the simulation software that shows Elon Musk&#8217;s Hyperloop is likely to work, how Alien bugs were discovered in the Earth&#8217;s atmosphere, the hell that is the iOS developer center, the idea of segmenting AnyFu between premier and standard level experts and the possibility of bringing on a business / marketing partner, the segment on This American Life that mentions Jason's high school, how to increase your luck surface area by writing about increasing your luck surface area, how the CIA has been arming and training rebels since late 2012, the Pentagon&#8217;s desire to get in on the actions, AIPAC&#8217;s push for war and why the US ultimately backed down, Jason's @ tweet to his congressional representative, the famo.us Javascript rendering framework and how China brainwashed American POWs using a classic sales technique.

242: TZ Discussion - How the NSA Broke the Internet

Justin and Jason discuss the Uber wedding that Ja…

Justin and Jason discuss the Uber wedding that Jason and Sandy attended over the weekend, their two female listeners, how the most recent Pluggio deal fell through and why Justin has decided to take Pluggio off the market for the time being, what needs to happen in order for AnyFu to succeed, possible plans for Catalyst, how Colby is reading Ender's Game and why Justin wishes the technology in Asimov's Foundation Series actually existed, whether physical immortality is achievable and why Jason believes that cryonics is the ultimate Hail Mary pass, how Simon Holmes increased his luck surface area and the book that resulted, why memories are inherently unreliable, how they're formed and how they can be hacked, Jason's benchmarking experiments using Node.js with MySQL, CouchDB and RethinkDB, how Miley Cyrus hacked the press, how LinkedIn tried using HTML5 for their mobile app but then changed back to native, Jason's frustration with getting Titanium to work correctly for Android and why Justin chose to build the Digedu mobile app using HTML5 and PhoneGap, Gmail's annoying new policy for dealing with email forwarders, how the NSA has broken or subverted the majority of Internet's encryption algorithms and security protocols and Bruce Schneier's call to arms, the twisting of truth about the chemical weapons attack in Syria, the missing evidence, and the rationalizations for a US led response, who's going to man the Digedu ship while Justin is on his upcoming vacation, a recent technology headache with the updater code, and their recently hired front-end developer.

241: TZ Discussion - The Asymmetric Investment

Justin and Jason discuss Uber's latest fundraisin…

Justin and Jason discuss Uber's latest fundraising round, the selling of Pluggio, Rob Walling's startup Drip, Justin's hack for creating a tablet unlock code and how's he looking for a front-end developer, how Tesla achieved a perfect safety rating and captured more than 12% of the luxury car market, whether it would be a good idea to invest in Solar City or Yahoo, the prospects for BitCoin and why Jason likes asymmetric investments, Uber's future and how Jason is building a dashboard for Uber's realtime system, why Jason thinks getting a post to the top of Hacker News requires the same recipe as launching a successful startup - a good idea, good execution and help from a group of supporters, the latest revelations on the NSA's vast illegal surveillance apparatus and why Jason believes it's an existential threat to democracy, how higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior and why Jason wants to formulate the laws of human nature, Julian Corlette's TL;DR landing page experiment, David Yang's HNSummaries, Kale Davis's TLDR.io, and Jason Calacanis's Launch Ticker, the NYC-based Fullstack Academy, Jason's skepticism on the Lean Startup movement, and Justin's latest SaaS idea that he's positive will work but isn't talking about.

240: TZ Discussion - Hope in a Quantum Encryption Box

Justin and Jason discuss the details of selling P…

Justin and Jason discuss the details of selling Pluggio, what Justin considers to be the ideal attributes of a SaaS business and his idea for a collaborative web app for doing mockups, the hypercritical startup advise of Ben Horowitrz and Dustin Moskowitz, the surprising wealth of A-list celebrities and Internet entrepreneurs, the Xerox compression bug and the Laravel "returning" bug, Nassim Taleb's Skin in the Game paper, analog mockups, developing an Android app in Titanium, why Apple's board is concerned about the current rate of innovation, the nonsensical empirical risk assessment of the U.S. government, the cynical political theatre of shutting down U.S. embassies based on non-specific terrorist threat, how Snowden was offered one year's asylum in Russia as well as a job by social networking giant VKontakte, why Lavabit and Silent Circle both shut down their encrypted email services, how the TSA is rapidly expanding beyond the confines of the airport and the increasing militarization of local police, the lurching surveillance / police state and the possibility of a quantum internet.

239: TZ Discussion - Putting Up Drywall at the New McDonalds

Justin and Jason discuss the canvas-based drawing…

Justin and Jason discuss the canvas-based drawing app that Justin built for Digedu using his JS library known as $$, how Jason got drag and drop working in Titanium and his idea for creating a mobile game for learning electronics, the original Star Trek series vs. Start Trek: The New Generation, the single window strategy for building mobile apps, creating 180 websites in 180 days, the challenge of staying current with the latest programming technologies, the 97-year old man who makes art using MS Paint, how PayPal accidentally credited a man $92 quadrillion, coding vs managing coders, the selling of Pluggio, whether Jason's secret project will remain secret forever and his future plans for Catalyst, why men need women and why they become more generous when they have daughters, why you can't force kids to be what they're not, Jason's experiment with a low-carb diet, the Soylent production delay, Justin's intuitive eating / habit-building plan, Greenwald's drip news strategy for keeping the NSA story alive and how Nancy Pelosi saved the NSA surveillance program, the television show Breaking Bad (don't worry - no spoilers), what's killing the bees, how Joel Spolsky killed a software patent in only 10-minutes using AskPatents.com, Xamarin - an IDE and platform for creating native, cross-platform desktop and mobile apps using C#, and a new theory of cancer postulated by physicists.
All rights reserved