< Onymos Blog
Tech Links: The Successful (?) Startup with No Money, Why GitHub Won, and More
- Why did GitHub become the “dominant code hosting platform”? GitHub co-founder Scott Chacon explains.
“A few days ago, a video produced by @t3dotgg was posted to his very popular YouTube channel where he reviews an article written by the Graphite team titled ‘How GitHub replaced SourceForge as the dominant code hosting platform.’
“[…] Being a cofounder of GitHub, I found Greg’s article and Theo’s subsequent commentary fun, but figured that it might be interesting to write up my own take on the reasoning behind the rise and dominance of GitHub and perhaps correct a few things that were not quite right from their outside analysis.”
- In a less, uh, victorious blog, Exercism co-founder Jeremy Walker talks about how his startup with 2M users has “no money in the bank.”
“Last week we hit the huge milestone of two million users. Within a few hours, we also hit 45 million exercise submissions.
“A day later, I paid the final payroll for me, Erik and Aron, and our bank account reduced down to the point we can’t afford to pay another.”
- NASA is having some fun with parody horror movie posters in time for Halloween.
“Take a tour of some of the most terrifying and mind-blowing destinations in our galaxy … and beyond. After a visit to these nightmare worlds, you may never want to leave Earth again! You can also download our free posters — based on real NASA science — if you dare.”
- The Wayback Machine got hacked. It only put the entire history of the Internet at risk.
“‘Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on [Have I Been Pwnd],’ read the JavaScript alert that momentarily appeared on the site.”
- If you’ve got $120,000, you could be the owner of Sotheby’s first work of art being “credited to a humanoid robot.”
“Meller has argued his creation is Duchampian: ‘Where Marcel Duchamp refused us the ability to see art in the same way as before, Ai-Da refuses us the capacity to look at the artist (and by extension the human) in the same way again,’ wrote Meller and researcher Lucy Seale for The Art Newspaper last year. ‘What it means to be a human is changing, whether we like it or not, and this is perhaps why Ai-Da has proved so disturbing. She is reflecting this change, perhaps rather unsubtly.'”
- Our very own Shiva Nathan is Mobile Breakthrough’s CEO of the Year.
“Mobile Breakthrough, a leading independent market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global wireless and mobile market, today announced the winners of its 8th annual Mobile Breakthrough Awards program.”
He’s in good company. Previous winners include Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon.
- “A timeline of how one of the largest health data breaches in US history went down.”
“Months after the February data breach, a ‘substantial proportion of people living in America’ are receiving notice by mail that their personal and health information was stolen by cybercriminals during the cyberattack on Change Healthcare. At least 100 million people are now known to be affected by the breach.”
- Remember that California “AI safety” bill everyone in Silicon Valley hated? Gavin Newsom vetoed it.
“In any event, SB 1047 — California state Sen. Scott Wiener’s proposal to regulate advanced AI models offered by companies doing business in the state — is now kaput, vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The proposal had garnered wide support in the legislature, passing the California State Assembly by a margin of 48 to 16 in August. Back in May, it passed the Senate by 32 to 1.