"Which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture? Any company that needs to have good software."

"I long have been fascinated by the extraordinary achievement from the ex-Paypal team and wonder about the reasons behind their success."

A hedge fund, Magnetar, helped create arcane mortgage-based instruments, pushed for risky things to go inside them and then bet against the investments.<br />
And make sure to listen to the full story (free streaming) on This American Life: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/405/inside-job

In the last year, the two brothers have sold 3.5 million copies of Doodle Jump, a simple and addictive game, via Apple’s iTunes store. That accomplishment may make them the world’s most successful iPhone and iPod touch developers.

"Facebook's contention was robots.txt had no legal force and they could sue anyone for accessing their site even if they scrupulously obeyed the instructions it contained. The only legal way to access any web site with a crawler was to obtain prior written permission. Obviously this isn't the way the web has worked for the last 16 years since robots.txt was introduced, but my lawyer advised me that it had never been tested in court, and the legal costs alone of being a test case would bankrupt me."

Social networking in a box. Build a social network for your community, based on the power and flexibility of WordPress. BuddyPress is no longer limited to WordPress MU installations. It will now work with both WordPress and WordPress MU 2.9.1 and higher. You’ll get all the features of BuddyPress regardless of which WordPress version you use, the only difference being the tracking of blogs with WordPress MU.

Deciding which Great Idea to pursue is just the first step, says Caterina Fake. The next essential is forming the team that can make it happen

(Social media pioneer and co-founder of the photo-sharing service Flickr, Caterina Fake led the technology development group at Yahoo (YHOO) after it acquired her company in 2005. In 2008 she left Yahoo and joined Hunch as co-founder.)

The Rumpus: Do you save everything ever entered into Facebook at any time, whether or not it’s been deleted, untagged, and so forth?
Facebook Employee: That is essentially correct at this moment.
Rumpus: When you say “click on somebody’s profile,” you mean you save our viewing history?
Employee: That’s right.

One Monday a month, the Burger of the Month Club convenes at a New York restaurant to eat and rate the restaurant's burger. Below, two of the club's members, Brett Weiss and Jason Beckerman, discuss 10 of the 47 burgers the group has tried. The number that precedes each restaurant's name is its current ranking.

It seems to have passed without huge fanfare, but on April 20th 2006, the Alexa rankings for tech sites around the globe suddenly doubled, literally overnight.

Read It Later has come to the iPhone. Video demonstrates main features and Tap to Save integration with Google Reader. More at: http://readitlaterlist.com

Based on the great Ask MetaFilter thread from 2007: What single book is the best introduction to your field (or specialization within your field) for laypeople?.

The whole thing’s worth a read but a while back I decided to go through, give it a squeeze, and extract the juicy bits: the books themselves. So below is a list of books, grouped into topics, as recommended by the thread.

And, of course, this is quite an arbitrary list of subjects and books — ask the same question of a different group of people and most of the list will no doubt be different (although the books that are the same… those will be the interesting ones).

People from all walks share what they believe are the most important rules to follow for a happy, successful, and fulfilling life. At one time or another we have all said "if I only knew then what I know now…"; now is your chance to share. These are the "Five Rules For Life" submitted by Gina Trapani, tech writer and founding editor of lifehacker.com and smarterware.

Working from home, whether as a freelance contractor or remote employee, can be a great thing, particularly if you live alone. But what if you have a spouse and/or children at home with you while you work? Every work environment offers distractions, but those who work from home with their families face a unique set of issues—and need equally unique ways of dealing with them.

Using inexpensive off-the-shelf components, an information security expert has built a mobile platform that can clone large numbers of the unique electronic identifiers used in US passport cards and next generation drivers licenses. The $250 proof-of-concept device – which researcher Chris Paget built in his spare time – operates out of his vehicle and contains everything needed to sniff and then clone RFID, or radio frequency identification, tags. During a recent 20-minute drive in downtown San Francisco, it successfully copied the RFID tags of two passport cards without the knowledge of their owners.
Direct video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9isKnDiJNPk