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What is a collateralized debt obligation (CDO) anyway? And why did it get the United States into so much trouble? According to NYU economist Robert Engle, CDOs are "wonderful creations" […]
Microfinance—a system of small loans and money services geared toward small businesses—has been heralded as a bold new financial frontier, opening up a wealth of opportunity to those otherwise unable […]
Eliminate the middle-man. This classic piece of business advice recently received an unusual interpretation: the literary agent, commonly seen as the middle-man between author and publishing house, is circumventing the […]
This idea was suggested by Big Think Delphi Fellow Joseph LeDoux, of the Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology at NYU. “Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better […]
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How an expensive trip to the emergency room convinced a tech entrepreneur that there is something seriously wrong with medical care in America.
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Medpedia seeks to balance the distributed nature of knowledge with the oversight of medical professionals.
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The "major thesis of our lives" is that zero marginal cost technologies like the Internet are allowing systems of control to be distributed, rather than centralized.
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A brief description of virtual currency and why it may revolutionize the way we pay for things on the Web.
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A conversation with the chairman of Medpedia.
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The best way to balance open source developing and growing your own business is to combine the two, Hansson suggests.
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Hansson loves Apple’s products, but he calls their decision to restrict programming languages for iPhone apps a "fascist move."
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Cloud computing shouldn’t be an either/or decision. We should definitely make use of the tremendous collaborative possibilities of the Web for some tasks but utilize "the awesome local, graphical power […]
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"They have no bearing on what I do," says Hansson of the software giant. But he admits there is something sad about no longer having an "evil empire" to rally […]
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Hansson merged Rails and Merb last year, and, despite initial "squabbles," the fruits of their cooperation—Rails 3—is on the verge of release.
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With applications like Ruby on Rails lowering the bar for creating web applications, some programmers may complain about "the unwashed masses" overrunning their "beautiful, pristine programming communities." Hansson thinks that […]
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"A big part of what makes Ruby so special to work with is just how much expression you can pack into a few lines of code," says Hansson.
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David Heinemeier Hansson was so fed up with PHP and Java that he almost gave up on programming altogether—then he found Ruby and everything changed.
45mins
A conversation with the programmer and creator of Ruby on Rails.
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Bioethicist Jacob Appel thinks that adding small amounts of lithium to our drinking water could potentially reduce the rate of suicide.
