How intern mentorship works at Khan Academy http://t.co/SA93VH8D

Really great post about what makes a technology company (and what doesn't).

Fascinating article that dives in to how an octopus relates to its environment.

"there are a lot of folks who think gamification means pulling the worst aspects out of games and shoving them into an application. It’s not. Don’t think of gamification as anything other than clever strategies to motivate someone to learn so they can have fun being productive."

Dan Gillmor: "Raise the Crime Rate" -- another look at the devastating results of our prison-industrial complex http://t.co/LWLMYRwo

Longreads: RT @Travelreads: "Vietnam's Bowl of Secrets." @davidfarley, @AFARmedia on cao lau soup in Hoi An http://t.co/YJ9sS3mn #longreads

Longreads: "African Agriculture: Dirt Poor." Natasha Gilbert, @NatureNews on tackling hunger through soil http://t.co/uttyWv2o v @lsarpp #longreads

Longreads: "Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy: Inside Dartmouth's Hazing Abuses." @janetreitman @RollingStone http://t.co/ZFK1ec8D v @peterlattman

Longreads: "Minor Cords." @laurarenamurray, @newinquiry on an emancipated minor v. @RobinRespaut http://t.co/JIGasUuR #longreads

Neat looking plugin for measuring and comparing traffic and engagement with a site.

Neat tutorial that is worth trying on Linode.

Neat way of doing multiple resolution images for the new iPad without uploading multiple files.

"Reacting well to competition requires critical analysis of your own product and its shortcomings, and a complete, open-minded understanding of why people might choose your competitors."

"When an engineer becomes a lead or a manager, they create a professional satisfaction gap. They’ve observed this gap long before they became a lead with the question: “What does my boss do all day? I see him running around like something is on fire, but… what does he actually do?” The question gets personal when the now freshly minted manager begins to understand that life as a lead is an endless list of little things that collectively keep you busy, but, in aggregate, don’t feel much like progress.

The positive feedback an engineer receives in the Zone is the sensation that you literally performed magic. From the complete problem set in your mind combined with your weapons-grade focus, you build a thing that you immediately recognize as disproportionately valuable. And you see this value instantaneously - that’s the high.

I believe that leads and managers are forever chasing the high associated with the Zone, but rarely achieve them because their job responsibilities are in direct contradiction to the requirements to achieve it. We often lack the time to have the intimate knowledge of a problem space because we rarely have 10-15 minutes free to consider it."

"That’s the way it has to work in a knowledge organization. You don’t build a startup with one big gigantic brain on the top, and a bunch of lesser brains obeying orders down below. You try to get everyone to have a gigantic brain in their area, and you provide a minimum amount of administrative support to keep them humming along."

Rands' advice for what to do when you realize the sky is falling on your head.

"Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.

This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways."

"Paragraphs, headings, blockquotes, articles, ordered and unordered lists, and so on, all emerged from age-old ways of working with text. Now new cowpaths are being paved on the web itself, and we need the people who love the text the most to get involved in where we go. We need you."

"More importantly, advocacy is one of the ways in which a publisher remains relevant in a world where the only obstacles to publishing are a reasonably fast internet connection and skill with a keyboard. By filtering and developing the best content—with an eye to how it benefits your readers—a publisher can simultaneously spread ideas both within and without a community. You can strengthen your readers’ ties with one another, and improve their lot in the rest of the world all at once. Think about that, and you can begin to see a much more compelling vision of the publisher of the future: not a gateway, but a representative."

In the context of professional journalism, this amounts to asking what unanswered questions are most pressing to the community served by a newsroom. One could devise systems of asking the audience (like Quora and StackExchange) or analyze search logs (ala Demand Media.) That newsrooms don’t frequently do these things is, I think, an artifact of industrial history — and an unfilled niche in the current ecosystem. Search engines know where the gaps between supply and demand lie, but they’re not in the business of researching new answers. Newsrooms can produce the supply, but they don’t have an understanding of the demand. Today, these two sides of the industry do not work together to close this loop. Some symbiotic hybrid of Google and The Associated Press might be an uncannily good system for answering civic questions.

Solid summary with some interface feedback about Twitter for iOS.

Solid description of the challenges facing news organizations.

"It often costs more, but I’ve found it to be the most worthwhile investment you can make. There’s nothing better for your work and your life than a quiet, focused mind."

Fantastic look at how the American military and government assigns color to objects.

Great advice about how and what to open source.

"This is why I say priorities can only be observed. In my book, a priority is not simply a good idea; it’s a condition of reality that, when observed, causes you to reject every other thing in the universe — real, imagined, or prospective — in order to ensure that things related to the priority stay alive."

Facebook's tactics are the same as other sites which browser makers mark as malware. Time to mark Facebook as such.

"I expected a lot of things when I started traveling, and most of them ended up being accurate. One thing which I didn’t expect, or plan for in any capacity, was just how drastically my general outlook on the world would change following the removal of material possessions. I don’t know why I didn’t expect it, really, cause it’s something that’s written about frequently. Prior to departure I’d absorbed countless articles discussing the sense of freedom from giving up all one owns. But I’ve never really been that attached to “stuff” – and I had no reservations about giving up mine – so I didn’t really see it as a big deal.

The shift in perspective doesn’t really have much to do with the things you own owning you, as such. It’s a state of mind. Whilst living a “normal” life, even as a relatively non-materialistic person, I was always thinking about the next “thing” to buy, or pay for, or do. I had absolutely no appreciation for how much time my mind spent locked into this rut of: earn money, buy something, do cool things with it, earn a bit more money, buy another thing."

"Man-machine symbiosis isn’t just about knowledge retrieval, it’s also about knowledge creation. Our computers have no intelligence without us, but they accelerate our collective intelligence at a speed that has never been seen before."

Good summary piece about the lobbyist-driven changes to the school lunch program.

Great post about the benefits and downsides to working from home.

Cool ideas from Mark Cuban about how the financial industry can change.

"But by imitating the best journalism of yesterday without a full understanding of why that journalism was great and what made it so powerful, our industry is slowly amassing an unsettling amount of cargo cult behaviors: we’re imitating a 20th-century writing style and ethical code without the first idea about how these contribute to journalism that is informative, engaging and fair."

Rands shares some tips for making your presentations the best they can be.

Anil Dash shares his views on creating a large research university in New York.

Fantastic test to gauge how healthy your company and team are.

"The antidote is people. It’s not the physical infrastructure of Silicon Valley that makes it work, or the weather, or anything like that. Those helped get it started, but now that the reaction is self-sustaining what drives it is the people."

Rands writes about the different types of conferences. It's always about the people.

David Carr at the New York Times questions the future of WikiLeaks.

The Times doesn’t have an exclusive on intellect. Their readers have quite a bit of it, and can get the information they want even if the Times doesn’t want to provide it. The Times is on much more precarious ground than internet leaking is.

Cool notes from Carlos about what he's working on at the Union Bulletin.

Jeff Atwood explains the motivation behind game elements in the Stack Exchange model.

Shawn Blanc's observations about what's new and what that means in iOS 5.