podcast

🎧 Is Google Search getting worse?

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Great Freakanomics podcast episode to inspect if Google Search is getting worse.

There is a part in there about how Google accidentally ran a 1% hold out group that don’t see ads for 8 years. They found “3 percent more searches from people who had ads than didn’t”.

Great insight.

If you liked that episode, here’s another recent favourite of mine: Are personal finance gurus giving you bad advice?

🎧 The amazing history behind The Pirate Bay and its fight to stay open

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A gripping story about a few kids getting together and fighting power in the open Internet. Account given by one of the founders. Love it. Have a listen.

https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/92/

The Pirate Bay is a website, a search engine, which has an index of torrent files. A lot of copyrighted material is listed on the site, but the site doesn’t store any of the copyrighted material. It just points the user to where you can download it from. So for a while The Pirate Bay has been the largest places you can find pirated movies, music, games, and apps. But this site first came up 2003. And is still up and operation now, 18 years later! You would think someone would shut this place down by now. How does the biggest source for copyrighted material stay up and online for that long? Listen to this episode to find out.

If you liked this episode, Money Maker #102 and Synthetic Remittance #124 are great too!

Can diversity help your company?

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ReplyAll is an awesome podcast from Gimlet. For those who listened to “Startup”, this is Gimlet’s second podcast. Couple of weeks back, they put out a show about diversity. There were some interesting insights shared during the show.

(start at 11:50 for the diversity story)

ReplyAll - #52 Raising the bar (more notes on the website)

The line that really stayed with me was:

“When you are stuck, talk to someone who keeps the ketchup elsewhere.”

That is a wonderful thought.

Few interesting notes from the show:

  • Startups do better with people from similar backgrounds. This is due to the lack of overhead in communication. The common mindset helps.
  • Silicon Valley heavily lacks diversity (despite building products for the world!). I think the show was particularly focusing on African Americans.
  • Diverse groups of people, or even algorithms, tend to be better at solving problems.
  • Diversity is not limited to gender or race. It can be people of different backgrounds.
  • Always ask “how did you get to where you are?” during interviews to discover a candidate’s background.

For a lot of these ideas to succeed, there has to be a couple of things in place:

  • People should embrace the differences. They need to understand that everyone in the team has a different background.
  • There has to be a strong focus on communication. To take a step further, learning about one another is important.

Find out how your team mates (or people around you) started off. Find out where they keep their ketchup; or tomato sauce. Make an extra effort this week.