Issue #11 · February 29th, 2016 · View in your browser

Instead of starting a regular lemonade stand, a kid named Jack Bonneau started a chain. And because Jack has pretty smart parents, any kid can now register and operate their own “Jack Stand” lemonade stand at a farmer's market. Jack says he loves learning about profits, losses, margins and “all of that stuff”. [NYTimes]

Some thinkers are Architecture Astronauts, they think in abstractions: “Napster is popular because it's a peer-to-peer network” instead of “Napster is popular because people type a song's name and can listen to it right away”. Going too high up prevents you from focusing on the real problem people have. The problem that you actually need to solve. [Joel on Software]

The youths of the 21st century are not eating cereal anymore. Why, you ask? Because they don't want to clean their bowls. Seems like a fair reason to me, convenience trumps all! [Washington Post]

Society tells us we can do everything well. That we can have an optimal work life and an optimal home life. However, humans are not designed to do just one thing, unlike sports cars and pianos. We have many interests, many obligations, etc. We've chosen breadth and variety over total focus. That's why work-life balance is a dangerous and elusive concept. And why you shouldn't worry too much about doing everything well. [The School of Life]

77% of mobile searches occur at home or at work. It's time to forget the old perception of mobile as the “on-the-go, while moving” tech. It has become the default way of using the Internet, period. (Pro tip: slow pages are what users despise most about mobile web.) [GoogleWebmaster]

“With us,” Murray continued, “when you're on a planet, you can see as far as the curvature of that planet. If you walked for years, you could walk all the way around it, arriving back exactly where you started. Our day to night cycle is happening because the planet is rotating on its axis as it spins around the sun. There is real physics to that. We have people that will fly down from a space station onto a planet and when they fly back up, the station isn't there anymore; the planet has rotated. People have filed that as a bug.” — the creators of No Man's Sky talk with The Atlantic. (No Man's Sky is a game where the universe generates itself, it's not pre-written like every other game.)

Being an empathetic parent will take a toll on your health. Sure, the children of empathetic parents are emotionally and physically better off than other kids. But when these kids have a problem, their empathetic parents' immune system takes a hit and their cells reveal low-grade inflammation. Worth it? [Quartz]

“I want a spade, not the experience of digging.” is the idea that encapsulates best what we need to be wary of when it comes to conversational UIs. Most products are dumb utilities and you don't want to “talk” to them. [Cennydd Bowles]

The picture on the right was created by a neural network that combined the two pictures on the left. Thus, no human was involved in designing it. Is this the future of special effects? Check the gallery on Imgur for more images. [Imgur]

*Thanks and have a nice week, 

Ulysse*