Twitter's 27 favorite links from Dec. 2012

Below are the 27 links I shared on Twitter in Dec. 2012 that subsequently earned at least 100 clicks

1. RT @annathemoony: I just found out about the shooting in CT and the Onion pretty much sums up my feelings. (22,337)
2. How to Become a Morning Person (1,897)
3. Please Don't Learn to Code (629)
4. "If you're not paying for the product..." xkcd+Instagram edition (618)
5. 5 APIs that will transform the Web in 2013 (556)
6. The Web We Lost (410)
7. US patent lawsuits now dominated by 'trolls' -study (377)
8. Basketball Isn't a Sport. It's a Statistical Network (344)
9. LEGO Produces Discontinued Set So Boy Who Saved Up For 2 Years Wouldn’t Be Disappointed (324)
10. Windows 8: The perfect Christmas gift for someone you HATE (305)
11. Why an A-list VC firm sold a startup to fund a lawsuit (232)
12. How tall can a Lego tower get? (216)
13. The Inconvenient Truth About SEO (210)
14. How do we read code? (209)
15. The Basement (206)
16. Search Mad Men Style: Animated Punchcard Interface for Google Search (204)
17. Losers exist. Don’t hire them (189)
18. R.I.P. Frothy Times, A Return To Normalcy for Startups and VCs (189)
19. Design Mistakes We Made in Our iPhone App (188)
20. Cards Against Humanity: Results of "pay what you want" (180)
21. A 50-Point Checklist For Creating The Ultimate Landing Page (171)
22. What science says about gun control and violent crime (161)
23. Rethinking Mobile First (151)
24. 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person (148)
25. How to Email Busy People (144)
26. Wikipedia doesn't need your money - so why does it keep pestering you? (119)
27. Why are frontend developers so high in demand at startups if front end development is relatively easier? (109)

Stats gathered via Buffer.

Some poor fools think I'm an authority on startups

Photo (Photo credit: Jay Garmon)

Here's me getting profiled by Insider Louisville, which characterizes me as...

"[A]bout as close as Louisville has to a start-up nomad. That specie of homo technicus so common in San Francisco and Silicon Valley is vital to creating, then sustaining, any city’s entrepreneurial culture. The swashbuckler who jumps from big corporation to start-up, start-up to big corporation. At the Louisville level, it’s extremely rare because there aren’t that many viable startup-to-corporate-to-startup opportunities."

It goes on from there. I'll be over here wondering who the heck they're actually talking about, 'cause surely that can't be me.

Twitter's 43 favorite links from Nov. 2012

Jeff Bezos (Photo credit: Dunechaser)

Below are the 43 links I shared on Twitter in Nov. 2012 that subsequently earned at least 100 clicks.

1. "Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas." (1373)
2. Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election (1319)
3. 25 Entrepreneurs Tell What They Wish They’d Known before Founding Their First Startup (1071)
4. Open Source Entrepreneurship (729)
5. Some thoughts and musings about making things for the web - The Oatmeal (703)
6. Defining engagement by clicks, likes & shares works for Google’s search engine, not for a social network (549)
7. 5 APIs that will transform the Web in 2013 (442)
8. Don't Fall For Fake Facebook Privacy Notice (434)
9. It's an amazing time for things that aren't quite traditional laptops (424)
10. Follow the goal creep by David of 37signals (365)
11. The startup founder's lie about "comfort zones" (335)
12. Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works (312)
13. What the Research on Habit Formation Reveals about our Willpower and Overall Well-Being (304)
14. The truth about the "friend zone" (295)
15. Why you should take your 20′s seriously (291)
16. Want to create a new habit? Get ready to break it. (288)
17. The perfect email (273)
18. 50 Startup Lessons Learned in 12 months (258)
19. Why Coke Cost A Nickel For 70 Years (256)
20. Q: "How much does an app cost?" A: "About as much as a car." (255)
21. 512 Paths to the White House - Winning Scenarios for Both Candidates (246)
22. I Am A Terrible Programmer (243)
23. Why art is hard (236)
24. Startups: How you can do it alone (220)
25. No Studying After 5pm: Using Parkinson's Law to Kick Procrastination's Ass (218)
26. A billion dollar software tech company is founded every 3 months in the U.S. (215)
27. This is why I’m not backing you on Kickstarter (215)
28. Sorry, No Calls (200)
29. Who Is The Smallest Government Spender Since Eisenhower? Would You Believe It's Barack Obama? (193)
30. Entrepreneur’s Don’t Think Enough. Here’s What You Can Do About It (193)
31. Apollo Flight Controller 101: Every console explained (192)
32. Google Launches Ingress, a Worldwide Mobile Alternate Reality Game (158)
33. Einstein's list of demands for staying with his wife (158)
34. "It’s better to have a few fantastic things designed for you than to have many untrustworthy things poorly designed" (153)
35. 2512 (149)
36. It's fine to get an MBA but don't be an MBA (142)
37. Triumph of the Nerds: Nate Silver Wins in 50 States (137)
38. "How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting." (136)
39. Programming is a Pop Culture (133)
40. Jeff Bezos attended 60 investor meetings to raise $1m from 22 people, just to get Amazon started (133)
41. Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC)and our Napster is Udacity (121)
42. If you’re 27 or younger, you’ve never experienced a colder-than-average month (119)
43. Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech (117)

Stats gathered via Buffer.

Holiday gift ideas: The hard sci-fi starter kit

Hard science fiction is often code for "sci fi that requires the reader to do math" -- it's a label that turns off not just non-sci-fi fans, but even devout but nontechnical science fiction fanatics. Are there hard sci-fi books that not only overcome this label, but might imbue a nascent love of the subgenre?

The SF Signal Irregulars say yes (in podcast form).

Patrick Hester, Jeff Patterson, Paul Weimer and (sadly) me build a reading list to tempt even the staunchest hard sci-fi doubter. And, yes, Ringworld makes multiple appearances.

[BONUS: We stop mid-podcast to disabuse Patrick of the notion that The 13th Warrior is a good movie. I may have instigated this intervention. I also haven't been invited back to the podcast since. Coincidence? I think not.]

If you're looking for the nerdiest of all possible holiday gifts, this podcast is an ultra-geeky idea factory. Take a listen.

As always, my rap sheet of past SF Signal podcast transgressions is available here.

Related articles

• Ranked: 15 sci-fi books everyone should read
• Sci-fi books that are jam packed with ideas?
• 21 Pictures that Sum Up the Whole History of Science Fiction
• 100 Greatest Sci-Fi Movies - Video Supercut
• Dyson Spheres: The Ultimate Energy Shell Game

15 most popular links for October 2012

Below are the 15 links I shared on Twitter in Oct. 2012 that subsequently earned at least 100 clicks.

1. Why I got Fired from Facebook (a $100 Million dollar lesson) (1840) 
2. The science behind how your productivity is chosen by what you eat (915) 
3. How do our favorite tech companies make money? (661) 
4. Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong (597) 
5. "CEO is a very unnatural job" (561) 
6. "In order to be a good programmer I need to adopt a certain mindset. That mindset is slowly making me unhappy." (498) 
7. The 9 Monsters That Kill Most Startups (486) 
8. How I automated the boring parts of life (471) 
9. The rise of the “successful” unsustainable company (396) 
10. BEST. ANALOGY. EVER. (352) 
11. "Splitting articles and photo galleries into multiple pages is evil. It should stop." (241) 
12. Surprising Hacker News Data Analysis (231) 
13. Meet the hexaflexagon. It's about to blow your mind. (189) 
14. 99 problems and a life hack for each one (153) 
15. The single best reason to save PBS you'll read today (129)

Stats gathered via Buffer.