A lot of people think Gladwell created the 10,000 hours theory, but he merely popularized it. The original research comes from K. Anders Ericsson. Here's a link to the original paper, which is actually quite accessible, if you're interested: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/D...
I agree. But as the article goes on to point out, we are not more trusting of complete strangers, but rather strangers who've been vetted by many AirBnb reviews, background checked by Uber, etc. Technology has changed the definition of a 'stranger'.
If the noise levels are too high, why not let the neighbors call it in? It seems like a waste of time to proactively try to find parties when they could just wait around at night for people to call in the noise violations.
The book touches on this. Basically, the human brain is biased towards novelty. It's much more likely to remember something if it's unique or interesting or different -- if it stands out.
The book's title, Moonwalking with Einstein, is one such example. Gordon Ramsey is probably another: there are lots of chefs out there, but if you see a chef screaming at people in his kitchen, it's probably going to stick with you, consciously or otherwise.
I always thought there were laws against running a service like this in the US. For example the rules for registering a USPS P.O. box are very stringent:
> To rent a PO Box, two different forms of identification are required. At least one of them must be a valid photo ID. [1]
This way they can actually track you down if you have something illegal shipped to the box.
A service like this where you can easily sign up without properly verifying your identity is just waiting to be used as a temporary drop-box for people shipping drugs from SilkRoad, people shipping goods they bought with a stolen credit card, etc.
If you search the page for "You mentioned you used Erlang in GitHub." and click the link, it'll fast-forward the video right to where they they talk about what's mentioned in the title.
I think this is probably an excellent example of what can be done with a comprehensive set of automatic regression and performance tests. I'm guessing most bugs are caught immediately after each build, and they can be fairly confident releasing stuff without doing much manual testing.
Yet another Wikipedia article with graphic pictures that I agree should be there, but are not something I want to see while eating my morning bowl of cereal...
I always thought it was taboo to use the default samples that came with an app, but she seems to be perfectly fine with it. I thought one of the things DJs prided themselves on was their ability to find unique samples to integrate into their shows. However, I'm guessing at this point the default sample library is pretty extensive...
It's not clear at all that they are reading people's emails and selling the data.