antiismist

If you watched the video then you'd know that the designer did a great job of integrating the content into the design of the newspaper. It isn't a copy-paste job. There was design and layout and graphics that you just can't do on the web, and he demonstrated that people like it.

So if you change the question to, would you invest in a designer who had a track record of boosting circulation by 20-100% in two years time?

That was my favorite part of the interview too. It sort of flips around the issue of something being "hard". I.E. how can a language be built to make hard problems easier, as opposed to how to use a language to solve a hard problem.

Etherpad rocks. Just today I was thinking that it would be great to be able to use it as a platform - e.g. imagine a real time wiki.

The libraries aren't good for PLT scheme, at least for web development. For example, want to parse an RSS feed? Compare http://www.rubyrss.com/ to using HTML Prag (http://www.neilvandyke.org/htmlprag/).

Want to do billing? openid? you are out of luck. But having said that I'm experimenting with a site in PLT Scheme (and I know a couple that use Kawa as well).

Agreed. And there is serious apples to oranges comparison here. For example, why is iTunes on the list? If one is including any business that transacts on the web, then Geico (over $1 billion last year) and many more should also be on the list.

Instead of declaring a local function, you can use let (http://docs.plt-scheme.org/reference/let.html)

e.g.:

  > (let fac ([n 10])
      (if (zero? n)
          1
          (* n (fac (sub1 n)))))

  3628800

I understand how the information is public and therefore free to use. All I'm saying is that it sounds great in theory, until someone goes ahead and makes your profile and gathers up your personal info and lets people rate you. I didn't ask for it explicitly or implicitly so it is annoying.

FWIW I find avvo to be pretty sleazy. I am a lawyer but haven't ever practiced law nor do I intend to. Nonetheless, avvo has created a profile for me that lists out my personal info (name, address, phone number, graduate school, undergrad), lets people review me, and spams me to get me to claim my profile.

I think it's one of those things that sounds great theoretically but isn't so great when it happens to you. Not saying that I am going to sue, but I find it in pretty poor form.

That's cool. Could I interview you about developing web apps using Scheme? I'm working on a blog post / interview on the topic w/ all the people I know who do Scheme web development.

Anyway if you are interested I'd love to hear from you, my email is: idoh@idoh.com

What is your scheme-based website? Is it ourdoings or something else? Just curious because there aren't a lot of them out there that I know of.

It depends on what they plan on doing - if they are running ads just on Stormpulse then there are lots of solutions available.

If they are building a vertical ad network (i.e. connecting advertisers with multiple weather-related publishers) than something like Adify will do the trick.

Full disclosure: I work at Adify.

Maybe http://news.ycombinator.com/active is what you are looking for?

Sort of a follow on ... right now the flow is:

  1: click a button
  2: select a user name
  3: join a room

You could eliminate step 2 (see, e.g. http://etherpad.com) and defer the choosing of a username until later. That would make it even easier to use.

Also, there is a display bug where you try to join a room w/o picking a name first - the message (Name cannot be empty) overflows the lightbox.

Works as expected, good job. It took me a while to figure out what the right window does though.

Once I figured it out I had some fun with a chatterbloc inside a chatterblock inside a chatterbloc.

Building the company long term does appear to be their strategy. But their ads are so low quality that they are, in fact, distracting. Surely running some nice creatives would be better?

There's a lot gamesmanship that goes on. For some sbir grants you can subcontract out 50% of the work.

So you get a grant to work on some subcomponent of one of the major defense contractors (Raytheon, Lockheed, etc). Then you turn around and subcontract that piece right back to the defense contractor, up to 50%. Then you take the remaining work and give it to ex-Defense employees who become your employees for a bit.

So the small business wins b/c they get some % profit plus can do work at a high dollar amount per hour. The big defense contractor wins b/c they get essentially free R&D work on their subcomponent.

Marc Andreesen said that Facebook doesn't run brand advertising by design. Anyone know why this is the case?

Even though I don't like advertising generally, I'd much rather look at a well-crafted Nike / Apple creative than the weight loss / degree mill tribal fusionish junk they run now.

It sounds like enough to win a lawsuit. The burden of proof is more likely than not. If they have software that tells them the names of the songs that were playing, then that is pretty damning evidence.

Sure, you could have renamed your songs, but who is going to believe that?

I've thought about using last.fm but didn't for this very reason. Wasn't it obvious to everyone that at some point CBS would avail themselves to the information that their subsidiary was collecting?

I used to be into Bill Simmons but lately not so much. I think once his wife (who knows nothing about football) beat him in NFL weekly predictions is when I made the switch from Simmons to Gregg Easterbrook.

Well someday Facebook might sell your info to credit agencies, which they can do at will.

How will you feel when your credit rating gets lowered because of some off-hand comment you made on some blog?

True. I had something small deployed for a while but it ran into that same issue.

I feel the same way about ESPN. I like reading interesting articles about sports but it is actually not that easy to find good content - there is no hacker news for sports (yet!).

Justice is blind my friend. RIM decided not to settle, and it cost them ~ $612,500,000.

http://telephonyonline.com/mag/telecom_rim_settlement_few/

Put this in your .htaccess:

Redirect 301 / http://www.gizmodo.com

But seriously, when I look at the page:

  - it doesn't render properly in Firefox
  - it seems like a knockoff of gizmodo
  - it seems dead, e.g. everyone has 0 moojos.

I thought the term was vicariously lazy (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3394)

I know the feeling. I keep a running jargon.txt file that I use to capture marketing junk I hear at meetings, e.g.

  liase with
  leverage
  common voice
  knowledge base
  proliferate

I was half thinking to make a website so other people trapped in meetings could contribute their own jargon. Sort of a social bored at meetings spot.

You mean http://dotfiles.org

(dotfiles.com hasn't been updated since 2006!)

A lot of people use google instead of typing in URLs. So to get to facebook, people go to google, then type in facebook or facebook.com, and then go from there.

Small world, my wife also shows youtube clips in her psych class, and has to download them b/c of lack of connectivity too.

This would absolutely help many companies.

I saw this first hand at a company that I worked for. For accounting, you take the receipt and file an expense report. That goes into quickbooks. Then you get the credit card statement and have to go line by line and match it up with the items that were expended. It would consume many hours each month.