izendejas

This article was definitely informative and I say keep these coming.

But I agree... Data, data, data! Or keep your political bias out of here!

About that: http://pleaserobme.com/

This doesn't make Facebook, Foursquare et al evil. People should know better. However, common sense should tell these companies it's probably best to keep home addresses private to avoid law suits/scandals. It just seems like the right thing to do.

There's surely a market, that point I do get, (how big I guess we'll find out) but sometimes I don't get this kind of allocation of resources. Just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you should.

Anyway to the point: the site is awful. Bright yellow background? It's too simplistic (too 90s) and it just seems like a "scammy" site--which ironically (by some's standards, anyway) it might as well be.

What a shame. He could have stood up against this BS deal. Google wouldn't fire him. In the worst case, they would probably ask him to resign and this would still draw attention to the issue. What in the bloody hell is happening at Google? Seems to me Sergey has lost control of this company.

Google: opt-in should be the default. This would really save them much of the agony.

And can someone please kill the cookie model of doing business? Cookies should be limited to storing session info across one site only. Many people (I can't say that most) at least take this for granted.

I'm all for personalization, but tracking of individual activity without a user's knowledge is disaster waiting to happen.

Hurd is a brilliant man and above all, the man could execute. He leaves behind some very talented executives. Let's hope they stick around. This is a wonderful opportunity for someone new to come aboard and give the company a more solid vision because it was unclear what HP's vision was under Hurd. It's tough when you have 300K+ employees.

I think this calls for Vyomesh Joshi to step up. Now that's a guy that works wonders. He's keeping the printing business alive (against all odds) with some serious leadership and innovation.

Social aspects of the internet and games are not part of HP's strategy. HP's in the business of selling infrastructure that makes the internet and games possible.

Correct. Subjectivity is key--and thus, my point was regarding your second statement. My point is, while you may have dropped out because you thought going to school is a pursuit of the asinine (or parts of it maybe?), some of us didn't see it that way.

I went to a very competitive public school. They looked at more than just my grades. I'm sorry that you got rejected, but quite frankly, if you didn't get good grades, it's hard for a school to vouch for you mastering basic skills you'll need at the next level. If however, those grades are a reflection of one of many problems of obstacles you may have faced, then that's where your personal statement comes in. If you decided to do your own thing, then as someone reading applications, I'd rather give your spot to someone else and wish you well in that sense.

Whether you decide to go to college or drop out is a decision I hope everyone can live with either way. At the end of the day, yes, find what you love and do what you love. Schooling is a great, great way to learn how to do many things, meet many great people, etc. It's not the only path, but it's an easier path for most people because you have the threads of people who came before you and would know how to guide you--assuming you're on the lookout.

I beg to differ. People that develop a grit are the ones telling those that didn't what to do. If they couldn't get the work done, how else do you expect them to lead? You can't define a submissive person as simply as above. A submissive person is also one that didn't have the grit to develop his communication skills, his people skills, his critical thinking skills, and his creativity, etc.

An education is what you make of it. Those of us that "survived" the pursuit of the "asinine" found a way to take advantage of the many resources a schooling system offers to compensate for any deficiencies and learned a great deal. Those resources are your fellow classmates, your teachers (imagine that), clubs, sports, and I can go on and on.

Hmm... I assumed it was google-backed because the author has published a few of the algorithms in well-known conferences using his google email, but yes, this code is probably not used extensively, if at all, internally.

Here you go: http://code.google.com/p/sofia-ml

it appears you can now refer to yourself in the third person: kids, sesame street... this sounds like an educational setting to me.

They running some version of arc90's readability to extract articles and display them nicely. http://twitter.com/arc90/status/19079131365

This reminded me of Gator and their disingenuous practices. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claria_Corporation

Agreed. It won't be an entirely manual process. There are services out there like Zemanta who do a good job of automatically tagging text.

Exactly! And freebase has a lot of this data mapped. This data is so rich it holds huge potential.

For example (for those that are unfamiliar with the richness of this data), visit: http://www.freebase.com/view/en/y_combinator

And there you'll note that Y Combinator is mapped to the official site, it's Wikipedia page, it can tell you who the founders are, etc. If you link to Paul Grahm, you can then find out what his personal site is, and so on.

This is huge for many reasons, but namely, this could finally lead to the "semantic web." Metaweb's video, which is linked to in the article, explains part of the "how".

The problem with the semantic web is that many need to embrace it. Many people need to tag text with these "bar codes" (uniquely identified entities). That can take a big effort and there has to be a ROI for this big undertaking. The other is that there is no standard. Well, Google just solved those. With a dominant market share, you don't need someone to agree on a standard, you just force them to--or else they lose out to competition. And as far as the ROI in tagging web pages? Well, what's the ROI on SEO? This will bring about a new form of SEO, except that Google can now undercut many of the search results and answer many of the queries directly--so that'll get interesting... and I'm sure Wolphram Alpha certainly agrees.

Google was also smart to buy Metaweb in order to give web app developers a good reason to use their entities and just FB's open graph entities.

Congrats to the Metaweb team! Freebase + Wikipedia are two of the best gifts to humanity.

"Cheap to employer does not mean cheap to society" Perhaps, but it's difficult to quantify the overall cost-benefit of a cheap labor force, so I'd stay away from arguing either way without presenting numbers. On the one hand, a cheap labor force leads to cheaper goods/food; on the other hand, a cheap labor force means tax payers have to pay for health benefits, education, etc. Are savings more than the costs? If anyone has numbers that'd be great to know.

What facebook is trying to build is not a search engine. Rather, I believe they're building more of a recommendation engine. As your friends (in theory) begin to "like" a bunch of stuff on the web, next time you do a search for hotels, the hotels your friends "liked" will show up.

The meta data for each site/artist, etc you like will also give them (in theory) enough data to recommend not just on what your friends like.

Whoever unlocks the magic in the data and offers a compelling, personalized experience will rule the next decade.

IMAP went down for me over a month ago. Gave up.

How long before we have a tournament with Wolphram Alpha vs. Google vs. Bing vs. Watson, etc?

any surprise this individual's karma is -39.

Otherwise, ignore.

I believe it's both, but the link above by GR8K I think clarifies HP's positioning: they want to sell companies the cloud infrastructure and the services to go along with them. It's a lucrative business, perhaps much more so than the smartphone space (especially when you realize smartphones will be commoditized like the PC at some point), but I don't know the numbers. They're up against IBM, Cisco, and a few others.

You either failed the read the sentence in its entirety or your sarcasm is nicely veiled. "... including but not limited to printers and tablets."

I personally have no problems with him, but I have serious problems with his opt-out policy.

As such, I relished the fact that he was sweating up there. This is good. Why? There's nothing like body language to get the truth out of someone. And because I hope this brings even more attention to the privacy issue.

Jobs: "But it's a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light - that it's going to change everything. Things don't have to change the world to be important."

What would that Jobs think of Apple's new commercials that pitch the iPad as "revolutionary" and "magical"?

Interesting, that was (is?) a Jobs who trusts individuals, but has "a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups." I wonder if this shaped his leadership style (his "control freakishness" as some call it), so that he makes many of the calls and doesn't rely on committees.

A bit offtopic (from thinking about R^n to visualizing it), but I recommend reading about parallel coordinate systems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_coordinates

"absolutely" is a hyperbole, but you're right, let's not add to the misinformation--it's self-defeating.

BTW, are you a facebook employee? I went through your comments and a good 90% (no hyperbole this time) are comments related to Facebook posts, and some looked pro-facebook. Nothing wrong, of course, just curious.