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This is thought-provoking discussion, even if the concepts aren't particularly new. The web has a ton of disparate information, and we're always looking for better ways to organize everything. Some things that have worked well include search engines, bookmarking tools, and [social network] aggregators.

It's an interesting exercise to imagine the future of bundling/distributing all the bits of information we accumulate online.

Morbidly fascinating, like watching a house fire. Kennedy's predictably snarky comments on the post make him sound like a typical troll and my interest suddenly fades.

The old-school brick-and-mortar attitude toward web presence is kinda what I was trying to imply by the vague "technical savvy."

There's definitely a market out there that cares about small businesses on the wab, regardless of a business's current mindset, goals, or customer acquisition strategy. Either this market is small or unimportant in some fields, or it's difficult to convince business owners otherwise.

Just in case you haven't looked, delivery sites (e.g. seamlessweb, delivery.com) incorporate restaurant hours as a core feature. Not that they're great reference sources, but they're working with the same types of data.

Restaurant sites seem to suffer in much the same way as many other industries with typically bad websites (say, real estate, legal firms, and local services). I think this might be due to the difficulty of marketing to small businesses and a general lack of (or perhaps ignorance of) technical savvy.

Thanks for the effort to make local restaurants more "usable" -- this type of endeavor can only help if it manages to catch on.

This looks like an organized collection of bash scripts with standard libraries for basic configuration processes, much like the fundamentals of Puppet and Chef.

This is great for simple initial setup (I'm sure a lot of us already have some short bash scripts to similar effect). However, Chef is great for maintaining multiple similar servers and keeping things standardized across machines with minimal effort. Chef also gives you some handy tools like automatic deployment and ERB templates.

I'm using Chef with 7 servers on Slicehost right now, and it's easy as pie once the recipes are set up and your server is deployed.

Additionally, this type of technique works great with content caching.

I meant no disrespect here - as I mentioned beans and rice are enjoyed world-wide, in all manner of different styles. I count a few varieties among my favorite food combinations. Thanks for sharing.

Beans & rice, a worldwide staple. Calling this "hacker" seems like a stretch though.

This immediately reminds of what IBM was making noise about doing around 2000: assigning partners and small teams, changing job focus every few months, and forcing more employees to work in a shifting open space rather than offices. I never heard what became of their work environment policies but I assume this was more a PR and recruiting move than an actual shift in process.

The 37s approach sounds like a formal structure culled from bits and pieces of Scrum and the always-unfortunately-named Extreme Programming.

Reminds me of this, which also surfaced recently:

http://www.seppukoo.com/

Also strangely well-designed for a simple novelty site.

This is an interesting and under-discussed topic (especially among designers), but there isn't a huge amount of insight in the article.

Could anyone point out some good resources on threaded discussion design?

While I am swept up in the argument and the author has my head nodding along to each point, this is clearly an act of gross generalization that uses the worst of the blogging world as examples.

A blog is simply a tool, or perhaps merely a loosely-defined format. No tool or format constitutes a panacea for every problem.

I'm glad that the author (and hopefully the reader as well) is thinking critically about how technology is best applied to real situations and problems.

The more thinking about community building and content moderation, the better. This is certainly thoughtful, if somewhat untested of an approach.

This makes me wonder, could someone point to any essential (or particularly insightful) pieces on the subject?

Wow, this API has been a long time coming.

It looks to me like there are write operations for status, activity stream, friend invitations, and direct messaging. I'm not too surprised that LinkedIn does not offer all the contact details.

Phew. This documentation is organized in a somewhat annoying fashion.

Plug-sized servers sure are neat. They've been distributed widely for a year or so.

But what makes it "cloud?"

The examples presented here could be handy for learning about Rails techniques or (in my case, at least) helping you re-evaluate scenarios in your own code.

Very thoughtful presenation.

So they've created a Web front-end for the existing Q+A service? I seem to remember this already existing, but I could be mistaken. Perhaps this is more of a marketing move.

I think we're all well aware that typical users tend toward overly simple password choices. That's why helpful measures such as password strength gauges and password content requirements have become so commonplace. This is nothing new.

It amazes me that stimulants continue to be called "cognitive enhancers" or "brain-enhancing drugs." ...Really?

Focus and persistence do not equate to intelligence. Not by a long shot, and certainly not at the cost of awareness and creativity.

The concept of monitoring social site streams for dating/authenticity purposes reminds me of a site I heard about recently, http://ge.la.to/

There are many sites struggling to gain traction in mobile aspects of dating, and the problem is likely that it's difficult to get a critical mass of users set up before using the feature is appealing.

Regardless, I'm not aware of anyone who has put all this together successfully. Dating (in many aspects, but surely online) has shown itself to be a tough nut to crack.

I've been a musician for about 12 years. Lost focus recently; too busy concentrating on programming projects, and much of the work is remarkably similar.

Mostly I've used Cubase for sequencing and audio (although I've used Pro Tools, Sonar, and Logic too). Kontakt and the now-defunct Gigasampler for sampling. I mostly use samples, but a few synth engines are great, like the Albino series and some sample-based hybrids like Atmosphere. Waves collection for most DSP. I could go on and on here.

After all that, there's nothing recent to show off. Time to haul out some of the old equipment.

Basically an ad for a Hadoop conference in NYC; no technical content here.

While finance firms in NYC did indeed snatch up many bright technical folks, the same could be said for large software shops with NY offices like Yahoo and Google. The startup world here looks about the same as always - perhaps there's less of a particular sort of risk tolerance among technology investors on this side of the country.

I'm thrilled by the idea of a "tech revival" though. Bring it on!

Things seem to perform about the same for me, but I'm noticing more of a solid overall feel. I think this has to do with polished-up graphic effects, improved animation timing, and fewer lock-ups or periods of inexplicable waiting.

I used the $29 upgrade from Leopard - not sure whether it would function as a full installer.

The term "antigravity" makes little sense here. It's a plant-covered building, fully governed by typical physical laws.

I just upgraded this afternoon. The install process knocked my laptop out of commission for a full hour, but it worked exactly as advertised. I haven't run across any compatibility issues, however, because I tend to do server-type work in a VM. Things seem about the same with a bit more visual/timing polish and "solid" feel.

Dreamhost now has special "backup accounts" and seem to automatically patrol accounts for "abuse" outside of this provisioned space. They give 50gb for free, and then charge 10 cents/gb/mo beyond that.

It's not bad but a far cry from "unlimited." Still, it seems to work fine for rsyncing "small" backups.

It was vexing that the "3. See results!" link does not point to the example results page. I tend to read stenciled-text graphics last.

Feeding back the feedbackers.

I've heard a lot about software agents over the last decade or so (they were hot when I was studying AI in grad school), but I have never seen a particularly compelling application.

I'm curious to see how well these shopping agents (probably the preeminent practical example of the technology) actually function in the wild, and how they're adopted.

If the use of shopping agents actually became a market force, I suspect many online retailers would need to change various business practices to adapt, much like websites have adapted by optimizing for search engines.