thesethings

Yes! Yay, you made me feel less crazy. I like the new logo better, too.

Subjective retro-ness aside, the new logo is more of a logo (less textures, passes the silhouette test, etc).

I hear ya. But I think maybe my main point didn't get through. I'm not praising TechCrunch, or speaking to their intention at all.

I'm delighting in the outing of a well-worn Hollywood practice that ideally will not work as well as they try to court the Internets. If any publicist, PR firm, or studio starts to feel even a little self-conscious about massaging a story, i think that's great. And regardless of TC's intention, I think that's a little more likely after today.

I know TechCrunch has a bad rap around here. But one needn't like TechCrunch or believe in its integrity to appreciate a little dent in the armor of old school gatekeepers.

Hollywood publicists have traditional entertainment media in a tough spot, able to withhold access to "talent" without some sort wink + nod about what the story will be.

Of course many outlets do not kiss ass and still get courted by Hollywood creatives. But they need to establish that voice early on (Perez Hilton, Pink is the New Blog), not do a crazy 180 (What if Entertainment Tonight all of a sudden asked Tom Cruise a truly tough question?).

I think it's important that "big" tech media establish some boundaries early on. Sure TechCrunch gets some easy traffic for this. But that doesn't mean it's not also cool.

I wasn't aware that either of these quests for universals have been a failure. My friend did a relatively recent music thesis about universals.

I'm not in either field, but a belief in universal "deep structure" has helped me learn both language + music stuff. Even if they don't exist, I'm going to stick with what helps me :D

[Update. I'm slightly more educated than I was a few hours ago.]

I've found two reports that outline ways to migrate to renewables. They are sobering, but actually achievable.

A common thread among those who create actual concrete plans for running on renewable energy is this: We must use less energy to have our energy needs met by renewable sources.

(Their projections do account for the growth of newly industrialized nations, so it's not double-trouble.)

Some of the use-less-energy changes we would notice (how we get the food that reaches our table), and other changes we could integrate and not notice at all (lots of energy escapes buildings for no good reason, and that could change with different process + design becoming more dominant).

A cool part is that they don't see higher cost as long-term issue (that renewable energy is only temporarily expensive because it's uncommon and used in small doses).

Another kinda optimistic thing is that parts of the world that are still becoming "industrialized" have somewhat of an advantage (as they do with leapfrogging any kind of tech generation), and in some cases are being born with more renewable systems to begin with.

I completely understand those who overlook renewable sources because of the amount of energy we currently use is more than we can produce with them. It's not a dumb conclusion. But after going over these reports, I don't think using less energy is any more of an imposition than changing any other kind of infrastructure, and in many cases is stuff we're moving towards anyway.

http://getsatisfaction.com/wwf/topics/debate_the_energy_repo... http://assets.panda.org/downloads/101223_energy_report_final... [pdf, pdf, pdf! i warned you] http://www.greenpeace.org/er-ship/Global/international/publi... [pdf]

Is this cost like "organic" cost? (In that organic things get cheaper the more that gets produced).

Is there hope of renewable energy sources getting cheaper if they get more ubiquitous? In Portland we have a major wind turbine manufacturer, Vestas (http://www.vestas.com. They are from Europe, but have a big location here).

I guess my question is, the blades + farms get cheaper in large quantities, like anything else. So it seems the cost part could get better. But if they simply can't make enough power, that seems harder to conquer. Are you saying these things can't make enough power? (I suspect everybody knows this except for me.)

Don't wonder why you bothered writing that.

You wrote it because it made me laugh really hard and gave us some awesome tweetable quotables.

And because you're right.

And because as long as they keep fighting the Internet in lame ways, we all should fight back in fun ways.

Aw, HN folks post from those sources all the time. We are definitely aware of them and think they're great.

But what this video especially pointed out is that Khan Academy is not just great content, but an extremely innovative system.

Yeah. This was big, public news. Last year within a week, Bing + Google both paid Twitter millions of dollars for "firehose" access.

The reason I remember it pretty well is 1) Lots of people made "...finally making money" jokes, and 2) Both Bing and Google made separate realtime URLs shortly after.

Great idea! Can pay newsletters be submitted?

Idea: put some kind of link to American Airlines website/customer service in your website, so they can see your post as source of web traffic? They are probably "monitoring their brand," but still...

Yeah, I'm wincing that it's getting the HN traffic juice. More cognitive surplus has been spent here than went into the article :D

short version: Don't upgrade just for speed. i don't see a difference, have never heard of a difference in performance.

long version:

I use both. In my experience there is no difference in performance. Very occasionally a bug that hits one will not hit the other (but not always). Also, they get features at different rates. The consumer Google applications get new features and makeovers faster, and then it gets rolled into Google Apps.

It sounds like you looked at the feature matrix and know the main differences. Basically Google Apps gets you a throat to choke (there is support), and access to more API's to do stuff programatically. If you're just one account, a lot of that value can't be realized.

OK, this was more fun than freaky.

It thinks I'm male (I'm a girl).

It knows about my horrible novelty YouTube habit (tons of humor/comedy/tv comedy categories). #guilty

It thinks I have pets/cats. (Nope. but given how many novelty youtube vids probably involve cats, not crazy.)

And yeah, lots of finance/tech/business categories.

For now, I'm leaving them all in and not removing.

And sidebar to those who say this isn't everything Google knows about you. You're right. But this is just about ads.

The main Privacy Dashboard for account stuff is here: http://www.google.com/dashboard

They're clearly freaked out about by Stack Exchange. They attacked them for needing a "VC cookie jar," but couldn't actually saying anything bad about their sites.

This was also surreal: "Sites like Quora seem more like Tumblr or other blog-esque formats."

Wait. What?

Many here on HN have only ever seen EE when clicking on it accidentally because of their SEO-fu.

The rise of more modern Q&A sites combined with Google's renewed commitment to punishing automated/weak/content means this must be a challenging time to be EE.

I admit I'm not mad at that.

Quora has publicly stated after they added a non-Facebook login option, that registration went up a lot. They have openly questioned that call. (Though I have not seen them seek the same feedback about the real-person-only policy).

I think a lot of people who really like Facebook, still don't want it to be following them all over the rest of the web. So FB's high adoption doesn't necessarily mean people want it to use it everywhere.

This is my favorite active band at the moment.

And they just launched their new site with a very funny video. Lots of great ideas in this screencast for app tours.

Especially the idea that: there are no rules for screencasts.

Clickable:

AppHarbor: http://jasonsirota.com/deploying-an-on-premise-app-to-the-cl...

Azure: http://jasonsirota.com/part-2-deploying-an-on-premises-aspne...

Schedule:

Wednesday, February 2nd

8:45am - 9:00am Opening Welcome Edd Dumbill, Alistair Croll

9:00am - 9:10am What Data Tells Us Hilary Mason

9:10am - 9:25am Privacy and Big Behavioral Data in the B2B Space James Powell

9:25am - 9:35am The Mythology of Big Data Mark Madsen

9:35am - 9:50am Data Without Limits Werner Vogels

9:50am - 10:00am Data Everywhere: There Ought to Be a Marketplace for It Zane Adam

10:00am - 10:10am Delivering Big Data: A Conversation with Mike Olson and Rod Smith Abhishek Mehta, Mike Olson, Rod Smith

Thursday, February 3rd

8:45am - 8:50am Opening Welcome - Day 2 Alistair Croll, Edd Dumbill

8:50am - 9:00am Free Our Data: How We Made Sense of Huge Datasets Simon Rogers

9:00am - 9:15am Posthumans, Big Data and New Interfaces Alistair Croll, Toby Segaran, Amber Case, Bradford Cross

9:15am - 9:25am Why Legacy Databases Can't Survive the Data Deluge - It's About Dollars and Sense Ed Boyajian

9:25am - 9:35am The Heat Death of the Data Warehouse Barry Devlin

9:35am - 9:45am Innovating Data Teams DJ Patil

9:45am - 9:55am Your Data Rules the World Scott Yara

9:55am - 10:10am Can Big Data Fix Healthcare? Carol McCall

I've used Forrst and really like it. I wouldn't compare it to your blog any more than any other social site: it's going to enable social interactions + discovery that you wouldn't get on your site... but give you less control. (A fair trade I think. Both have their benefits.)

Like HN, Forrst is full of people who are earnest and invested in their behavior there. It doesn't mean everybody is always right or perfectly behaved, but they are sincere and really care about the topics at hand. I also like how Forrst users particpate when they have something of value to offer, rather than just to hear themselves type. (that's one thing that bothers me about Quora: people speak up without any really compelling reason to. Compare to HN when most skip threads if we're just going to repeat something.) Forrst also has excellent design and that permeates the culture and people treat design both as a craft and a technical skill.

The only thing I don't like about Forrst is probably just me: they have some etiquette guidelines i don't totally get. You can show work that's in progress, but i once saw a guy show a fully completed piece of work that a moderator thought was too self-promote-y. Then I once got modded because I showed some industrial (non digital) design ( because it wasn't graphic, though featured graphic typography on a sign). It's possible this policy has evolved OR I just didn't read the fine print closely enough, but i felt confused.

I would encourage you to check it out.

You are totally right about the ads being down. That's why it's so unfortunate/confusing that the how-to pages still feel cluttered. Visual clutter on sites like this are often just to make places for ads that "blend" in with content. But the new Mahalo has few ads.

As I wrote in my post: there are multiple sections of interesting information... presented in a disorienting manner.

I feel like the new learning mission is sincere, but am waiting for more tweaking.

Hadn't considered that. Can you expand a bit? I'm really into YouTube and would love to hear your theories.

I think it is a little harder to spam YouTube (with content) than the web. On the web, you can just parse feeds/spin text. On Youtube, you have to upload things. According to the presentation, they built out studios and are recording videos at a fast pace (and they do have thousands of videos on their channel, all with a signature white negative space backdrop). It is totally possible to make bad videos, not denying that. But it's a bit harder to trick systems into thinking there's something there that's not/misdirect.

Not saying there aren't other places in the system to abuse stuff (On YouTube you can friend spam, Fave-spam, etc), but it's hard to do with content.

Were you thinking content spam?

I hear ya, but the agenda (mostly) doesn't matter to me. I assume corporate blog posts are published for commercial reasons, even when it's about the author's personal life.

And I've gotten so much value out of HN discussions that benefit the site linkee (lots of awesome threads start out "Show HN: My new site/business").

I guess my main point is: I'm all for the business linked to getting PR, as long as we, the HN members get some cool value out of it. In this case, i thought the post was very topical because talent/skill shortage is a frequently talked about issue here, as are work cultural norms in general.

But I totally respect the opinion that some posts may not have an interesting enough ideas to make PR interesting. That said, I always wait for the other shoe to drop: the HN thread it spawns often ends up being incredible.

Sidebar: I love the way they did the screencast. Smart and it made me laugh a bit. But mostly I'm a sucker for "weirdness" in any medium. (This is why i like the yayquery podcast, too.)

I've heard about this dynamic a lot.

This is why somebody I know hasn't pulled the trigger on putting his place up: People aren't flaking so much as being extremely selective about who they rent to.

Basically my friend totally wants to go on AirBnb, but knows he will only offer to people he can semi-cyberstalk to his satisfaction/hope to be 3 degrees of separation from via industry/community circles (to make him feel comfortable).

Right now you don't have to rent to anybody you don't want to, even when you put your availability up for a certain time-frame, which is great. But it does confuse potential guests who get false positives for available places.

I think AirBnb needs something beyond ebay-style reviews to resolve this. The groups thing could be a good start (there are are interest/ community groups, like HN group, on AirBnb).

I'm super happy for Garry, but for selfish reasons, I'm bummed out.

I feel like a band i really like was in the studio working on a new album, and a songwriter just left.

I guess i was waiting for another shoe to drop in terms of the realization of the Posterous vision.

Anyway... congrats to Garry. I saw his TWIST interview a while ago, and thought he seemed really nice and had really interesting ideas.

An HNer, kylemathews, has a nice Drupal-based package, eduglu (http://eduglu.com/). It's both an opensource project and start-up. Having followed him on Twitter for a while now, I know his interest and passion for improving/hacking education long precedes his financial interest in it. Really rooting for his project and anything else that moves the edu situation forward.

Yeah. I caught that too. So awkward. As a she, i'm all for some "she's" in abstract examples, but they switched pronouns in the middle of an expression. Strange.

My experience w/Yahoo! mail is surreal. It even marks my own mail as spam. And misses lots of real spam.

(i use gmail primarily, but have an old Yahoo! address for bacn)

Just a heads up: It's a PDF. (Not that there's anything wrong with that :-)

Good paper. thanks for posting. Rare combination of deep AND highly readable.

I started in the middle and read through before circling and back and seeing it was written by creator of HAProxy. So it was even more impressive how objective/ pragmatic he was about different approaches.