thesethings

I too use pre-paid only. I pay less than $7/month w/Virgin mobile. I do look longingly at smartphones. But it's just not worth it for me with current structure of plans. They're either voice-centric, which i'd never use, or data-centric in ways i don't need. i'm near a computer w/internet access most of the time. I love the Internet, and do all the dorky social networking things that make me somebody who should be slurping access from everywhere. I'll gladly drop bank for something that fits me, but i'm basically waiting out the entire old school phone system :D In the meantime, i have a bad phone. I bet there will be Android phones soon on the big pre-paid systems.

I grew up in the Bay Area and lived in Daly City + SF among other places. (live in Portland, OR at the moment)

I actually seriously dig downtown San Jose, would live there. It's right next to SJSU (which yeah, is mostly commuter school, but still gives an energy.)

It does have a real downtown, bigger than any other BA city's downtown (except SF), and it's super diverse, which is important to me. (Diverse not just in ethnic makeup, but in terms of what everybody does for a living. SJ is not all computer people as much as other towns up north.)

I like going to DIY/indie-ish music things... I would probably go to SF for that, but SJ has more of a scene than most places in-between. It also has the sort of neighborhoods/housing (not all condos, not all new basement-less ranches) that is conducive people creating when they don't have much money. (I've also just described Portland, hmm...)

Still, the article is fair enough: most young geeks who aren't art nerds would probably rather live in Palo Alto than SJ. But for other types, SJ is better than anywhere in-between except for SF. And depending on other things, it's even better than SF.

I also like how bike friendly SJ is, but PA isn't bad for that.

I just wanna say my comment here was sincere. I am fine w/being down-voted. But I don't want the author to think I was mocking.

I seriously like this site.

This is so cool. Yay you! Yay mashups and my romantic ideal of the Internet! Yay Hacker News for helping me find stuff like this/giving you place to announce!

Agreesies. I just logged out today after seeing 3rd party sites being too Facebook aware, and even regular Facebook still thought my session was hot, let alone 3rd party sites who are harder to gauge.

If you read the (unfortunately unthreaded and super-hard to browse) comment thread, there were a lot of users questioning that.

I guess I'd like to know more about "active" users, and social features.

Also... in 2010 it's just super surreal in a domain as vast as "movies," to not have deep social features to help people manage and discover.

I'm buying the OP's suggestion that Friends was turning up tons of recommendations that you can't stream (that part is the studios' fault, not Netflix's), and it was leading to a lot of dead-end experiences.

But I just really don't buy that Netflix's longterm strategy is to get less social. They are too ahead of the curve, and too smart to think/do that.

My personal theory is that they are overhauling Friends and social in general, behind the scenes.

Maybe if folks like Netflix are so bad at the social part, we should separate the place where we talk about movies, from the place where we consume them.

Kind of like how Good Reads + Library Thing are better than Amazon for discovery/listing/reviewing books (I partially take that back, Amazon is pretty good at discovery of "similar.")

Anyway, what this incident makes me think about is: We just need a good social site where the social object is movies.

Is there already a GoodReads.com of movies?

Thank you for taking the time to write and screenshot this.

I generally see great promise in the ad platform.

FB lets you target based on occupation (or likely keyword match in their profile) in a way you can't with Adwords, which for some markets, is pretty cool... in theory.

In real life, everybody I know is finding FB too expensive to leverage, and posts like yours are explaining why.

As somebody else in this thread pointed out, even if FB cleans this up, they're risking alienating all advertisers away from ever trusting the efficacy of the platform.

If low inventory is the problem, they should be giving early advertisers more of a "free ride," with cheap repeats.

When I do that, I can only see French as an option. Do you get other languages?

Just a heads up: Audio in German, subtitled in French. But you can get the main idea without knowing those languages.

Yaaaay! I was using Gmail as a Posterous blog post editor (because attaching images and mp3's and then sending them to Posterous resulted in beautiful posts, something confusingly less possible with the web editor.). Anyway, I had no doubt they were cooking up something for the web editor... not because i had inside information, but just because they seem extremely thoughtful and in touch with how people actually work. (They prioritized email/mobile editing... fair enough. And probably smart, though less applicable to me.) Keep up the great work, Posterous folks!

Please everybody, listen the whole way through. The Steve stories are in the first have of the interview. And they're pretty juicy (maybe just because we've never heard them before, unlike lots of other Steve legend?).

You may be tempted to stop the interview after that. But Chris is an amazing and admirable entrepreneur AND person. He shares some really moving stuff about his background that makes all of the Steve stuff fall away.

It's generally a bad sign. I wrote at length about it here: http://thesethings.posterous.com/rapping-grandmas-and-ninja-...

The gist of my post was: Originally, it was a way to suggest to a technical candidate, "Don't be scared, our place of work respects technical people." It was a code in a way for, "We're not a boring bank. Or if were are, you still might have fun here."

Now I think the term leveraged in the opposite interest: "We need YOU, the candidate, to be awesome. But our wacky language still gives no clue about us, the employer."

I know Scott would probably never refer to himself as a "thought leader."

I picked that title because I thought "book author" wouldn't be as descriptive.

I like him because I find his _thinking_ interesting. I rarely find people referred to as "thinkers," though, so I went with thought leader.

(I don't work for Google or anything. I just think that Google didn't do the clearest job of explaining the opportunity.)

(Aw, so cool you came to this site!) And also cool this involved Arduino.

I actually submitted this on behalf of the person who wrote the blog post, and do not know him personally :(.

The rule says you're gonna hear more feedback when people are unhappy than when they're happy. So I thought I'd pipe in and say that I was totally aware of the affiliate link, and didn't mind it at all.

Yep. NSFW. That was a bummer.

It's true that video files aren't so hard to pass around. But it's way harder to pass videos around than a blog post links.

My main point is was related to your interesting "ads that look like content" observation:

That there can be little difference between the things that many people give away (ads), versus the things they sell, especially in terms of labor by the creator.

I agree with this, but I frame it differently:

You're going to make a lot of stuff. Some you will give away, some you will charge for. You pretty much HAVE to give _some_ stuff away not because we live in a post-Napster, open source apocalypse where everybody expects things to be free, but just because you need something to get people to give your idea/song/software a chance.

As I have a lot of friends in bands, I often come back to music: "You will make a lot of music. You will probably give most of your recordings away, with the exception of special packages now and then. You will probably almost always charge for your live performances, with the exception of a few special occasions. You will regularly make some thing related to your art and charge for it (screen-printed posters, sweathshirts, etc.)"

People who make any kind of intellectual property can basically put it in one of two buckets:

* stuff i will charge for

* stuff i won't charge for, but is used to attract attention/keep people feeling involved

The difference between the two isn't arbitrary, but it isn't exactly based on qualitative difference. It's mostly based on distribution, limitations of medium, and a stuff like that. You'll probably tend to give away stuff that's easy to pass around, and charge for stuff that's not. Not in a piracy-centric mindset, just thinking mostly of friction, etc. It's entirely possible the thing you charge for doesn't take more work to do than the things you don't charge for.

Data points:

* As pointed out by others, the people hiring programmers may not be so hot at it

* As pointed out by others, the exact same skills can get you a really cool job, or a really bad job.

* _Getting a job_ it a totally different skill than _Doing a job_

* Regardless of your programming skills (which i'm not here to talk about), i may be able to help you with your _job getting skills_ .

* New Mexico: Wack

Personal anecdotes:

* i got fired for a bad reason that wasn't my fault

* i got fired for a good reason that was my fault

* i got fired once because of a combination of my own issues and the innate lameness of an environment

* One time some crazy circumstances beyond my control, combined with a mild legal infraction on my part, led to hijinx

The message:

* Being appealing isn't magic.

* Being found isn't magic

* I'm not awesome, just skilled

* I can help you get the same skills with one of three services you can pay for

* don't just believe me, here are some examples

This was great. I'm not commenting on the message (though I liked that too, he wrote enough caveats in there to make it responsible.)

I mean the writing was great. I laughed at least 3 times, and grinned most of the rest of it.

It's a really long sales letter. True.

But it also has at least three stories in there that are so entertaining that even if you're a bored millionaire taking a break from counting the vintage restored cars in your airport hangar, and need no career advice at all, you should still probably read the post.

(no affiliation w/Giles or his enterprises)

It's hard to tell which of the photos are referring to which rooms. Is the 'closet' room pictured there?

Good catch. I was so distracted by the window management moving to the left, I didn't see that.

That's an important part of previewing windows. Even if that specific panel is now gone, something has do something similar (give you a visualization of what's open, how many desktops you have.)

I'm now even more eager to try this out.

I am lukewarm on this specific design, but am totally happy and excited by how ambitious this all is (not just the theme, but the logos, collateral, etc.)

I want Canonical and Ubuntu to kick butt. Mark seems like he's really making an effort to be a "product" person, which open source could use more of. Bravo! (And this has always been reflected in Ubuntu, which I really appreciate.)

Some nits: The new font is a step backward. The softness of the old font was both distinct, unique, AND comfortable. The new one is not as unique. And I don't think will age so well. (Plus, fonts and logos are not something that need an overhaul as often as themes and campaigns. I just think it was maybe too soon to overhaul the font. It was a strong brand.)

I LOVE the new colors. Yeah, there's an Apple overlap, but I don't think "APPLE!" as soon as I see it.

Window controls on the left: I don't like it. I have desktops on all three major OS's, so it's not because I'm trained for one way or the other. There's just something that feels better about them being on the right.

Overall: I'm giving it all a chance, and will jump in with both feet when it's released, without undoing the major changes. The main point here is: They really care and have a vision. Whenever somebody makes a tool/OS/webapp/meal with a really specific vision, i always give it the benefit of the doubt, and try it THEIR way, not bending to my preferences or instinct to add salt/take off the tomato/go to my favorite theme/etc. When I don't try stuff with that trust, i often miss out. I hope Linux users give it a fair shot, even if stuff feels funny at first.

Death threats. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6499095.stm The whole situation was weird. Though she specifically was targeted, it seemed like the site the threats came out of was a group of generally angry, lame folks who lashed out in all directions constantly. I could barely understand it at the time (though I of course would have freaked out in her shoes, as the language was so specific and graphic.)

Definitely do it. Also, there are at least 2 full length keynotes gave at different conferences around online (and many shorter videos as well).

I don't think she thinks of it as a break, but actually something that enables her to do MORE work :D

As somebody who devoured her twitter, I do feel an absence. But I do think she's working on similar stuff/themes at the moment, as she was pre-Twitter break.

Kathy did not close her Twitter account due to anything bad (unlike the unfortunate threats that coincided with her blog shutting down.)

There are lots of ways to participate in communities and conversations, and she wanted to step away from that one for a bit.

I can't point to a public URL as I got this from private conversation, but there was a public Tweet from one of her friends on this as well.

In any case, her work is GREAT and anybody from an engineer to a marketer would do well to absorb her customer-centric philosophies that make EVERYTHING clear ("your product doesn't kick ass... your product makes your CUSTOMERS kick ass...")

Google and learn :D