This takes guts:
Yesterday afternoon, during planned maintenance that was not intended to interrupt service, an issue arose that took down a critical database cluster. This brought down our entire network while our engineers worked feverishly to restore these databases and bring your blogs back online.
While you…
Kasparov talked about ‘freestyle’ chess tournaments, including his own, where humans were allowed to partner with computers in any combination. In one 2005 tournament where the player’s and team’s identities were concealed until the end, the winner was revealed to be not a chess grandmaster teamed up with a Deep Blue, but a pair of average players with a few ordinary home PCs. What, then, was their secret sauce? The processes, or the software, had the least amount of friction, with well designed data analysis tools and user interface. This allowed the average human/average computer/smart process combination to win out over the smart human/smart computer/inferior process combination. It also showed that faster computers aren’t everything, but more intelligent software is needed. (source)
Yes, yes, a million times yes!
[these opinions are my own and are not here on the behalf of any current or former employer]
One of my roommates is moving out, and we took this time to figure out which internet provider is best for all of us. In comparing the plans, we came up with an interesting heuristic for what we want from our upload capacity: no one’s torrenting should slow down anyone’s YouTube video. We all agreed that this seems reasonable, and fair, between friends, and will pick our internet package likewise. But in my explaining 56k/DSL/Cable/FiOS to my flat mate, I realize that the Network Neturality agreement between Verizon and Google makes sense on a similar basis.
My neighbor’s torrenting shouldn’t slow down my Hulu, for the exact same reason it shouldn’t slow down my hypothetical television: that wouldn’t be fair to the people making TV shows. The people who whole heartedly treat video as a medium of expression demand a certain quality in the delivery of their work, and to move forward, companies who provide this medium, like Hulu or Google, need to guarantee that their work won’t pause every other minute while some cache gets replenished.
I imagine Verizon is the best partner for this, as they’re investing in a lot of last-mile connections with comprable upload and download bandwidth (FiOS). If Verizon can guarantee that internet video will stream as uninterrupted as television does, they’ll be able to move more and more television consumption into the browser. And say what you want about television content, but a cheap medium where people can broadcast film guaranteed to be uninterrupted is a good thing.
However, there are also valid concerns on the torrenting side: peer to peer traffic is an important part of the internet, and Verizon should be forced to update their network speeds even after video demand is satisfied. To ensure this, I would propose a strict sunset clause on any violations of network neutrality, so that this is truly a temporary solution to move the video industry toward using the internet as their medium of delivery. In the long run, Verizon should provide enough bandwidth for sufficient p2p and video bandwidth to exist side-by-side.
I just tried to use mint and their servers were down. You wouldn’t be able to tell it from reading their ad copy, though. No, not until you log in do you get a 404. Not just a 404, but a 404 disguised as an ad.
There’s some serious UX genius behind there somewhere.
Here is a URL that I can see, but I cannot click. How do I get to that URL, in my browser? I have to go through twitter. Because if I right click that URL, it acts as if I right clicked the tweet. Then I must click on the “open in browser” to open the tweet in the browser. Even though I see the URL, I can’t get there with less than four clicks.
Recently, I’ve started tweeting “some band - some song #goodsong” when I like something I hear. It seems a convenient way of telling people I like a song without taking up their time if they’re busy (that’s the kind of banter the twitter protocol seems to be best for). I’d like to make an application that aggregates those songs, and maybe lets me upload mp3’s of them [or finds versions online] to form a “personalized radio station” of sorts (tons of those, I’d want it to integrate into thefeelgood, others may prefer last.fm).
Also, I enjoyed Surfwise, #goodmovie.
While we’re at it, I should really get to adding that feature on my hn-extended project where “the ‘o’ key should open a link in a selected comment #ghissue”.
But no, what I’d really like is a platform that makes all of these ideas trivial to implement. What would such a platform be like?
Tijoe, a guy I knew in college, liked a video I shared, but my wifi gave out before facebook would load which one it was. Now I have to connect to Echo Base, my neighbors’ wifi, so that I can find out this meaningless little bit of information. I don’t really want to know which video appealed to an old friend, I need to know.
I just finished watching Art & Copy and can’t think of a movie I’d rather recommend to someone interested in serious things.
It shows a sense in advertising that we are usually blind to, except in some very rare moments. Advertising, whatever we think of it, shapes our world. Good advertising shapes it for the better. It makes us taste things the way we do, it makes us hear things the way we do, and it makes us think of things in the terms we do. Both in the people behind the ads, and the messages they present are simply fascinating when considered in detail.
Is Pixar’s WALL-E’s character of EVE, in reality, a product placement for Apple? It seems hard to deny she…
1. looks like an iPod,
2. is, by definition of her character in the plot, the height of futuristic technology, and
3. is created by Pixar, which is, like Apple, founded by Steve Jobs?
How many aspects of our minds, exactly, are shaped by Steve?
For a long time,
location.hashwas a way for AJAX applications to get back button and bookmarking support, and libraries like jQuery BBQ from Ben Alman made dealing with it cross browser a cinch. Now, with HTML5 coming of age, there is a new feature that aims to replace the use of...
A man fell into a river and was obviously struggling to stay afloat. Another man came upon him and tried to offer his assistance. “Give me your hand!” the first man said to the drowning man. No response. The drowning man continued to struggle even though he was less than an arm’s length away from his rescuer on shore. A local leader came upon the scene and instantly recognized the issue. “Take his hand!” said the local leader. The drowning man was immediately rescued.
Many places we are saying something like “Google is tracking your location” and ask for the user to click yes or no, might it be better to say instead “do you agree to submit your location to Google”?
In the near future, America and China are on the brink of war. In the middle of the propaganda battles, the daughter of the American President and a powerful Chinese tycoon fall in love. For a long time they struggle to meet whenever they can: at diplomatic talks in Paris, on vacation in Dubai.
Finally, when the daughter fearfully opens up to her father, he sees it as an opportunity to bring unity to the two nations. If they can just have a showy diplomatic wedding after their real (secret) wedding, it would be an enormous sign of accord and bring certain peace between the superpowers.
But this makes the daughter realize what pressure will be on her to maintain a lifelong relationship, as breaking up with her would-be husband would mean destroying her father’s legacy.
The ending is up to you.
Nah, who am I kidding? The American elites are an incestuous bunch. You don’t see a Bush marrying Saudi royalty. But they do hold hands!
It is simply a collection of ideas, which, as they cross my mind, seem worthy of posterity. I pick them out, and force them out. They go splat onto the page.
It’s been a couple of weeks, so I might as well voice a strong opinion:
Google reminded me what being around smart people is like. The kind where you walk away from lunch with two papers (given with a similar pride as with which Avi, my college dorm mate, would present his problem sets), or a discussion more informative than any lecture, or a book of 200 pages, explaining the details of that stumbling frustration you’d hit when you studied epistemology, or the kind of people that recognize that obscure neurobiological study about heightened activity in the hippocampus in London’s cab drivers.
Feels eery. And exciting.
