December 2009
68 posts
2010 Predictions
caterpillarcowboy:
Here are my predictions for 2010:
Badges and game mechanics - Driven by the success of foursquare and Farmville, everyone is going to want badges and game mechanics embedded in their apps. Hell, we might do it, too. Not only do well-tuned game mechanics increase engagement, it also increases user exploration and education. Of course, it’s easy to do it badly,...
“1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2)...”
– Douglas Adams in DNA/How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet, explaining how the world works (1999). (via designtumblelog) (via rafer)
“The physical book really has had a 500-year run. It’s probably the most...”
– Jeff Bezos on the Inevitable Obsolescence of Books - Amazon (via Gizmodo) (via obsoletethebook) (via infoneernet) (via caterpillarcowboy)
Agreed, and there are many things that annoy me about books, but I still buy them because they are still DRM-free (surprise, surprise!). When the Kindle and...
Femmes idéales – Louvre.ARTE.tv →
(via dixiecupua)
Google should open source what actually matters:... →
In response to this PR email: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html
» The danger of feature-driven design |... →
Features can have a negative value to consumers because they make the products more difficult to understand and use. We are finding that people like products that just work. It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce than designs that assemble long lists of features.
Features have a specification cost, a design cost, and a development cost. There is a testing cost...
“VCs are boxing themselves into a pretty tight investment window. VCs retreating...”
– Burnham’s Beat: The Great Abdication: Consumer Internet, Venture Capital, and Angels
This is it right here. Read it again. Then read the whole article.
(via caterpillarcowboy)
In Texas
When we left WI for TX last wednesday, the temperature was in the low digits. We spent 19 hours driving, covering 1260 miles. We hit the following states (from north to south): MN, IA, KS, MO, OK, TX. We stopped seeing snow altogether after the southern part of KS. When we stopped to sleep in OK that night, the temperature was in the low 50s.
We’re in Texas country, where the weather has...
“I argued that the future potential of the realtime web is not in the misnomer...”
– Beyond Realtime Search: The Dawning Of Ambient Streams
Rafer sez: Correct, Discovery isn’t Search.
(via rafer)
I don't know if this was every officially...
caterpillarcowboy:
Postling will be one of the select companies that will be part of Polaris Ventures’ Dogpatch Labs space in NYC, opening next week at 36 E 12th between Broadway and University. I’m very excited to be in great company as well moving into our very first office space!
Congratulations!
“Perhaps what our machines should do is to read information snippets the same way...”
– Black&White™ — Slaves of the feed – This is not the realtime we’ve been looking for
“If I have been visiting the MagmaBooks online shop then all sorts of relevant...”
– Black&White™ — Slaves of the feed – This is not the realtime we’ve been looking for
Forward
caterpillarcowboy:
davidkaneda:
The past few weeks have proved quite life-changing for me. Readers may have noticed a few comments on Twitter, but I think it’s time to get a few things out in the open. First up: I’ve moved. I’m no longer based in Philadelphia, but now living in Palo Alto—the heart of the silicon valley.
This was not an easy switch by any means. I’ve lived in the northeast for...
urllib3 - Project Hosting on Google Code →
Highlights
* HTTPConnectionPool and HTTPSConnectionPool - Thread-safe connection pooling and re-using.
* filepost - File posting! Supported implicitly by HTTPConnectionPool.post_url.
* (Optional) Automatically handles redirection and retries! * New in 0.3: HTTP and HTTPS (SSL) support.
“If anything, I’m just embarrassed I didn’t see this coming. I’m embarrassed I...”
– Matt Langer (via marco) (via rafer)
“Top-performing companies were 15 times more likely to apply analytics to...”
– The best companies are analytical | The Equity Kicker (via caterpillarcowboy)
Objects Are Not Abstract Data Types →
“The data seem incontrovertible: AT&T, while meeting 4,000 percent growth in...”
– AT&T Takes the Blame, Even for the iPhone’s Faults
Ries and Trout, authors of The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, place AT&T perfectly with their description of Law #4: The Law of Perception. To paraphrase Ries and Trout, a company or product’s perception by the public is more of a reality...
“If you think of your software as your co-worker — someone you work with who...”
– Sending an IM via Gtalk in Clojure - pl patterns
Jay-Z vs T Woods [from...
red923: I always thought Jay-Z had 99 problems whereas the person he was rapping to only had one problem. However, Jay-Z's situation was still preferable as none of his 99 problems were a bitch.
Prototek: My impression is that he's feigning sympathy for someone else's girl problems but what he's really getting at is that he has 99 real and significant problems compared to your petty girl troubles. He then proceeds into the issues he has to deal with in his entrepreneurship of drug distribution and music production.
“Great entrepreneurs are hard to work for. They jerk you around, change things...”
– Fred Wilson, Action Oriented (via caterpillarcowboy)
“It’s the kind of culture that can tolerate rap music and extreme sports...”
– Marginal Revolution: From Poverty to Prosperity by Paul Romer
The mythical bitmap index →
“Morteza Zaker sent me pointer to their work comparing bitmap indexes and B-trees...”
– Which should you pick: a bitmap index or a B-tree?
Legendre, We Hardly Knew Ye « Ars Mathematica →
It turns out that the standard picture of Adrien-Marie Legendre was actually a picture of his contemporary, the revolutionary Louis Legendre. (
“We humans actually are not interested in computing. What we are interested in is...”
– Pranav Mistry’s TED India talk
“A president of the United States cannot be a pacifist.”
– EJ Dione on ATC today, about Obama’s acceptance speech
Tumblr Goes Real Time →
infoneernet:
Starting today, the popular light blogging platform Tumblr will publish its users’ feeds in real time. Tumblr will use the increasingly popular PubSubHubbub format to announce updates. Tumblr’s real-time hub will be powered by Superfeedr. Thanks to today’s updates, Tumblr - which has close to 2.5 million users - will now be able to send out real-time alerts to any service that...
Kirk's Rants: Document Stores: Please Give Me A... →
ClojureQL — Where are we (going) →
ClojureQL enables the Clojurian to stay within his Clojure-domain even when interfacing with his SQL database, greatly simplifying the code-base.
“I recently had a discussion with another engineer after I had discussed some of...”
– » Persistent Folders: Or, why ideas don’t matter, and execution does | pixelmonkey.org – alter or abolish?
“It was boring when people complained about an early Future of Web Apps being an...”
– Women Women Blah Blah Blah | HPC
Who knew? Boring gets things done
“My advice for someone out of college who wants to start a business. Should you...”
– Intrapreneur or Entrepreneur? « Sam Aparicio
“An intrapreneur is somebody who runs a business unit inside of a bigger...”
– Intrapreneur or Entrepreneur? « Sam Aparicio
“PageRank is a technique for finding hidden flows in huge quantities of data,”...”
– The Ninth Annual Year in Ideas - Magazine - NYTimes.com
Google + Ecology
(via dixiecupua)
Why Homicide Declined in American Cities during... →
caterpillarcowboy:
apsies:
azspot:
But not all criminologists were surprised by the sudden decline in urban homicide. In fact, in 2008 a number of people predicted that the homicide rate might decline, depending on who won the presidential election. Psychologists, sociologists, and historians now have a growing body of evidence that suggests that the rate of violence among unrelated adults...
“Urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its...”
– John Thackara, from In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World (via jayparkinsonmd) (via mariaaa)
“As with many non-fiction works, the complete book is less powerful than the...”
– Mountains Beyond Mountains - Philip Greenspun (via llimllib)
The API myth - Startup diaries →
Let’s weigh some pros and cons. Pros: a ton of buzz, increased user growth and adoption, many new traffic sources, developer loyalty, and tens of thousands of mashup projects. In the end, this means more traffic, more revenue, and much more exposure. Best of all, the world is practically guaranteed to benefit from all the new ways this information would undoubtedly be parsed, and you’d...
Ask HN: Equity for a first employee →
1-2%. A lot of people say 5%. 5% is what you’ll give to an executive down the road. First employees are very important, but probably not as important as your second CEO. 6% is what you give to YC. First employees are very important, but a first employee who is worth almost as much as YC should probably be your cofounder, not an employee.
This is also for your first employee. You may...
Opening Up Librelist.com Code, Looking For... →
This is a quick announcement that I’m looking to turn librelist.com into a free competitor to google’s groups mailing lists. I’ve created a completely open bug tracker, RCS, and wiki site at support.librelist.com and put the most recent code in it. The goal is to make it a donation supported mailing list system that caters specifically to open source projects, in much the same way that...
Clojure development environments - Clojure |... →
From the comments:
Emacs / clojure-mode:
You need to install git to pull down the latest sources!
You need Clojure and Clojure-contrib (usually you cannot dowload
contrib but have to build it)
You need to have ant / maven to build contrib
You need to download Emacs
You need to download clojure-mode
You need to modify .el startup files for Emacs
and then - how do I get to the REPL? how does this...
“Many of the strategies employed in competitive and recreational sports are...”
– The 40-30-30 Rule: Why Risk Is Worth It :: Tips :: The 99 Percent
“Read the tabloid covers at a grocery store sometime; they use the same tactic....”
– Giles Bowkett: Blogs Are Godless Communist Bullshit
“News sites aren’t about great information; they’re about giving you...”
– Giles Bowkett: Blogs Are Godless Communist Bullshit
