aloneinkyoto

Meetings != Communication

(always avoid double negations)

A more apt comparison would be Antarctica. But even in Antarctica you can go outside and feel the sunshine on your face in the summer. You can't really do that on a space station or on a Mars base.

I would personally probably miss the smells and the seasons the most.

It always troubles me when people talk about the future and futurism optimistically and without understanding the historical context and why it might be a bad idea.

For you that don't know, futurism had its roots in 20th century Italy and was a broad art and cultural movement that ultimately gave rise to fascism. It also inspired both Lenin and Hitler and merged with the ideals of industrialism to create communism (Leninism) and national socialism.

The difference is, back in those days futurism was considered avantgarde. Today it seems to be modus operandi.

And on a side note: Why would any sane person want to live in space? Going there to do some important science for a while, sure. But living in a tin-can in an insanely hostile environment for the rest of my life? Not gonna happen.

I don't think he is talking about "high priority" in the project management sense, rather in the visual or cognitive sense that the presentation of a feature to the user is highly prioritized. His argument is basically that it is more important or relevant to make the feature "obvious" (easy to understand) rather than "high priority" (attention grabbing).

Yes, but the only feedback provided was that my argument was a straw-man. I.e. they disagreed with the point I was trying to make. And as far as I understand, the social contract on Hacker News implies that you don't down vote if you disagree, only if the comment is spam or trolling, etc.

Although I suppose I'm on the verge of becoming somewhat of a troll right now.

I didn't claim that a sustainable businesses can't do good work. I simply claimed that sustainability is at odds with producing good things. Which is a fairly different claim. Though I can see how the distinction was not perfectly clear in my comment.

But to be honest I thought I was being very careful in my wording about something that should be self evident, e.g.

"...will most likely not be as inherently good as it could be."

Running a business implies a trade-off. The trade-off is that if you want to be successful (i.e. sustainable) you need to focus on the business and not the product. Which is exactly what the article is stating.

Maybe a better example to support my claim is Apple. They make great products. But the way they do that is by focusing on the process of creating great products. Jonathan Ive specifically talks about this in the Objectified documentary. He says that most of their time is spent on designing the manufacturing process and the tools needed to mass-produce the products, only a very small part of the time is spent on the actual design of the phone or computer and that design is almost always a direct implication of the manufacturing process rather than something they magically dream up in some creative haze.

Why am I being down voted for this? It is not spam and not intended as flame bait. It is not off topic and it is not pointless humor. It is a serious comment that needs to be debated and not hidden away at the bottom of the page.

I am not stating anything extremely controversial, simply the same thing the article is stating, but with a slightly different wording.

Don't down vote me because you disagree with me or because you think I am bashing capitalism (I am not, I love capitalism). If you think my argument is weak or lacking, please tell me so in a comment instead.

That something is enjoyable does not make it inherently good (unless you ascribe to Utilitarianism). There are of course other factors beyond pure enjoyment that contribute to the inherent goodness of a thing. You don't need to enjoy a medical device in order for it to be able to do its job well, for example.

Rather, the distinction I was aiming at was between "process" and "product". But I suppose that wasn't very clear. My intention was not to start a flame war on capitalism.

In my opinion a process can be sustainable (and thus very likely profitable), but a product can not. In this case a business model is a process and the thing you put in your mouth (the hamburger) is the product. For the hamburger to be perfect we would need an ever escalating process. Constantly adding more complexity or work to refine the product we can create thus creating an unsustainable process.

If you want to create a hamburger in a sustainable and profitable way. The McDonalds process is most likely one of the best ways to do that. But it will NEVER create a perfect hamburger. The same is of course true with the opposite. A tiny connoisseur coffee shop can conceivably create a perfect cup of coffee and push the boundaries of the state of the art. But it will NEVER be a sustainable process. You need to make compromises in order to achieve that.

The point I was trying to make with the McDonalds example was simply that a scalable and successful business model necessarily implies that they are unable to create the "perfect" hamburger. They have practical limitations inherent to their process that makes it impossible. If they instead were running a two star luxury restaurant they might have a chance at making a perfect product. But that wouldn't be a scalable and sustainable business, and most like not very profitable either. Most luxury restaurants have extremely low margins and in many cases operates with considerable losses.

And just to make it clear, I am not trying to criticizes capitalism per se. I'm only basically stating the same thing the article is stating; that there is an inherent paradox in capitalism that makes it more complex to deal with than is directly apparent. Everyone that goes into business or deals with business indirectly through policy-making should be as aware as possible of this paradox, simply because it will prevent us from collectively ending up in a world with great processes but awful products or with great products but awful processes. Neither of which are very tempting scenarios.

This is the paradox of capitalism. Focus on creating something inherently good and it will not be sustainable. Focus on creating something sustainable and profitable and it will most likely not be as inherently good as it could be.

Example: McDonalds. Brilliant business model. Awful product.

I have experienced this scenario first hand. It made me quit my otherwise fairly well paid new job.

I was talking about Facebook the tool, i.e. how it is actually being used by people. Not Facebook the business model, which I agree with you is exactly as you describe, but is something completely different and separate from how it is perceived and used by ordinary people.

But you are profoundly fooling yourself if you believe that that is what Facebook is. If all you want to do is CC a list of people some photos, there are way better tools out there.

I think it's pretty obvious that Facebook has been, from the start, something very different. It is so ingrained in every little design decision and how they promote and talk about the service that it is a tool for managing your public persona. Not a simple communication tool, or replacement for email. Though they obviously offer that kind of functionality as well through Messages and Chat.

Facebook wants to enhance or maybe even change the way you interact socially. It's not a political agenda, but it is definitly a very conscious mission to change a large part of western culture.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about this. So let me state it again to make it clear:

FACEBOOK IS A TOOL FOR MANAGING YOUR PUBLIC PERSONA.

That's great! My concerns seems to have been unfounded then.

The jury is still out on the new privacy stuff though.

The macro difference in philosophy between Facebook and Google+ is that Google+ encourages social silos and obscurity (typical characteristics of geek/hacker culture, inherited from American liberalism and Californian utopism), while Facebook on the other hand encourages emphasis on context and sharing (in the two way interactive sense, not the one way broadcasting sense that for example Twitter promotes).

But that is exactly what is counterproductive about it. Because it forces you to make assumptions about the people you interact with. Have you asked all of your friends wether or not they might find your family photos interesting or not? Do you think there is no value in being exposed to things that is beyond your comfort zone? I might be a 25 year old party animal that doesn't care shit about family life. But seeing the odd family photo or two in my feed now and then might perhaps be good for me? And I might even enjoy it, even if I don't want to readily admit it to my self. There is also the dimension of making the social realm more "democratic". In the sense that it is a good thing if people are not intentionally excluded from social contexts. It helps create a more tolerant society and more robust and flexible social networks if the interaction in the networks are less clustered (something a hacker, with knowledge about how the internet works should be able to appreciate).

The somewhat technical explanation is that what Google is doing is implementing something very similar to "Social role theory" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_Theory), which emphasizes social roles as the defining characteristic used to understand social interaction. While Facebook rather is implementing something more akin to "Symbolic interaction theory" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_interaction).

Facebook Places is the feature I've been using the most on Facebook since it was introduced. And I can probably say the same thing about the rest of my circle of friends. It is very sad if they are intentionally going to limit such an awesome and well designed feature (way, way better than anything Foursquare, Gowalla or Twitter offers). Especially if they are going to require you to attach a status message or photo to every check in. Most check ins I do is simply to passively tell my friends where I am to coordinate social gatherings in an informal way without having to attach any greater meaning or social significance to the fact. I'm sharing my location. I might not necessarily be interested in sharing anything more than that.

It's a bit like saying: "Oh, by the way. I might be hanging out down at the bar tonight. Swing by if you feel like it". Without actually having to say it out loud.

edit: The more I think about this, the more angry I get. It feels like the Google+ nerd mafia is slowly destroying Facebook through bad influence. They simply don't understand how and why Facebook works and is popular. The whole privacy and circles stuff for example, which is just stupid. No normal person cares about that. Facebook is a tool for sharing and connecting and to limit that in the name of privacy is insanely counterproductive. It only adds a wet blanket of politics on something that is better understood through social psychology and sociology. Facebook used to understand that, but now it seems they've started to become distracted. Sad really.

> You know, stuff that actually kinda matters, and can improve people's lives.

Are you arguing that social networks don't improve peoples lives?

The problem with this model is obviously going to be producing the content and I'm surprised Gruber doesn't mention that.

Distributing books this way will add a lot of complexity and cost to an already expensive workflow. If this format succeeds I imagine it will have more in common with "games" than it has with traditional "books". The model for funding and producing these "books" would therefor probably be more similar to how games are produced.

The possibility to unify all my communication around common threads makes sense, being able to use it as a replacement for chat & email - as it has properties of both

Hey, I think Facebook just launched a very elegant solution for that. But what would the world come to if we would suddenly start using the same tools as our grandchildren for serious business?

This solution is utterly stupid. Why do they pay their engineers millions of dollars if they don't even know the basic semantics of the HTTP protocol?

Per RFC 2616, the POST method should be used for any context in which a request is non-idempotent: that is, it causes a change in server state each time it is performed, such as submitting a comment to a blog post or voting in an online poll.

The solution to the security problem is to not pass the authentication data in the query string which is intended for specifying parameters that vary the result of the performed query. Instead the authentication data should be passed as custom HTTP headers. E.g. "X-Fb-Sig-User: 218471".

I am very amazed that this is not common knowledge. This is a 20 years old protocol that might possibly be the most widely used and implemented high level communication protocol in human history. Get your shit together people. Seriously!

edit: I guess I was a bit quick to judge. Didn't realize that the request originates from an iframe in a browser where you can't easily set custom HTTP headers. Maybe it is possible to do with some XMLHttpRequest magic, but I can't think of a solution that would work of the top of my head.

Does anyone know where I can buy the PINO Digital Kettle Pro in Europe? Amazon refuses to ship it to my address in Sweden.

I like to call this the post-industrial synchronization psychosis. Our societies irrational desire for order that inevitably leads to total chaos.

In what way can a programming language be objectively better than another language? I thought they were tools for accomplishing specific goals? It's not like we hold competitions declaring hammers being better hammers than screwdrivers.

The reason why GDP is still used is because we have a lot of historical GDP data available and it is a fairly simple measure to understand and collect data on. Nor do we have a good enough alternative measure yet. We do have several candidates, but just as you state they all have weaknesses that needs to be understood.

The problem with economic sciences is that the GDP measure is used without critique, without fully understanding its trade-offs or by simply ignoring it deficiencies. That I believe is very careless when you are in the end dealing with the lives of real people.

Rich man in a ghetto or rich man among friends. Pick one.

Human development index (HDI)

Genuine progress indicator (GPI)

Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW)

Gross national happiness (GNH)

The Gini coefficient

Just to name a few. None of which is perfect, but at least better than the GDP when it comes to actually saying something about the quality and state of an economy.

> Yes. This is something else virtually every economist will agree on.

A statement which only help to make his point about economists being ignorant crocks. GDP is heavily doubted as a good measure of standard of living in all other social sciences.

Examples of what the GDP measure fails to take into account: ecological sustainability, wealth distribution, non-market transactions, underground economy, non-monetary economy, subsistence economy, quality improvements and inclusion of new products, what is being produced, externalities, sustainability, etc, etc...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#Limitati...

- Always show a useful fallback for empty views. Preferably visually distinct and "subordinate" to actual content (e.g. centered gray text instead of left aligned black text).

- Try to minimize the impact of destructive actions and try to offer the possibility to rollback potentially dangerous actions. Make dangerous actions look dangerous (e.g. make delete buttons red).

- Think about visual distance and distraction, especially in flowing text. Columns look good, but forces the eye to scan for the start of the next column when reaching the end of the previous. Don't place two equally important things right next to each other, etc...

I was not arguing about relational algebra or theoretical expressivity or logical equivalence or anything like that. I was simply stating that in practice most business problems are easier to model and more flexible to query in the MongoDB model.

Of course you need some time get used to thinking in terms of documents rather than tables and rows. But once you get used to the idea you can easily model most domains that occur in practice.

> MapReduce is a distributed computation engine. While it can be used in that way it was never meant to be a database system. BigTable is proof enough of that.

Yes, MapReduce in the Google and Hadoop sense is designed for massive batch processing. That's why BigTable and HBase exists. MapReduce in the CouchDB and MongoDB sense is a Turing complete query and processing layer built on top of a column store. In the CouchDB case MapReduce is the only way you can query the database.

http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Introduction_to_CouchDB_views http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/MapReduce http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Aggregation#Aggregation-...