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Ross Miller posted a link

YouTube - The FriendFeed Whiteboard

July 25 at 10:39 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Rick K, anand, Herman, Rachel L Fisher and 12 other people liked this

Jess Lee shared an item on Google Reader

Wicked Stop-Motion Video From PES

July 23 at 6:17 pm - Link

Evan Parker, Howard Trickey, Simon, Joel and minus3 liked this

whoa! very nice. - j1m

Awesome. - Mandi

Paul Buchheit posted a link

How your behaviour can change your children’s DNA - Times Online

July 20 at 2:00 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

j1m, Ana, xero, Steve Olson and 18 other people liked this

"Last week academics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, published research showing that overweight mothers produce offspring who become even heavier, resulting in the spread of obesity across the generations. “There is a worldwide obesity epidemic,” said Robert Waterland, a professor of paediatrics who led the study. “Why is everyone getting heavier and heavier? One hypothesis is that maternal obesity before and during pregnancy causes epigenetic changes in the ways genes are expressed.” Waterland’s research was done in mice for ethical reasons but population studies have suggested similar effects in humans. Marcus Pembrey of the Institute of Child Health at University College London identified 166 fathers who admitted smoking before they were aged 11, and whose sons had a sharply elevated risk of obesity. The implication was that smoking had altered the way their genes worked without actually changing the genes. In another study Pembrey and colleagues analysed records of an isolated Swedi" - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet

interesting and scary. - Edwin Khodabakchian

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Very interesting. - Colby Olson

Wow, I'm with Edwin. Scary. - Rahsheen(isSoAwesome)

now we're screwed... - fuchs

wow, even more reason to view obesity as the epidemic it really is. - AJ Kohn

This is actually good news. While the epigenome may cause heritable changes, it is also more flexible than those changes in DNA sequence. Thus, it's likely that genetic treatments that change the epigenome will be faster coming than those which try to fix more permanent changes in DNA sequence. - Joel

How Lamarckian. I'd love to revisit some high school classes now. - Paul Haahr

"Waterland and his colleagues studied the effect of maternal obesity in three generations of genetically identical mice, all with the same genetic tendency to overeat. One group of mice received a standard diet; the other a diet supplemented with the nutrients folic acid, vitamin B12, betaine and choline. The special 'methyl supplemented' diet enhances DNA methylation, a chemical reaction that silences genes." http://www.bcm.edu/news/item.c... and a link to the abstract for the paper: http://www.nature.com/ijo/jour... - Raymond

Kevin Fox posted a link

Dr. Horrible

July 18 at 11:49 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

fshamsi, Tudor Bosman, Harvey Simmons, Raymond and 16 other people liked this

Joss Whedon, Doogie Hauser, Firefly, Buffy, etc. If *Any* of these words mean anything to you, then this should too. If you have 24 minutes free, watch it! If you have 48 minutes: Watch it twice. Acts I and II are out and Act III comes out on Saturday, but on Sunday they all come down and you have to pay to see it. - Kevin Fox via Bookmarklet

"I've got a Ph.D. in Horrible-ness" nice - Joel

Just watched two of the three episodes today, and will watch the third tomorrow. Thanks for clueing us into this! Really damn cool! (and reminds me, unsurprisingly, of the fine "Once More, With Feeling" musical Buffy episode :-) - Adam Lasnik

Just watched Act I and it's delightful. Out of the names you mentioned, I am familiar with Doogie Hauser only. Now I am going to look up the others too. But before that, Act II and III. Thanks. - Vinay | विनय

NPH is the man! - Raymond

They make good use of counterpoint, for those that are into it... :P - Dan Hsiao

Paul Buchheit posted a link

Official Google Blog: Our Googley advice to students: Major in learning

July 16 at 2:23 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Steve, Simon, Marc Chung, BeeLing and 58 other people liked this

"Here's a real-life example, a challenge a team of our engineers once faced: designing a spell-checker for the Google search engine. The routine solution would be to run queries through a dictionary. The non-routine, creative solution is to use the query corrections and refinements that other users have made in the past to offer spelling suggestions for new queries. This approach enables us to correct all the words that aren't in the dictionary, helping many more users in the process." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet

"a team of our engineers" = Noam :) - Paul Buchheit

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This was actually one of my favorite interview questions early on at Google ("how would you write a spell corrector?"). Most applicants fumbled around and needed quite a bit of help. Noam, on the other hand, had the best answer I ever heard. It was immediately obvious that he was smarter than me. - Paul Buchheit

What did Noam say? Was it the one Google lists as "The non-routine, creative solution is to use the query corrections and refinements that other users have made in the past to offer spelling suggestions for new queries."? - Philipp Lenssen

That's a very basic summary Philipp -- the actual algorithm is quite sophisticated. - Paul Buchheit

"Learning, it turns out, is a lifelong major." Amen! - Nenad Nikolic via twhirl

@paul: its wrapper can use some common-sense improvements, though. - Alex

@paul Noam was a legend at Duke (at least among the Putnam-inclined math majors.) I love the feeling of asking an interview question I really like a few dozen times and then having someone come along who gives a better answer than the one I came up with. Of course, that raises the bar for all subsequent candidates. :) - Josh

I always worry about a company or organization that hires the same types of thinkers, even if they are thinking in a good way. Some of the best ideas I've ever had have come from trying to answer the questions of pretty dumb people who just weren't thinking through something. It's best to have a mix to truly spur on creativity. - Andrew Leyden

That algorithm explains why searching for an obscure word (vetted) causes it to give me search results for "Dictionary". - Gabe Schaffer

@penguinsix: one can quite safely assume that an average googler (and non-googler) has enough interaction with the outside world to be routinely presented with such questions. Hiring them might be useful to increase the concentration of them, though =) - Alex

Paul, That's a great example, I use Google Search as a spell check tool all the time. esp when FireFox and MSFT spell checks don't offer the right suggestions, or pick up words like blogosphere. Google always gets it right. - Tac Anderson

Not to be nitpicking but Google doesn't always get it right Tac :) http://images.google.com/image... - Philipp Lenssen

I've found that companies that ask interview questions about problems they've actually faced or solved have a better chance of understanding the candidate than those that make a question up. - Robin Barooah

It's interesting to see Google saying "Major in learning" on their blog, when it seems like the first step in filtering for many of their jobs is "Did you major in computer science?" I guess saying "Major in computer science with a minor in learning" is a bit more awkward. ;-) - Keith Pelczarski

Jeanette Martinez had a new status message on Gmail/Google Talk

“Come walk with me! https://www.kintera.org/faf/r/...”

July 15 at 4:30 pm - Link

Joel and Tudor Bosman liked this

MG Siegler posted a link

Early iPhone App Store metrics: Free iPhone apps get better reviews than paid ones » VentureBeat

July 14 at 2:27 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Joel, Amit Patel, Dean Terry, mike "glemak" dunn and 3 other people liked this

j1m posted a link

The opposite of eureka II: nature -- Mole 118 (17): 3817 -- Journal of Cell Science

July 12 at 10:44 am - via Reshare - Link

Joel, bob and Jim Norris liked this

Good article, especially for thinking about molecular genetics. One way to think about it is that we often apply occam's razor in the wrong space. It's not that proteins or DNA should be the smallest molecules that will do the job, but that they should be the easiest to assemble from the parts available at the time. - j1m

Simon posted a link

Photo of the Day: Chinese anti-terror Segway commandos - Autoblog

July 3 at 5:40 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Ana, Ryan, Derek, minus-one and 26 other people liked this

Absolutely awesome. - j1m

Totally Johnny Quest. Too bad they don't hover, but that's awesome enough as it is! - Tad - just Tad

That is... awesome... - Daniel Bruce

I'll see your Chinese commandos and... raise you Roman Centurion dudes: http://lucylc.smugmug.com/gall... - Richard Chen

Karen Padham Taylor posted a link

Science News / Where Funny Faces Come From

June 23 at 11:10 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Mitchell Tsai, Ian, Mike Cornell, Shannon Jiménez and 4 other people liked this

Hmm what does Darwin say about the plain ol' ugly face? - Steve Craft

Dominic Yang posted a link

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol

June 17 at 1:52 am - Link

Joel, Anne Bouey, Shannon Jiménez, Andrew Meyer and 6 other people liked this

maybe we can buy cheaper gas in the future. - Dominic Yang

Carbon-negative? Interesting! - Jim Norris

Jess Lee shared an item on Google Reader

Must Watch: Awesome New Hellboy II: The Golden Army Trailer!!

April 3 at 4:28 pm - Link

Joel liked this

Paul Buchheit liked a story on Reddit

Why the female flirt is wasting her time

March 30 at 5:37 pm - Link

Erick Jimenez, Joel, Nico Steegmann, Slippy Lane and 9 other people liked this

So, can we have a large pile of labelled examples we, the clueless, can train on? We could make flash cards and stuff. This would be useful to know even for people who aren't looking. - ⓞnor

Loved this quote: ""The average bloke either doesn't realise that we fancy him until we are giving birth to his children in the labour ward; or he presumes all women fancy him all the time. "God was playing some kind of prank when he developed two sexes." " - Adam Lasnik

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This is my life in 2 sentences: "When shown images of women making advances, men tended to misread the sexual cues as friendliness. At the same time they mistook photos of women merely being friendly for sexual interest." - Erica Baker

"like" ⓞnor's comment. Heehee... flash cards. - Shannon Jiménez

Where's the evidence? I want examples! - Jim Norris

@Jim's comment. The evidence would be in life. XP - Amy Tureen

That's what they would call "unsupervised learning". - ⓞnor

I want to see data. This article just says general stuff like "far less accurate" or "women overestimate". If the numbers were conclusive they would have made the editorial cut. This is exactly the kind of news article that would get published on scant data or thin margins. - Jon McAlister

I agree Jon, this article is fluff. It seemed like the kind of thing that would have generate an interesting discussion on FriendFeed though, and maybe someone will dig up the real data... - Paul Buchheit

Not only are the data buried, so is the peer-reviewed article. At http://reddit.com/info/6cu5e/c... Livescience has its take on the paper. More tellingly, a purported participant confirms what others noticed: subjects see photographs, not others directly; the protocol could induce systemic errors: http://reddit.com/info/6dycb/c... - John Lam

Corrected title: "Why the female flirt with Indiana University undergraduates is wasting her time". - Igor Krivokon

Facial Action Coding System is system for recognizing fake smiles - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... - As a die-hard geek, I'm lousy at recognizing emotions just by looking at the eyes (There are some tests where you are given pictures of faces, with just the eyes, and you have to identify the emotion. I score around 10%). - Mitchell Tsai

Here's a great resource page on facial expressions - http://www.kasrl.org/facial_ex... - and the wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... - Mitchell Tsai

I love that quote, too, Adam. - April Buchheit

So the actual female flirting advice to be taken from this? Girls, if you want to get us into bed, you only have to be friendly (we'll do the rest!). If you want to be "just friends"....try flirting! :-D - Slippy Lane

"like" Slippy's comment. Also love the quote that Adam posted "The average bloke either doesn't realise that we fancy him until we are giving birth to his children in the labour ward; or he presumes all women fancy him all the time." Classic! - Emily Miller

The problem with the study is that the subjects were shown photographs. You cannot tell from a photograph!! They should've been shown videos. - niniane

I think it's more deeply flawed than that. They should have used a 50-50 mix of experimenters who wanted a date with the subjects and experimenters who didn't. - j1m

Jennie Lin posted a link

What Every American Should Know About the Middle East

April 1 at 2:03 pm - Link

Clare Dibble, Mike Reynolds, Joel, Leandro Koiti Sato and 3 other people liked this

"What’s depressing is the fact that this only took me 30 minutes to write, and you 2 minutes to read. Yet most people in the United States, including those in the media, the house of representatives, and probably even the Pentagon, lack even this cursory level of knowledge about the region." - Jennie Lin

Another page of stuff you might not know: http://dmiessler.com/writing/t... - Jim Norris

Glenn Slaven liked a story on Reddit

Paul Graham: How to Disagree

March 30 at 2:46 am - Link

Kellie Miller, Cartwright Reed, Joel, Haris bin Ali and 4 other people liked this

This is a great post about how to argue your case. - Robert Scoble

Nicole Simon posted a message

“Friend Feed request: thanks for suggesting these people. Don't want them. Show me a new selection!”

March 30 at 1:34 am - Link

Casey Sheldon, Joe Beda, Kevin Johnson, Seek Ground and 9 other people liked this

especially not when they do not even share anything ... - Nicole Simon

YES, if I didn't add them the first time I don't want to see them the next time. - Johannes Kleske

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a next page would be enough. i get why they recommend them, but i want more. ;) - Nicole Simon

I TOTALLY agree that a next button is hugely needed. I'll talk with them about this on Monday when I go to interview them. - Robert Scoble

Just put a "Show another suggestion" button along with "Subscribe" - Mete Donmez

By the way, liking a comment should be possible, and while there why not the capability to comment on a comment? - Mete Donmez

Mete I assume their algo is setup to disply the most relevant users to you. Random shuffling would not be the same, which is why pagination of it makes more sense. And for the commenting - because that would be a forum then. ;) - Nicole Simon

Should say "Hit me again." ('and give a wack to these users if u never want to see them recommended again') - Also whats with the 'imaginary' tab, thats a bit star trek meets jennifer aniston. - ben barren

well some i just do not want to subscribe to now - for example because they do not have anything in there yet. but later i might. i do check out for similar reasons the friendfiender app in facebook and prefer to ignore them every single time. ;) - Nicole Simon

How about a nice "random friend" button? You know, just for kicks. - Vince DeGeorge

Here are some people that none of your friends follow ;-) - Greg K.

Bret Taylor shared an item on Google Reader

Street View in the API (or, How I Spent My Summer "Vacation")

March 27 at 12:40 pm - Link

Joel, accesine, Evan Parker, Tom Stocky and 3 other people liked this

Ross Miller posted a link

Google Streetview Camera Car Fleet Set to Invade America

March 27 at 3:07 pm - Link

Счастье! [umbrella mode], John Lam, Joel, Voyagerfan5761 and 12 other people liked this

Oh no, it's the rise of the (economical, no frills) machines! - Paul Buchheit

If they were going for 'Don't notice me, I'm just a car' I would have painted the mountings the same grey as the car, and maybe incorporated them into bicycles on roof-racks. - Kevin Fox

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Shouldn't they use Ferrari's so they can take more pictures faster? :) - peter

Only if they want a lot of pictures of freeway shoulders and police cars... - Kevin Fox

I mean... they could have at least gotten creative with the colors... maybe it's because geniuses choose green... - Ross Miller

wow ..it's an arabesque image - Jascanu

Note the post is from July 2007. "and maybe incorporated them into bicycles on roof-racks" Camouflaging sounds a little more disturbing rather than less... in fact they should probably have a big warning sign or something saying "smile, you're on street view" or whatever. Here's the *cough* street view noindex sign by the way, you can post it outside: http://blogoscoped.com/files/s... - Philipp Lenssen

This is fine {emt:100,10,its amazing} - Jascanu

Coming next on Top Gear: Google in a Reasonably-Priced Car! - Richard Chen

What I don't understand is this - my Mother's $300 digital camera can recognise faces and automatically adjust the focus for them, so why can't Google automatically recognise faces and blank them at the capture stage? Would save a LOT of hassle. - Slippy Lane

Bret Taylor posted an entry on FriendFeed Blog

Post your FriendFeed comments back to Twitter

March 24 at 5:23 pm - Link

Leandro Koiti Sato, accesine, chartreuse, Rick Castello and 42 other people liked this

Ana says, "We're bringing Twitterback. Yeah." Does anyone get that? - Paul Buchheit

You forgot "We're bringing Twitterback. Yeah. [deep voice]" - Ana

Show 36 more comments

sending this from FriendFeed? - Marshall Kirkpatrick

Marshall: not sure if I am understanding your comment, but reply-via-Twitter only works on Twitter items, not all items. - Bret Taylor

right on FF team .. today has been a good day for the "conversation" - Steven Hodson

awesome - mathew ingram

This is a very cool feature! - Sue Murphy

Loving this feature. - Seek Ground

I got the Twitterback. nice one, Ana. - David Vasileff

A small bug: after logging into Twitter as required, clicking “change user” brings up an Ajax popup with a mistaken message: “You are currently logged in to Twitter as paultoo”. I just confirmed i did not tweet as Paultoo. - John Lam

Interesting. Interesting indeed. - Bwana McCall

I would say this was a blazing fast feature implementation along with new service additions. - Turker Keskinpala

John, the 'paultoo' display bug should be fixed. Sorry about that -- the html had it hard coded and of course it looked right to me :) - Paul Buchheit

still not sure how this works, though :( - Mario Sundar

come on Marshall - get with the program! :) - MG Siegler

Paul - that was almost the title of my post, as was something with 'twitterback girl' - MG Siegler

@MG - twitterback mountain?? :) - Steven Hodson

@steven - solid as well - MG Siegler

Once again, you guys have responded to user feature requests with great speed. I assume comment "postback" (you can have that, lol) will soon be enabled for other services too? Soon there will be no need to leave friendfeed other than to find new material to share here. Keep up the good work y'all. - Slippy Lane

I wonder, does commenting on blogs entries in FriendFeed also post the comments into the blog post itself? Let's try this. - Christopher Yeo

Christopher, if there's an api to do that we'll definitely add it to the list. - Paul Buchheit

@slippery Lane .. now if we can just get 'Like' for comments and nested threading I think most would be really happy camper and the FF team could take .. hmmm .. a couple of hours off to themselves for their 20% projects <snicker> - Steven Hodson

@Paul .. with Disqus you can reply to comments via email so I imagine something should be able to be worked out for that - Steven Hodson

excellent... - don loeb

Paul, no apology needed. I'm happy to help, especially against bugs hard-coded to be invisible to yourself but visible to everyone else. :-) - John Lam

@Paul, thanks for your comment about blog APIs. Does that mean the FF team is looking into auto posting of blog comments into Blogger (assuming that the APIs for that is available)? - Christopher Yeo

thanks guys - Devin Anderson

FF had a fast turn on integrating user comments, hurrah! - ryan

Arigatou! - Mike Reynolds

I like this. But I wonder if this is going to reduce Pownce usage? - Bill Bittner

what happens when i edit a twittered comment? - Alex Gawley

Nice. You guys just keep listening to your users! In that spirit, I would like FF to read all my email and write my blog posts. Sound good? ; ) - Carla Thompson

I would also like FF to layout my clothes in the morning, make my breakfast and drive me to work. Come on, Kevin... Make it so! :-) - Chris Reed

@Steven Hodson: Yeah, in fact I think you and I (and others) have mentioned similar things all over ff. Of course, my comments don't seem to get noticed by Paul and the gang, when the guy after me says the same thing so much more concisely! :-) - Slippy Lane

@slippery lane .. ya but then we're not Fred Wilson either are we :) - Steven Hodson

Dozens of people have requested "Like" for comments; since we don't have it yet, I assume it'd require a schema change or something. Or maybe it's that Jim doesn't like me anymore :) - ƃuɐʞ

Liking comments is technically simple, but it deserves some careful consideration on the UI side. Every feature has a very real cost in terms of added complexity. - Paul Buchheit

@Paul - I can definitely appreciate the UI side of it especially when dealing with a limited canvas like web pages - but it is good to hear that you are thinking on it at least - Steven Hodson

Me, I'd put a drop arrow by the comment icon or commenter name for voting on a specific comment (allows for future per-comment expansion too). Then I'd hide the vote count and voter names in the "Show n more comments" link. Although to be honest, if I was doing it, it would probably never work seeing as how I'm much better at metalworking than web design. - Slippy Lane

fantastic, thx - timepilot

I often end up seeing the reply twice (once as a comment, once as a Twitter), can the duplicate somehow be quashed? - ⓞnor

Jim Norris posted a link

2008 March - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog

March 22 at 4:48 pm - Link

Joel, Sophie Yip and Chris White liked this