Neha Narula
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Yelp
Neha Narula wrote a review on Yelp
Monday at 5:02 am - Link
"I hate it when businesses take advantage of customers when they're at their most vulnerable. Like, when you're standing on a corner waiting for your taxi to arrive, looking at your watch and freaking…" - Neha Narula
cab companies are the worst: http://www.yelp.com/biz/yellow... - Roshan Vyas
Twitter
omar posted a message on Twitter
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omar posted a message on Twitter
Blog
Jess Lee posted an entry on jessblog
September 19 at 12:08 pm - Link
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Natala Menezes posted a message on Twitter
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MG Siegler posted a message on Twitter
FriendFeed
Bret Taylor posted a link
September 10 at 8:58 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link
"Amazon.com customers will be able to buy wine through the e-tailer's Web site as early as this month, a spokesman for the Napa Valley Vintners Association said Wednesday. Amazon has been working with the nonprofit group, which represents 315 vintners in the Napa Valley, to arrange workshops with wine producers that might be interested in selling wine through the retail giant, said Terry Hall, the group's communications director." - Bret Taylor via Bookmarklet
If that doesn't work for you, Bret, I'd be happy to bring you some! - Anne Bouey
Winery-to-consumer shipping still illegal in 15 states? Totally archaic. - Richard Chen
No wine to Massachusetts - why? Puritans! Silly belt buckles on their shoes Puritans! - Andreas Matern
FriendFeed
Neha Narula posted a link
Hurricanes, as seen from orbit - The Big Picture - Boston.com
September 10 at 3:12 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link
found via kottke.org - Neha Narula via Bookmarklet
Blog
niniane posted an entry on Niniane's Blog
September 5 at 12:16 am - Link
The next time I move (and have to change my address anyway) I'm totally signing up for one of those we-scan-your-paper-mail services. - ⓞnor
Consider the filing cabinet to be the audit trail table in your database. Every time the database changes, the audit trail table has to be updated, so indexing that table adds extra cost to every change in the DB. However, it makes the audit trail easy to query. If you don't index that table, every audit lookup requires an expensive table scan that bogs down your whole server for minutes at a time. That expense might be so high that you don't do audit queries even when you want to. - Gabe
What's an audit query, and why would anyone ever do one to their old phone bills? - ⓞnor
The audit table in your database keeps track of when something in your database changed. You would do an audit query when you want to find out when some field changed or what the value was on a particular date, for example. You would want to do this with your old phone bills when you want to figure out the last time your rates changed or to see how this month's usage compared to this month a year ago. - Gabe
My point is that keeping the data unindexed makes it almost impossible to use, so why bother keeping it at all? - Gabe
Because "almost impossible" is different from actually impossible, and because the large cost of finding those few items you need is less than the combined small cost of indexing the many items you file. - ⓞnor
Sure, Onor, but odds are that the task of going through the unsorted mess would be substantial enough that you just wouldn't do it, or would find other ways around it like just asking the phone company. - Gabe
Sounds good to me. But if the IRS comes knocking, you might really want those records... - ⓞnor
i like sinophore's comment on your blog (but i like commenting here better). i had a gigantic pile of bills/statements/etc in my closet which i had to sort through before i moved :( it was painful. - Neha Narula
The write penalty might be worth it if you ever need an incredibly fast seek performance... - Steve Lacey
Oh God, I can't stop laughing at the "Sure, Onor" comment. (Gabe, that "O" is an egg.) - niniane
Niniane: egg? That "O" is CIRCLED LATIN SMALL LETTER O (according to http://www.fileformat.info/inf...), so what makes it an egg? - Gabe
Oh, it's the latin little-o? Maybe you're right then, and it's Onor. - niniane
Does it look like an egg or something? - Gabe
sunny side up. - Sanjeev Singh
The story is #7 on the Reddit front page. - Gary Burd
I am amused at how much discussion this post is generating. I hope RB doesn't mind. - niniane
I'm pretty sure you can't just uncircle an o like that, it messes up the phoenetics. - j1m
Anyway, I agree with ⓞnor's weights (as always) -- the point of saving papers is that there's a tiny, tiny, tiny chance that you'll need them. Not a chance that you'll want them really bad -- I don't know what that chance is -- but the chance that you'll *need* them. In that case you just search through the damn things, even if you have a file cabinetfull it won't take more than an evening to look at each one. In my experience this happens about once every 10 years. - j1m
Neha: Why did you have to sort them? Why not just move 'em all in unopened boxes? My name: we Circlevanians are used to people mangling our names. Call me Onor, Nor, @Nor, whatev'z. - ⓞnor
And if it turns out that you do need to search, just file then: manual incremental filing is probably less efficient than manual batch filing. - Larry Greenfield
Some people on the blog assert that there's some kind of hard latency requirement for lookup. Those people are wrong. John K Lin asserts that carefully filing your bank statements into neat little alphabetized folders is warm and human, but putting it all in storage for later and getting on with your life is cold and robot-like. John K Lin is weird. - ⓞnor
eggy: two things. First, there was a bunch of extra stuff like envelopes that I didn't need to move. Second, it gives me happiness to put things in file folders. - Neha Narula
Google Reader
Neha Narula shared an item on Google Reader
September 5 at 12:46 pm - Link
baker has a blog! - Neha Narula
Google Reader
Neha Narula shared an item on Google Reader
September 4 at 8:44 pm - Link
jesus christ. - Neha Narula
Google Reader
Tessa MacDuff shared an item on Google Reader
September 4 at 7:28 pm - Link
How to hang picture frames. Useful and hilarious: "I am the reason the plaster is crumbling under the weight of the nail, it's my fault, and maybe if I had just tried harder his life wouldn't be so unbearable." - Tessa MacDuff
Twitter
omar posted a message on Twitter
FriendFeed
Neha Narula posted a link
McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition).
September 1 at 1:49 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link
hamlet, the facebook news feed. via omar - Neha Narula via Bookmarklet
Blog
Gabor Cselle posted an entry on Gabor's Blog
August 29 at 2:08 pm - Link
congrats! i hope your trip is lots of fun. - Neha Narula
Flickr
MG Siegler published a photo on Flickr
I just had to.
August 29 at 2:02 pm - Link
You witty sonofabitch. - Josh
Awesome use of the new someecards build your own card tools. - Christopher Sacca
Very nice... - Bindu Reddy
Google Reader
Neha Narula shared an item on Google Reader
August 28 at 10:46 am - Link
awesome. we need more fashion in technology. - Neha Narula
Google Reader
Neha Narula shared an item on Google Reader
August 27 at 10:36 pm - Link
a piece on the head chef at el bulli, who is one of the geniuses of our time. - Neha Narula
Google Reader
Neha Narula shared an item on Google Reader
August 27 at 5:45 pm - Link
these are awesome. take 10 minutes out of your day and watch the BMW one at #2. - Neha Narula
FriendFeed
Jess Lee posted a link
Sex and the Olympic city - Times Online
August 25 at 10:41 am - via Bookmarklet - Link
"I am often asked if the Olympic village - the vast restaurant and housing conglomeration that hosts the world's top athletes for the duration of the Games - is the sex-fest it is cracked up to be. My answer is always the same: too right it is. I played my first Games in Barcelona in 1992 and got laid more often in those two and a half weeks than in the rest of my life up to that point. That is to say twice, which may not sound a lot, but for a 21-year-old undergraduate with crooked teeth, it was a minor miracle." - Jess Lee via Bookmarklet
wow....wow, the picture is so funny after reading the article...the two legs and the one finger - Pokai
It is all about Sex! We still human, well maybe not Robert Scoble he is a Cyborg! LOl - Igor The Troll
Stay classy, Times. - Matthew Davidson via twhirl
dammit jess, you beat me to the punch. - Chieze Okoye
I want to know if she has a license to sell those crawfish. - ha3rvey
Pics or it didn't happen. - sergiooo
Google Reader
Neha Narula shared an item on Google Reader
August 25 at 10:49 am - Link
do you live in the mission? get involved! attend the supervisor debate. - Neha Narula
FriendFeed
omar posted a message
“i have succumbed to friendfeed. now i feel like my photo. but i'm having fun!”
August 23 at 3:06 pm - Link
FriendFeed
Jim Norris posted a link
Look! A Printer For Your Latte
Look! A Printer For Your Latte
August 22 at 10:59 am - via Bookmarklet - Link
Very cool! - Karen Padham Taylor
soon we'll see "hand-made latte art" advertised. - Neha Narula
ok, this is just awesome! +1 - tagami
This is really cool... One thing though, the reason I gravitate towards coffee shops that have latte art is that there is a high correlation between latte-art and good coffee... Now with these machines, it might no longer be the case :( - Bindu Reddy
you know who has good latte art? cafe del dogge in palo alto. very creative stuff - Charles Hudson
@Jim Not as good as my Guinness shamrocks on St. Patrick's Day! - Anne Bouey
I love that one of their demo images is the Utah teapot. - seth
Cafe del Doge: Venice, Cairo, Tokyo, Palo Alto. - j1m
is that true j1m? That's awesome - Adam Kazwell
Hmm, that's awesome. Excellent advertising opportunity - Sam Allan
It looks like it's depositing chocolate or cinnamon powder. Does anybody have more information about how it works? - Gabe
FriendFeed
Paul Buchheit posted a message
“Here is an idea that will offend music lovers: When exploring new music, I want the player to jump directly into the middle of the song, not start at the beginning. It should be more like changing channels on the radio. It only takes me a second to decide if the station is worth listening to, but...”
August 21 at 11:41 pm - Link
most songs start slow, so it take a long time to decide if I start at the beginning. If I like it, then maybe I'll go back. The same thing goes for the "next song" button on the iPod. Speaking of, why doesn't the iPhone have a "next song" button? I have to unlock the thing every time I get tired of the current song. The radio is much closer to what I want, except the music is generally awful and there are commercials, but I like to jump fast. - Paul Buchheit
like an Amazon preview but would actually finish the song? - Nice Fish Films
iTunes and Amazon samples do that - Chris White
Hop,skip and a jump! - Jason Brooks
love listening to the radio on road trips for that very reason....but there is so much music that takes longer than a few seconds to understand and appreciate. how to make that work? - Hayes Haugen
Yeah, I never tried Amazon, but that's closer, though obviously I want the full song there. Also, it needs to be faster song-to-song, and of course I want more randomness. This thought inspired by http://friendfeed.com/e/d13f6a... - Paul Buchheit
When will the artists learn? Music should start out on a high and then just build from there! - Raymond
Most movies also start out really slow and boring. I've found that I prefer to start in the middle and then only watch the beginning later on if I liked the rest of the movie (it's like a prequel that fills in the bits that didn't make sense). It also makes them a little less predictable. - Paul Buchheit
Paul: Whoops, you just posted a beta link :) - Eric Florenzano
double-click the iphone button while it's locked and it will popup an ipod dialog to pause, forward or go back. - David Vasileff
Thanks for the tip David. That helps, but is still doesn't really solve my problem. I want to go to the next song without using my eyes. Imagine if you're drunk and mostly asleep, or like jogging -- you don't want to have to focus on some touch screen just to skip whatever annoying song popped up on shuffle. Fixed Eric :) - Paul Buchheit
Paul, if you are using headset with control button, just double-click the headset button to advance? if you are using regular headphones then you're out of luck. may be a good app idea to have a music player where you can just shake to advance. - David Vasileff
Paul, I like your priorities: "like if you are drunk, mostly asleep, or maybe exercising..." - Clare Dibble
The suggestion seems to make sense for certain contexts. As for movies, I noticed that pretty much all movies that are boring in the first 5 minutes also will be boring for the rest of the movie -- and vice versa, a good movie will also have a good, interesting start. - Philipp Lenssen
As a song writer I deem this ridiculous, you need the whole experience, its the juxtaposition of the sections that is the song. A trailer taste is fine (chorus maybe) but I wouldn't want to judge a book by reading a page in the middle. - HollowMarkeD
Suggestion: extend ID3 to include "preview in" and "preview out" values (offsets from 0:00). The artist/label can decide which snippet is most representative, and embed the tags at production. Players can then fade in/out, enforce max length, string previews together for one-click album previews, etc. Maybe even allow multiple in/out pairs per track (player blends smoothly) to give artist/label more creative control. Pardon if something like this is already implemented somewhere. - Amir Gharaat
same with buying a cd, let me play track 6, if it is good, maybe i'll buy it ... same with a novel, have a look at page 145, if it hooks you, buy it ... this paul bucheit guy is pretty smart - Gregory Lent
in iTunes when I want to find new stuff, i go through my downloaded collection hitting the right arrow (with shuffle on), and use the mouse to keep jumping in the middle of each song I land on. I think this should be easier... and is probably a good candidate for a specialized button, jump to "middle" of next song. - nadim
@HollowMarkeD Is it better to judge a book by reading just the first page? Reading an entire book before forming an opinion is for reviewers, not channel surfers. Also, there's a wide range of how people experience music. For example, I usually don't notice song structure, story, or lyrics, and my 5-second judgement of a song is a good predictor of how I'd feel about the whole thing. - seth
I'm with Amir: think "movie trailer" for music (minus the deep voice introduction) with the most significant snippets selected by the artist (or the record company, ok) - dario
I wish Amoeba had this feature on their winamp listening stations - that's exactly how I start evaluating a new CD. - John Harding
for dance/electronica - yep. Tiesto's sales would double. - Bill de hÓra
Twitter
Natala Menezes posted a message on Twitter
Blog
August 20 at 12:29 pm - Link
it seems almost... wrong to see christian louboutin flats. - Neha Narula
FriendFeed
Jim Norris posted a link
Crispy on the Outside » This Week in Bacon
August 3 at 10:12 am - via Bookmarklet - Link
"This week’s feature is a bacon alarm clock, the cleverly named Wake n’ Bacon, that wakes you up with the smell of real cooked bacon, rather than the traditional, grating, cruel, terrible, gruesome alarm-clock sound." - Jim Norris via Bookmarklet
LOL, one would quickly come to hate bacon. :P - Tanath
FriendFeed
Paul Buchheit posted a link
August 17 at 12:16 am - via Bookmarklet - Link
"At Maker Faire earlier this year, Robert Bruce Thompson gave a talk (video unfortunately truncated at both ends) that highlighted how attitudes towards chemistry have changed since he was a kid, starting with a tour of the powerful chemistry sets available in 1964 (courtesy of the Sears Catalog), and tracing the dumbing down and rising fear of liability that doomed them, until, as Kevin Kelly noted in a recent review of Robert's book, we reached "the so-called chemistry sets today which boldly (and insanely) advertise they contain 'No Chemicals!'" Why are we failing at math and science? Because it isn't fun any more. When you put safety on the highest altar, what do you give up? When fear of lawsuits -- not to mention fear of technology -- drives product design, marketing, and public policy, you eliminate science at its roots, in the natural experimentation of kids who want to know how the world works." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet
Excellent point that I had not considered in the declining interest in math and science. You can't study science because it's "not safe", and why study math if you can't relate it to real, good hands-on science? - klecu
feels like i've been reading that the usa (and england) has been failing at math and science since i was a boy - Bill de hÓra
Bill, it's true. The American education system has been gutted. It blows my mind what qualifies for classes these days; it's certainly nothing like it was when I was a kid. Kids are taught only what is necessary for them to pass nationwide, standardized achievement tests. They're not trained for adulthood at all. Balance a bank account? Better learn that at home because you're not going to be taught that at school. It's embarrassing. - Akiva Moskovitz
Bill: Yeah. Every year in August there is a huge hoohaa over grades and pass marks. The number of students taking ANY of the sciences comes up every year without fail. The decining number of nuclear physicists, for example graduating from UK institutions is going to make the governments nuclear program more difficult. - Roberto Bonini
"The guy got off the phone and asked 'you're not making any drugs down here are you?" I said no!! He smiled - he winked at my parents. Then he said the most unexpected thing: he said the gang at the labs offered to give me a tour of the labs anytime I wanted." - Clare Dibble
The same discussion happens over here in the UK on a regular basis - particularly when the exam results come out in August. - Andy Davies
akiva, "balance a bank account" that's another matter - very little math is more important than compound interest, practically speaking ;) - Bill de hÓra
I wouldn't blame it on incidents like this. Most of the developing countries (like Taiwan, Singapore, etc) have excellent Math & Science education, despite the fact that most students in school have zero access to chemicals, labs, or any interesting equipment whatsoever. Those countries are usually even more restrictive on random experimentation. The real reason Math & Science isn't emphasized in the US is that we glorify other paths to success (business, or reality TV shows, or being an athlete, etc.) - Piaw Na
I don't think this article has much to do with the real failure in our schools (elementary, middle, high school) to teach kids basic math and science, and more importantly, to make it INTERESTING. - Neha Narula
Well, here in the USSR (when it still was) things were pretty restricted, but the 'Young chemist' set still contained everything from hydrochloric acid to kalium permanganate to Prussian blue and more exotic (nowdays) substances a kid with an itch could use to blast or poison if not half a block than at least the neighbor's apartment. There weren't any accidents widely reported :) - Alex
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