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Paul Buchheit
I am Paul. I choose to believe what I was programmed to believe.
Confidence required - http://sivers.org/confidence
Jesse Stay, Mark Trapp, Rob Michael (Atmos Trio) and 2 other people liked this
"It was all very humbling. So humbling, that I found it hard to do anything at all. I had designed and announced my new company. I was psyched for it to exist. But when it came down to doing the necessary work, I hesitated and procrastinated. “Who am I to be starting another company? I’m just going to fuck it up like last time.“ After all I’ve learned, I can’t believe anyone actually thinks they’ll succeed in the complex world of business. Don’t they see all the really smart people who have tried and failed? I can’t believe how foolish I was to start my first company. Just me in my bedroom with no experience, making a little website, when I was up against giant IPO-funded competitors. I was an over-confident punk, thinking I had the answer, and everyone else didn’t. But it worked."
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
Real bears playing Hockey - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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durbin, Orlando Pozo and Gary Burd liked this
Where am I?
R_ C, آریـوبرزن, Susan Beebe and 8 other people liked this
Junkyard? :D
- AJ Batac
Aboard the Nautilus
- Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)
Outside the Burningman Cuckoo clock?
- Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)
Whoa, I thought that was a Dalek.
- PENGUIN: MAJOR CAPS LOCK
In front of a computer ;-)
- Tim Tyler
sometime it happens !!
- Nayan
Reynolds aluminum recycling museum ?
- Eric Logan
TARDIS
- m9m, Crone of FriendFeed
Some kind of temple.
- Cole Jolley
Cole Jolley, I think the same. But who knows?
- ashish
looks like it's all recycled/repurposed materials - some sort of altar maybe... definitely would like more of a panoramic shot
- Chris Heath
Don't know where you are but I love the recycled junk sculpture!
- Rachel Lea Fox
Killer garage sale?
- Susan Beebe
Some serious windchimes?
- Eric Borisch
thanks for putting us curious georges out of our misery && so when did the real-time email feature go live? it was just brought to my attention by this: http://friendfeed.com/ericlog...
- Chris Heath
We've had realtime email integration for quite a while -- check the blog for the exact date.
- Paul Buchheit
thanks for the quick reply paul... so was this a favorite from the event? or just an easy image to stump us with?
- Chris Heath
I thought it was an interesting structure.
- Paul Buchheit
Wow--I was close!
- Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)
from iPhone
Open as in water, the fluid necessary for life - http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009...
lgalli, Robert Scoble, Hutch Carpenter and 34 other people liked this
When is Facebook going to give people open access to the address book? :)
- Bindu Reddy
They already do. My DROID syncs with my Facebook and Google contacts, converging them both for the same contact on either network. Don't ask me how that's done though
- LANjackal
You mean your DRIOD can get to the email addresses of your facebook contacts?
- Bindu Reddy
""Open" is a great thing. Everyone likes it." Maybe everyone you know ;)
- Clare Dibble
a friend of mine has a bb storm and it integrates w/ facebook (when i call him, my facebook avatar shows up... etc etc) -- the Droid being able to combine contact lists and merge them when applicable sounds like the next step
- Chris Heath
It's still not open. That data is locked into the built in contacts app and you can't get it at an api level. Android 2.0 has a complete (well, half-baked) contact model that allows aggregating contact info. Not to mention that when I entered my contact info into facebook that I understood it was going to be shared that way. But from an end-user standpoint it's great!
- Hayes Haugen
@LANJackal that sounds great... I guess my information is dated than..
- Bindu Reddy
Very great post. One of the best. This share remember me with two other great peoples described by Katie Hafner is his book (Where the wizards stay up late): Vint Cerf (you known what i mean) and Dave Clark (by his famous quote : "we reject kings presidents and voting. we believe in rough consensus and running code.") With an "open" mind like yours, they make with days, months, years, a very great open life fluid. I'm very happy to follow you. As Louis Gray says : Please keep blogging. Thank you.
- Guy Vander Heyden
Apple's Mistake - http://paulgraham.com/apple...
Hasan Ozgan, Adriano, goodmachine and 32 other people liked this
"I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken. The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil. How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that's just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak."
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
Even as an end-user, Apple's approval process for the App Store seems heavy-handed and censorious. It makes me like them less.
- Spidra Webster
From the OP: "with fussy tastes and a rigidly enforced house style." - fussy tastes is spot on, but rigidly enforced house style doesn't quite describe the most irritating thing: unpredictable criteria/enforcement.
- Micah Wittman
Paul B, what's you take on the other Paul's statement: "I think the reason Google embraced "Don't be evil" so eagerly was not so much to impress the outside world as to innoculate themselves against arrogance." ?
- Micah Wittman
Is the App Store approval process cumbersome? Sure. Is it completely and totally broken, no. There are over 100,000 applications, LOTS of developers, and because one or two vocal development groups "pull out" it doesn't mean it's doomed. Apple has not "harmed their reputation with developers", I AM an iPhone Application Developer, I've actually SUBMITTED an application (have you Paul?),...
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- Rob Pickering
Rob, Paul Graham, who wrote the essay (not to be confused with Paul Buchheit, who shared it here), advises startups that publish iPhone apps, notably Dropbox.
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
Tough challenge, dealing with the "community," while enforcing strict standards. I'm glad they're holding the app-dev's to a high standard. One big security hole due to a lax in rules just to be "nice" and iPhone AND Apple's rep turns to applesauce. Seems they need about twice the personnel to get through all the work. Again, tough challenge.
- John Coonen
"Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results." -- well said
- ǝuǝƃnǝ
Security holes aren't due to lax rules. It takes a broken sandbox. You don't need app approvals to maintain a sandbox.
- Peng-Toh
It's analogous to Yahoo trying to maintain curated links versus Google's pagerank. It doesn't really work past a certain level of scale.
- Todd Hoff
Graham describes Android as an orphan; I don't think that's the case. It's being actively updated, and evangelized for use in all kinds of devices (not just phones). If anything, I think Google considers Android more strategic than they let on.
- Kevin Shaum
Chrome OS will help kill Silverlight and other non-open tech, preventing msft and others from recapturing the web. (though I expect that it will support Flash by necessity)
Vladimir Yashnikov, Dan Douglass, Burak Çelebi and 148 other people liked this
Good point.
- Robert Scoble
I hope it doesn't. After all we need good media delivery platforms.
- Swaroop
Including GNASH - the open source alternative - would solve that problem
- Bogdan Costea
yeah, nobody really needs flash. kill it.
- Zio Bonino
Chrome OS might be a compelling case for SVG/<canvas> + <audio> tag replacements for flash. Dunno what SVG's perf is like on WebKit tho.
- Matt Mastracci
Microsoft will port it. It's all about codecs & DRM. Ogg Theora isn't all that great.
- Rodfather
Is that Steve Jobs disguised as Zio ?
- Swaroop
@Swaroop Yes, we do. Like HTML5.
- Benjamin Dobson
@Swaroop eh eh, I've got flash disabled on all my systems :)
- Zio Bonino
@Benjamin I'd prefer HTML web apps over native apps anyday. But it'll take time for it to mature
- Swaroop
Rodfather, I don't think that will be an option for msft :). If Chrome is built the way I would do it, there is no installation per-se -- everything runs in the browser and the config in stored in the cloud (and cached locally). The computer is a pure appliance.
- Paul Buchheit
@Zio You're the real Steve Jobs
- Swaroop
Microsoft moves much too slow to force new standards these days.
- Louis Gray
@Louis: IE8 flunking ACID test :)
- Swaroop
What about more standard codecs like h.264? That isn't open and is in hardware already.
- Rodfather
h.264 is established and must be in there, but it's not a platform like Silverlight is.
- Paul Buchheit
A world with no Flash and Silverlight. I can't wait.
- Paul Grav
Yeah, it's too bad they didn't open-source it. This stuff with Mono is silly -- if you want to make a real standard you need to make the real implementation be open.
- Paul Buchheit
MS are about 10 years too late with Silverlight. And they'll most likely be dragged kicking and screaming into supporting HTML5.
- Paul Grav
Zio sez (hopefully humorously): "yeah, nobody really needs flash. kill it" -- have you ever watched a single YouTube video in your life? Like seventeen gazillion other people across the wired world. yeah, you're right, nobody needs Flash. ha!
- .LAG liked that
Remember Dave Clark in 1992, "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code."
- Guy Vander Heyden
.LAG: most YouTube videos are playable without Flash now. My iPhone plays most of them and it doesn't have Flash. Certainly by the time the Google OS came out YouTube would be converted completely to non-Flash capability.
- Robert Scoble
Robert: The youtube flash application helps read the flv files on Youtube's servers and provides a UI (decoder too).
- Swaroop
Even Google admits they're not sure I'd bit for bit html5 video is less bandwitj consuming than flash. And flash isn't just media delivery, also interesting games and apps like tonepad, splicemusic.com's online sequencer, etc (I'm musically inclined, so most of my examples will be along that line) and please don't suggest we redo it all in java
- Ed F
from Nambu
Does this mean the next Silverlight release is codename Seppuku?
- Jay Cuthrell
Maybe we'll see commercials encoded in movies if everything is open.
- Rodfather
Flash is too established to kill off right now, so I'd be surprised if Chrome didn't include flash support. It will take many years to get rid of that thing. First they need to fix the standard browser to not be so broken (lack of video, multi-file upload, etc), then they need everyone to switch to the new html5 solutions.
- Paul Buchheit
Scoble ...that may be true, and YouTube plays on my Pre without Flash (yet)...but that doesn't mean that "nobody needs Flash." really? what would replace it?
- .LAG liked that
So Google's NaCl http://code.google.com/p... (now integrated within Chrome/Chromium) was just a temporary workaround, right?
- Jérôme Flipo
Use HTML 5 instead!
- Minh Bui
Is it just me or does Native Client (NaCl) remind you of the Microsoft Active X approach?
- Daniel Chow
But who prevents Google from taking over the net?
- Andreas
youtube videos play on iPhone/iPod Touch as they are higher res mp4 files NOT flv files. It was a big deal when Steve negotiated that deal with youtube.
- vijay
You have Moonlight to run Silverlight applications in Linux. Not perfect, but then an application made on Silverlight is "not perfect" by definition
- Marcos Marado
The point here is that Google has no motivation to include Silverlight on these machines, and installing software likely won't be an option (it's a web appliance), so it will be absent from a lot of netbooks, just as it is absent from iPhones. That cuts into market share, which is a bad thing for a platform that is trying to compete with more universal tech like Flash and HTML....
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- Paul Buchheit
@DanielChow: NaCl has very little overlap with ActiveX, apart from running native code. It runs in a provably safe way, and explicitly does *not* allow it to access arbitrary host APIs. But it can be quite useful when you need to run code that would be too slow in Javascript (even on v8): e.g., heavy encryption/decryption, possibly codecs, definitely game physics, and so forth.
- Joel Webber
There is a time and a place for Flash and Silverlight so I hope it will run it. There are simply some things you can do which aren't possible, or practical in html/css/javascript.
- Steve Temple
Paul: why wouldn't Chrome OS come with Moonlight? And if not, why wouldn't you be able to just install it? And third, why the hell would people want Moonlight for? I never installed it and not even once felt the need to!
- Marcos Marado
from fftogo
because of moonlight http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlig... the potential userbase of silverlight is greatly improved, agree that projects which don't consider compatibility are limiting their potential
- Mike Chelen
@mindboosternoori Ryanair site uses silverlight: http://www.ryanair.com/site... that's the only website I know that uses it - for this you would need moonlight :)
- Ihar Mahaniok
Flash is needed for the google os to be useful in education. Many education based websites are flash based.
- Willowdale
@Paul "Google is probably paying OEMs to ship with this OS, so instead of paying $x/machine to include windows XP, they will get paid $y/machine to include Chrome." - paying present tense, already? Isn't it enough for OEMs not to have to pay hefty licenses to Redmond, etc., while being able to ship with a free, stable OS+browser combo; they need to be paid to do that as well?
- ianf ⌘
I sure hope so. I think the wide array of JavaScript libraries have been killing Flash for years. Silverlight was never really a player. The only think keeping Flash afloat is video
- Scott Radcliff
I don't know what's under the hood of Silverlight (nobody knows), but Flash is basically a sprite engine controlled by Actionscript, which is basically an adapted version of Javascript anyway. It's nicely packaged though, and has an army of developers, so it won't go away that easily, at least not until there are Flash-to-Canvas/ HTML5 porting tools/ translators and the like.
- ianf ⌘
to follow that logic...photoshop is needed as well
- Chris Hofmann
somebody call me when http://playboyarchive.com is working in Chrome OS (it's currently implemented in Silverlight)
- Karim
If it gains any traction at all, MS will just make Silverlight version that will run on Google OS. Sure google could block it, but they haven't done so with the Chrome browser.
- Jeff Weber
Interesting. I doubt the Google OS will get that big anytime soon though.
- Scott Radcliff
from email
Silverlight doesn't have a chance now...I wonder what would Adobe Air do.
- Saad Kamal
not really, if google want to be open then they will need a plugin architecture for it and then MS could just port for it. I really don't see this troubling mainstream users any time soon.
- Darren Stuart
Though I agree with the view that MS monopoly may erode as alternative devices get adoption over PC/Notebook, and these devices will mostly run on open source OS, but it may take years to create a significant change in every day usage of normal users. In the end, OS choice is mostly done by manufacturers, and they would be happy to get paid by open source vendors for putting their OS on...
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- Kaan Bingol
People want media. Hulu, Netflix, Kindle, iTunes, etc. They need to address that or they are DOA.
- Hayes Haugen
Hayes, what makes you think it will lack media support?
- Paul Buchheit
I don't think it will lack licensed media support but what deals they are able to make will be crucial.
- Hayes Haugen
Hayes, i thought you were going to say that Netflix was using Silverlight. ;-)
- Karim
Yes, they are, what is their deal with MSFT? Can they do non Silverlight distribution?
- Hayes Haugen
i believe the Netflix non-Silverlight distribution is a format called "DVD" that works over the "Snail Mail" protocol. ;-) but clearly if Google is paying OEMs to install Chrome OS, they can pay Netflix to go back to Flash which Chrome OS will probably support "by necessity" ;-)
- Karim
How can Google make money from Chrome OS? Or does it want to make money from it except through advertisement? I still can not imagine that all software and service are free and sponsored by advertisements.
- Derek Wei
All Chrome OS questions are answered by today's Fake Steve Jobs ;)
- Hayes Haugen
Is there a need to make money? If more and more people eschew desktop offline applications in favor of online web based apps, it means more pageviews, more eyeballs, more advertising inventory, plus has the side effect of undermining a big competitor's cash cow.
- Ray Cromwell
That's the key, Google wants everything online. They figure the more people online, the stronger they become, and the more money they make. At least that what was said at the Chrome launch.
- Scott Radcliff
from email
I'm amused that the "backwards compatibility" argument against alternative operating systems has slowly turned into "does it support flash", and when you unpack that it really means "does it play YouTube". I suspect Google will make sure ChromeOS cna play YouTube and they don't need Flash to make sure of it.
- Nick Lothian
Is it possible that Microsoft will write Office for the Web using Volta instead of Silverlight? Could be a showcase announcement for their attack on GWT
- Ray Cromwell
I think Microsoft is going to focus less on the front-end of the web and more on the back-end, middle tier and database sides. Azure is a big deal that consumers aren't talking about because it's not flashy but will be pretty important to developers (and especially enterprise-level applications) when it's finally ready because everything becomes an interface to the cloud. Microsoft is...
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- Her Lindsay-ness
Azure looks really cool. Hint: so did Blackbird.
- Michael R. Bernstein
lol blackbird (scary redmond flashback) - a good example of azure platform utilization can be seen via jon udell's elmcity project - http://blog.jonudell.net/elmcity...
- mike "glemak" dunn
Nosense, I want silverlight, flash, html and any other technology in my desktop & mobile phone. Silverlight? yes, there you can develop under Python, Ruby et al, instead of the outdated javascript.
- Sebastian Wain
Good Point, Paul. The web has to be free from proprietary software. And to h.264, sorry OGG Theora is free and superior.
- Ryo / Fuck Facebook
It looks like with Native Client, you should be able to write your Chrome OS app in any language you feel like. So far, they have some examples in C/C++, but one of the things they ported is a Lua interpreter. If Adobe isn't going to invest heavily in fixing the show-stopping bugs on non-Windows versions of Flash, it's inevitably going to die, and there's really nothing either Google or Apple can do even if they wanted to support Flash better.
- Victor Ganata
...ActionScript3 is ECMASCript-compliant. I know nothing about standards bodies, and shii like that, but what if Adobe dropped ActionScript and said, "You can now use pure Javascript to build Flash applications..." It wouldn't be a big leap. I'm pretty sure that would shut-up all the Flash haters. And to the folks who say Flash is hanging around just because of video...well, video is...
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- .LAG liked that
Actionscript is just the glue for the more advanced what-iffy graphic functionality of Flash. They can not drop it for Javascript, because it contains additional graphic primitives that JS lacks. But it's not the JS-or-Actionscript that makes it a target for hate, it's other things. Nobody denies that it's pretty capable, but it is also badly written, eats up memory like no other, makes...
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- ianf ⌘
I like this post!
- Mohammad Abdurraafay
from iPhone
I honestly don't know how necessary Flash is. Apple seems to be doing fine without supporting it. But certainly Gnash and Swfdec should be implementable on Chrome OS. The fact is that without Adobe's full support on a given platform, Flash apps will always be second class citizens on alternate platforms, and so far, there's no indication that Adobe is interested in fully supporting any platform other than Windows.
- Victor Ganata
ianf ...you bring up great points about Flash's detriments, as does Victor, but until there's a better way to bring video to the Web, I can't see it disappearing. Adobe seems to keep improving the Flash VM, hopefully they'll address those CPU-hogging issues and make a more efficent runtime. Yeah, I hate hearing the fans kick-in when visiting a Flash-heavy site too. <sigh>
- .LAG liked that
alternative to flash video such as ... html5 :) (requires ff3.5) http://www.dailymotion.com/openvid...
- Mike Chelen
from IM
Ed, only??? thats one of the main reasons cited for the continued requirement of flash on popular sites like youtube
- Mike Chelen
Ed, those other uses can be accomplished through pure Javascript, video was the last remaining stumbling block
- Mike Chelen
Still waiting on non-Flash recreations of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch... or this: http://www.youtube.com/watch... Well aware of how someone mentioned higher up how you can combine javascript and svg to get nifty flash-like effects. I want apps like that though ^ Only real alternatives I've seen are Java-based ones, and those runs even slower than Flash.
- Ed F
Pardon me, but the OP is a ridiculous conclusion. For that to be the case, Chrome OS would have to kill Windows, OS X, etc altogether. Paul, I understand your viewpoint as being an ex-Google person, but that's just NOT going to happen. Right now the video specification from HTML5 has been dropped because of an impasse, meaning that we may be transitioning from 1 closed-source boss - Flash - to another - H264. Good luck.
- LANjackal
But why do these type of apps have to be written in Flash at all? You can easily do the same thing in C, C++, ObjC, Python, Ruby, etc., with the Native Client API that they're building for Chrome. http://code.google.com/p...
- Victor Ganata
I'm just saying, it's not like Flash is the end-all/be-all. As Apple well demonstrates, some people can live quite well without it.
- Victor Ganata
Victor ...i think the answer to the 'why do these have to be written in Flash at all' question is because Flash is installed on such a significant portion of Web browsers. But I recall that Adobe Flex had a competitor, Laszlo/OpenLaszlo, which compiled apps to SWF or to Javascript. Who's to say that Adobe doesn't have the same capability of making SWF apps into JS ones? On one hand, it...
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- .LAG liked that
Ed, such apps are possible with Javascript and HTML5 multimedia features, the question will be how difficult developers find it, and whether the performance is fast enough
- Mike Chelen
LANjackal, there is a question of degree in that Flash + H264 uses proprietary software and codec, while HTML5 + H264 requires only the codec. while OGV is no longer part of the spec, it can certainly still be used to have completely open video formats, and recent comparisons have shown it performs well http://people.xiph.org/~maikme...
- Mike Chelen
Silverlight's 3 is looking pretty impressive today but tend to agree
- Charlie Anzman
What everybody seems to be missing about Flash is that it works because there is one implementation which is mostly backwards-compatible and the same across platforms. It beat Java because, among other reasons, Java just didn't work the same across JVMs and platforms. The problem with HTML5 is that it will have a different implementation for every browser, and that means your app/game...
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- Gabe
Paul, don't you prefer brutal competition SL vs. Flash vs. standards bring to the table by definition? Or are you more into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - 2020 Google Union - type of ideology?
- Kari Honkanen
Kari, I don't understand your question. Competition is good, but with open-source we get that -- no need for flash or SL.
- Paul Buchheit
Paul, no, we don't get the same level of competition with open-source only. As long as there's an opportunity for big gains (like in this case to bridge the gap before html 5 era...to satisfy demand), there will be innovations driven by that. I believe we all benefit from a free market economy that includes commercial, closed source, innovations. I am more scared of the possible future...
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- Kari Honkanen
I wouldn't worry too much amount multimedia. By exposing WebGL, (and hopefully OpenCL), you can offload a lot of compute intensive stuff onto the GPU via GPGPU techniques, and NativeClient is there to take up the rest of the slack, but the for the vast majority of iPhone-like games, I'm willing to bet V8 Javascript on a modern processor is more than enough. That leaves licensing issues...
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- Ray Cromwell
Paul, so are you saying that Google will block both Flash and Silverlight from ChromeOS? That's a new take on 'open.'
- Cliff Gerrish
MSFT next smart move: get Chrome OS (it's BSD licensed), inject IE9 and Silverlight into it and go benchmark against Chrome :)
- Claudio Cicali ♋
MSFT sucks Claudio :)
- Orlando Pozo
Something feels contradictory about a system touted to 'kill' competitors being 'open'. Sounds almost predatory to me.
- Karoli
I'm not opposed to non-open software, but for OS, browser, etc I prefer that it be open. Cliff, Google isn't going to "block" anything, but they can certainly choose what to include, and my guess is that they won't include SL. As Claudio points out, MSFT can make their own version of ChromeOS that includes SL, which is why open source software is nice (it can't be crippled too much or else someone will fork it).
- Paul Buchheit
I have heard somewhere that Fash uses it's own port where Silverlight works over the HTTP port. That's why Netflix works so well. To that, Flash costs more on a sever side because providers can charge more for that port traffic. Could it come down to who is cheaper? (I am fully prepared to be wrong).
- Johnny Worthington
Johnny, they both use HTTP -- there's no difference there.
- Paul Buchheit
Is Chrome OS BSD-licensed? I thought it was using a Linux kernel.
- Victor Ganata
@Paul - well, Flash can do P2P stuff over non-HTTP posts, but that is very new (Flash 10 I think). The cost isn't affected anyway.
- Nick Lothian
My understanding is that netbooks would have to be absurdly popular for Chrome OS to make a dent in the popularity of Flash or SL.
- Gabe
it is possible to have smaller groups for open source software, such as google's own gears api http://code.google.com/apis...
- Mike Chelen
How is HTML 5 going to defeat Flash and SL? I haven't used it, but I don't see anything in the spec that looks like it could compare.
- Gabe
@Gabe - what do you think HTML5 is missing? It does video, drawing, local storage, "threading" via WebWorkers. The biggest hole I'm aware of is the lack of access to webcams & microphones. What have I missed?
- Nick Lothian
Nick: When you say HTML 5 has "drawing", are you refering to the Canvas element? I would not consider an immediate-mode procedural raster drawing library to be much of a competitor to retained-mode declarative vector libraries like SVG or Silverlight. Programming with the Canvas tag is sort of the equivalent of programming in assembly language for bitmaps.
- Gabe
@Gabe: I think you've got it upside-down. A Canvas-style API is the fundamental basis on which you can build a retained mode structure like SVG, et al. If a platform includes a retained-mode library as a convenience, so be it. You can build SVG on Canvas, but not the other way around (hacks like IECanvas notwithstanding -- they have horrible performance characteristics and are a nasty abstraction inversion).
- Joel Webber
So, if Moonlight (Mono) runs on linux -- Will google make sure it doesn't work on Chrome OS?
- Cliff Gerrish
Joel: I don't think you said anything contrary to what I said. I just don't understand why any programmer would want to waste time writing an app using a low-level library when I could use a high-level library that implements everything for me.
- Gabe
@Gabe - I agree, and people are implementing those libraries now. See http://raphaeljs.com/ for example. Also, don't underestimate the convenience factor. I don't own any Flash development tools, but my text editor works pretty well for Canvas+JS based stuff.
- Nick Lothian
Nick: Didn't the author of raphael have some massive rant about how bad the Canvas element is? And I don't have any Flash dev tools either, but I use a text editor for most of my Silverlight development. It is incredibly convenient to be able to type something like <DataGrid ItemsSource="{Binding tabledata}"/> into a text editor and not have to create the data grid myself.
- Gabe
Why is Flash a "necessity" for an OS? I enjoy what flash can do, but it is like putting pimped out leather Oldsmobile seats in a Ferrari. It would definitely be nice, but certainly not a necessity.
- Dan Douglass
Early post goof up. To your original point, I agree. I like how Google is approaching the internet space with web apps that can be run with out a bloated browser.
- Dan Douglass
Dan Douglass: Flash is necessary because so many web sites rely on it. How many people would want to get a netbook that couldn't play FaceBook games or watch YouTube videos? Of course Google is in the unique position of being able to make YouTube work on ChromeOS without Flash, but they probably can't do anything about Hulu, Vimeo, or any of the other video sites out there that require Flash.
- Gabe
Imagine that you are about to be reincarnated (as a baby human) and can pass along 140 characters of advice. What would you say?
barbarars, Raymond Marr aka Knatchwa, Kim and 58 other people liked this
Assume that the baby will be born into circumstances similar to your own, if necessary...
- Paul Buchheit
Wow, that's a stumper of a question! :)
- Susan Beebe
Learn all that you can, be noble, true, humble, love much. Seek wisdom from your family and friends
- Susan Beebe
I wouldn't need 140 characters: "in whatever you do, strive to do it as well as you possibly can." 64.
- Bren, Photophobe
from iPhone
Floss. :)
- AJ Batac
"It's mostly an illusion"
- Paul Buchheit
Never stop learning, enjoy the little things, cherish friends & family, try your best, keep an open mind, and indulge yourself occasionally.
- Nathan Chase
chase your passions, the rest follows. observe everything. work, love and play hard. change happens. live full and balanced. 3
- Charles Ying
What goes around comes around.
- imabonehead
I think Nathan has it! At least he said exactly what I would have written. :-)
- Victoria Plautia
Don't panic.
- PENGUIN: MAJOR CAPS LOCK
from fftogo
Risk is not an option. And eat your vegetables.
- Micah Wittman
Study Thomas, he has more answers than anyone else you will read.
- Alex Scrivener
Number to a Swiss bank safe containing cash, guns and numerous passports. Yes, it is from a movie.
- Peng-Toh
.....so are we trying to guess the meaning of life here? essentially I think that's what this question boils down to. I only need two characters:
- Ⓐ ☠ slayerboy ☠ Ⓐ
42
- Ⓐ ☠ slayerboy ☠ Ⓐ
Fear the fail whale.
- Jim Norris
"If you think you already know the answer, you will never know the answer"
- Paul Buchheit
Alex, which Thomas?
- Paul Buchheit
Plastics, my boy.
- MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)
from iPod
You're a towel!
- Vezquex: God of FF
Don't fear the fail whale.
- Paul Buchheit
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, if you were in their position.
- Ruchira S. Datta
Everything is transitory.
- John E. Bredehoft
Don't tell them I told you this. They'll think you're nuts!
- Larry Hosken
"There's always an easier way"
- Paul Buchheit
I'm surprised no one's quoted Kurt Vonnegut yet. :)
- April Buchheit
April, is that your advice or an observation?
- Clare Dibble
Observation.
- April Buchheit
Stay away from the mohel.
- Leo Laporte
Crush the enemy. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of the women.
- Internet's Tad
"Think big. Code small."
- Paul Buchheit
For April: "There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."
- Paul Buchheit
Phase 1: Collect Handerpants; Phase 2: ?; and Phase 3: Profit
- imabonehead
Just wing it. It'll be cool.
- April Buchheit
Let's git rid of 140 chars nonsense limid.
- Petr Buben
"Reasonable men adapt to the world around them; unreasonable men make the world adapt to them. The world is changed by unreasonable men."
- Paul Buchheit
Paul, try telling April that next time she is frustrated with you; I'm sure it will help ;)
- Clare Dibble
Just told my son this tonight -- Leave the earth better than the way you found it.
- joe is not going rogue...
Don't be such an asshole, asshole.
- Rodfather
@Paul, Aquinas
- Alex Scrivener
"Don't believe it when people say you can't do something. Prove them wrong."
- Cristo
Assuming my reincarnated self has wifi and a smartphone, I might point him to Des'ree's 1990s pop hit: http://www.youtube.com/watch...
- Doug
Treat others with respect. Feed your intellectual curiosity. Don't accept limits others place upon you and often, patience is required.
- Louis Gray
"Nobody else knows what's really going on either."
- Amber, Random Time Lord
LCD is better than plasma
- Alex Scoble
"Its not that bad, stop sh*tting yourself, ;)"
- chaz2b
++Leo, that sounds like very useful advice. :)
- Ruchira S. Datta
In the end it really doesn't matter, enjoy it while it lasts, do what makes you happy, try not to sabotage the happiness of others.
- April Russo (app103)
Don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s all small stuff.
- Laura Norvig
"Dear Reincarnated Self: my head is frozen with the Life Extension Foundation. To get cool advice pls unfreeze me at ur earliest convenience."
- Philipp Lenssen
"Dont be afraid to take chances or march to a different beat. In the end only the soul counts, don't sweat the small stuff. Listen, learn."
- Grant Bierman
Dr. Cable. Watch it. ;-)
- 'Like' robot (frɐnc)
I dare you to do better.
- Charles Ying
"Please ask the next generation to increase maximum message length."
- Ray Cromwell
BTW, Commander Data was able to get away with sending only 2 *bits* of information into the future/past to break out of a 'groundhog day' scenario. The message: 3
- Ray Cromwell
There once was a site called Twitter. It was worth a billion dollars...
- Sean Kelly
Exercise every day, learn to program asap. I have discovered a truly marvellous proof that these are the right things to do which this twee
- j1m
"I've finally discovered the secret to a contented and effective life, which for you, begins now. This joy can be yours. Just claim it by t" <snipped by character limit>
- Kurtiss Hare
Search for the will of the creator. Prefer the heaven of love to the hell of power.Every moment is unique.Train empathy. Give. [ yeah, I kept in the character limit! Twitter is like life sometimes, only, hu, more limitted :-]
- Willi Schroll
L^2>∞ love of life is greater then time and space. Compassion destroys the destroyer peace above me below me around me down me radiate peace
- Robert Higgins
That's easy: Join friendfeed as soon as possible.
- Jim Hearts FF
don't sweat it kid, you just got a do over...
- J. Abdul-Qahhar
H4sIABnpA0sCA+3KOw2AMBQAwB0VTwEeWHFRPhOFEgghdU91kFsvN+Qcb7m2SMcSR4kzpxp72tY7 xjQ3juVpZSq1j8F1Xdd1Xdd1Xdd1Xdd1Xdd1Xdd1Xdd1/327D0m3yMZIHwAA
- Edward Coffey
"Propose multiple solutions to every problem. Or choose your own life."
- fidlej
Learn Math.
- Alternating Reality Books
"Context is everything."
- Bruce Johnson
from BuddyFeed
@RayCromwell - see my first comment ;)
- Charles Ying
"Listen." The other 133 characters are superfluous.
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
Ray Cromwell has said it best *rofl* please increase message length!! It doesn't get any better than that! Words of wisdom!! :)
- John Tastad
Seek truth
- Shakeel Mahate
Love always wins. Don't sweat happiness: find joy. (ponders how to translate the "becoming a man" speech from Secondhand Lions into 140 characters...)
- Ladybug Heather
Remember to save often...data and money. Live life like you have a reset button.
- Brian Merriman
Ignore advice. You'll figure it out.
- Todd Hoff
I won't develop the ability to type until years later, so I guess my only advice is "Ga Ga" and "Ball."
- Fleagle
Frankie says RELAX
- VAL D.
It's not just you, they're all crazy. Make as many friends outside the family as you can. You'll want to leave home. Do it. Don't look back. (this is a seriously awesome topic!)
- Lo
Follow your heart. Don't worry about failure because apparently reincarnation is real. Snooches!
- Kevin Fox
Dont let others decide for you what is good and right for you. Not even this message.
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
Learn your math. Especially Geometry. It will make your coding SO much more compelling!
- Joe Nickence
"Don't tweet"?
- Marcos
Actually, I prefer FF..
- ★ Soner Gönül
Well I won't list all 140 but 1 I will is: Do not live your life to live..Live it to die. In other words, prepare for death because all life is about is another chance to get it right so you can end Samsara.
- Merlyn Seeley
"In your past life, you never understood why people liked Twitter."
- Ryan Kaisoglus
the world is made of atoms
- bob
Crawl back in?
- dannysullivan
Use the force. Search your feelings. Live long and prosper.
- Charles Ying
When the time comes, cut the blue wire.
- David Gaw
There's always something bigger than you.
- Daisy
Dear new self: whatever you do, don't make all the same mistakes with your life that I did with mine. For example, you should never ever try [MAXIMUM MESSAGE LENGTH REACHED]
- Steve is older than ever
Don't put twinkies on your Pizza.
- Will Higgins™
You, are fine. To hell w' 'em if they think you're not pretty/funny/smart/rich enough.
- Summer
Find Stuart Diamond and take his negotiation course when you're 16. Love yourself so you can love others. Also, reincarnation exists, and you were a geek in your previous life.
- Daniel Dulitz
Don't wish for what you aren't. Life will be far more interesting than you could ever expect. Play with the cards you're dealt, and have fun
- Bette Cooper
don't play safe gamble every day
- WarLord
Call me Stewie, bow now and pay later. Put another coal in the power plant so you can continue watching this homage and choke on the fumes. [140 and referenced Family Guy, ideology, commerce, ecology, choice, and lost will.]
- William 'Bill' McPhe
"Tom Cruise must be stopped. By any means necessary."
- Otto
Otto, you have room to add "--your mission, if you choose to accept it."
- Micah Wittman
Life is all about ass. You're either covering it, kicking it, kissing it, busting it, laughing it off, or trying to get a piece of it.
- Mona Nomura
Mona, you forgot the part about being one.
- April Russo (app103)
live!
- barbarars
Be kind to animals, nature, others & yourself. Do what you love. Love what you do. Never stop learning about the world around you.
- Bronson Harrington
Try to find the 140 characters you would pass along to your reincarnation.
- Eszter Susánszky
It went in my nose
J. Abdul-Qahhar, Mo Kargas and Kurt Starnes liked this
Welcome to The Inoculated.
- Stephen Mack
Smart move.
- Kurt Starnes
TWSS
- Mo Kargas
Sorry..I couldn't help myself :)
- Mo Kargas
heheh
- holly
Yup.. your showing up on the tracking website now. :)
- CW™
I got exposed the way real men do it - a family of 4 kids all with Swine Flu :-)
- Jesse Stay
Increasingly Horrified Man Listens To Self Explain What He Does For A Living - http://www.theonion.com/content...
Felicia Yue, Tomas Remotigue, Shakeel Mahate and 10 other people liked this
"Dawning horror tinged with self-loathing crept slowly over the face of claims adjuster Robert Pettlebaum, 42, as he described his job and by extension his life to others during a seemingly innocuous Tuesday lunch meeting. "Mostly what I do is I seek out discrepancies in the property appraisal versus the claimant's estimate of worth and then I…then I defer outpays…with…oh, God…," Pettlebaum said as shadows of unspeakable self-realization flickered across his increasingly desperate eyes. "Wait, no, that can't be right. I don't…do I?" Pettlebaum's mounting terror was met with incomprehension and nervous laughter from his companions, who sources indicated have anywhere between three weeks and 27 years before realizing their own existences are as desolate and barren as his."
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
I worked for State Farm (Insurance defense) for 4+ years - this sounds so true it's scary
- Susan Beebe
Joe Hewitt - On Middle Men - http://joehewitt.com/post...
Steve "Daddy do it!" Lacy, Maxamad, scott willeke and 24 other people liked this
"We're at a critical juncture in the evolution of software. The web is still here and it is still strong. Anyone can still put any information or applications on a web server without asking for permission, and anyone in the world can still access it just by typing a URL. I don't think I appreciated how important that is until recently. Nobody designs new systems like that anymore, or at least few of them succeed. What an incredible stroke of luck the web was, and what a shame it would be to let that freedom slip away. I do not wish to fight any mobile device makers who want to create a software ecosystem and act as the gatekeepers for that ecosystem. What I do want to fight for is the viability of the mobile web. Developers are rushing to create native apps, meanwhile letting their mobile web apps atrophy (I have certainly been guilty of that myself). Web technology is still relatively weak, and improving slowly. At this pace, what will the mobile web look like in 10 years? Will we...
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- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
But will Facebook stop working on iPhone apps just because of this? No. Neither will Google. Unfortunately, the big companies that have the clout to do something will not stand up for developer's rights, as long as the consumer insists on buying the iPhone and other such locked down devices.
- Piaw Na
In fairness to Google they are fighting for openness in the one conduit they control which is Android. Its asking a lot to expect them to completely boycott iPhone which would be their only other leverage with Apple.
- Ed Millard
Well, then I should expect Facebook to support Android, as well as all the other companies that have the resources to do so. :-)
- Piaw Na
Piaw, are you saying that facebook isn't supporting android? last i checked there was a facebook android app -- plus, this is just one guy's opinions, he does not speak for facebook (as far as i can tell)
- Chris Heath
Piaw, I'd imagine that Apple's non-approval of several Google apps has prompted Google to devote more resources to making superb Android apps (and yes, apps for the Pre and Blackberry) than iPhone. Where it really hurts is apps that have a hardware component. I don't know many/any developers willing to make consumer apps for the iPhone that require a hardware component because the rist...
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- Kevin Fox
I imagine Facebook is putting their resources in the ports their user base is demanding. The number of users they have on iPhone demands attention, and shorting it for reasons that are somewhat political probably isn't wise. With the growing popularity of Android it will probably warrant increased resources. Kind of sounds like Joe would rather make the web app work better and that would be more platform agnostic though its pretty hard to do a really exceptional mobile experience through a browser.
- Ed Millard
Is there a FB ad on Android? I switched from Android back to Blackberry earlier this year, but I definitely remember that there was no Android app before I switched.
- Piaw Na
I've never seen a major-label game be blocked from publication on a major platform for ambiguous and arbitrary reasons. Imagine if Modern Warfare 2 requires a patch to fix a hack and Microsoft decided to disallow it because they've decided that they don't want warfare scenes that take place within the United States? That's a fairer comparison.
- Kevin Fox
I have heard a few horror stories of games being rejected, or at least delayed, because the console manufacturer in question had its own strategic reasons for doing so (because they had a similar in-house game coming out, or because they thought there were too many similar games coming out at once). Not quite the same thing, but still a pretty dangerous situation if you're the developer.
- Joel Webber
Console platforms have a limited life (try playing the PS games on the PS3). Phone OS, however, look like they'll be around for the long term.
- Piaw Na
Joel, those reasons aren't ambiguous nor are they arbitrary.
- Chris Heath
They may not be literally arbitrary, but they are still opaque to the developer, and not in the developer's best interest. Not precisely the same thing (and probably less common), but close enough to bear mentioning.
- Joel Webber
Piaw, dude, you switched from Android to Blackberry? You are a man who loves outdated tools :)
- j1m
The switch was entirely based on my need for international roaming data plans at $20/month flat fee (this is on top of the standard fee, but the only time I *really need* data is when I'm roaming!). If any other smart phone came with that feature, I'd switch.
- Piaw Na
Joel, when an app is rejected at the time of a bugfix for reasons that existed in the released product for months, or when an app is rejected for an issue which exists in dozens of other apps that have been approved and a developer is shunned when bringing up this inconstant application of rules, then yes, I would call it arbitrary.
- Kevin Fox
Sorry, Kevin, wasn't being clear -- I was just responding to the assertion that console approval processes weren't as arbitrary as Apple's. I agree.-- Aplle's is even worse, and that's saying something!
- Joel Webber
Dear reddit, I noticed that most people, including myself, are shy and tend to be insecure around new crowds. Can anyone care to give advice on how to be extremely confident in any situation? - http://origin.reddit.com/r...
Space Cowboy, Mark Essel, Anne Bouey and 2 other people liked this
Hard to believe she didn't get the job ;) - http://www.businessinsider.com/my-nigh...
Roman Zolotarev, Mark Douglass, Cea and 55 other people liked this
"“I want you to estimate,” Oliver began, “how much money you think Google makes daily from Gmail ads.” Oh. My. GOSH. Was he serious? The answer depended on so many different factors, none of which I had any clue how to guesstimate. “Um, you mean a hard number? Maybe…$70,000?” Oliver’s hearty laugh told me my response was foolish. ... Now I was asked for an exact amount of revenue. “Say each G-mail user opens seven new e-mails a day. They would see 28 ads. If they click on ¼ of those ads, then only seven ads are clicked. If all advertisers are charged $0.05 per clicked ad, then the amount of revenue would be whatever $0.05 x 7 ads x the number of G-mail users is. Does that make any sense at all?” “Kind of.” Oliver sounded confused. “You lost me at the ‘only clicking on ¼ of the ads’ comment. Let’s move on.” "
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
Does everyone get those estimation questions? I didn't get anything like that in the interviews I had at Google.
- Benjamin Golub
There's a reason I'm not a Google employee...
- Robert Scoble
Here's a hint: if they ask you to estimate something, don't just make up a random number. Also, don't assume that people click on 1/4 of all ads :)
- Paul Buchheit
@bgolub She was interviewing to be an APM. I imagine those interviews are quite different from Eng interviews. I can't be sure having only done Eng interviews myself.
- EricaJoy
Its unfortunate, because the interviewers need to filter, but some people don't do well when put on the spot under real-time stress, but in a job situation could solve similar problems being left to think about them. The kinds of skills needed to win lightning math competitions or TopCoder, are not necessarily the skills best needed to work on a product.
- Ray Cromwell
The problem I had with my interviews at Google were they were too literal. They were all questions that a recent college grad would be familiar with but anyone with any length of experience in the industry would have forgotten by this point. Going back and studying after I remember the answers now but I felt like I was being interviewed by someone just out of college (which was probably the case).
- Jesse Stay
I've heard of one Eng interview question that could be answered quickly by estimation (but more slowly by just computing it). (I wasn't asked that question myself, nor did I ever ask it.)
- Ruchira S. Datta
Priceless "You lost me at the 'only clicking on ¼ of the ads'" comment is priceless :)
- Micah Wittman
Jesse, I wasn't asked any questions like that, nor did I ask any. I guess the interview process can be very variable.
- Ruchira S. Datta
The "estimate something unknowable" question is something anybody interviewing for an even remotely technical position should expect these days--even though you might not get it--and you should understand the interviewer is asking to hear the process you go through, not the answer. As far as the 1/4 click through rate goes... well... that's classic.
- Ken Sheppardson
Ha-ha, clicking on ¼ of the ads seemed like a ridiculously high estimate to me. I never click on an ad. And now I have ad block pro installed so I can't even see them.
- Laura Norvig
A Google interviewer asked me similarly ridiculous questions. Why ask me about low-level database algorithms when i'm interested in java and web positions?! We danced around one question for 10 minutes while i tried to answer it to his satisfaction. It should have been obvious to him i'm knowledgeable enough about databases and database programming to just move on to the core interview.
- ·[▪_▪]·
Ray, it's not a math problem -- it's a problem solving problem.
- Paul Buchheit
Paul, there are different kinds of problem solving as well. To take mathematicians as an example, von Neumann was said to be very quick, whereas Hilbert was rather slow. So Hilbert might not have done well in an interview.
- Ruchira S. Datta
The classic variations I've heard are "How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?" and "How many hamburgers does McDonalds sell each day?"
- Ken Sheppardson
Wow... how would you answer either of those questions?
- SAM
One of the people I interviewed with didn't speak very good English, and I spent 3/4 of the interview arguing with her how I thought Friend Connect could improve. I was then given 5 minutes at the end of the interview to try and answer her technical question which was about binary trees, something I hadn't studied or played with since college. 5 minutes wasn't enough to recall. The questions I was asked were math problems (and I graduated with a 3.95 GPA in college, A in stats and Algebra).
- Jesse Stay
I could never survive an interview process like that. So I won't even try.
- Laura Norvig
Jesse, sorry to hear that. I would usually ask one 45-minute interview question or two 20-minute ones. I was only asked 45-minute ones. And no non-technical questions till the end.
- Ruchira S. Datta
These are almost the same questions I was asked (which I could answer easily now): http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap... - amazing that Google hires MIT grads, considering MIT has an entire course around "hacking the Google interview".
- Jesse Stay
SAM: You'd just dive in with an estimate of *something* and walk your way through it. E.g. How many people do you know who own pianos? What % of the population do you think owns pianos? How often do they get their pianos tuned? How long does it take to tune a piano? How many people live in Chicago? It doesn't matter so much whether your numbers are right, it's the fact you know how to combine all the component estimates into an overall estimate.
- Ken Sheppardson
Not being able to do the math is fine, thinking that 1/4 of ads are clicked on is not. It's the approach and rough estimates that matter.
- Paul Buchheit
Yeah, the two important pieces of info the interviewer got in this situation are from (1) the initial random guess vs walking through some estimating process and (2) the lack of understanding of click through rates
- Ken Sheppardson
Those problem solving skills are useful when you have to model real-world systems. How many concurrent users to you estimate will we have at peak load? How many expensive vs. cheap queries are they going to perform? It's basically the same process - figure out reasonable estimates for each of the factors, do some basic stats and math and get a ballpark of how many servers you'll need vs. whether your problem is even viable.
- Matt Mastracci
Ruchira my technical questions were all at the end (except for 45 minutes on arguing with someone I could barely understand how Friend Connect could improve). I got the non-technical, easy. Going back and studying I would have gotten the technical too, which is silly considering how fast I was able to find the answers (and understand them). I think that's why non-technical should be...
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- Jesse Stay
When I interview, I look for clear, informed thinking. I'm sure that's what Google looks for, too. It's the odd personal interaction that turns an interview into something hasty and pressured. I'm fine giving a person a question, and time to mind-map or outline -- tho I do prefer someone who can do the thinking right there in the moment. Also, it's best to warm a person up to the type...
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- Christopher Galtenberg
Jesse, the technical question is supposed to be about problem-solving. You see how someone solves problems by watching them do it. It's not about looking things up.
- Ruchira S. Datta
Ruchira, 5 minutes to show the thought process in figuring out how to tell how many levels are in a binary tree isn't enough to determine if someone can problem solve.
- Jesse Stay
Call me soft, but I don't think she should have been bounced for a bad guess on ad CTR under interview stress. She worked through the appropriate steps and setup the right equation, just one of her assumptions was garbage. If she wasn't under pressure, and was asked to prepare a spreadsheet modeling out ad revenues, would she have really picked 1/4? or would she had thought about it...
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- Ray Cromwell
Jesse, agreed. That's why I like the longer interview questions. E.g., I would often find that someone was good at writing code but bad at complexity, or could think of an algorithm but not program.
- Ruchira S. Datta
RE "ridiculous questions", one of the things I try to do when interviewing somebody is ask a question to which the correct answer is "I don't know." That's one reason I might drill down on some sort of low level technical issue outside the candidates field of expertise. If you don't know, say so. Don't sit there and try to pretend you do. Be willing to admit there's something you have to learn. For extra credit, explain how you'd find the answer.
- Ken Sheppardson
Ken, there's major game theory going on. Does the interviewee think the interviewer wants a best effort attempt or rather an admission of insufficient data/experience.
- Micah Wittman
Another one I realized afterwords he was talking about linked lists, but he never mentioned linked lists. He had just asked how many edges it would take (asking for the exact formula, mind you - it's been 10 years since stats!) before a cycle could be made (or something like that). If he had just mentioned he was talking about linked lists I could have given him an answer much faster.
- Jesse Stay
Micah: Yup. And I want to see how much somebody will thrash before they ask what it is I actually want to know.
- Ken Sheppardson
you got to thin the herd.
- Aron Michalski
The right answer may be both. A good communicator, person who knows how to 'read' the other will put it out all out on the table. Hopefully without being too wordy :)
- Micah Wittman
The interviewer is comparing multiple interviewees. Google gets so many qualified applicants that it's very likely that even though she was OK, compared to others applying for the same job, she didn't do as well.
- Piaw Na
The interview process is designed to have few false positives, but in the classic tradeoff it can therefore have many false negatives. Although Jesse, in your case it sounds like it was just executed badly.
- Ruchira S. Datta
The funny thing is the best answer wasn't always the answer they were looking for. For some reason interviewers never want to see the hash table answer, which is almost always the answer in the real world. (yet they never ask you why a hash table may not always be the best answer)
- Jesse Stay
I always want the hash table answer Jesse. People who use red-black trees or whatever often haven't written real software :)
- Paul Buchheit
Paul I like your style :-) So much time is saved that way.
- Jesse Stay
@Paul: Agreed. I also find a surprising number of people who think they're brilliant for inventing tries, when a hash table would solve the problem faster, and with less code.
- Piaw Na
Not only that but in a search world that can make or break your search speed. We dealt with that in HIPAA transaction matching at UnitedHealth Group while I was there. The hashed digest made matching records so much faster.
- Jesse Stay
I cringe when I find out the developer interviewing me just graduated from college 3 years ago.
- Jesse Stay
I have never been asked for these estimation questions during my interviews but engineering positions need them too. Good estimators are good engineers.
- Burcu Dogan
@Jesse, why does that bother you? I was interviewed at Google by 6 folks, 5 of which were way younger than I was --- one of them so young that I remember him from when I was his TA in grad school. It didn't matter --- the questions weren't particularly hard, and I had fun. I didn't think Google's interview was any tougher than Yahoo's, Microsoft's or any other tech company known for engineering excellence.
- Piaw Na
My quickie solution to the Egg Drop problem is exponential doubling sequence + 2x linear search = 25 drops, best solution is 14. Doh! BTW, I've heard this problem stated before as a Cats with 9 lives (can survive 9 drops).
- Ray Cromwell
Piaw because a recent college grad is only going to ask you what they learned in college
- Jesse Stay
Try to solve my interview puzzle question: http://cromwellian.blogspot.com/2006...
- Ray Cromwell
Ray, that's a cool problem.
- Matt Mastracci
@Jesse So the 3 years in the "real world" mean nothing?
- EricaJoy
@Matt, I specifically constructed it so that it would be impossible for people to search for a pre-existing solution.
- Ray Cromwell
@Jesse: I'd been working in Silicon Valley for 10 years when I interviewed there. I did not feel that my experience disadvantaged me.
- Piaw Na
I just take more of a "get it done" attitude when I write code. I'd rather focus on getting the problem fixed in the fastest manner possible rather than spend all this time on theory. I guess it all depends on the problem at hand as to whether that's the right choice, but a recent college grad is less likely to understand that than someone who's been in the field for awhile. I like the...
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- Jesse Stay
BTW, if you're a startup that wants to take on Google that's the way to beat Google. It's why Twitter has grown so fast.
- Jesse Stay
True, if you look at many of the successful Web 2.0 startups, a lot of them didn't solve interesting computer science problems, but executed well in other ways. Implementation speed becomes a priority, as they can always go back and fix stuff later or rewrite, once they reach a certain level. Twitter ran "ok" enough on a Ruby mishmash until they broke down, but they didn't really lose their users because of it.
- Ray Cromwell
Glen, unless the speed isn't as important as getting the product out the door fast.
- Jesse Stay
All of those formulas need a "T" element (time to write the code), along with an "M" (maintainability) element
- Jesse Stay
I think the best way to get a job at Google is to build a business and get bought by them :-)
- Jesse Stay
Its good to be retired... ;) just sayin
- WarLord
@Glen: Are you seriously asserting that insertion into a tree (of any sort) is O( 1 / (n log n))?
- Piaw Na
@Jesse: It does no good to acquire a company whose software wouldn't scale (or whose people can't make them scale) when Google turns the firehose of traffic at them. Some of the due diligence done before a company is acquired (by Google or anyone) is to make sure that everything's technically up to snuff, or the people being acquired are smart enough to get them up to snuff.
- Piaw Na
I don't see anything "nightmarish" about her interviews at all...In fact it seems pretty amazing to me she couldn't figure out the "math" problem in the 2nd interview.
- Bindu Reddy
Well just for grins, here are a myriad of "problem solvers" trying to figure out how many golf balls you can fit on a bus: http://www.acetheinterview.com/questio... My solution to this is tell me how long it will take you to hang my wet clothes on the line without slipping on the downward slope of a ravine on 5 acres of wood...
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- Melanie Reed
If the question was really about problem solving then why would you stop at 1/4? That's just a parameter.
- Todd Hoff
You would stop at 1/4 because you've already interviewed 20 other folks, and some of them gave you a much better answer there. You would then go back to hire one of them, or keep interviewing more people because nobody was good enough so far.
- Piaw Na
wow, very insightful but clearly she is not geeky enough for the job!
- Loc
Todd: The interview didn't end when she said 1/4, they just "moved on". The point wasn't to get a specific dollar amount, it was to see her process.
- Ken Sheppardson
It's true that 1/4 is just a parameter, but choosing something out by so much shows a pretty significant lack of knowledge in an area that has _some_ relevance to Google. I'd suspect there would have been candidates who'd been able to have sensible discussions about the likely CTR in Gmail based on known CTRs on other websites and the factors which influence it. Surely that's relevant?
- Nick Lothian
Also, clicking on 1/4 of ads, with 4 ads per email means that people were clicking on an ad every time they read an email. That's pretty clearly wrong.
- Nick Lothian
Yeah, the 1/4 answer shows that the candidate did not apply her own personal experience to the problem solution. That's a negative mark.
- Gary Burd
Nick, then don't say it's about the process, because clearly it's not. The process was correct. If you care about the numbers then ask about the numbers. Ken, "you lost me" is not moving on.
- Todd Hoff
“Kind of.” Oliver sounded confused. “You lost me at the ‘only clicking on ¼ of the ads’ comment. Let’s move on.”
- Ken Sheppardson
How you came up with your estimates is part of the process. Also, the ability to do basic match (1/4 * 4 = 1) is part of the process. "Does that sound high or low to you" is part of the process.
- Nick Lothian
I wish I had learned how to reason probabilistically much earlier than I did. I never even heard about Bayes theorem until after grad/professional school.
- Victor Ganata
"@Matt, I specifically constructed it so that it would be impossible for people to search for a pre-existing solution" Ray, what's the last piece of useful technology you've worked on?
- Bill de hÓra
@Nick "It's true that 1/4 is just a parameter" - well is it or isn't it? is the model wrong or not? "but choosing something out by so much shows a pretty significant lack of knowledge in an area that has _some_ relevance to Google" - You mean like a Web based email client, or an ad serving system?
- Bill de hÓra
"How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?" - Don't care, bought a dump truck instead. These questions are to interviews as rail shooters are to video games.
- Bill de hÓra
@Plaw "It does no good to acquire a company whose software wouldn't scale" - explain Jaiku and while you're at it, explain Chubby.
- Bill de hÓra
you can click on the ads in gmail? learn something every day.
- SuezanneC Baskerville
Paul Buchheit's assumption of a 25 percent clickthrough rate on a Gmail ad is way to high. Most advertisers report an average of 3 clickthroughs per 1000 impressions. That about one one-hundredth of the rate that Paul has entertained. I suggest that he experiment with Google or Facebook advertising before flaunting assumptions that are two orders of magnitude beyond the norm.
- Rich Reader
@Rich Reader that's right you tell Paul not to flaunt his assumptions about Gmail. But maybe read his post and comments first. Oh, and maybe his bio.
- Steve Crossan
@Bill, Google Web Toolkit. Prior to that, http://timefire.com/showcase.
- Ray Cromwell
@Rich Reader: I can't quite discern whether your comment is satirical. Paul wasn't making that assumption, and I'm fairly confident he knows a bit about Gmail, Google advertising, and Facebook. :)
- Simon
http://friendfeed.com/search... Paul I am having deflamatory comments about me with my first and last name used, could you please warn this user or something, it is effecting my business and is illegal, I have told brent TWICE, but he removed my account and placed it on private now which was quite rude to be honest, now I will see a lawyer about deflamation since it effects my views as a writer if she is not removed or given a warning
- dawngordon
Just saw an interesting article on Gawker about Google hiring http://gawker.com/5392947... and then another where Peter says they misconstrued his statements: http://www.mv-voice.com/square...
- Laura Norvig
Introduction to Tart — a general-purpose, strongly-typed programming language - http://viridia.org/project...
Troy Benohanian, Tracy, Micah Wittman and 26 other people liked this
I hadn't heard of this one before -- apparently its from Python people. Soundss nice! "Some of these motivations are: * The desire for a language that would combine the simplicity and readability of Python with the power of static typing and template metapgrogramming, as well as modern language features such as closures and generic functions. * The desire for a compiler that compiles to highly efficient native code instead of a VM. * The desire for a language which would fulfill the same role as C++, but designed from scratch with the benefit of hindsight. * The desire for a language which would fulfill the same role as Java, but more concise and requiring less verbose boilerplate."
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
Is there a provision for types that are dynamically bound, or is it all strongly-typed?
- Cristo
I wonder if the the nullable? feature is just as much as PITA as const in C++.
- Gary Burd
oh i was thinking how could i have liked it when i haven't even read it in recent times, good work http://friendfeed.com/jimminy
- ffcode
oh, R is going to like this, he's all for strongly typed languages. has it got aspects?
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
Gary: My experience with C# makes me suspect that explicitly nullable references are going to be the occasional annoyance, not the plague of C++'s const.
- Gabe
what is going on? a new language every week! there would not be enough computers in this world to run all these languages
- Tzury Bar Yochay
Still reinventing the wheel, are we? This really puzzles me to no end..why do they think they need to create more 3rd generation programming languages like Google Go & now this "Tart" thing, when what we really need are everyday useful 4GL and 5GL languages/systems/frameworks that would really move us forward. If we keep things going the way these guys are, THE MACHINES WIN..
- Alex Schleber
Alex: What defines a 4GL or 5GL such that languages like Go, Tart, and C# don't qualify?
- Gabe
Gabe, if your average C programmer isn't confused by them, they don't qualify as 4GL or 5GL languages. ;)
- Cristo
Looks interesting. I tried to find this "Talin" person and found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... As fascinating as proteins are, I don't think an individual one is up to creating a programming language. :-)
- Ruchira S. Datta
Ruchira, you might find these links helpful: http://viridia.org/ and http://www.sylvantech.com/talin...
- Michael R. Bernstein
An early birthday present: The Gmail Javascript compiler was just open-sourced! http://code.google.com/closure... (it compiles JS into smaller, faster JS)
Mona Nomura, Uğur Aslan, seyithanyener and 115 other people liked this
We first started work on it almost 8 years ago. It has come a long way since then :)
- Paul Buchheit
Happy Birthday Paul!
- AJ Batac
Today is actually just my internet birthday.
- Paul Buchheit
Well, thanks :) But for a verbose API I'll stick with YUI :P Have to inspect the power of templating and compiler, though.
- Claudio Cicali ♋
I wonder what happens when you apply it recursively -- can you get down to 1 byte of code that takes no time to execute? ;=)
- Brian Sullivan
Finally! This is great.
- Tudor Bosman
Happy Birthday!
- Robert Scoble
Nice!
- Micah Wittman
Unfortunately it looks like the internationalization features may be missing. I wonder why those were removed? (or if I'm just not seeing it)
- Paul Buchheit
Paul you are my best-friend :`(
- Onur Gündüz
if you were starting a new site today, would you use this over jquery (which friendfeed uses)?
- Karl Rosaen
Karl, jquery is a library, this is a compiler. I would use them both.
- Paul Buchheit
well, i mean closure library :) but yeah, they could be used together
- Karl Rosaen
ah, i see this is a link closure compiler, not the broader closure tools.
- Karl Rosaen
Refactoring, JS style.
- Gabe
Now, this is a good news
- Ozkan Altuner
@Paul the Closure project has three components: compiler, library, and template language. Looks like the Closure/library might be competing with jQuery.
- Shakeel Mahate
this is sweet!
- Jay
I think jQuery does a lot of stuff that might confuse the compiler, e.g. iterating over an array of string function names and creating new function wrappers (look at the way the parent/child/next/prev/etc functions get installed) The Closure library is also full of type annotations that help the compiler make better optimization choices, so you're likely to get a better compiled outcome using Closure than jQuery + fixes + compiler
- Ray Cromwell
@paul -- I know you've been wanting this opensourced for a long time. sorry it took such a long time. Nick Santos and the jscompiler team has finally done it! Cheers!
- Jing Lim
Happy Birthday
- ashish
Many happy returns!!
- Пьющий водки
Happy Birthday, Paul!
- Andrew Terry
Happy Birthday Paul
- Sandeep Kalidindi
Happy B'day Paul! don't be evil :)
- sirishkumar
Congratulations to the team (and @Paul & Jing) -- I know everyone's been waiting a long time for this. For anyone considering whether to use jQuery vs Closure, consider that they're meant for largely different purposes. jQuery's good for enhancing static web pages; Closure's much better at building large apps. And as Ray points out above, Closure the library is going to get much better results from Closure the compiler than an arbitrary js library would, because of all the type annotations.
- Joel Webber
Paul Buchheit has been at the top of my best of pages all month. Rock on, Paul.
- Donald C. Lindsay
Hey HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAUL !!! Cool present!! <insert CAKE> :D
- Susan Beebe
Paul, any comment on this write up? http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs...
- Sachin
That writeup is trolling for traffic IMHO. Nit picking 50 lines out of 200+ thousand (written for readability, which get compiled and optimized), providing no benchmarks for claims, and spending half the time bashing Java, it just seems to be struggling to find something wrong with Closure.
- Ray Cromwell
Sachin: he seems to be commenting on Closure the JS library, not Closure the JS compiler (that Paul's post was about). And he may be a douchebag, but I haven't seen anything I disagree with.
- Gabe
@Sachin: I hate to be too harsh, but that post is pretty much garbage. From what I can tell he's pretty much managed to enumerate some of the worst things about Javascript -- nitpicking the code for referencing "undefined" directly without declaring it as an uninitialized local? That's insane. Following this advice is mostly a recipe for an unreadable mess. Also, look in the comments for several refutations of the idea that some of these are even optimizations.
- Joel Webber
Joel, you're just not man enough to handle a language where 'top' is an implicitly reserved keyword, and 'undefined' which should be, isn't. But it could be worse, 'null' could be something you could override. :)
- Ray Cromwell
"The Internet is not about technology; it's about communication. The Internet connects people who have shared interests, ideas and needs, regardless of geography." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
Troy Benohanian, rowlikeagirl, Mona Nomura and 100 other people liked this
Absolutely.
- Mark Krynsky
*salute*
- Mo Kargas
I like it, but I think it doesn't go far enough. The telephone allows you to communicate. But when you hang up the phone the call is gone. The internet has persistent objects that can be manipulated, so it is also about cooperation and collaboration.
- Neil Kandalgaonkar
Technology sure makes that communication much easier, though. Long live Friendfeed!
- Josh Haley
from iPhone
FWD: @scobleizer
- directeur
I always thought the Internet was for porn. At least that's what I learned one year at SXSW.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, you still owe us (me and Joge) $5000, btw ;-)
- directeur
I think porn falls under the connecting people with shared interests and needs. ;-)
- Brian Sullivan
Hmmm -- I think saying the" internet is not about technology, it's about the communication" is like saying driving is not about the car, it's about the journey. I like John Dupuis' way of putting it -- the communication part was an emergent property -- Michael Neilson has interesting things to say on this topic, too, but I've gotta dash so I'll link later.
- Mickey Schafer
YAY, I love the internet. Couldn't agree more. GLOBAL unfettered communication amongst all peoples, socio-economic class, philosophy, etc. is what it's all about; whereas, the technology is there to support the communication layer. THAT is very important in the DESIGN of Information Systems.
- Susan Beebe
The following (wild) question just dawned on me: If in 1440—the approx. year of Gutenberg's press—a global electronic network had magically emerged instead, A) What purpose would the power structure at the time deem for it, and B) How would it actually be used within the first few decades? Hundred years?
- Micah Wittman
Micah, The Gideon Society would have saved a lot of money on printing costs and no need for this ====> http://www.youtube.com/watch...
- Eric Logan
Eric, :) yes, that youtube vid is a classic.
- Micah Wittman
Any relation to Bret? :)
- April Buchheit
Neil: different communication formats have varying values for similar properties, such as bandwidth, delay, and rate of decay
- Mike Chelen
Neil: Good point about persistence, except that Twitter has objects called tweets that last only about 7 days ;)
- Alex Schleber
Alex: one compensating strength is that posts are publicly web accessible, allowing them to be independently mirrored
- Mike Chelen
High communication: words. Medium communication: pictures. Low communication: grunt, poke.
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
Internet = TV + Radio + Books + Newspapers + Magazines + Telephone + Soapbox + [add your medium] = Media melting pot
- Ciro
Actually, the Internet may be about the incarnation of cosmic consciousness, and may not be primarily about anthropocentric intraspecies communication. I only half jest -- sometimes species are only vehicles that don't necessarily understand their function in the big picture, or what they are birthing. With the Internet, one senses something trying to pull itself together that is bigger than human.
- Sean McBride
let's say it again: it's. com. mu. ni. ca. tion. :)
- Alberto D'Ottavi
+1 Mike Chelen; to Ciro, Alberto -- conflating function, social value, and technology diminishes the ability to understand what the "internet" is/does/could be, etc. The internet is not portable; certain technological devices are. The infrastructure that supports portability is inconsistent; radio rarely is. It's very difficult to "listen" to books using the internet; the internet is...
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- Mickey Schafer
I agree with you 100% - The connections made here can't be made anywhere else! The transparency and accessibility of people, good people, is prevalent!
- Angels In Action
I didn't read all the comments above, but I don't think it's just communication. It's also about knowledge, data, availability of knowledge and data. creativity, etc... I'm afraid with this situation of lots of social networks people are a bit too preoccupied by the community-factor. Internet is more than that. Please don't forget that.
- Ton Zijp
To Mickey: 1. "The Internet is not portable; certain technological devices are." splitting hair...Give me the Internet without the "technological devices" as you call them. 2. "The infrastructure is inconsistent..." Video is video, audio is audio...otherwise the TV is also inconsistent and so is the radio and books, I digress on this one. 3. " And I believe it is actually important to...
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- Ciro
Ton, I agree! Ciro -- As someone who teaches undergrads who have to use technology and the net, I can't afford to be blithe about "they can if they want to". One of my interests is the relationship between discourse and behavior, so for kicks, I conducted a survey last year to get a feel for how students related to tech developmentally. One overwhelming result was that sometime during...
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- Mickey Schafer
I don't agree. Technology IS COMMUNICATION. Please consider W.J. Ong's Orality & Literacy or Pierre Levy's essays. Our literacy is still evolving and that's possible just because we can write (and communicate) with different technologies. So... Nice quote indeed, but wrong.
- Matteo Balocco
Bruce: language, art, and gestures are all forms of communication technology, each of which can be used to greater or lesser effect
- Mike Chelen
Internet is technology, great and simple technologies which work well and so you can focus on communications stuff
- Luca Zappa
Mickey: internet access may not yet be a universal commodity like paper, yet this property can shift rapidly in degree, redefining its qualities. regarding user expectations, to some extent this may be addressed through improved software design, for example google docs automatically save every few seconds
- Mike Chelen
Matteo: is that different from saying that all communication is a form of technology?
- Mike Chelen
Mike, I'm afraid it is different. While communication is a natural competence shared by all the living beings, technology is just an optional layer for just a niche of them. So we may say that all the technologies carry some informations (and we must consider them communication) but certainly not all communication is a form of technology.
- Matteo Balocco
However we agree that this is nothing more than an academic discussion. The quote by Taylor is still really good for some slideshows. :)
- Matteo Balocco
Mickey, thanks for your feedback. I don't disagree with any of your latest observations regarding the importance of keeping machine (medium) and internet (content) separate and the dangers of not doing so...My point was simply directed at the idea that in the context of pure content utilization, the hardware such as the cables (or airwaves) as transport media and content presentation...
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- Ciro
Google hopes to remake programming with Go - http://news.cnet.com/8301-10...
Thomas Amberg, Barry Mitchelson, Marwan Osman and 103 other people liked this
This could be very good! "Google software luminaries such as Unix co-creator Ken Thompson believe that they can help boost both computing power and programmers' abilities with an experimental programming language project called Go. And on Tuesday, they're taking the veil of secrecy off Go, releasing what they've built so far and inviting others to join the newly open-source project."
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
What do you think, Paul? I know it's early, but Python latched on at Google... Think this is a response? And just on a lark, do you think Go may be headed for the browser at some point (to replace javascript)? Many of us have wondered if Chrome will take a stab at reinventing/reworking the web stack. Go feels more like a back-end tool, but wondering what came to your mind when you saw this...
- Christopher Galtenberg
Christopher, Python is nice, but we need a new system language, something high-performance to replace C/C++. This may be it.
- Paul Buchheit
Yeah, I was remembering your thoughts from here, Paul: http://friendfeed.com/paul.... Wonder how the ooc folks feel today...
- Christopher Galtenberg
My first reaction was oh yay, another C like language with brackets to make it acceptable. Having Rob Pike and Thompson on the team is impressive but makes me think of a plan9 resurrection. Using CSPs though is pretty cool and it looks like it supports mobile tasks.
- Todd Hoff
"Specifically, Go uses a technology dating back to the 1960s called CSP, or communicating sequential processes, that handles interactions among a set of cooperating programs, Pike said. The technology made an appearance in programming languages such as Occom and Erlang, but it generally hasn't been applied in systems programming."
- Paul Buchheit
If Google uses this for internal projects, that will give it a big advantage over something like plan9 in terms of being practical (not to mention the fact that it's free software, which plan9 was not, and a programming language, not an OS).
- Paul Buchheit
I am very excited about this, it's not genius or rocket science but it maybe the language to put alongisde C/C++ for real. I thought it was going to be D, maybe this is it
- Lawrence Oluyede
D seems too fragmented to be usable. All my hopes are on Go now :)
- Paul Buchheit
And note that the language is designed to be IDE independent.
- Piaw Na
Plan9 was a set of composable tools. In this case Google is providing the OS and the tools.
- Todd Hoff
Go is NOT an OS!
- Piaw Na
Where's the link to it?
- Gabe
Please ; at the end of lines... (I hate languages without ; for some psychological reasons)
- Ozgur Demir
I am no fan of language features designed to ease parsing but i suppose that's important for a system language? But it's hardly a user (i.e. programmer)-centric design. I think they should have drawn more from Scala (for concurrency model) and Io (for a beautiful syntax) instead of the messy, old languages they chose. Luckily, it's not designed for my needs so i'll never have to worry about it.
- ·[▪_▪]·
@ozgurdemir I agree. Either require them or don't. Don't make them optional in some cases. It confuses what programmers generally expect of a programming language: consistency.
- ·[▪_▪]·
Just checked and hated it. Sorry guys, it's not about the rest of the language.. it's just the ;'s.
- Ozgur Demir
while checking it, I noticed how much I love C / Java syntax and how lame to trying to change it just for to make a new product different.
- Ozgur Demir
@Paul you should know better than to confuse a language with its implementation! The people working on this all hail from the C/Java lineage and I don't know...may be fast but generally C is a hassle and Java is too dumbed-down. Trying to fix the mistakes they made in the past. Wonderful...
- Rudolf Olah
For god's sake, who cares what the syntax looks like? What matters is whether it solves useful problems or not. It's designed to clean up a lot of the problems stemming from the legacy of C[++], compile fast, execute fast, be appropriate for systems programming, and have good primitives for concurrency. Those are good goals in my book, and they fill a much-needed niche.
- Joel Webber
I do care.
- Ozgur Demir
I thought it was kinda weird the way the video highlighted how fast it compiles. Compilation speed is great, and the vid was impressive, but I've never seen a language launch where that was highlighted so much. "Look, it compiles fast!!!!!! Oh, BTW, we are trying to solve concurrency".
- Nick Lothian
@Ozgur: Sure, but as long as the syntax isn't broken in some way, or ambiguous (VB6 comes to mind), it's surely much less important than what the language is capable of (compile speed, execution speed, what can be expressed, etc). Syntax seems like a distant third- or fourth-most important aspect to me.
- Joel Webber
@Nick: That kind of struck me as well when they first started talking about it. But when you consider that your main alternative is C++, and that compile times can get absolutely brutal (try compileing WebKit sometime -- it takes hours), it makes a bit more sense.
- Joel Webber
@Joel. yea, I can't say you're wrong and I am right.. these are all preferences.. for me, syntax is an important aspect in terms of code readability that's why I care since it becomes a real pain in the ass on a midsize or bigger project.
- Ozgur Demir
This thread is degenerating into rubbish. You know who you are - please stop.
- Christopher Galtenberg
from iPhone
@Joel yeah, I guess. But compiling something like that should take hours! Back when men were men and compiling a kernel on my 386 was a major undertaking success was so much more satisfying! Who are these young'uns Thompson & Pike and what do they know anyway!
- Nick Lothian
Yeah, really! Real programmers had to swap disks multiple times to run a Pascal compiler on Hello World for the C64 :)
- Joel Webber
Yeah, compilation speed doesn't mean too much. Would be nicer if they focused on the *thinking* part with regards to concurrency.
- Rudolf Olah
Compilation speeds mean a lot when you're dealing with the google programming model. This is a company that invented code search for internal use. (See as an example: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7613693...)
- Piaw Na
Luckily it isn't named "goo".
- Peng-Toh
@Piaw - nice example. I only skipped through it, but I can't see why something like that makes compilation speed critical. It seems similar in concept to static analysis - more speed is good, but the lack of speed doesn't break the model.
- Nick Lothian
@nlothian: static analysis and compilation both include parsing. efficient parsing of C++ is rather hard to achieve, due to messy nature of multiply included files and macro substitutions. if code analysis takes hours (ok, half-hours), it ceases to be useful.
- 9000
Lack of speed totally breaks the model. When you can get your analysis and search tools to respond in sub 500ms, the model for coding completely changes. You no longer remember where files are --- you just search for them and expect the search tool to remember for you. This enables massive code sharing, and allows small teams to be extremely effective, since they can now leverage other teams' work.
- Piaw Na
Must be Google..
- ★ Soner Gönül
Why compile time matters: http://xkcd.com/303/
- Robert Felty
Use an IDE for iterative development of the components you are working on, make modules independent through interfaces, do a nightly build so the bulk of build products like libraries etc are available, then these compile issues go away. Justifying based on compile times is so 1990s.
- Todd Hoff
Ah, but how exactly does your IDE allow you to do iterative development quickly? You have to be able to compile individual modules (whatever form they take) quickly enough to make this feasible. If you take C[++] as the de facto systems language, it fails badly on this front, because the only way to share interfaces among modules is via the preprocessor, and precompiled headers only get...
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- Joel Webber
Poor Frank McCabe and his ten year old "go!" language: http://www.reddit.com/r...
- Daniel J. Pritchett
C++ allows for abstract base classes. No implementation. Compose systems this way and you minimize recompilation. And I'm assuming the initial subsystems are developed in a mocked unit tested environment and then within a very narrow scope, so interface changes are minimized until the system test phase is reached. The compilation argument would make sense if they were talking about a...
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- Todd Hoff
Sure, but you still have to define the abstract base class (interface) in a header file somewhere, and individual .cc files end up depending upon a large number of these in practice, so that any change to one of them tends to force you to recompile a lot of object files. As you say, there are some ways of reducing this effect, but in practice large C++ systems end up taking forever and a day to compile (try compiling WebKit; a lot of Google code has this problem as well).
- Joel Webber
C++ templates are also implemented badly, which makes compilation slow.
- Piaw Na
Only if you don't compose your system well Joel. I've worked very comfortably on systems that took 12 hours to compile across a cluster of 32 build machines. I'm not saying I don't want a language where you don't have to go through all these hoops, but to say it's inevitable in C++ is not so, you just have to beat make into submission and not create a big ball of mud, which is good practice anyway.
- Todd Hoff
@Todd: Fair enough -- I'm definitely not saying you're wrong, and I have also worked on fairly large C++ code bases (mostly games) without everything going to hell in a handbasket. But you have to admit that it would be nice if you didn't have to wait many hours (or use a Google-sized build cluster) for compiling your code :)
- Joel Webber
I've worked "comfortably" on projects where the full rebuild time was a few hours on my local machine, but I can't say that I was ever working optimally. Even in the instant-on environment I'm working in now, there are occasionally changes that I have to wait a full build/deploy cycle to test and it almost always takes me 2-5x as long to solve problems in that case. You can multitask while you wait, but it's just not the same (IMHO, of course).
- Matt Mastracci
I think 12 hours to compile across 32 build machines is unacceptable. I want instant compilation. You know, the kind that Turbo Pascal used to have.
- Piaw Na
I think that there's a dramatic improvement in developer productivity when the compile-link-run cycle time goes from a minute to a second.
- Gary Burd
Piaw before you say what is or is not unacceptable you might want to take the trouble to know what problem is being solved. Turbo Pascal to a real deployed product like a unicycle is to the 5th fleet.
- Todd Hoff
But any, good, modern IDE compiles incrementally and continuously so there's no noticeable compilation step. Compilation shouldn't be a _highlight_ of a new language. It's nice and the ease of building developer tools is a benefit to uptake but, in the end, the language has to be something developers _want_ to read and write since we have to look at it so much. Syntax matters. It's why so much sugar is added to languages.
- ·[▪_▪]·
As stated before, modern IDEs don't scale to google-sized code bases. Go is not designed for your tiny projects that fit in main memory. It's designed for large scale development projects.
- Piaw Na
@piaw You seem to assume that Google doesn't organize it's code. Any good project, regardless of size, especially for large projects, should be modularized. If Google has to load every piece of code into the IDE, they have more serious problems than Go will resolve. Trust me, I work on a project with tens of millions of lines of Java code and i've been responsible for analysis and...
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- ·[▪_▪]·
Well, Piaw actually did write a fair amount of the code at Google, so I'd give him a little more credit :) I know plenty of people at Google who *do* use Eclipse/IntelliJ on Google's code base (myself included), but you do have to break it into manageable chunks to make it work. That's sometimes easier said than done, to be fair.
- Joel Webber
When I worked for a large company in the internet advertising business, I found that dependency creep was a constant problem. I spent more time than I would have liked trying to get fast compilation time in Eclipse/IntelliJ. I welcome a tool that helps with this problem.
- Gary Burd
"I have already used the name for *MY* programming language" http://code.google.com/p...
- Maxamad
I think that time spent pruning and organizing your code and library is best instead spent working on better tools that make your development environment super fast and capable of scaling. That's the way Go was designed.
- Piaw Na
If you want fast turnaround, eliminate compiles all together. There's no reason why a language can't support a double or triple hybrid model. Look at a language like Factor, image based like Smalltalk, you write a function, and can patch it into the live running app instantaneously, where it will run interpreted in combination with compiled code, until the runtime gets around to...
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- Ray Cromwell
I noticed that Go has an interpreter work-in-progress living in its source. The start of an instant-run mode?
- Matt Mastracci
Smalltalk had a massive sharing problem --- you couldn't ever replicate what was in your Smalltalk image on someone else's machine. Eliminating compiles would be nice, but again, if you're solving problems at a massive scale, interpretation would be an order of magnitude loss in execution speed that you can't afford. That said, a Go interpreter would not be out of the question, or even hard to build.
- Piaw Na
@Piaw - was just reading "Coders at Work" this week and Ingalls (http://www.codersatwork.com/dan-ing...) was saying the exact opposite. He said he pauses his Mac machine and sends his Smalltalk system state over to a Windows developer and they start right up, debug, and fix.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
The point is not to have the production version run in interpretation, the point is to increase developer productivity by allowing a fast edit-run cycle, production builds can take as long as necessary. When you're in development mode, you often don't need full execution speed, you are checking for correctness. Take GWT for example. You can make changes to Java source, hit reload, and...
more...
- Ray Cromwell
What does production mean? An experiment that processes a large number of records so you can decide how to proceed with your line of research is hardly production, but it nevertheless has to execute fast over large amounts of data. You might think that it doesn't matter how quickly that runs, but the difference between 10 minutes and 100 minutes is huge in terms of productivity.
- Piaw Na
Yes, if you copied the entire image over, you could replicate a smalltalk VM. The problem is, then you have to live with the other guy's image and customizations. Smalltalk is great, but it really was designed as a single-user environment.
- Piaw Na
It depends how often you are running experiments over huge datasets like that. In the case where I needed some experimental data to proceed, yes, if after every edit, you had such an experiment, then maybe programming in a neutered language would be worth it, but I'd say that for the majority of developers, this is not the case, so being able to run unoptimized builds/interpretation...
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- Ray Cromwell
No, it is not for everyone. It's very much for large scale datasets that are encountered somewhat frequently on the WWW.
- Piaw Na
Jeremy Grantham: Sucker's Rally Almost Over - http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-b...
vivekian, Adam Kazwell, Ed Millard and 8 other people liked this
"Within days of the March low, Jeremy published "Reinvesting While Terrified," in which he observed that it was time to bet the farm. He soon called for a stimulus-fueled rally that would take the S&P 500 to 1000-1100, which is where we are now. He also laid out his expectation that the market would then move sideways for 7 years. Well, we've hit the high of Jeremy's sucker's rally prediction. Stocks are now once again significantly overvalued (Jeremy puts the overvaluation at 25%, with fair value on the S&P 500 at 860). He thinks the market can go a bit higher but that it will break down next year. He's looking for a "painful" pullback of at least 20%. A new low is not likely, but not out of the question."
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
wow
- Susan Beebe
It seems like a lot of the gains we've been seeing in the stock market lately have been on weakness of the dollar, rather than a great improvement in economic conditions. So the stock market isn't gaining in value, it's just that the beans that are used to value it are getting smaller.
- Cristo
The market is not sustainable at 10% unemployment, the quarterlys were based on lay-offs not earnings and with no money being spent on mainstreet ie christmas shopping sideways' would be lucky'
- WarLord
We'll see. Tops are much tougher to predict than bottoms. There are many people calling for a major sell-off here, which means it probably won't happen.
- Rob Hoeting
More Animal Fat, Better Sleep - http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2009...
Maggie, April Buchheit, Chris Heath and 4 other people liked this
"After I wrote about eating a lot of pork fat and sleeping better, David Shackleford commented that he had a related experience: When he started eating much more animal fat and meat, he started to sleep better. He had posted about his sleep improvement before he read about mine. I asked him for details. He answered:"
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
javascript:void(document.body.contentEditable=(document.body.contentEditable!='true'))
Mehmet Fatih YILDIZ, Dmitry 'radiant' Volkov, workalien 24/7 and 93 other people liked this
WHOA! Cool!
- AJ Batac
awesome!
- siniradam
you just made my color blind self cry tears of joy - I can now click that to discover all of the links that some crazy color mad designer has "hidden" from me by their color choices
- bear (aka Mike Taylor)
wow neat trick
- Onur Gündüz
is there a bookmarklet to make hackernews look good on the iphone?
- Ivan Kirigin
Add this to FriendFeed and you've got Wave :-)
- Jesse Stay
Reminds me somewhat of ClutterMe http://www.clutterme.com/ - they figured out how to make a whole page in-place-editable (javascript of course) - just click anywhere and start typing: http://www.clutterme.com/pages...
- Christopher Galtenberg
Nice, discover links obscured by CSS
- Orlando Pozo
Cute trick. Not being familiar with java script (at all) what is the void%200 statement there for?
- Eric Borisch
Without the void 0, the browser will navigate to a page showing the result of the computation.
- Paul Buchheit
Not grasping the %200, though
- Rahsheen ™, Coach of FF
But that's not the case when I just execute it in the (safari) address bar. I take it that's expected?
- Eric Borisch
%20 is a space. I'm not sure about safari -- I use ff.
- Paul Buchheit
Cool. This + FB + malcontents + screenshots = ???
- Eric Borisch
What is this supposed to do again ?-- it does nothing that I can discern in IE, FF or Chrome (on Vista).
- Brian Sullivan
OK I see what it does on FF.
- Brian Sullivan
But only in FireFox presumably?
- Brian Sullivan
It works on IE
- AJ Batac
So it does -- first time I tried IE8 crashed.
- Brian Sullivan
Works in Chrome, too
- Jan Ole Peek
It doesn't seem to work in 4.0.223.11
- Brian Sullivan
I'm still on Chrome 3.0.195.27 but it says no update detected... this is in Win7. Pretty sure my OSX Chrome is 4.0.223.11 though.
- Jan Ole Peek
4.0.223.11 is the latest in the dev stream.
- Brian Sullivan
Works on Chrome Mac version here. I added the script as a new bookmark in the menu.
- Jesper Lind
Try this instead to avoid the %20 weirdness: javascript:void(document.body.contentEditable=(document.body.contentEditable!='true'))
- Matt Mastracci
Doesn't seem to work either -- maybe a bug in the dev version?
- Brian Sullivan
World's coolest bookmarklet, especially those who are creating demo apps.
- Mike Reynolds
Wow, this is awesome (works perfectly for me in Firefox 3.5). Simple Bookmarklet code that makes Web pages "editable". Now if only there were save + back buttons or something = Instant Wiki.
- Alex Schleber
I realized after playing for a while, some of the keyboard events stop working, like submitting form by hitting Enter .. (FF 3.5.3)
- Onur Gündüz
this is the fundamental line of every wysiwyg editor you use. for IE use allowEdit
- Tzury Bar Yochay
Clicking it a second time makes it un-editable (and therefore it should respond to events and such).
- Paul Buchheit
So how do you discover 'hidden' links.?
- 'Like' robot (frɐnc)
Cool, worked for me (the box is Windows Chrome 3.0.195.27)
- ǝuǝƃnǝ
I mean in all open tabs and windows, not just in editable mode. It stayed that way, still no keyboard events (not restarted ff yet) :)
- Onur Gündüz
Figured how to make it but what's it good for - pretending to rip other people's stuff to sh*t?
- Michael Slattery
Michael - I'm thinking about possible use as a minor webdesign tool. Of course other tools are more powerful, but this is a nice simple one.
- Deborah Fitchett
Ok, I finally get it
- Michael Slattery
this is the worlds best website
- Grant Rhoades
0x21 and still just trying to figure it out...
Anton, SuezanneC Baskerville, Luca Perugini and 29 other people liked this
Jesus I feel old (0x22)
- Christopher Galtenberg
Halfway to 0x42, when the answer will be yours!
- Eric Borisch
That's normal. An article earlier this year said your brain peaks at age 39 (0x27), so the best is yet to come.
- Bruce Lewis
thats the trouble with being 0x2B - the hex doesn't help the denial any more. I should go octal with 053
- Kevin Marks
I wonder if that means you can drink [G33K B33R] http://www.bawls.com/product... legally now...
- Eric Borisch
Happy Birthday, Paul
- Bret Taylor
I have no idea what that means but, it looks like you need a Happy Birthday.
- Jim Hearts FF
Happy Birthday, Paul!
- Anne Bouey
Happy Birthday, Paul!
- Tudor Bosman
from email
Happy Birthday
- Eric Logan
Happy Birthday :) <insert CAKE>
- Susan Beebe
HBTY**2 HBDP HBTY!
- Mike Koss
Happy birthday!
- Ovidiu Predescu
010001000110111101100111011101010110110100100000 011001110111010101101110011101010110111000100000 011010110111010101110100011011000111010100100000 011011110110110001110011011101010110111000100000 00100001
- Ozgur Demir
I'm really 0x30, but I don't feel a day over 0x2F
- Glen Campbell, B.A.
Almost nobody understood my earlier webapp idea, so I'll try again. Imagine you were looking at a website such as FriendFeed and you wanted to create a near pixel-perfect copy but in a way that you could move things around, adjust shadows, etc. I want a tool that makes that easy.
Maxamad, Meryn Stol, Charles Ying and 27 other people liked this
And without taking screenshots or copying the html, since the point is that it should have the power to quickly create something that looks just like our current ui. Also, it should be web based, because then fonts, etc will be right, and also I hate installing things. My previous attempt at explaining this: http://friendfeed.com/e... (Balsamiq is not what I want). It does not need to produce html though, so it can cheat anyway it likes.
- Paul Buchheit
So you wanna something like "html to png/psd"? Editable graphical interface with layers and stuff?
- Selim Yoruk
No, not at all. My point is that you could look at the the FriendFeed ui (with your eyes) and then create something that looked just like it.
- Paul Buchheit
Fireworks is pixel perfect, correct font sizes and previews image in browser. Yes/No?
- Toby Graham
Are you looking for something like what is mentioned in this article - http://www.labnol.org/interne...
- Atul Arora
Are you want something like web-based rich page editor which works with objects in manner the human see them and want change them?
- gmarketer
I guess it's difficult to explain something that doesn't exist :(
- Paul Buchheit
thats piracy!!!
- Arjun
Paul, I like the idea, it's got merit. There's plenty of tools that do half the job, that is, snip the page. The second part, i'm not overly familiar with the tools out there. The manipulation. I guess you could snip the page, and embed into your tool a js library, like scriptaculous, and attach special event significance to the controls/tags, for moving, dropping, dragging.
- Stu Andrews
I think I get what you mean now and I agree. That's not very helpful but hey. In the mean time you could edit the page live using firebug maybe?
- Toby Graham
It seems to me like you want the Visual Studio Win Forms designer for web apps hosted and served to designers as a web app. Drag and drop elements onto the page and adjust their properties in a property grid. Then send a link to others so you can share your concept.
- Eric Schoonover
For this, I use simple vector graphics editing app, like Xara or InkScape - I just make screenshots and use them as raw building blocks - usually I cut out from them small elements like controls/text-blocks/images/etc... In vector graphics enironment managing such kind of blocks is much more easier than in photoshop.
- Phil Smirnov
remembers that this idea has been described by David Siegel in 1997 in his book : Creating Killer Web Sites (http://tinyurl.com/5skw63)
- Oaksun
Paul, i think the edit-page command on ubiquity with the ability to: visually edit css and publish the changes is close to what you are describing.
- Ian
Eric pretty much nailed the description of the dream tool that I think Paul was asking for. In my dream the web app is truly collaborative and has an active GUI. So you can adjust those properties using a mouse or tablet and anyone else on your design team can watch as you do it so they can make suggestions and modifications as you work.
- David Muir
Let's say you want to make a mockup of FriendFeed called "FriendFood". You want it to generally have the same layout, only the top blue bar will actually have a background made of lasagna and a font that is made of French fries, and what shows on the page is everything people write about food on the regular FF, like "pasta OR bean OR potato OR steak". But you'd like someone to be able to do that from the web and without messing into much coding. Is that it?
- Rodrigo Jaroszewski
I use OmniGraffle for this purpose.
- Jason Wehmhoener
Could you achieve it by using Firebug and tweaking the CSS?
- Shakeel Mahate
So something with the usability of say, omnigraffle, but that only used webkit for its rendering. With text controlled and positioned by actual css so that line spacing etc were correct, although again with a simpler UI than CSS has.
- Robin Barooah
Paul - I _just_ came across a site that did exactly that. Unfortunately, Safari's browser history is failing me and I can't find it anymore. Doh!
- Patrick Lightbody
Paul, not sure if you're still reading, but are you looking for interaction design changes as well, or just appearance?
- Mark Trapp
Did you try "PENCIL" an add-on for Firefox http://www.evolus.vn/Pencil/
- Francois Lamotte
I had never heard of Pencil, but it sure looks a lot like what I think Paul is describing.
- Jason Wehmhoener
I use ScrapBook Firefox extension to capture the page as is, and then edit that using Firebug.
- Jughead
Paul, I totally got you first time - anyone who thinks it's not a good idea has plainly misunderstood :-) It's the next step up from sketching out your UI on paper, n'est pas?
- Slippy "Threadsbane" Lane
Thanks @Francois. Pencil looks quite promising...
- Ashwin Bharambe
Firefox Webchunks? Does only the snipping part though. Perhaps an add-on to webchunks that will let us use all those chunks together.
- Vamsee
it'd be kind of like pushing edit on a wiki, right. like, firefox would have an edit button then you could visually redo the page
- Coleman Foley
There's also Axure RP, something I found a while ago. http://www.google.com/search...
- Jauder Ho
Dosen't ASP.Net do that already???
- Roberto Bonini
One quick tip in Photoshop is to turn off anti-aliasing and use your various web fonts (Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, etc.) and use your preferred font size in pixels/points... This will provide you with screen accurate font appearances and sizes. The biggest problem with a "pixel-perfect" browser rendering is that it will never be consistent from browser to browser. They all render ever...
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- Nathan Chase
Idea for a useful webapp: A tool for doing web page mockups that's better than Photoshop because things actually look right (because it's rendered by the browser). It doesn't need to generate good html, so absolute positioning, etc is ok.
Daniel Rowley, Laura Norvig, April Buchheit and 25 other people liked this
FrontPage? DreamWeaver? http://refreshingapps.com/showcas...
- Her Lindsay-ness
Totally brilliant idea. I write my own bad html mockups in a text editor or whatever IDE I'm playing with at the time, but a tool to ease this process would mean I could get on to abandoning the half-finished project much sooner than usual. :-)
- Slippy "Threadsbane" Lane
Um, isn't that what Balsamiq does??
- Cyndy
Please god no, don't create another "doesn't need to generate good html" code generator. srsly
- Jason Wehmhoener
Well, as for the mockups, there is really great Firefox extension called Pencil. You should try it.
- Mladen Srdić
using Cappuccino, an open source framework that makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser?
- huixing
Paul, have you checked out Axure http://www.axure.com/? I've typically used Visio or resorted to whiteboards/paper as they are easier to edit.
- Jauder Ho
Jason, I would be fine with it not generating html at all. As for Balsamiq and some of the others, the idea is actually that it would look more like the final product instead of less. Photoshop gets fonts wrong and stuff because it isn't a web browser, and yet people still keep using it, so it seems that it must have some advantage over the other tools.
- Paul Buchheit
Photoshop has two major advantages, multiple uses and precision. Photoshop can be used for more than just web mockups. One person can achieve multiple goals with Photoshop while a mockup tool just makes mockups. The second advantage is the mockups look great in presentations because the author has complete control. Photoshop mockups aren't real they're hyper-real.
- Kevin D. White
Are mockups that look exactly like the finished product even desirable? I'm reminded of the "Napkin Look & Feel" (http://napkinlaf.sourceforge.net/#Overvi...)
- Laurence Gonsalves
Depends whether your goal is to sketch and idea or create a final design. For the latter, you really do want it to be pixel perfect. For the former, you want a "wireframe" or whatever the cool kids call it these days.
- ⓞnor
What ⓞnor said. For "wireframes" a whiteboard is fine, but eventually you want pixel-perfect designs.
- Paul Buchheit
Paul, you should check out Denim, http://dub.washington.edu:2007/denim...
- imabonehead
Paul have you tried Fireworks, that's what our designers use.
- Michael
http://www.balsamiq.com I got this link from Cooper U boards a while back, and a lot of my co-workers have found it very useful. While it's not pixel perfect, it allows for really quick mock ups with the idea that the design of the end product will be done by actual designers.
- Sam Ee
http://www.balsamiq.com/product... That's a better link. The demo video sold me on the idea.
- Sam Ee
Second attempt: http://friendfeed.com/e...
- Paul Buchheit
I've been looking for something like this for years. Balsamiq is definitely a good start, but I feel like there's not quite enough depth yet. Has anyone had luck with stencils like the ones found at http://graffletopia.com/ (for Omni Graffle)?
- Sutee Dee
pixel perfect? The web isn't print. Complete control over the rendering environment is an illusion. Don't submit to it!
- Andy Bakun
Paul, have you checked out Axure RP?
- Jauder Ho
Vi is pretty good. You just write some text and point a browser at it.
- Cliff Gerrish
Try wireframing and prototyping apps - I am not sure if output is rendered at browser level though. Protoshare.com, jumpchart.com, productplanner.com
- TrafficBug
Done, already
- Ozkan Altuner
That's kind of an understatement :) (these people keep emailing me, completely unaware of the fb deal)
SAM, sridhars, Symon Muchina Thuo and 47 other people liked this
<coffee comes thru nose>
- Jeff (the メガマクダジ of FF)
LOL
- CW™
I hate recruiters
- Ivan Kirigin
Recruiters, gotta love em. Well, actually you don't.
- Eric @ CS Techcast
Haahah. That's a good one.
- Micah Wittman
You should reply and say, "Man if only you'd called me a couple of days ago I would have been able to do something with you. Now? Well, sorry, you just missed your chance."
- Kenton
wtf?
- kosmar
what fb deal???
- Gustaf
ha ha.. are they looking to give you a job or get you to hire them on behalf of FF.
- Bindu Reddy
Presumably they are offering their services to recruit staff for friendfeed. You're just an entry in a mail merge database, as far as they're concerned.
- DGentry
HAHAHAH That is epic!! tooooo funny :D
- Susan Beebe
LOL!
- Kol Tregaskes
Tell them you'd like a job at Facebook.
- Andrew C
All is well Paul....What's happening in FB...
- Symon Muchina Thuo
loled so hard.
- sridhars
I tend to agree with Scoble about the "forum problem", but at the same time I really like seeing comments. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I think it's less of an issue if you keep groups relatively small. re: http://scobleizer.com/2009...
Nicola Greco, Marc Dong, John Serra and 81 other people liked this
I think the current FriendFeed approach is close to optimal. Do you not see it that way?
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
FF has the inherant ability for the user to take control, both of what they see and the comments they allow. If a user is judicious in their lists and/or filters they should see mostly relevent content (IF that's what they actually want to see). The ability for a poster to moderate comments on their own post gives us the ability to avoid trolls/spam and/or steer the conversation (again,...
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- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
Scoble and other "super users" have this problem much more than regular people because they have thousands of subscribers. This is also part of the reason that Twitter probably works better for celebrities -- it's more of a broadcast channel.
- Paul Buchheit
They could have a million subscribers and it wouldn't be an issue, Paul: turn off comments on his FF posts and it would be all broadcast all the time. It's the number of people they choose to subscribe TO that is the issue. To be honest, it's like someone walking into a football stadium and then complaining that it's too loud. If one chooses to follow thosuands of people one must surely expect that the amount of 'noise' is going to increase.
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
One thing that was tossed around a while back was the ability to disable comments from anyone you're not subscribed to: that'd allow those with a lot of subscribers to have high-signal conversations that their subscribers can still see and gain value from.
- Mark Trapp
Perhaps he'd like a 'hide user' button similar to FB? This would prevent the "brings people into YOUR life that YOU DID NOT INVITE!" effect... of course the conversation could be rather disjointed. Maybe a small 'additional comments hidden' status that would show them when desired... Of course, without the conversations, FF == twitter?
- Eric Borisch
Paul, can you help me test something? :)
- directeur
The features that would make FF optimal would be to let users follow each other's hides and blocks. For most users this would be a nice, small improvement. For users like scobleizer it might make a huge difference. Of course, implementation details matter.
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
The problem is that we don't keep groups relatively small. There are always those who are like me who like to connect, for one, but even normal people add tons of people to their groups. It's just natural. I remember I was first to add 1,000 people to my Twitter account and people thought I was weird. Now thousands of people do that.
- Robert Scoble
One thing with Facebook is they capped it at 5,000 friends. Which kept it from being used by super-connectors but also caused it to be seen as a place where you talk with just your real life friends. Now that public pages are coming on strong, we're seeing that change.
- Robert Scoble
Bruce: the FriendFeed approach is far from optimal. Many, many people told me they don't like joining a forum and like just lurking instead, which is why they chose Twitter (Tim O'Reilly is not the only one who told me this). Tim Robbins likes that on Twitter he can listen to his heros. He sees it as a learning engine. Those of us here love FriendFeed because it lets us talk. But it definitely turns off lots of people.
- Robert Scoble
Paul: the solution is to let us toggle comments on and off. Give the USER CONTROL. If they just want to listen to their friends, hide all the other noise. But then give us who like commenting ability to turn that back on.
- Robert Scoble
You have the ability to toggle comments on and off: Edit -> Disable Comments.
- Mark Trapp
Robert, comments _are_ content.
- directeur
Mark: that is on a PER ITEM BASIS though. Totally useless for what we're talking about.
- Robert Scoble
directeur: yes, but they are content a LOT of people don't want to see or deal with.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, but then you'll be a megaphone broadcasting "your" views.
- directeur
Robert has the same comments (or the same potential) on his blog as he does on FriendFeed, so I don't think it's the comments themselves. I think it's the fact that FriendFeed makes comments almost on equal level as the original post, instead of burying them way down at the bottom of a page or requiring a click to view. Out of sight, out of mind, right?
- Daniel Sims
Nothing in the API precludes someone from writing a FriendFeed client that hides all the comments so you just see a river of feed items. That's how Twhirl, AlertThingy, and all the native iPhone apps implement FriendFeed.
- Mark Trapp
I have two arms. I barely use my left one. Please cut it off!
- directeur
Turning comments off entirely would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If you could authorize other users to delete comments on your items, you could minimize the forum problem.
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
directeur: that's right. That's what most professional publishers want.
- Robert Scoble
I really think the "comments are awesome, why would you ever want to get rid of comments" argument falls on deaf ears at this point. The solution ought to be how to turn off comments if you want to get Scoble (or the people he's saying he represents) back on the FriendFeed train, or to say they're not worth it. I do think if it weren't for the comments, there'd be at least a half dozen other things Scoble or people like him would come up with to not like FriendFeed at this point.
- Mark Trapp
I like the idea of having another options to disable comments for people you're not subscribed to. That way you can allow conversation, but limit it to people you "know" if it makes you more comfortable or limits the noise. I think you should have the ability to set the option as a default for all new posts but be able to override it on a post-by-post basis: 1) public comments 2)...
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- Her Lindsay-ness
Her Linday-ness: I want that but it would be hard to design.
- Robert Scoble
Mark, I think you make a valid point but then the question becomes: if there are no comments, is FF still the best medium to use? If so, then the ability to turn off comments on one's entire feed should be easy enough to code and implement. I suspect, though, that all things being equal (meaning: there's no ability to comment on an item) FF would no longer be the best medium for a broadcaster.
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
Mark: I don't think these people will consider FriendFeed at this point. Too much momentum over on Twitter. Look at the news brands: http://twitter.com/Scoblei... you're not going to get them to switch off of Twitter at this point. Sorry. That game is over.
- Robert Scoble
I think the real game is how does Facebook evolve?
- Robert Scoble
The real game is an open decentralized solution. yes, I'm a dreamer.
- directeur
Which leads everyone to wonder why you're trying to nitpick a feature like this, or base your argument on the lack of the feature. The real reason why you (and others like you) aren't into FriendFeed isn't because of the forum problem or the lack of a feature, it's because you think Twitter is better and that's where everyone is. That's fine: that's a great argument. The rest of it is inconsequential to that argument, and wouldn't invalidate it even if you got your way. So what's the point?
- Mark Trapp
I've been talking with a lot of brands and celebrities and regular people. For public studying they like Twitter better. That has Facebook wondering what it will be in the future.
- Robert Scoble
Mark: sorry, but I spent two years talking to thousands of people about FriendFeed and I'm just passing along why they didn't like it. Take that feedback or leave it. Your choice.
- Robert Scoble
Mark: did you speak at dozens of conferences about FriendFeed and Twitter? Did you show hundreds of tech influentials FriendFeed and listen to their feedback?
- Robert Scoble
But your feedback doesn't correlate to the real reason why you, and the people you say you represent, are saying why you won't ever use FriendFeed. You said there's nothing anyone could do to get people to use FriendFeed.
- Mark Trapp
Mark: if I want to listen to ONLY tech influentials, I can on Twitter. I can't on Facebook. I can't on FriendFeed. http://twitter.com/Scoblei...
- Robert Scoble
Robert, if you're going to pull the "don't you know who I am?" crap, it falls on deaf ears. Let's have a constructive conversation on what you're trying to talk about.
- Mark Trapp
Can't you make lists in FF?
- Andrizzle Gizzle
Sure you can: you can import feeds and lists on FriendFeed.
- Mark Trapp
Mark: times change and at this point it would be hard to get anyone to take FriendFeed seriously. That said, I believe that it IS possible to move people from Facebook to Twitter or Twitter to Facebook, so THAT is the real battlefront.
- Robert Scoble
any comment thread about 20+ without threading and community promotion/demotion becomes difficult to participate in (for me). Though there is a difference between discussing the radiator on a 94 Subaru and the nature of discussion forums.
- Hayes Haugen
Robert: is the problem really comments or the fact that each time an item gets commented, the items pops back at the top of the list? Regarding the noise, I think that the "problem" with friendfeed is that it was much easier for people to plug in automated feeds and that as a result, there was less of an explicit action. I do not know how other people feel about this but I really miss...
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- Edwin Khodabakchian
Mark: OK, show me your public list the way I did on Twitter. You can't do that here, sorry.
- Robert Scoble
Hayes: BING BING BING.
- Robert Scoble
Ok, so it's not about who you read, it's who you can show that you are reading.
- Andrizzle Gizzle
Bing goes the internet! lol
- Marshall Kirkpatrick
Sure Twitter has a lot of momentum now, but how quickly the winds change. Frankly, it's a shame that FF is going to be neglected... I wish that someone with as much motivation and insight as Paul and the original team could take it over now that FB has consumed them. There is still SO MUCH potential in this platform that it is depressing to see it squandered. @Robert - I don't think it...
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- Her Lindsay-ness
Robert, I don't use public lists: I believe you read my blog post about why I don't. But Hutch Carpenter does, and here's his FriendFeed public list on Innovation Management: http://friendfeed.com/innovat...
- Mark Trapp
Robert, who do you call "influentials"? Do they talk "tech" all the day? Isn't it unhuman? Let's go back to spring/summer 2008, and redefine "smart" for me, please :)
- directeur
Edwin: the problem is on FriendFeed it has the chat problem -- it gets noisy and gets noisy fast.
- Robert Scoble
directeur: influentials are people who influence. I picked them. Shoot me.
- Robert Scoble
The noise is largely proportional to the circles you're in. If you put yourself in a huge room, it will be a loud room.
- Kevin Fox
Robert, do you remember the "MOAR NOISE" phrase? It was THE reason why I built NoiseRiver. Filters, I used to say when you were always saying: MORE NOISE!
- directeur
Kevin: exactly. But on FriendFeed the room gets big VERY QUICKLY because as more people join they drag in their followers with them.
- Robert Scoble
Facebook has the same problem. While we're chatting here, tons of tech news diversity have swooped by.
- Robert Scoble
So Robert, should there be something built in to "warn" others of becoming "chatty". Something that says: "This comment is irrelevant. You may post again when you have something relevant and germane to our discussion"? So WHO makes those distinctions and judgements?
- Melanie Reed
Compare this chat to http://twitter.com/Scoblei... which one brought more information to you? The chat is more fun, cause we're engaged, but it's noisy and if you don't care about it, a waste of time.
- Robert Scoble
Melanie: in a chat room you can't control people that way.
- Robert Scoble
Robert: True, but [big number]*[average number] is far larger than [average number]*[average number]
- Kevin Fox
Hayes you are correct. Slashdot has actually had the best discussion forums for more than ten years because it has threading and community moderation. Its not a trendy social networking site though so no one notices. If you had a social network site where you post topics but with Slashdot like forums it would rock. Only down side is moderators tend to inject bias but /. has good signal after moderation kicks in
- Ed Millard
Robert, I don't care about more information. I have more than enough. :)
- Melanie Reed
Does it really have to be one or the other Robert?
- Internet's Tad
from fftogo
(Where you (scoble) are the big number)
- Kevin Fox
Kevin: the problem with FriendFeed is if you and Melanie were having a conversation it would be pretty small, right? But I follow you. The second I touch your conversation it gets big.
- Robert Scoble
If only someone could figure out how to make a room that gets big very quickly appeal to broadcasters...
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
This problem doesn't happen on the private Facebook because you have two-way friending there and a cap of 5,000. But on Facebook Pages? Absolutely. Noise baby noise!
- Robert Scoble
Bruce: broadcasters don't like any of this because there's no way to monetize. Why do you think Arrington really hated this?
- Robert Scoble
Robert, I don't care about more information. I have more than enough. :) What I would like is what Tad is implying in his comment. You know you can have "...two opposites that have learned how to blaze together" ;) And excuse me, but is wrong with a big conversation?
- Melanie Reed
"The chat is more fun, cause we're engaged, but it's noisy and if you don't care about it, a waste of time. " If someone doesn't care about it on FF, they can hide it and not see it again. Problem solved.
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
Chatting is not intended to provide information. It is like planning -- it is the process of chatting that is what is useful not the words that are spoken/written.
- Brian Sullivan
Thank you, Tina! and Brian!
- Melanie Reed
Melanie: I love big conversations. That's why I loved FriendFeed. But most people aren't like me.
- Robert Scoble
Tina: there are so many things going by on my screen in FriendFeed that hiding them all would take all day long.
- Robert Scoble
Robert -- why is it that you think that people are like you and things should be done for your needs?
- Brian Sullivan
FF is too busy!!
- Joe Silence is not dead
Brian: again, it's not about me.
- Robert Scoble
Robert one word: APML. I used to yell it back in 2008, no one cared. You want "filters" by personal interest.
- directeur
FreiendFeed sold ME on it two years ago. I've been trying to sell others on it. The feedback I'm giving is from OTHERS.
- Robert Scoble
The Forum Problem is a problem?
- teh Dork Knight aka Kenny
directeur: APML will never work.
- Robert Scoble
oh dear, don't hate the messenger.
- Joe Silence is not dead
Robert: who are these "others" and what are their numbers?
- Melanie Reed
Paul nailed it - Twitter is a broadcast channel. Massive amounts of subscriptions are fine there - it's all about reach. But if you want discovery, if you want to engage, then FriendFeed and FoaF is where it's all. They're NOT the same. One you can subscribe/follow as many as you want, in the other, subscription abuse will cripple your ability to view and interact.
- AJ Kohn
Finally, a thread on this subject that makes sense.
- Akiva Moskovitz
Threading may or may not help... it seemed to hurt with GoogleWave... it was so hard to follow all the tangents... of course without threading a lot of the tangents just get lost anyway. I guess I have given up on trying to catch everything... If it's important and I didn't see it the first time, eventually the concept will bubble up enough times for me to notice. That's one NICE thing about following lots of people and participating in lots of convos.
- Her Lindsay-ness
why won't APML, or something like it, work? i missed that memo
- Marshall Kirkpatrick
Robert, go say this to Last.fm or the BBC :-) Smart recommendation engines are the future
- directeur
FriendFeed may make some audience/discussion leak out, but also makes audience leak in through seeing what your friends are talking about. Arrington may be mostly concerned about the leak out. Other broadcasters may be looking for the leak in.
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
Marshall, me neither! :)
- directeur
Also, the meta around the content in FF (likes, comments) is what helps turns random data into information. It's annotated and qualified.
- AJ Kohn
Lindsay: true
- Hayes Haugen
Thank you, AJ, yes. And you can sort that out when you want to on your own time. That's the utility of it.
- Melanie Reed
Perhaps one solution to the 'forum problem' is to allow posters to selectively choose who can participate in the discussion but still be viewable to the public.
- Rodfather
So maybe the real question is, why do some people prefer conversation over broadcasting and vice versa? Is the broadcast-mentality simply a matter of popularity (the inability to reciprocate all the connections, so just broadcast instead) or is the effort it takes to connect with people on a more meaningful basis a major turn-off? Or is it just the tools that people use and what makes it easier for them?
- Her Lindsay-ness
Rodfather, this will bring wars. Trust me. I'm not a commercial object. So you want to SHOUT and ask me to close my mouth? :) Moreover, close comments, other threads will be started and the noise you wanted to avoid will be even greater. The Streisand Effect, anyone? :)
- directeur
For example: this discussion has 80+ comments and rolling. I don't mind that at all. I am engaged. I am also updating a web page on our web site as I do it and switching over to grade 30 some PRF's for students on the play Macbeth. I am not having any trouble with the "forum problem" or any "chattiness" I learned the "ropes" of FF when I joined and accepted that it as it was.
- Melanie Reed
To me FF turns data (the river of content out there) into information (the good stuff - explained). The tool set FF provides is superior in this way - but it takes time to dial in the right set of filters to apply to the data set (which changes!) and many simply overwhelm the great filtering system they've provided.
- AJ Kohn
A lot of people don't want to put in the time and effort to make the tool work for them like you, AJ and Melanie. I can empathize with that. I think it also has to serve their base inclination of either broadcasting or conversation, and the tool choice is also influenced by whether they already are part of a community on it or not. Most people won't leave their community even if it us using the less appropriate tool for their inclination.
- Her Lindsay-ness
directeur, then those people can make their own thread and allow everyone to comment. I'm thinking of in case there's a roundtable event where certain 'experts' in a field can have a thread to discuss a topic among themselves without worrying about others cluttering the thread.
- Rodfather
AJ, indeed - the task is to build new concepts with and for filters. Filters, not to shut stuff out, but to mix it better to create a constant flow of narratives.
- zeroinfluencer
AJ, is it more that FF provides the platform for the users to turn that data into information? The users are integral to FF. Now with Twitter you can program a week's worth of tweets (I have heard) but I don't wish to do that. Facebook... you could almost do that-although it does have engagement -you could certainly use it without. But FF runs on an engagement engine
- Melanie Reed
Marshall: I don't trust automatic systems to guess what I'm going to be interested in next. Never seen a system yet that works. But we should debate this.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, we should debate it! The robot that makes all my decisions for me says it's quite likely I would enjoy doing that! ;)
- Marshall Kirkpatrick
That's getting into intelligent agents and AI once full blown
- Melanie Reed
if you ask me, and you don't, the problem has always been lack of comment moderation and threading. Too many users isn't a problem if no one sees them. Slashdot was one of the first doing this, using an interface which is actually very similar to FF and it seems to work there.
- Vincent van Wylick
Web tech needs to look outside their dev environments for richer influences in filter design: http://www.youtube.com/watch...
- zeroinfluencer
Is the problem that Robert is looking for a single service solution. I see the same 'content' on Twitter and FriendFeed but I scan Twitter for 'raw information' and go to FriendFeed to 'discuss' it with others. I watch the news at home on TV but I talk about it with my friends or work colleagues around the water cooler or coffee shop table. I am comfortable existing in several spaces
- Johnny Worthington
from iPhone
@Lindsay: I don't know. I'd rather educate people on the power that FF can provide with a little effort. Or, that it actually doesn't take LOTS of subscriptions. Max it at Dunbar's number (which is what I do for my home feed) and you'd be fine.
- AJ Kohn
+++ Johnny Scotty would be proud of you: The right tool for the job
- Melanie Reed
@David: Exactly! My home feed - I tweak it. I use people like Robert and Rob Diana and Michael Fruchter and Anthony Citrano and Thomas Hawk and numerous others to bring a mix of themes and concepts into my feed.
- AJ Kohn
So are we saying that its not the tool itself...but HOW it is or is not used that maxes utility? If so I agree!
- Melanie Reed
@Melanie: Yes, the users are the key. The users are the filters. http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/soylent... And the engagement provides a rich annotation and a secondary level of filtering. So yes, users and their engagement absolutely matter.
- AJ Kohn
Sure, yes, how you use it maxes utility. But it also helps if it's suited to how you WANT to use it... if not it's a struggle. And people don't like to struggle, even if it's possible to make something do what you want it to... easier to use another tool if it fits your purpose better. FriendFeed fits my purpose so it's not a struggle for me... but for someone with a more broadcasting mindset than a conversational one, it's going to be tougher.
- Her Lindsay-ness
Vincent, most long-time FriendFeeders have spoken strongly against any sort of moderation/rating system for comments. No one wants mobs of people trying to control what other people can see like what happens on Digg. It's why every time the topic of 'Unlike' comes up, people rise up to talk it down because it creates an aura of competition and negativity.
- Akiva Moskovitz
AJ, yes! users are the filters.
- Melanie Reed
Akiva +++
- Melanie Reed
Anybody use Mailchimp here? It is tangential to the discussion. They have a cracker jack built in user educational system that monitors and makes usage suggestions.
- Melanie Reed
Is lunchtime finally over yet?
- Hayes Haugen
I'd love to peek in on the recommendation engine discussions. I'm in the 'they don't work camp' myself but I'm open to being convinced and perhaps technology has approached a point where it could work but ... from working in eCommerce I've seen it fail time and time again. Random factors, contextual issues etc.
- AJ Kohn
@Melanie: Know of Mailchimp but don't use. The 'monitor and makes usage suggestions' sounds interesting though.
- AJ Kohn
AJ, that's because the devs didn't pay attention when their instructors (ahem) were teaching it to them. ;)
- Melanie Reed
Another point I'd like to make is that no one is forcing anyone to read the comments here. If people want a broadcast-only medium, it's fairly easy not to click on the 'x more comments' link. Unfortunately, Robert makes a painful observation: he played FriendFeed cheerleader for two years and the people who needed to take the bait didn't or did but then cut loose. That pretty much means...
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- Akiva Moskovitz
Johnny: I am comfortable with all of these too, but it's not about me. But, anyway, the business battle now is between Facebook and Twitter and it'll be interesting to see the choices that Paul's team makes and how those compare with the team NK over at Twitter is making. Then the market will choose which one is best.
- Robert Scoble
Akiva: If I were at Facebook and knew that they could turn into the next MySpace I'd put every single engineering minute onto Facebook. Wouldn't you?
- Robert Scoble
Like I said before, there is still SO MUCH potential here... and it's a shame to see it squandered. I think there are a lot of ways it could be taken to the next level. For sure it could be a contender to Twitter with a few enhancements, but fat chance of that now that there is no longer a dev team, and that it's "parent" is a competitor.
- Her Lindsay-ness
Robert, here's a good example: You want to debate intelligent recommendation agents? Allright, I know that you know Chris Saad. Chris is a very cool guy in fact! But do you know Deniz Oktar? Deniz, who is not as popular as Chris, is a SMART Turkish guy too and works on the same subject. If you limit your view to "popular" people, you'll definitely miss him. And debating such a subject without alternative ideas likes Deniz's or humbly mine, won't be perfect :)
- directeur
Not sure, Robert. Is turning into the next MySpace a good thing for you or a bad thing? For me, it'd be bad.
- Akiva Moskovitz
Akiva, go take a look at (and experience) mailchimp's monitor and make usage suggestion system. It's adaptable for a number of scenarios
- Melanie Reed
I think the business battle (other than the marketing to consumers end of it) will be occupied and won by Wave. Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed are mere toys in that world.
- Brian Sullivan
Melanie, I'm not complaining about a solution that MailChimp could provide. I'm fine with FriendFeed as it is (for the most part).
- Akiva Moskovitz
directeur: most people choose news brands to curate and find new people that will have something valuable to say. See http://twitter.com/Scoblei... for instance. That already is TOO MUCH so telling people to get more people or more things into their lives just isn't going to cut it for most people.
- Robert Scoble
Allowing public panels where only the influential can talk certainly would have a useful role, Its just like panels at conferences. A lot of people would no doubt like to just follow the influential in these forums. On the down side it would make the already influential more so and it would probably lose some audience if it was done a lot because there is no democratic engagement. The people who don't spend all their time cultivating their fame and networks do say interesting things too.
- Ed Millard
directeur: and, anyway. if he's in Turkey and not in San Francisco he's far less likely to influence tech in a major way. So I disagree.
- Robert Scoble
(FYI - look at this conversation and tell me where else anything like this could take place.)
- AJ Kohn
No, we're completely boring and worthless, Ed. We're not worth paying attention to. I mean, who wants to see a picture of our kids? ;)
- Her Lindsay-ness
IRC or a phpBB messageboard!
- Joe Silence is not dead
Akiva, I meant for those who might struggle "getting" FF but would enjoy and benefit from it once they do. There's an "on ramp" to FF that rivals North Corridor Dallas coming out of an apt complex on to 50mph+ 4 lane traffic. Some of us are better at that than others, but you still see a lot of cars on the road. :)
- Melanie Reed
There has also been a lack of creative uses using the FF tool sets. Good uses of the tools inspires participation + it's easy to criticize -- harder to create.
- zeroinfluencer
@Robert: Whoa, whoa. Weren't you arguing that adding 8K new people from Twitter Lists was a good thing? Is more better, or worse?
- AJ Kohn
+++David
- Melanie Reed
@David: Good point, no real developer platform. That's been a big boon for both Facebook and Twitter.
- AJ Kohn
Robert, yet he DOES. You just aren't into that speciality :) If you think that every "tech" thing must happen in SF you really miss A LOT.
- directeur
Woah, Robert, so you are saying anyone who doesn't live in SF doesn't count in a tech discussion? That's a little self centered isn't it?
- Ed Millard
I understand it but I really dislike any discussions where the topic seems to be "how can we turn this thing that the people who use it like into something that people who don't use it and would only use it for selfish reasons like?" Screw them. If something's not as "techy" as Slashdot and it's more chaotic because the comments aren't threaded like Slashdot and there's no moderation...
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- Mark H
Lindsay, I want to see a picture of your kids. I only wish I had some to show back. ;)
- Melanie Reed
Ed: you are NOT a careful reader.
- Robert Scoble
Robert's not saying that those ideas can't happen, or that a true revelation can't come from elsewhere, but that ... the likelihood that someone outside of SF to influence tech is less. The Capital of the Internet is SF. I'd agree with that. But that doesn't mean it'll always stay that way, nor does it mean that tech from other areas can't be influential. (least that's how I read it.)
- AJ Kohn
OK I just read it, you still said if you don't live in SF there is very little chance you will have any influence on tech. If you have no influence then you either have nothing to say on the subject, or even if you do have something to say it wont matter.
- Ed Millard
Hrm, I think the whole thing is overblown. My personal FF landing page still has as much utility as my first day (if not more). Bleh, whatever.
- Chieze Okoye
@AJ The FF API is beautiful, I don't think dev communities saw the richness that you can create with the aggregation of FF streams. A few valley PR oriented bloggers pushed 'conversation' as FF's 'killer app' - whereas, the realtime aggregation streams and republishing of content is radical and unique.
- zeroinfluencer
Well I'm pretty sure all the people in Seattle, Toronto, Paris, London, Moscow,Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing, Bangalore, Boulder, etc. probably disagree
- Ed Millard
@David: I'll take your word on the API and wouldn't doubt it given the FF team's chops. But fostering usage, that community - that's where things may have gotten shaky. Too few people leveraging it. It could still resolve back to an inability to really grasp what FF can do for them.
- AJ Kohn
AJ, I think you're on to something. Back in the day, usability (including general user and disabled) use to be a well-known topic. Universities made it a part of the curriculum. Everything before and including e-commerce got the once over. But it occurs that the latest generation (including GLS and SM) have outpaced the community standards for usability. It's really the wild west again-...
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- Melanie Reed
Akiva: I suspect the noise problem Robert's describing from others isn't that comment threads get too long. It's that items keep popping to the top as new comments show up, when they don't want to see the new comments. I don't see any way around that except a separate client. It would take too much away from the FriendFeed experience for the default interface not to work this way.
- Bruce Lewis
Mark, I didn't mean to suggest /. is the only solution to the forum problem. If you have really big forum discussions /. is time tested way to control noise and raise the signal level. On the other hand it would probably be a horrible solution for intimate and friendly discussions among friends. Someone earlier Lindsey? kind of had a good suggestion. When you make a post have a row of option buttons and let the poster set the kind of forum for that thread, broadcast, panel, open, modded, thredded, not..
- Ed Millard
Ed: I specifically said "far less likely." I didn't say there is very little chance. But, seriously, this is an argument for another thread. Lots of people think they have influence but actually don't have as much. For instance, I love to think I have influence on Facebook but I'm far less likely to influence that then Paul Buchheit is. Facts are facts.
- Robert Scoble
Chieze glad you like FriendFeed. Me too. It's awesome. But that doesn't mean much to the rest of the world.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, how often do you use "Add This"? It's germane :)
- Melanie Reed
OK we will agree to disagree on that one and drop it. I've lived in the bay off and on, I think there are pluses and minuses to being there.
- Ed Millard
Melanie: "Add This" being the "Add Photos" at top of FriendFeed? Not as much as I should.
- Robert Scoble
Robert: No this service: http://www.addthis.com/ This is fast becoming the SM share button for many websites. Ours uses it. And FF is on it. Take a look at the entire list
- Melanie Reed
FriendFeed's feature set will mean a lot to the rest of the world when it's fully integrated into Facebook in 2011.
- Bruce Lewis
Bruce: I don't think it'll take that long.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, you may be right, in which case FriendFeed is a relevant thing to look at. Maybe it isn't actually too far ahead of its time.
- Bruce Lewis
Just like Lisp can make you a better programmer in other languages, FriendFeed can make you a better thinker when writing about other social networks. Popularity isn't everything, even for a blogger.
- Bruce Lewis
You mean, it's not all about attention? :D
- Her Lindsay-ness
Who really knows why Twitter got all the traction? Does Scoble? I very much doubt it. I think there's a great effort going into finding a logical explanation for Twitter massive success and FriendFeeds more modest gains. My own best guess is that it has more to do with the madness of crowds than it does with any limitation in FriendFeed. Twitter had a decent enough foothold already by...
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- David Hall
from FreshFeed
Twitter got the traction because Twitter's easy. It requires very little effort to get into and it requires even less to participate. It's the same reason why YouTube comments are the cesspool of the Internet and MetaFilter's comments are not: anyone can sit around and watch videos all day and then trash talk them but you make people pay to comment and you'll weed out the chaff almost...
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- Akiva Moskovitz
David: I was there from early days on Twitter and studied how it grew. I know more than you might think. Remember, I was the first person to follow 1,000 people there and I was the 13,800ish user to join.
- Robert Scoble
This link is the most illuminating one on FF traction at the time of the buyout. It indicates FF was just starting to regain traction after it had stalled out for a while and it suggests if maybe FF had stuck it out a while longer things might have changed. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...
- Ed Millard
Twitter got hot in the early days because of Leo Laporte and because of SXSW and because it was goofy fun way for tech influencers to talk to their friends. It just kept growing from there. Another factor in addition to simplicity (Akiva's right there) is the API. Tons of clients and tools and services are built on top of it. FriendFeed got nearly none in comparison.
- Robert Scoble
The difference may be luck of the draw ( a la Gladwell)
- Brian Sullivan
People had to build tons of clients, tools and services for Twitter because the default web UI is so bad.
- Ed Millard
Ed: what that graph doesn't show you is what we now know. Google Wave sucked a lot of attention of geek influentials away (IE Hype) and Facebook's Connect is running away with another game. I went into FriendFeed the week they decided to sell and asked them because I knew Twitter had new features coming that would make FriendFeed less interesting. I think the FriendFeed team looked at the competition and decided to fold.
- Robert Scoble
How could I have ignored the API? It's like Firefox's plug-ins: it's the only thing that makes Twitter usable for many users. Without it, they wouldn't touch it. Heck, if it weren't for Tweetie 2, I wouldn't touch it either.
- Akiva Moskovitz
And Facebook's Connect platform is getting incorporated everywhere. I think FriendFeed was hoping to become part of the general web, like what we did over on http://building43.com and that just wasn't going to happen because Facebook's Connect platform is rocking and rolling now. In fact, I made a fundamental blunder by not going with Facebook on Building43. If I had, our traffic would have been much higher than it is now.
- Robert Scoble
You can be sure that once CNN and other assorted media outlets started plugging Twitter it was game over. Once the band wagon was rolling every "personality" was going to hop on. It is a little disturbing that Miley Cyrus has now joined the "everyone should delete their Twitter accounts" camp.
- Ed Millard
David Hall +1 Steven Berlin Johnson would be a good reference - the persistence of babble is incredible valuable in phatic communications. FF, through the web interface hides a lot of that. Instead, the babble was more bookmark centric and less about 'having a sandwich'. That's why you have, on the whole, better conversation threads on FF, and ending up having to duck out of the way of...
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- zeroinfluencer
Disturbing REALLY????? My word, Miley is absolutely right <sarcasm/>
- Roberto Bonini
To paraphrase Louis Gray's wife, "nerds in startups are fickle". I speculate they had a lot of self doubt when they stalled out prior to that up tick, and decided to sell just about the time FF was starting to take off again. Someone waves $50 million at you during a period of self questioning that is a potent motivator, I think Zuckerberg saw that and he did nip a potential competitor in the bud.
- Ed Millard
But all the above comments is about public sharing. I use FF a lot for project planning and development - it's fast - you can discuss items with good archive search, and you can post media. I wonder how many people use FF in this way, and ignore the public babble?
- zeroinfluencer
Having read most of this thread (and Robert, comments are VERY valueble) the"forum problem" is NP-complete. Comments are valuable becuase seeing people reason is often just as enlightening, if not more so, than the original information.
- Roberto Bonini
Ed - mind you, there's only a few ways you can get to the helm of the FB API design and product development. :) Who's to say this isn't all going according to plan?
- zeroinfluencer
Roberto: me and you agree on that. In my research most people do not. They see these things as noise. But, if you make the comments toggle on and off we BOTH win! Plus, comments REALLY help search!
- Robert Scoble
Ed: correction, it was $50 million.
- Robert Scoble
Robert you keep talking about "your research". Is this anything more than anecdotal conversations?
- Brian Sullivan
David, Well maybe Paul and Co. are doing a trojan horse on FB but what I've read about Zuckerberg he doesn't seem likely to relinquish control of anything he cares about and I am skeptical you are going to turn FB in to FF with their entrenched user base.
- Ed Millard
@Scoble you're arguing from authority again. I think on a broadcast platform like Twitter that's an easier one to pull off. On Twitter it's a big "so what" if you've posted a load of BS because most people will simply miss any challenge to your "content." Post the same on FriendFeed and you get tackled and you get tackled in public. Reasonable enough grounds to explain your current stance and certainly as good as any reason I've heard you put forward yourself.
- David Hall
Robert, I stand corrected, and it is corrected, this editing your posts thing is one of FF's scarier features.
- Ed Millard
OPEN QUESTION: Is FF gaining or losing users? I see very little here now - but I'm told user numbers are going through the roof.
- Jim Connolly
Ed: tell me one thing. What's the biggest difference between FF and FB? There's already not as much difference as you'd might think. The one thing I miss over there? Real time search.
- Robert Scoble
Twitter got big because it's about ego. Look at me, Me, ME! Twitter flourished because people like to talk about themselves. (FF is not, which is why it hasn't gained nearly as much traction.) It was developed as an update service. It has evolved into ... something else. As for comments, they are invaluable.
- AJ Kohn
Jim: user numbers are not going through the roof here. I don't know anyone credible who has said that. The registered numbers are going up, but the active numbers are going down.
- Robert Scoble
AJ: FriendFeed is just as much about ego as Twitter is. If not more so.
- Robert Scoble
Ed, the goal is to design influentially for the web. Paul B does seem to give that ethos in his startup camp talks and general interviews. I would think FB would warm to that ideology.
- zeroinfluencer
Very true. Robert.
- Roberto Bonini
@Robert: How? Seriously, I'd like to hear your opinion.
- AJ Kohn
Robert: In other words, as people like yourself, Arrington and even those little guys like myself with a couple of thousand subscribers leave - we're being replaced by less active users. Makes sense. I used to check in on and off all day. Now, 2/3 times a week,
- Jim Connolly
Jim: not true. I don't see a lot of people joining in here and I'm watching it closely. Sorry. More people are leaving the back door than are coming in the front.
- Robert Scoble
To me the two big ones are 1) perception that it more walled garden networks and not as open though certainly it has avenues which are more open like FF 2) its home to massive quantities of apps, games, spam from people trying to get rich that hold no interest to me, though obviously many others like them. FF is probably just overlooked by that crowd, if it were bigger it would be infected with all that crap too. FF seems to mostly just be good people from my limited time here.
- Ed Millard
All User Centric Design is modeled around the ego. Good software design keeps that in mind. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
- zeroinfluencer
AJ: Twitter is, for many people, about business now. Not ego at all. News brands: http://twitter.com/#... no ego. Tech companies: http://twitter.com/Scoblei... No ego. But here? It's ALL about ego!
- Robert Scoble
David is right.
- Robert Scoble
On Twitter the default is to show number you follow, number of followers, number of Tweets. That's all playing on ego and popularity. Nearly everything (even lists) is geared to stimulate a innate need to acquire more of something as a way to ... validate contribution or perceived influence or authority. FF does not show this in the default mode.
- AJ Kohn
Companies and brands are the most aggressive form of ego there is, and they usually are direct reflections of the ego of the company's CEO.
- Ed Millard
Alright Robert. In order to reduce the signal to noise ratio, we can do one of two things, we can use "Likes" to filter the comment stream. If I Like more posts from Robert than i do from LG, Roberts comments appear but not LG's. We can use semantics to (somehow) sort the thread and show comments relevant to the original post. (simply dumping noise isin't a solution - not all noise is noise all the time. Likewise, increasing signal in an echo chamber is fruitless)
- Roberto Bonini
@Robert: Oh, I think Twitter is a great business tool! It's a marketers paradise. But I'm not sure that's what most people believe it to be. People still think they're going to get some sort of social dialog there. I think it's why Twitter churn is so high. People get it thinking it'll be one thing and quickly find out it's another.
- AJ Kohn
+1 AJ, there are some people that use Twitter in awesome, constructive, useful, ways like Tim O'Reilly and Jay Rosen but a lot of people its pure self promotion. As for news outlets using twitter they are going to go wherever the eyeballs are, and they will go to multiple networks not just Twitter. Those are pure broadcast, no engagement, they aren't really a ringing endorsement of why Twitter is great.
- Ed Millard
I'd bet FF *would* take off (but be worse for it) if it listed how many times the content I fed got liked and commented on, and that (along with subscribers etc.) were all listed right there at the top of my home feed. And that upon signing up, I'd get suggested users based on subscriptions but also who got the most likes and comments. Yet, I don't think that's conducive to what FF really excels at.
- AJ Kohn
@Robert, biggest difference between Facebook and Friendfeed - reciprocal connections. Without a doubt. The apps, the ads, other stuff, is true, but for me the central difference, and the thing that betrays a fundamental difference of worldview between the two apps is whether or not you can follow someone's content without them having to follow you back. You can only do that on Facebook...
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- Jandy, ConcertMaven of FF
@Ed: I realized a long time ago that Twitter was a big Internet megaphone. And if you could get a lot of people to 'listen' to that megaphone well, that's powerful stuff. It's about Reach. Twitter gives your message reach. Nothing wrong with that. I just don't see it as ... transforming.
- AJ Kohn
Those who study the art of propaganda consider reach to be everything, because following reach is influence, and following influence is control. TV is losing its reach in the Internet era so most of those "brands" and "personalites" are rushing to find a way to regain it, enter Twitter and FB. They are better because they are bidirectional.
- Ed Millard
*Noise* :)
- ashish
@Ed: I'd be interested to see more on how reach leads to influence. It often does but ... not always. Plenty of multi-million dollar ad campaigns in the graveyard as examples. Reach + ? = influence.
- AJ Kohn
Ed I think you're right. I caught that TC piece at the time too. Seems to me that the FriendFeed guys had a bit of a crisis of confidence and grabbed lunch while it was on offer. In any case I always figured FriendFeed as a place to graduate to once you'd rammed up against Twitters limitations. And, as I'm sure you know, that doesn't take long. That's how I got here. I was actually on...
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- David Hall
You don't have influence until you have reach so its the prerequisite. Then it a matter of how effectively you craft the message and push the buttons in your target audience. Some people are good at that part, some aren't, some fail, some succeed.
- Ed Millard
Robert, I just wonder. Isn't twitter more about consuming the information and FF more about sharing and discussing? Look at http://twitter.com/Scoblei.... What can anyone add to that or comment on that? I agree it is getting a lot noisy in here (exhibit, this post). But not all posts will be this noisy I think.
- Amit
+1 Jandy, she answered Robert's challenge to me better than I did.
- Ed Millard
@Ed: I'm not sure. New memes start with someone small sometimes. Say ... keyboard cat ... and someone who has reach communicates that message and it goes big. So who has the influence? The creator of keyboard cat or the person to has the reach to make it go big? I find it very interesting.
- AJ Kohn
Jandy: +100. You just nailed for me why I like Twitter and FriendFeed better than Facebook. Agreed.
- Robert Scoble
Robertt, maybe this post and the scads of comments prove your point, but maybe your point is limited to your own experience due to your unique position in tech. You speak, noise follows. But that does not make Friendfeed irrelevant or useless for the average or even just left or right of average user. You have a unique experience that is going to color any forum you put your time into....
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- Martha
+++Jandy
- Melanie Reed
Well put, Jandy.
- Akiva Moskovitz
I think the forum problem is not as big in smaller more intimate groups. Recently I've been very active in the DMU group here that includes a lot of folks who've migrated here from Flickr. The relevancy is much more higher in these venues than in the main feed because it's a smaller controlled experience. I do wish though that groups were more full featured like the rest of FF though....
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- Thomas Hawk
oh of course and photo voting pools for groups would by awesome too. ;)
- Thomas Hawk
Lists are not enough. Twitter, FF and other social networks need tagging by default, then filter on list + tag. That's the element that would kill the noise and turn them into interest networks.
- howard shippin
from BuddyFeed
Martha: you might have a point if we were just talking about me. But we're not. So, try again. Again, I've talked with thousands of people about these things. They tell me they don't like the noise that public forums bring. I've been doing this for 25 years and this isn't the first time I've heard this pushback. Facebook, by the way, on its iPhone app, handles it perfectly: it hides all...
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- Robert Scoble
You all keep referring to this as either chat or comments when actually its a discussion. I think that the ability to discuss anything on Friend Feed or anywhere else for that matter IS where you learn the most. I'm not techy like most of you, I'm just an ordinary 'average' user, but I see twitter more as a 'newsreel' of info, shallow but instant, whereas Friend Feed is more a 'thrashing out of ideas and opnions, and is therefore all the richer for it.
- Sandra Large
Sandra: chat/discussion/forum/comments are all pretty much the same thing. Yes, the two are different. There CAN be lots of learning here, it's just that this is a lot noiser than other online things in some ways.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, about noise: when you or other tech influencers introduce FriendFeed, you show the things you're excited about, which tend to be big and noisy, right? And if you're the first person someone follows on FF, they're going to get a noisy first impression. The slower growth that doesn't come through tech influencers may have less of a back door.
- Bruce Lewis
And about the 25+-year-old forum problem: Moderated Usenet was great until moderators slacked off. Decentralized moderation fixes that, at least for small discussions. Larger discussions can lead to whack-a-mole (though I notice this one hasn't), but with one of the suggestions I made earlier in this conversation the number of whackers could scale with the number of moles.
- Bruce Lewis
Moderation = censorship. Censorship sucks. Give the users control to hide and block. The less censorship the better.
- Thomas Hawk
@Paul - what about a view to only see the user's posts/content ie no comments of others and no likes => then it becomes twitter like
- Kishore Balakrishnan
Come on, it's hardly messier than Facebook, since the default view only includes the first and last comment. Basically the gist I'm getting is that people who think they're important don't want to listen to people who they don't think are important. Such is the human race, I suppose.
- Victor Ganata
+++Victor hammer meets nail.
- David Hall
Robert said "FB iPhone app ... hides all comments with an arrow that you can then use to expand the comments. That is so much better than this mess here that it isn't funny". Robert, I must be missing your point because FF also hides most comments until you expand them because you want to read them... Don't want to read FF comments, don't expand them, problem solved. Or are you saying FF is a "mess" because it shows first and last comment?
- Ed Millard
235 comments! I really don't want to expand *that* on FF! Is this a pain-point for anyone else?
- Space Cowboy
Not for me. If I'm interested enough in the topic or dialog I'll click the time stamp and open the post page to read everything. The text amount is comparable to a medium length blog post: if I have the time to read that I have the time to read this if it interests me.
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
A typical blog post? Dragging & copying the comments only (which took about a min. of scrolling) produced 9200 words and 23 pages of text. Blog posts also tend to have a more easily read narrative.
- Vincent van Wylick
The problem is for big conversations like this one you need threading and maybe moderation, but for more normal conversations that are smaller flat is better. Allowing a switch between the two adds complexity. For big conversations FF lacks the button to reply to a specific poster so the viewer can thread, at least as an option. Much of the noise level in this conversation is due to people having to manually try to fake threading.
- Ed Millard
The threading vs. flat conversation is interesting to me - we've tried multiple times to put Disqus or Intense Debate on a film blog I write for, and every time we meet huge resistance to threading ESPECIALLY on long threads. People say they have a lot of difficulty finding the new comments when they aren't all at the top or bottom.
- Jandy, ConcertMaven of FF
Why can't there be a summary fly-out with timestamps based on response rate to single comments and a "last comment made" link as well as "thread count" links and lastly, "participants in this thread" link? Collapse everything else except the initial post. The initial interface looking like this one, should always be available for those who want to "sort through". You want the...
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- Melanie Reed
Jandy, you kind of have to let the user flip between threading and flat to solve the chronology problem. Slashdot has a popup menu at the top that lets you view in "Threaded, Nested, Flat, No Comments". The down side is the UI gets progressively more complex both to implement and use unless you are going to force everyone to lowest common denominator UI.
- Ed Millard
But Ed, that's what I have against the traditional "threaded" approach: all the fork like structure. It does get complicated real fast. What's needed is somewhere a "summary" for those jumping in late to "catch up" but also the "single comment" link to democratize the discussion. Threads have all the indentation problems of trying to follow that way IF I am picturing what you mean by thread.
- Melanie Reed
+1 Ed
- 'Like' robot (frɐnc)
My other observation is this: everyone creates a "story" about the ideas and information they are taking in and immediately starts associating connections in their mind creating a mental picture whether they realize it or not when they are perceiving that information. Our user interfaces don't yet lend themselves to that especially where it come to dialogue and forums. We've accepted a...
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- Melanie Reed
Here's why you don't need indented/tangential threading: FF discussions tend to be small enough to fit in the "RAM" in one's mind. It curtails many threads that might ramble; the exception (like Paul's thread here) comes when the power of the topic/zeitgeist and vibe of a live chat going strong overrides that usual point of decay. Predictablly, one or several commenters here will start a new thread or escalate it to a blog post and summarize their thoughts based on what transpired on this stream.
- Micah Wittman
Melanie, have you used Slashdot, they did forums earlier and better than anyone. The forum starts out flat, and then starts threading. Random community moderators start modding up the insightful posts, and burying the trolls, crap, etc. Once the moderation kicks in the "summary" is all the posts that were modded up to 5 which are shown expanded. All the lower moderated stuff is there but you have to clck to see. Slashdot would suck like YouTube comments if they hadn't solved the forum problem.
- Ed Millard
It's organic, not hierarchical. As other have stated, there is as much to learn from watching the process unfold as there is to gain from end result.
- Micah Wittman
Ed, no, I haven't used Slashdot but I'm willing to give it a try. I'm pretty adaptable. But when I see a problem and it becomes "the picture" for me, in this case a circle then I know its time for the leap out of the present "prison of one idea". ;)
- Melanie Reed
Micah, its true threads are bad for small friendly forums. Some of this discussion is about what happens when the forums on "celebrity" social expert's threads get so big they overflow readers brains and they turn in to *noise*. One noise problem is organization, the other is some post and some posters are better than others in the mind of the celeb and the reader.
- Ed Millard
Slashdot dealt with most of the forum problems ten years ago, they had to to survive the trolls. The problem is their UI needs to be complex to be flexible and keep everyone happy. Their audience is also mostly geek power user. When you get to social networks the other UI school is demanding the UI be dirt simple so the unwashed masses can cope, but dirt simple mean its inflexible and it ticks off nearly everyone, especially power users. Hard problem to solve... making everyone happy.
- Ed Millard
Ed, conferences have break-out groups. The same idea should be employed.
- Micah Wittman
Ed, yes, you offered a little explication for others of what happens when you lost the ability to categorize your"story" into a mental picture that is associated with previous "stories" you have stored in the brain. That end result is "noise". Some of us are better at doing that than others, that's true. But there come a point of over flow for all of us. What our UI needs to do is to amplify and assist in that "story" constructing process.
- Melanie Reed
Break out groups is a nice idea, but it seems a bit cumbersome. You need to make a new post, post a link here and get some critical mass from the first forum to move. If you do it five times you would splinter the first forum and lose critical mass, especially in a "real-time" forum where people will only watch one forum at a time. Chances are most people will cling to the first forum if its interesting.
- Ed Millard
Ed and Micah, what I hear both of you saying, and Robert as well, is that at some point in the "story" constructing process, the dialog from the forum needs to end in the narrative of a blog. Up till now, the blog component has been a random, unattached part of the discussion. AM I hearing that you think that in some way it should become part of the UI? So that the discussion gets...
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- Melanie Reed
Not sure I follow, blog is kind of a one voice, one direction thing, only way a forum morphs to blog is when once person splits off the forum to make a more in depth point and posts the blog link to the forum. I'm mostly just talking about the various methods for restoring order in a big forum, and improving signal to noise ratio. Most entail putting more options and more UI in and around the forum and making the UI more complex which many think is bad on a social network.
- Ed Millard
Ed, as I was writing this, it occurs to me that what I'm suggesting is what I may have just figured out (finally) that Google Wave is trying to get us to do. But if so, I beleive FF could actually do it better. the "noise" problem that was created by the various forms of SM, inside and outside of the platforms, was the inability to "connect the dots". We didn't have a framework for how...
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- Melanie Reed
One of the problems that we haven't solved is the usefulness of digression and random access of connective tissue in the "story" process. That's the wild card that often comes up as "noise"
- Melanie Reed
I can't speak for Robert. Some of his issue "seems" to be he only wants to see the Silicon Valley/SF movers and shakers in his feed talking about tech and social networks, and he doesn't much want anyone but that same group to be posting on forums under his auspices. Friend Feeds openness is bad for that. The same is true for all the Twitter celeberati. They don't want peons anywhere near their online presence to tarnish it.
- Ed Millard
Only way I can see to maintain FF openness for those who want it, and celeb broadcast only mode for the celebs who demand it, in one social network is you have to have an option when you make a post on your feed to control the forum methodology (i.e. broadcast only peons can only look on, panel mode where only my social elite are allowed to speak & peons can watch, private where only my circle can speak and see (FB mode), or completely OPEN(FF mode).
- Ed Millard
There also seems to be an issue where someone you follow, through the "like" process, can inject pictures of kittens, babies and man titteh in to your feed. Of course that is kind of the original point of social networks, seeing what your network sees. I think some just want hard core tech news and talk and twitter lists probably do allow an uber though somewhat lifeless feed like that.
- Ed Millard
Ed, well, that is the territory of the heart when it comes into contact with the machine. And oddly (or maybe not so oddly) there is a post on my feed that addresses that theme: http://friendfeed.com/faithx5... ;) Digression and Random access at work. lol And I find that refreshing. I'm always excited about how some new idea may be generated because I allowed what...
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- Melanie Reed
@Melanie: I fully believe in non-linear learning. The ability to take input from diverse thematic content and synthesize something ... to apply something from one world to the other. That's where I think we're heading. I think of it a little bit like a digital version of Burroughs' Cut Up technique: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
- AJ Kohn
I can't believe I read the whole thing
- Michael Slattery
Such a simple and obvious solution: provide an optional *LIST* view for Friendfeed items. Open the comments only on items that look really interesting. Am I missing something obvious? Then Friendfeed could easily emulate Twitter on all essentials (and surpass it in many other areas).
- Sean McBride
Sean, I think the obvious thing you are missing is there are no FF developers any more so FF probably isn't getting anything it doesn't already have. And there are camps here that don't really like the alternatives that FB and Twitter offer which is why this is such a hot button issue. I wish there was one social network that had lists, open forums, walled gardens, and broadcast mode based on the wishes of the person running a feed so everyone could be happy in one network.
- Ed Millard
Don't believe your lying eyes (TED Talk) - http://www.cnn.com/2009...
Maxamad, April Buchheit, ǝuǝƃnǝ and 13 other people liked this
"Put another way, only by accepting my own humanity can I accept the humanity of others. "Seeing myself see" creates the opportunity for this acceptance. Illusions, then, were not the point of my talk, but simply a tool for encouraging this process. Resolving uncertainty is essential to our survival. Hence our fear of ambiguous situations is palpable -- e.g., the inability to resolve sensory conflict between the eyes and ears can result in nausea (like seasickness). And yet it is only by embracing the unknown within education, science, art and most importantly within our own private lives that we will find new routes to more enlightened ways of seeing and being. Thus, courage not confidence is at the heart of this process of actively redefining normality, which is the route to compassion and creativity."
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
Have you read Dan Margulis "Professional Photoshop"? It is all about that.
- Matter of Attitude
The quote is a little unclear, but parts of of it seem apropos to the latest big English-language discussion here on FF.
- Kamilah Gill
huh?
- Daisy
Drop of water at 2000 fps (very cool) - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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Eren Emre Kanal, Dan Hsiao, durbin and 74 other people liked this
This is pretty cool.
- Bastian
I didn't see this segment, but I was watching this special in my hotel room when I was at the society of rheology conference. It made me think that I need a high speed camera. For science, of course ;)
- Clare Dibble
This is very cool. I'd like to see it with other liquids, and water with different this mixed in. Like soap for instance, which messes with the surface tension...what happens then?
- Bill Scherer
hi
- soso
Are there any liquids that don't have surface tension?
- Gabe
My husband and I are addicted to the show Time Warp: random things done in front of high speed cameras. The oldies but goodies like popping a water balloon are stil my favorite...
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
That's amazing, which is why science rocks! :)
- imabonehead
Love it! I want to have 2000 fps water drops as my screensaver.
- EricaJoy
Very cool!
- Garin Kilpatrick
Amazing. What else would be interesting to visualize at 2000 fps?
- Philippe
True beauty
- Инк Лонгтан
from iPhone
There is only as much beauty in nature as you can appreciate and not a grain more. thoreau
- Robert Higgins
+Bill I wanna see Quicksilver or Mercury at 2000 FPS
- Robert Higgins
Я предпологал!!!! :) Теперь я знаю!!!!
- atner
focus
Torsten Eckert, Siavash, Chris Martin and 11 other people liked this
Where in FB HQ is this one?
- Benjamin Golub
Should I say?
- Paul Buchheit
I think I remember seeing it in the bathroom
- Benjamin Golub
It must be over a bathroom stall.
- τorƍue
At Extreme Networks (which builds switches and routers), the plastic urinal inserts were silkscreened with the logos of competitors like Cisco, Foundry, etc. It made vendor meetings... interesting. Given Extreme's current level of success versus those competitors, also quite ironic.
- DGentry
I don't get it.
- See-ming Lee 李思明 SML
Hormesis - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
ashish, Keith Bourgoin, Dani Radu and 8 other people liked this
"Hormesis is the term for generally-favorable biological responses to low exposures to toxins and other stressors. A pollutant or toxin showing hormesis thus has the opposite effect in small doses as in large doses. ... The biochemical mechanisms by which hormesis works are not well understood. It is conjectured that a low dose challenge with a toxin may trigger certain repair mechanisms in the body, and these mechanisms, having been initiated, are efficient enough that they not only neutralize the toxin's effect, but even repair other defects not caused by the toxin."
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
Learned a new thing today.
- AJ Batac
Where would you say the 3 martini challenge falls on that graph? :)
- Benjamin Golub
Heh, tech rockstars and heroin...
- directeur
thanks for sharing - eustress! ;)
- Harscoat
This is very vigorously debated and generally hormesis is not widely accepted.
- Chris Brinkerhoff
Not exactly but sounds like a vaccine effect which are viral particles at low concentration.
- ashish
ooc - low-level / high-level goodness - http://ooc-lang.org/
Shivanand Velmurugan, JMaultasch, Benjamin Golub and 56 other people liked this
Looks promising. C++ is too much of a disaster -- we need a real successor to C. "ooc is a modern, object-oriented, functional-ish, high-level, low-level, sexy programming language. it's translated to pure C with a source-to-source compiler. it strives to be powerful, modular, extensible, portable, yet simple and fast."
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
Meh. I dislike post-fix'd declarations, and given that the assignment operator is frequently used, I think C's decision to make it a single character operator is the correct one. Otherwise, it doesn't seem any better than say, Objective C, D, or any of the other languages vying to be the next C.
- Piaw Na
Have you looked at the D language? http://www.digitalmars.com/d/ It's been around for years and near the top of language shootouts in performance.
- Ray Cromwell
Pointers? Do we really need pointers?
- Gabe
Yes, if you're doing a systems language, you need pointers --- for writing device drivers, if nothing else.
- Piaw Na
Based on the sample code, it appears to have a very direct interface to C, which I think is important for a systems language. For most things I'd rather just use Python, but for lower-level, perf-critical stuff, we need something else. D looks like too much, but I haven't tried it.
- Paul Buchheit
Type inference, yummy - a main reason why Scala has mad traction these days
- Christopher Galtenberg
Start by creating a really lightweight and easy to use development environment. I should be able to teach Jay Rosen to program in it. Back in the 80s there was serious compeititon in this area -- from Borland with Turbo Pascal and on the Mac, from Think Technologies with their C and Pascal systems. The languages aren't the issue, at least not for me. I want to program in C again, but the curve is too steep in all the environments. Give me a Turbo environment and some nice libraries, and lets go! :-)
- Dave Winer
Dave: http://tryruby.sophrinix.com <- that kind of easy
- Christopher Galtenberg
Piaw Na: For ':=' I've just made a homepage edit to make it very clear. := is decl-assign. Regular assign is '=' as in C/Java/etc. RTFM! ;)
- 'n ddrylliog
Piaw Na: As for trying to be the next C... well, no =) The next C is probably C itself, since C hackers are way too picky to be satisfied with anyside above C (in high-level/low-level terms)
- 'n ddrylliog
Btw, why is everyone thinking of ooc as a systems language? It can be used as such, but it's not really the goal. Do you all think so because it's compiled?
- 'n ddrylliog
I'm thinking of it as a systems language because that's what I want. We already have reasonable options for higher-level stuff, but when writing a database or whatever, we're stuck with C or C++.
- Paul Buchheit
Paul Buchheit: Hmm. High-performance implementations of current reasonable high-level languages are still pretty much experimental :/ (unladen swallow, shedskin, etc.) Why sacrifice performance? Many compiled languages have shown that expressivity isn't reserved to "interpreted" languages. =)
- 'n ddrylliog
Piaw Na: about ooc being better or worse than Objective-C, D, etc. Well, D is really complex. It gives a *lot* of control, but it makes code less readable imho. As much as you may currently dislike it, the ooc syntax is (for some at least) more readable, so more maintainable, in general simpler, etc. (a lot less trickier than C++, for example. And if you don't see what I'm talking about, you haven't done enough C++)
- 'n ddrylliog
Ocaml is pretty expressive, it has a REPL, and it's been in the top of the language shootout benchmarks for years.
- Ray Cromwell
How does ooc compare to C#? If I had to write something like a compiler, I'd use C#.
- Gabe
The missing dots really bother me.
- τorƍue
C++ a disaster? I don't think so, its main problem is the lack of high level straightforward frameworks. IMHO generic programming is a deeper paradigm than OOP, but like functional languages has a slow learning curve, look at the matrix implementations/compiler optimizations in Boost!
- Sebastian Wain
from iPhone
Sebastian: C++ has lots of significant problems. For example, it's actually 3 languages: precompiler (#define), C++, and templates. The template language is so powerful that you can't even tell if the compiler will halt on a given program, let alone understand the error messages it produces. Just the shear size of the language, manual memory management, things like multiple inheritance, and vast overlapping standard libraries make it hard to program in by giving the progammer an overly large cognitive load.
- Gabe
My two biggest gripes: Error messages from templates, specially from STL, can be notoriously hard to track down. And secondly, default implicit conversions can lead to hard to track down bugs. When you have a type system so complex you have to mentally "run the compiler" as you code, something's wrong.
- Ray Cromwell
I've been doing nothing but C++ lately. It's not bad, but only because everyone subsets it. The compilers are horrible, but I don't think that's because nobody has an incentive to improve g++'s front-end.
- Piaw Na
Ouch. decl-assign is terrible. I hate that. I think C's syntax (e.g., int a = 3; ) is much better than decl- assign. If you want to imitate C, at least make the declarations C-like. Personally, I think language design should be performed so that you can hand-code a compiler (i.e., no lex & yacc). Why? Because hand-coded compilers can much more easily produce human readable error...
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- Piaw Na
I've seen it argued that LL(k) compiler-compilers don't have this fault, because they generate recursive decent parsers that look somewhat like what you'd write by hand, JavaCC certainly has this attribute for example. Although I'm quite fond of the parser-combinator approach now.
- Ray Cromwell
Gabe: the issue is: when you need performance you must follow the C++ path. Don't forget http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp...
- Sebastian Wain
What Ray said. yacc uses an LALR parser, and LALR parsers are kind of notorious for producing inscrutable error messages. LL(k) compiler-compilers can generate much more intuitive error messages, and the code they generate often looks like something a human would write. Both JavaCC and ANTLR are good LL(k) compiler-compilers. I believe LL(k) parsers aren't strictly as powerful as LALR...
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- Laurence Gonsalves
On the topic of ooc: the "object [space] method-call()" syntax is the most jarring thing about the syntax for me. I'm surprised that there doesn't seem to be any actual introduction to that syntax on the linked page -- it's just used several times without explanation. Also, I have to say I'm not a fan of conservative garbage collection.
- Laurence Gonsalves
Yes, when I hand code parsers, I write them in recursive descent form. The problem with C++ is that it's not easily parseable in that form. And seriously, any language where you can write map<string, string>, but have to write map<string, vector<string> > is seriously messed up.
- Piaw Na
+1 to Laurence's comment about conservative GC: that's plain evil.
- Piaw Na
Yeah, Piaw only uses progressive GC, and even then he keeps complaining that it's finding ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
- Daniel Dulitz
I believe JavaCC grammar repo has a relatively straightforward C++ grammar implemented, using LL(k)
- Ray Cromwell
Piaw Na: You got so much wrong in so few comments that it's actually worrying. Decl-assign is not terrible. It's called type inference, and is used in a lot of modern languages (ML, C#, Scala) to make our lives easier, and limits repeating yourself and it works damn well. Grow up and learn other languages. So no, the goal is not to imitate C. Go use Objective-C/C#/C++/Java/D if you want C-like languages.
- 'n ddrylliog
Piaw Na: Second: I have hand-written the ooc 0.3 compiler's parser, and it was a piece of cake, because the syntax is so simple and unambiguous. Having "object[space]field" is a non-issues since declarations are "name: type". And you're mistaken in thinking that the fact you can hand-write a parser for a grammar means that it's simple. It's the other way around. If you can write a LL(K)/LR/PEG grammar, then the syntax is *very* straightforward. And the new ooc compiler (rock) uses a PEG grammar..
- 'n ddrylliog
Conservative Garbage Collector: There are advantages 1) the performance is a lot better than you would expect (and actually faster than plain malloc/free for lots of small objects) 2) there are advantages, e.g. seamless integrations with all the C libs out there. 3) Writing a GC isn't easy, the Boehm has been around for years and is well-tested/optimized, portable, etc. Read the papers please :/ This thread is a showcase of ignorance and arrogance.
- 'n ddrylliog
As for "Language blah is better". No, sorry, apples are not better than oranges. That's your personal taste. Well, good for you =) One size doesn't fit all. Why do you even bother?
- 'n ddrylliog
why `diagonal := Vector3f new()` instead of `diagonal := new Vector3f()` or even `diagonal := Vector3f()` is this because someone felt he must not be like any other language?
- Tzury Bar Yochay
I know several typed inference languages. I dislike them --- again, type inferencing never took off not because the technology was hard, but because programmers preferred the declarations --- it really helps. Not to mention tools like ctags/etags, etc., do a good job for popular programming environments (i.e., vi and emacs), which meant that languages without such support never get widespread use.
- Piaw Na
Conservative Garbage Collector: 1) this is more an argument abut gc than conservative gc. I have no problems with gc, I just want accurate gc. 2) That's a fair point, but not enough to make me want to use conservative gc. I'd be happier managing resources from C libraries manually than worrying that hash values are confusing the collector. 3) Yes, writing a gc isn't easy, but I'm sure...
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- Laurence Gonsalves
@Piaw, a type inferenced language just means that the type is concretely there, just it doesn't need to be declared in syntax. Thus, any smart editor or IDE, or other tool could reify or show types on demand if the developer so chose. Ctags are a relatively primitive mechanism for source code indexing, once you have an editor which understands your language's AST/semantics, you don't...
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- Ray Cromwell
Tzury: why 'diagonal := Vector3f new()'? Because new is simply a static method: http://ooc-lang.org/blog... Your definition of "any other language" must be "Java and C++" and both are inconsistent/magical on this issue, as opposed to, yeah, pretty much "any other language" (Smalltalk, Ruby, Io, ...)
- 'n ddrylliog
I've never heard of this before. Feel a bit disconnected.
- mikepk
Ray: for better or worse, most programmers out there are using Emcas and vi. Why? Because no other tool scales up when you're dealing with large code bases. (That's one reason why even some Java programmers at Google use vi and Emacs) I don't care how primitive the tools are, they have to get things done.
- Piaw Na
I agree with Laurence about conservative GC. The big one is memory fragmentation. Once upon a time, when all we ever wrote were desktop apps, memory fragmentation didn't matter. For server side applications, it matters a heck of a lot, and any language that uses conservative gc might as well provide the delete operator.
- Piaw Na
C++ can be used quite effectively without STL or complicated templates, but it will never be safe from corruption or memory leaks.
- Todd Hoff
I love lamp.
- Mark Jepsen
@Laurence 1) Yes and no. The performance gap between good conservative and precise (/accurate/exact) garbage collectors is less significant than one would think. 2) That's a valid point 3) Actually, I've thought of using Steve Dekorte's libgarbagecollector (look on GitHub). These are still plans though, Boehm was clearly the easiest option to start with, and ooc itself isn't bound to...
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- 'n ddrylliog
Easily one of the most fascinating threads on FriendFeed right now. You guys are talking mostly over my head but it reminds me that I need to get my ass out of managed languages one day.
- Akiva Moskovitz
@mikepk The language+impl has only been out there for a few months. =)
- 'n ddrylliog
@Todd Totally agreed, which explains some design choices in ooc. Memory leaks is a non-issue with a GC, and as for corruption, as long as you stay out of manual memory manipulation, the compiler does most the checking for you, statically.
- 'n ddrylliog
@piaw: I think we're mostly in agreement, but I really don't think it's fair to say that "most programmers use Emacs and vi". I use vi a lot, but when it comes to Java/Scala code bases, I still use Eclipse (or IntelliJ, or whatever). Even at Google. I just don't map the *entire* Google Java code base into my workspace at once. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of Java developers at...
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- Joel Webber
Joel: sure, you can play tricks like mapping only what you use. But a surprising number of Java users at Google kick up vim/emacs just so they can use the *fast* low-latency search tools when they need to read code outside of what they've mapped. The numbers were really surprising to me.
- Piaw Na
I've been using emacs for 2 decades and I still use it when I need to quickly edit something or slice and dice text with macros (or I write sed/perl to do it). But when I'm developing stuff, a switchover point occurs where emacs is no longer sufficient and I desire the IDE. Emacs is great for scripts where you can test for errors via a quick eval, but the cost of a compile is high in...
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- Ray Cromwell
There is, once you get into Google-size (or even Linux-kernel-sized) code bases. But I guess I've living in the Google bubble for so long, the concept of not having mega-libraries doesn't even occur to me. And we've built enough fancy tools at Google that make Emacs way faster than Eclipse/IntelliJ (see http://code.google.com/p...). Latency matters!
- Piaw Na
Ultimately, this is a search problem, something that google excels at. I'm not sure why you think Emacs has any innate advantage over Eclipse/IntelliJ for this. If GTags can be built for Emacs, it can be done for those IDEs. (Those IDEs already index all symbols and store them on disk) The issue here is that "find symbol" is necessary, but not sufficient, especially on large code bases....
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- Ray Cromwell
Heh. I open sourced all the infrastructure, but not the ranking algorithms for code (which are google proprietary) Having seen lots of old Google hands work in Emacs, I think you'll find that they disagree. People have tried adding plugins to gtags for Eclipse/IntelliJ, but none have succeeded --- those IDEs aren't designed to take plugins quite the way Emacs does. Even Vim isn't as...
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- Piaw Na
As a practical example, the Linux kernel core (minus the whole driver universe) is about 500kloc. The GWT compiler, which I work on, is about 500kloc. I have zero complains about my IDE's ability (IntelliJ 9) to deal with this code base. Call it a medium sized code base if you will. Too big IMHO to practically use with Emacs/VI (where I desire refactoring and other navigational...
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- Ray Cromwell
What you'll find is that top engineers everywhere have heavily customized environments, scripts, editors, libraries, even their own programming languages, that make switching hard. Anecdotal evidence doesn't really prove anything, if "old hands" is meant to covey argument by authority. Like I said, I've been personally using Emacs since 1987, I use a bevy of ELisp, Perl, Awk, and other...
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- Ray Cromwell
I think the mindset difference is huge. Codebase too big? The IDE solution is to subset. The EMACS solution is to create a search index held in memory and apply search technology to it. The size of the community hacking away on these tools also matters.
- Piaw Na
Piaw, you do realize that the IDE solution (I can't speak for Eclipse), is to build a search index and apply search technology? IntelliJ spiders all your reachable code and files on project setup (now, as a background process since it can take some time) and serves up IDE functions by consulting the index. In fact, it's very much like Google Suggest. I can type symbol lookup requests...
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- Ray Cromwell
Oh yeah, but they do it on disk and so have high latency when the code base scales up. I know, because people switch to Emacs/gtags from those IDEs for that reason. :-)
- Piaw Na
Google's code base is large? I mean, I know the data it holds and indexes is very large, but somehow I assumed the code itself was quite small.
- Andrew C
Actually, they cache some or all of the indices in memory depending on heap, at least according to the IntelliJ lead, if you increase heap, you lower cache thrashing. I still don't see why you think ETags/CTags/etc is any different in this regard. IntelliJ uses a similar index structure, it just records a bitmask on each tag as to the context (comment, identifier, method, field, etc)....
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- Ray Cromwell
@Andrew: I assume Piaw's talking about the *entire* code base, apps and all. That's a lot of code.
- Joel Webber
gtags keeps it all in memory on a server, so there's no disk seek latency. There's nothing fundamental about the IDEs that makes this stuff impossible to do. It's just far easier to do in Emacs when there's just one of you. Once the prototype gets going, it's usefulness allows others to add in more useful functionality. Until recently, things like IntelliJ weren't even open source, so...
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- Piaw Na
Thanks Joel. Yes, I'm talking about the entire codebase. All of it. :-)
- Piaw Na
@Piaw, Ray: It's becoming clear to me that we're all essentially saying the same thing. To deal with a large, complex code base, you need good tools. IDEs vs. Emacs isn't really much of a dichotomy if they're both building indices and cross-references of your code base and serving them up to you within the editor. They're both IDEs, n'est-ce pas?
- Joel Webber
Yes, I'm just saying, if you need to build something in a hurry, it's far easier to do it in Emacs. But more importantly, ignoring a base of Emacs/Vi users when designing your programming language is ignoring a large percentage of the population. And in some cases, it's a large percentage of a very influential population.
- Piaw Na
@Piaw I somehow lost your point between the "omg I don't like type inference" and the "you're ignoring Emacs/Vim users". It's still straight-forward to look for declarations of things, what's your problem? It's precisely why := and = are separate operators
- 'n ddrylliog
You'll get no argument from me. I'm a fan of diversity in programming, and I do use emacs daily. IntelliJ/Eclipse would do well to offer a simple in-editor tool for building plugins via any Java scripting engine and support saving those persistently. I guess my point is, I can't live without Etags functionality, and now I can't live without all the other features I've gotten used to:...
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- Ray Cromwell
Even without any support, editing ooc in at text editor (I personally use Vim and Geany for .ooc) is very easy, cause you can search for "whatever:" (notice the ':') and be done with it. Try doing that with a C/C++/Java codebase =) That's the payback of a simple, non-ambiguous consistent syntax
- 'n ddrylliog
And AFAIK, most ooc users/contributors/hackers use vim. A few use emacs, too. We have a vim syntax file, and a contributor is looking into writing an emacs mode. =)
- 'n ddrylliog
@Piaw, Ray, et al: To finish my previous thought -- There will always be some point at which an IDE (be it Emacs or Eclipse) will fail to scale. The time and space required to deal with the code base eventually grows without bound, and you simply aren't going to load it into a single machine's memory. Even if you could load all of Google's code (or at least its index) into a single...
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- Joel Webber
Or you do the work to integrate the external search tool (or whatever) into the IDE. Emacs is designed to make that easy. The other IDEs that are around today, not so much. Code Search introduces a lot of latency. gtags as implemented internal to Google has sub 300ms response times. Whenever it goes down, I get complaints from people, declaring that "it's just too much work to remember where files are."
- Piaw Na
I think Piaw's concern with type inference comes from the fact that explicitly stating the type of something acts as documentation. With type inference that documentation goes away. For example, in ooc, suppose I search for "whatever:" and I see "whatever:= foo()". What's the type? Whatever foo() returns. So now I have to look up foo(). Suppose it uses type inference on its return type (assuming that's possible in ooc). Now I have to dig even deeper.
- Laurence Gonsalves
I'm guessing the IDE digression related to the fact that a sufficiently smart IDE can add the implicit type information back by doing the same type inference as the compiler. The problem with going down that road is that you're coupling the code editor and the language. Either your editor needs special language support so it can do the type inference, or you have to put up with not having an easy way of knowing something's type.
- Laurence Gonsalves
I don't understand how you can do conservative garbage collection without leaking memory.
- Gabe
Gabe: In theory, you can't. In practice, Hans Boehm did a lot of studies in the 1990s showing you that the leakage is very tiny. The real problem is memory fragmentation. With accurate GC, you can actually improve the locality of your data structures in memory (e.g., by putting elements of a linked list or array next to each other so a cache fetch brings them all into cache), with conservative GC, you can't do that.
- Piaw Na
@Laurence: type inference: For me, the advantages far outweighs the drawback(s) (And, no, no return type inference in ooc). Plus, you don't *have to* use type inference. You can declare type explicitly in your whole codebase if you feel like it.
- 'n ddrylliog
For the record: I'm not saying I necessarily agree with Piaw's distaste for type inference. I've thought about the issue in the past, but haven't used languages with type inference enough to have an opinion one way or the other. The lack of return type inference might be a good compromise, as it would tend to limit how far you'd have to search to figure out the type of something, while still eliminating a lot of the "busy work" in languages that require that you specify the type of everything.
- Laurence Gonsalves
@Laurence You've come to the exact same reasoning as me =)
- 'n ddrylliog
I do still think you should explain the "object[space]method-call" syntax somewhere on that page. Up until the point where you use that syntax ooc looks vaguely similar to C/Pascal/Algol/etc., so seeing this unfamiliar syntax with no explanation is confusing.
- Laurence Gonsalves
@Laurence I just edited the homepage. Better now?
- 'n ddrylliog
w.r.t. fragmentation and conservative GC: take a look at "Compacting garbage collection with ambiguous roots" by Joel Bartlett. Worked very well when I used it in a home-brew JVM for alphas at Dec/Compaq about twelve years ago.
- Sanjay Ghemawat
I really like the way C# handles pointers and GC: All objects are allocated from the GC heap. If you need a pointer to a GC-able object, you only get it by pinning it. Once the pointer goes out of scope the object gets unpinned. And you can only use pointers in code marked "unsafe" so it's obvious to the reader.
- Gabe
Gabe - does the fact that C# is not compiled to machine code like C++ make it slower?
- Robert Felty
Rob: C# gets compiled to native machine code when you run the code. There's also a program that ships with .Net called ngen which will create a native image without having to run the code.
- Gabe
It would be nice if Microsoft open-sourced C#/.net. I know there is Mono, but that seems like it will always be second-class.
- Paul Buchheit
What happened to the "Opening .Net Framework's Source Code" project, any ideas?
- Ozkan Altuner
I guess Rotor isn't good enough, huh?
- Gabe
I was thinking of an actual open/free license.
- Paul Buchheit
Paul Graham on object orientation: http://www.paulgraham.com/noop...
- Donald C. Lindsay
I was on EconTalk with Russ Roberts last week: http://www.econtalk.org/archive... Finally got a chance to listen, and think it came out pretty good :) Let me know what you think.
Alexander Arsky, zeroinfluencer, Micah Wittman and 32 other people liked this
Cool, checking it out now...
- Susan Beebe
I agree that it came out pretty good. Is that the raw conversation, or is it edited?
- Gary Burd
Thanks Gary. It's the raw conversation, I believe.
- Paul Buchheit
this is really good... :) that's because Paul is uber smart and that makes this really fun
- Susan Beebe
I was pleasantly surprised to see it show up on my iPhone. Great conversation.
- Cliff Gerrish
I listened earlier this week and liked it.
- Bruce Lewis
Russ rocks! I'm an avid Econtalk viewer . I thought the interview was good and useful considering I work on the product you championed.
- Hareesh Nagarajan
I was listening to the show while running some errands this afternoon. Had to give friend feed a try and more importantly see the toe shoes.
- Eric Nelson
very good Paul so open and honest
- Thomas Power
Just got to listen. Nice podcast, I liked the perspective on Google, on mindshare problems, and how you got your "toe shoes" in there :) Thanks!
- Vincent van Wylick
Great interview Paul.
- τorƍue
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