Pranav Bhasin › Likes

I´m not deliberately or consciously "relationship building", and I don´t "connect just to say hi", I just say "hi" (and usually something more) and let human nature take its own course. But I guess that´s not the "pro" answer you were looking for ? :) - Thomas Bøhm

Not enough - work is randomizing - just when you think you have time to do something - something else comes up. - Dan Morrill AKA Techwag

Now that you ask this question, I see the significance. But I don't generally connect with folks to just say Hi - normally talk to them only when there is something meaningful to discuss. - Pranav Bhasin

Damon Cortesi @dacort says he has 300 million rows in his. He runs http://www.tweetstats.com - Robert Scoble

Brian: Damon lives in Seattle. There are lots of people who are building interesting data sets here. - Robert Scoble

lol....does size really matter? or do most men just never move beyond that? - guruvan (Rob Nelson) from PeopleBrowsr

Oh, yeah? I have 8 million *columns* in *my* dataset. Beat that! - Sean Gallagher

My data set isn't really mine. It belongs to my users. - Bruce Lewis

my biggest is 3.7 million, i feel soooo inadequate - Mark Bockenstedt

Nevermind we can't factually verify. :-D - barce

What happened to cash burn rate? Or did that go out of style in '01? I must be behind the times, lol - LANjackal

Wow it takes ages for that service to load the tweets. - Nicholas James

Scary thing is most of those datasets duplicate exactly what Twitter has since they require so much caching - Jesse Stay

Now # of rows is the new measurement of e-genitalia? - Holger Eilhard

Reminds of Steve Balmer in 'Triumph of the Nerds' talking about IBM when they were writing OS/2. "You only get paid by 1000 lines of code" said IBM. KLOCs! "I hated KLOCs" said Balmer. - Andrew Leyden

+2 Holger! - guruvan (Rob Nelson) from PeopleBrowsr

Data = $$$$$$$$ - Susan Beebe

Susan, is it money if it's just the same data Twitter has in their DB though? IMO, Data costs money. Relationships and people = $$$$$$ - Jesse Stay

Data != $$$ ... Data Analysis = $$$ - andy brudtkuhl

Data, correction WELL MANAGED DATA = $$$$$$$$$. Twitter is only half way there (customer base); now they need to go back and innovate with core feature improvements; plus, scale the app /dc - kill the fail whale problems - Susan Beebe

data == 1:1 relationship, user == 1:many relationship - which is worth more? - Jesse Stay

Matthew, don't disagree. But I don't see this and WP as being equivalent either. Systematic knowledge is, in principle, unambiguous. The biggest challenge for WA will be figuring out that boundary and what constitutes formal knowledge. That's why it works very well for physics and chemistry and mathematics. Those properties of ice don't require citation really since they are unambiguous. Biology on the other hand, just to pick an example, isn't quite as absolute - Deepak Singh

It was Iddo not me who noted as first that life sciences data are pretty incomplete :). See also comments here: http://friendfeed.com/wolfram... - Pawel Szczesny

Pawel thanks ... updating my blog backend right now, but will update when things are up and running - Deepak Singh

Worse of incompleteness is that you cannot see where info is coming from, and not fix it either. With Google you just add a new HTML page which correct information... How does that work with WolframAlpha? - Egon Willighagen

http://www.wolframalpha.com/partici... - Deepak Singh

The challenge they face is figuring out how to make this scale. This is curated data at a scale beyond big. How do you do that? They have to learn to trust some sources - Deepak Singh

Deepak, thanx for the link... should have found that myself. - Egon Willighagen

Very nice article. "Add to that sources like Freebase..." Right. And more generally, bringing the web of linked data into Alpha (or the other way around) makes good sense. - François Dongier

I've noticed something a little disturbing in that it doesn't seem to have an internal check that different things should be different. Do a search on "structure of glucose" and "structure of galactose" and then compare D and L forms etc. There seems to be no internal concept of "different chemical/molecular species have different structures" that you would expect to flag up a problem like this. See http://friendfeed.com/cameron... - Cameron Neylon

Cameron - yuck. That's horrendous. - Matthew Todd

Given it was the first and most obvious thing I could think to test that might cause problems it was a bit of a disappointment. But its just the backing data that is the problem. The response to the query is sensible at least in principle. - Cameron Neylon

Meh. You mentioned two things, and it's put them side by side. It's made no attempt to answer your essential query. WP entry answers it OK. What is the added value from WA? - Matthew Todd

First of all the problem that WA is attempting to solve is non-trivial. It is NOT a search engine and looking through an index to deliver a document. It's optimizing functions from different bits of data and computing an answer for you in real time. So it's not perfect right now, but it will take a while to get there. Our responsibility is to make sure the results are accurate (as... more... - Deepak Singh

It will be very interesting to see how efficiently they can incorporate user's feedback to improve Alpha. - François Dongier

Agreed - Deepak Singh

Deepak, I agree with all of that, but it seems odd to have built in no apparent concept of equivalence or difference of chemical species and no concept of chirality. I agree that problem is non-trivial and I think putting up the two structures is a reasonable response at first order. Shows that it understands the query in some form at least. I am surprised though that there doesn't... more... - Cameron Neylon

That is somewhat strange. I've found a few interesting errors as well (demographics mostly). For WA, thee query itself and the actual computation are different steps. From my understanding there is a natural language front end that translates the query into the Mathematica language and then computes on it. So in this case, it seems to have understood the query correctly, but it might be interpreting just part of the query and that part returns the same answer. Definitely worth pointing it out to them. - Deepak Singh

Deepak - I would not say that chemistry data is commonly unambiguous. For a few textbook examples like water info is probably mainly correct from various sources - but the interesting compounds have properties that probably have been measured only once. Data provenance is important - (though even Wikipedia does not have references for most values in the chem boxes right now) - Jean-Claude Bradley

Chemistry is certainly a domain where the computation approach should really shine (compared to Google Search or Wikipedia). So it would indeed be disastrous (but very surprising) if Wolfram Research couldn't find an easy solution to the glucose-galactose problem. - François Dongier

I think the solution is probably reasonably straightforward - they need to use a more sophisticated internal representation of chemical names and structures. And as Deepak and others have said - way of collaboratively working over and improving the data. All things that we know people with the smarts and the tools to deliver - Cameron Neylon

Agreed. Want me to make some connections (unless someone already has good ones)? - Deepak Singh

Overall, i would say the wolfram|alpha is the step in right direction but the road is full of ambiguous signs. - ashish

Sure, Deepak, and let us know how we can help. - Mr. Gunn

Let's see what I can do. - Deepak Singh

@deepak if you have connections on the Wolfram side that seems like the best place to start - get them talking to Tony/PMR/Egon/BLueObelisk etc. and see where we get from there - Cameron Neylon

Would be nice to get some insight in how they work... looking forward to playing with their API, but too much on my list already... the inconsistencies found by several people here in the chemistry area seem to indicate that the actual computation they talk about is rather limited... I would very much see their view on that. - Egon Willighagen

Also see Nova Spivack's feed (http://friendfeed.com/nova ). - Pawel Szczesny

I'm having a hard time picturing the advantage WA could give us at the moment, re chemistry, for example. Cameron has asked for the difference between A and B. What other kinds of questions ought we to be asking WA, if it were performing as we hope it might? Presumably these are not questions simply about 'what is x or y' but more relational questions such as 'what are all the chemicals... more... - Matthew Todd

Did you check these examples? http://www26.wolframalpha.com/example... http://www11.wolframalpha.com/input... - François Dongier

Underwhelming. These are data I can get elsewhere. I guess it draws some graphs for me, using data from I know not where. It specifies the maximum temperature of a concord nose tip to two decimal places, a gaffe for which I would severely reprimand an undergraduate. - Matthew Todd

"Using data from I know not where": at the bottom of each answer, you should see a link "Source information". - François Dongier

Yes - see comment #1 above. No good. - Matthew Todd

Yes, looks like there's room for some improvement with respect to quoting sources. At this stage, I would be very happy if the answers were just useful :-) Not sure full source details would be very hard to provide. I agree having to send an email is not optimal. - François Dongier

Deepak - As it looks to me that WA will not share data under an open license I would personally not submit data to it. I prefer your idea of using it as an interface to Freebase or similar open data sources. Maybe you meant that by saying "the licensing and business models need to evolve", too. - Konrad Förstner

Here's a useful description of some of the Alpha datasets: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathema... - François Dongier

Konrad, yes. That is what I was alluding to. It's not crawling and indexing anything so how it would leverage other sources remains to be seen - Deepak Singh from IM

The blog is down/suspended? - Eric Jain

argh ... thought I was moving off by now and didn't pay my darn invoice - Deepak Singh from IM

I hate it when the bookmarklet adds that "Add a comment" if none is written :P - Jemm

looks a little like Ted Koppel - Janet

Jemm, it's annoying. apol, I should have deleted it - Duncan Riley

@Duncan: It's not your fault. It's just annoying usability issue / bug. - Jemm

The "Add a comment" bug should now be fixed. Sorry for the annoyance. - Paul Buchheit

Thanks, Paul! - MiniMage TKDteacher of FF

that might be the picture of the year - Dave Winer

Paul - thank you! I was wondering about those! :D - Susan Beebe

Dave, yeah that is a pretty funny pic! - Susan Beebe

OMG :) - Nicola Quinn

Come on people, isn't it obvious? Its a comb-over (*Smirk*) - William Meloney

So lovely the cutie. - Dogg 崇瑜

:)))))) - Mehrdad

I just think game show host when ever I see this - Toby Graham

I think of that Palin woman, I think that's her name. The one who ran for President with McCain. She had great hair, but otherwise was unqualified for the office. - Dave Winer

It's like Donald Trump dog, inasmuch as the wig is the wrong colour. And it's UGLY as SIN. - Will Higgins™

heheheheheheheh - johnpiercy

"I swear... all I did was lick a little Grey Poupon off a plate, and BAM, there it was." - abacab

cute~~~~~~~~~ - peter

lol - Anna Haro

el oh el - DO ANYBODY NO MONIQUE

cute! - Davide D'Incau

he's so full of attitude -- like "yeah, I got a wig, got a problem with that?" LOL - Jorge Escobar

I completely agree. The big key for tribe leaders, I believe, is that they are passionate about the topic and are routinely providing the latest news, the most in-depth information and the best conversations about the given topic ---- even if that means providing that with links rather than the blogger's own content. - Sonya Smith

But creating content around like minded individuals is hardly a new thing.... - Patricia

Nice post. Would love to check out toluu. Can someone pass me an invite? - Vishwas Narendra

Anybody who wants Toluu invites, send me an e-mail to louisgray@mac.com. - Louis Gray

Nice post Mike. Good overview of the current landscape. - Caleb Elston

Yay, me in a screenshot! Thanks Mike :) - Phil G

nice post, thanks to the intro to toluu, anyone have invite? me@seanpercival.com thx - sean percival

Sean, it is on its way. - Louis Gray

I like. I sent you an email too Louis. Thanks. - Amani

Thanks. Now I need to build my friends list on toluu. I wonder how. Is it tied into FF anyway? - Amani

How much monitoring/censoring is going on from there is what I'm dying to know. I can't wait for you to get home - Erin @queenofspain

@Erin the "can't wait for you to get home" note sounds like you are living together. Did I miss that announcement? :-) - Louis Gray

love the alt text *cackle* - Michael W. May

lol re:alt text - mikepk

This is actually really important to me right now. I just posted .jpgs of text on our biz site and it looks great. I was wondering if .pngs wouldn't be better looking. - Admiral Anika

png also allows transparency to be set - Michael W. May

Transparency FTW! - LogEx

Is it true that IE *still* doesn't support PNG properly? - Victor Ganata

I don't know how to make transparent files. When I save my .png they come out with white backgrounds. :( - Admiral Anika

So are they saying that Flickr has it wrong, and that my digital photos should be uploaded to the web as png? They don't really state when one should use jpg and when to use png. And I definitely don't want my photos to look "trashy" as they put it. - Wizetux

@Victor IE6 doesn't know how to show PNG24 transparency - Shey, Jamaican of FF

@Anika What program are you using? - Shey, Jamaican of FF

I prefer PNG format myself - Susan Beebe

I like how the JPG guy in this comic has compression artifacts. @wizetux JPG was invented to compress photos, so they will look fine, usually. However, JPG doesn't do so well on thinks like text and line art... or anything with really high contrast actually. - Phil G

Wheres SVG? - Roberto Bonini

author here. glad you guys liked it.. friendfeed just became my new favorite website...@wiztux: jpg is ideal for photos, so no, flickr doesn't have it wrong - Louis Brandy

Hey Louis, welcome to FF. Looking forward to more of your comics. - Thomas Hawk

Hi Louis - that was really funny!, thanks!! :) - Susan Beebe

really really good! - Marcos Marado

Shey, I use Photoshop, but I'm not a genius at it. It seems that whenever I make a transparent graphic for the web, and I go to save it, it gives me the 4 options. And then tells me I have to merge everything and next thing you know it's a white background. - Admiral Anika

Welcome to FF, Louis. - Admiral Anika

Louis, Thomas, or anyone - how much larger, on average, is a PNG file vs. a JPG file? My image excursions are primarily limited to BMP and JPG. - Ontario Emperor

@Anika Use the File --> Save For Web command and be sure the Transparency is checked in the Save for Web dialog box - Shey, Jamaican of FF

@Anika: Are you using Slices? That's the best way. - John Wang

@OntarioEmp. It depends entirely on the image content and the file settings. For "computer-generated" things with low numbers of colors (like logos or diagrams) a well optimized PNG is usually smaller (and better-looking) than a JPEG. For anything with alot of color and gradients (like a photo), JPEG is superior and will be many times smaller than a PNG. - Louis Brandy

@Shey, that's what I do (I think), but I doesn't work for me. I get a white background. @John, I have no idea what Slices is. Is that a program or tool in PS? @Sean, thanks for the tip. I'll look into that. - Admiral Anika

@Anika: It's a tool. check out School of Photoshop ( http://www.tutorial9.net/photosh... ) - John Wang

I wonder what GIF has to say about this. He lacks transparency but man can he move :) - Andrew Smith

lol nice! - Alan Le

@Shey what about IE7 or IE8 in terms of transparency support? - Victor Ganata

Couldn't help laughing :) - Pranav Bhasin

By paging even short articles they probably aim to increase page view count, ad-hits etc on the expense of usability. Cheap. - Jemm

I think they're trying to generate more pageviews and ad impressions. - Jess Lee

i hate it and sometime even move away from the page when websites split articles into multiple pages ... - Raza from Alert Thingy

it is all about impressions. Some sites (like NYTimes.com mobile) give you a link to view the full text of the article on one page. Normally I use that option especially when on my mobile as I do not like waiting for next page to load. - Davide D'Incau

They forgot to add that when they have RSS feeds, they are not full text feeds. Partials really annoy me. Oh and media content that does not appear properely or play in an RSS reader/Google Reader - Ian D. Nock

I don't even bother anymore, I just skip to the printable version. - EricaJoy

I head right for the printable view as well. - abacab

Paging sucks. - Thomas Hawk

Duncan, stop Bitching! LMAO - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

Its time ad impressions stopped driving the design. - Pranav Bhasin

All great points/annoyances. Pop-ups and registrations are my biggest frustrations. - Jill Howard Allen

There has to be a balance. Pagination is good for page views but if an article is long it often helps readability as well. Sadly, when presented a long article, many just walk away. Chunking it makes it bite size, which doesn't overwhelm users and gives them a sense of accomplishment from finishing a page. Clearly shorter pieces shouldn't be paginated, but the attention span of the average user is ... - AJ Kohn

They won't listen to this, even if they believe 'Content is KING', they won't change their habits. Use the site and the real-estate of the site intelligently and the crowd will flock. But they won't do it. Mostly, I prevent visiting such a site and read via RSS or something. But how about those who don't give full article on RSS. And its right, I have never clicked on Ads, ever. - Jayavasanthan J

Sounds like we need a Firefox plugin or Greasemonkey script that will ping a server, find out if the page you're on has a "Print" link to the article, and display that instead of the original page. Printable versions are actually still pretty usable these days. - Jeff Eddings

I'm personally boycotting sites that throw interstitial pages up before showing the article -- I think they don't value me as a user. - Jeff Eddings

they are all still stuck on the pageview model, and will be so until their advertisers and ABC ratings move into the 21st century. By 2015 perhaps - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

I hate when they do that... Or when I'm at work and CNN, for example, has a headline that links only to a video, with no transcription. Seriously CNN, I can't always sit and watch a video at work, especially since I share my workspace with other people. - Adam C.

@Gregory, that doesn't make sense. What's stopping someone from tossing 10 Google ads along the vertical of a page instead of 2 ads on 5 pages? - Rudolf Olah

but what can they do when their advertisers use page views as a way to choose who they advertise on? ABC should be smarter but their rankings use that as well. If you dont do it, you end up being considered "too small" for many campaigns. - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

the trick: go to the "print" view to get the article all on one page. - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

I love you Duncan Riley. :) I think it all boils down to this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patrici... - Patricia

What is the FF extension that puts all the separate pages into one? - Alex Williams

grr articles like that are not worth paging through. My mousewheel works fine, thanks. - Alan Le

Damn right. - DAVE ID

It may be a good way to cut costs, but why is it a better way to reach customers ? A McDonald unbranded store will still generate a lot of publicity because they already have a brand, but will it be the same if I start an unbranded burger joint today ? Perhaps not! - Pranav Bhasin

When I worked at Microsoft our Channel 9 site had NO Microsoft branding. That was back in 2004. - Robert Scoble

@Mitchell, u like Indian movie and indian actress Ash?? - Arjun from twhirl

Arjun: I've never seen her before. She looks beautiful! - Mitchell Tsai

Depends what you want. If you want to come over every night and drink beer, Twitter and FriendFeed aren't scalable. If you want to share interesting news items, URLs, and stories, then Twitter and FriendFeed are pretty damn scalable. - Robert Scoble

But what if you're suddenly the voice of a company? What if you're using those tools to be the next Frank Eliason, only for, say, Keebler foods? What if you're the new person tasked with using these tools to move the world? - Chris Brogan

I liked it! I also checked out the comments, and scrolled down to the end. Noticed a FriendFeed widget. Check it out, because it says it's 1969!. Oops. File this as a bug. Anyway, I am living this, as I try to be the online personification of the Plaxo brand (not in an exclusive way, but certainly with full enthusiasm. Scale is a real question here. - John McCrea

If you are really open, there will be ways to scale and to have a discussion with the masses. It is when you, as the voice of the company, only want to preach and not learn that it starts breaking. - Pranav Bhasin

While I think it would be harder to be personal with almost everyone it is very possible if you are ambitious enough about your readers. If I had that many readers I would make sure to personally thank them because after all they would be the reason I got popular if I did. - Freddy Gipson

Until someone sees there targeted audience expand, or some other specific goal come to fruition, they remain dancing around in a type of denial saying the scalable isn't so...seems many naysayers do not know what they really want... - Richard Reeve