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16 years ago
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on: Human-flesh Search Engines in China
"It’s easy to denounce the tyranny of the online masses when you live in a country that has strong rule of law and institutions that address public corruption, but in China the human-flesh search engine is one of the only ways that ordinary citizens can try to go after corrupt local officials. Cases like the Lin Jiaxiang search, as imperfect as their outcomes may be, are examples of the human-flesh search as a potential mechanism for checking government excess."
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16 years ago
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on: Announcing the NYC Startup Job Fair
"The NYC Startup Job Fair will bring students,
young alumni and startups together to help place bright motivated individuals in exciting New York based companies."
Emphasis on "young".
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16 years ago
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on: I wonder if this will work - Roger Ebert on website monetization.
His talk about micropayments makes me wonder why it hasn't come further than it has in all the years since it was first talked about. He mentions Google Checkout as a possible provider. But I would guess Paypal and Amazon's payment solutions have a bigger foothold. Anyone know of any widely used "micropayment" solutions?
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16 years ago
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on: Quora - Programming Challenges
I disagree that this is a bad idea. I think it's a good idea that hasn't been done well and it remains to be seen whether quora is up to the challenge. (btw, if anyone has an invite, i'd love to check out the site:
[email protected]).
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16 years ago
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on: Quora - Programming Challenges
pg recently said that one of the biggest changes in his thinking since starting yc is that he no longer believes that coming from a good school is an indicator of success in a startup and that this was an unquestioned assumption of his when he started out. at the same time, it helps to have smart people around and quora definitely seems to have a few.
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16 years ago
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on: Kanye West On Creativity
What's Autotune?
Auto-Tune was also used to produce the prominent altered vocal effect on Cher's "Believe," recorded in 1998. When first interviewed about this, the sound engineers claimed that they had used a vocoder, in what Sound on Sound perceived as an attempt to preserve a trade secret.[7] After the massive success of "Believe," many artists imitated the technique. It was evident in songs of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Some notable examples are Gigi D'Agostino's "La Passion" and Janet Jackson's US #1 hit "All For You," among many others. After years of relative dormancy, the effect was revived in the mid-2000s by R&B singer T-Pain, who elaborated on the effect in contemporary popular music by making active use of it in his songs, a style that has since gone on to be imitated by numerous other R&B and pop artists[8] such as Kanye West and, more recently, Jamie Foxx in his hit song, "Blame It".[9]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-Tune
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16 years ago
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on: Scientists Taking Steps to Defend Work on Climate
In case anyone questions why the HN title is different from the NYT title, I adapted it from the subhead which reads as follows: "Grudgingly, many climate scientists are beginning to engage critics, admit mistakes and open up their data."
_4lri
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16 years ago
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on: “It turns out”
Is it possible to call someone on this in conversation without being rude? e.g. "What do you mean 'it turns out'?"
_4lri
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16 years ago
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on: “It turns out”
William Safire's weekly "On Language" piece in the Sunday New York Times did this type of thing for decades and was required reading in my English classes. Sadly he passed on recently but you should be able to find stuff like this in his books or in his articles in the NYT Archive.
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16 years ago
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on: Noracle
What is Tim Bray known for? (please excuse my ignorance)
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16 years ago
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on: Peter Shankman / HARO Just Sent Me a Cease-and-Desist Letter. What Now?
Does anyone have any advice on whether he should delete the blog post to avoid any additional potential liability? I'm thinking about how Conan couldn't talk about his contractual discussions with NBC and imagine something similar applies in the case of legal action - but IANAL so I don't know.
Good luck with this, Ryan. This really sucks. FWIW, I thought your version was a great approach when I read about it first and significantly distinct from HARO.
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16 years ago
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on: Joel Spolsky to stop blogging; shares insights from JoelOnSoftware success
His Mercurial tutorial/promotion of Kiln was a great example of how to present dense technical material in a colorful, expressive way. But between the constant drive to squeeze every penny he can out of StackOverflow, first by charging for Careers and now by looking for VC money, and the relentless agenda-pushing of his own products, I feel like I need a shill filter for anything he says.
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16 years ago
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on: Which supplements really work? An interactive guide to evidence.
Don't care much about the data itself but the use of Google Docs as a data source in combination with whatever flash library they're using for the visualization is an interesting approach. Too bad there aren't more details on how they're reading from Google Docs. My guess is it's a Flex graphing library. Anyone recognize it?
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16 years ago
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on: You cannot copyright a Tweet
What about the artist/poet Jenny Holzer who tweets her latest compositions before subsequently publishing them elsewhere:
http://twitter.com/Jennyholzer
These short phrases have been the basis of her entire body of work for decades. I find it hard to believe she cannot copyright them.
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16 years ago
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on: NBC's broken Olympic coverage
West-coast residents have been particularly incensed that they wait an additional three hours after the East coast gets whatever "live" coverage there actually is in prime time, even though they are in the time zone where the Olympics actually are. What this means is that even if NBC is showing "live" coverage of its big events in New York, which is across the continent from Vancouver, it delays them three hours for Seattle, which is less than three hours south of Vancouver.Is there a business reason for giving the East coast preferential treatment West coast events and vice versa?
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16 years ago
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on: My Recommendations for Ruby on Rails Hosting Services
"3 hosting companies out of 9 have my referral id."But the point is, you didn't disclose the role of commercial sponsorship in your "recommendations" until you were called on it.
Because this article smells like an advertorial and it is not clear whether you are representing our interests or your own, I think this raises two questions:
(1) Why should we take seriously any recommendations from this blog if there is such explicit commercial deference?
(2) How many older posts need to be revisited for commercial sanitization that we have not called to your attention?
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16 years ago
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on: My Recommendations for Ruby on Rails Hosting Services
I wonder how many of these recommendations are sponsorship-based. Linode is curiously missing in favor of Slicehost. Considering the recent discussion here regarding changes to Slicehost's pricing options, this seems like either a striking omission or an outright plug.
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16 years ago
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on: My Recommendations for Ruby on Rails Hosting Services
Anyone tried HostGator? I'm wondering what kind of Rails hosting you're actually get for $5/month.
I'm using Dreamhost at the moment and my Rails app is crawling and barely usable.
Can't justify spending much on hosting at the moment, though, so HostGator sounds interesting if they don't throttle your resources as aggressively as Dreamhost seems to.
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16 years ago
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on: Mixergy is now a paid subscription service for interviews older than a week
I see what you mean but I guess I see an important difference between creating a sockpuppet in these two circumstances.
On the one hand creating an account to protect your anonymity when you make a potentially inflammatory accusation about the behavior of a prominent member of the community.
And on the other, creating an account to make it appear that you have more support on the forum than you actually have.
I find the latter to be a serious problem whereas the former seems reasonable and ethical.
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16 years ago
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on: Mixergy is now a paid subscription service for interviews older than a week
Does that somehow discredit his opinion?
