JustinSeriously
Joined 17 years ago
Karma
687
Submissions
80
Member since
Jul 21
Recent submissions
Comment · 13 years ago
Why Google made this change, from the article, "In this case, we are following the lead of the UN, Icann [the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers], ISO [International Organisation for Standardisation] and other international organisations."
When it comes to Israel/Palestine, every mapmaker in the world is taking a stance.
Comment · 14 years ago
Another example: long form sales pages. They've been discussed here on Hacker News before, and many people here hate them, but they do (apparently) convert very well.
Comment · 14 years ago
For a bare-bones approach, this shell command would also do the trick.
cut -d\ -f1 ~/.bash_history | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
(Note: There should be two spaces after the -d\ .)
Comment · 15 years ago
You're right, but money already is involved in these articles. Authors and actors (and agents, I've suspected in a few cases) are keeping a biased eye on their articles.
I think it would be difficult for Wikipedia to be corrupted by money. There's too much transparency, and there's too large of a community. The admins have already discovered with dealt with large-scale attempts to game the system.
What's actually at stake here is the appearance of objectivity. Affiliate links, which are nearly universal across the web, should be minimally objectionable.
Comment · 15 years ago
I've always wondered why Wikipedia doesn't include affiliate links to Amazon on all their book and movie articles.
I think their current logic is that affiliate links force them to choose which online store they want to support, which is something they appear loath to do.
Look at the page they send you too when you do try to buy a book in an article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0802130984 . It's so large and completist that it has two tables of contents, and it's so obsessively non-preferential that it does a good job of hiding the one amazon.com link that most people are probably looking for.
Personally, I've bought 100s of books and DVDs after reading their Wikipedia articles, and I'd be happy to let the WikiMedia Foundation get my affiliate dollars.
Comment · 15 years ago
(from Jakob Nielsen)
"Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html
The article includes the results of an eyetracking study, and a few examples of viewing patterns where people did spend a lot of time below the fold.
Comment · 15 years ago
As someone with technical knowledge and no purchasing power, I dislike talking to salespeople and technical people. I just want the name of a product that I can recommend to my boss. I want that datasheet.
I recently tried to recommend a great product to my boss. I had used it in a past job, and I knew what company made it, but I had no idea what the actual product was called. I didn't want to waste my boss's time, so I tried to do the research on my own and figure out what specific product I was looking for.
Their website wasn't very helpful, it was filled with generic product names and an amalgamation of SEO-friendly keywords and the word "solution". I emailed them to find out which product I was looking for, and next thing I knew I was on a sales call. Then I was on a sales conference call. Then they popped in for a sales meeting, even though I never told them my company's address.
I came away with a vague idea that their products were both nameless and probably very good. I explained it all to my boss; he took a pass.
I could've saved everyone a lot of time if I just had that comprehensive datasheet.
Comment · 15 years ago
Some bots auto-revert changes that are likely to be vandalism or spam, like if an anonymous user adds a link to a blog on a free blog hosting site. (Specifically, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:XLinkBot .)
Comment · 15 years ago
Sometimes you can work around this.
Find the install.rdf file for the plugin, and change the maxVersion variable to "4.*".
It doesn't always work, but I've had good luck with it.
Comment · 15 years ago
I ran it for Javascript, Ruby, and Perl, and I got this:
{"JavaScript"=>48, "Ruby"=>46, "Perl"=>28}
Comment · 16 years ago
I was about the say the same thing, but about Infoseek.
Comment · 16 years ago
Politics and current affairs
Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime. By John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. By David Remnick
The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers. By Richard McGregor
Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory. By Peter Hessler
Molotovâs Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History. By Rachel Polonsky
Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalistâs Frontline Account of Life, Love and War in his Homeland. By Basharat Peer
The Fear: The Last Days of Robert Mugabe. By Peter Godwin
The Watchers: The Rise of Americaâs Surveillance State. By Shane Harris
The Rule of Law. By Tom Bingham
The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Childrenâs Futureâand Why They Should Give it Back By David Willetts
Biography and memoir
The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance. By Edmund de Waal
Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Familyâs Feuds. By Lyndall Gordon
Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes. By Stephen Sondheim
The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece.By Eric Siblin
History
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. By Timothy Snyder
Why the West RulesâFor Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future. By Ian Morris
Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962. By Frank Dikotter
Red Plenty: Industry! Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream. By Francis Spufford
A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided. By Amanda Foreman
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of Americaâs Great Migration. By Isabel Wilkerson
Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth. By Hilary Spurling
A History of the World in 100 Objects. By Neil MacGregor
Economics and business
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. By Michael Lewis
More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of the New Elite. By Sebastian Mallaby
High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg. By Niall Ferguson
Science and technology
A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. By Paul Edwards
Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life. By Rob Carlson
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. By Matt Ridley
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. By Steven Johnson
What Technology Wants. By Kevin Kelly
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. By Siddhartha Mukherjee
Culture, society and travel
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. By Guy Deutscher
Sweetness and Blood: How Surfing Spread from Hawaii and California to the Rest of the World, With Some Unexpected Results. By Michael Scott Moore
Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theatre. By Larry Stempel
McGilchristâs Greek Islands. By Nigel McGilchrist
Fiction
Freedom. By Jonathan Franzen
To the End of the Land. By David Grossman
Parrot and Olivier in America. By Peter Carey
The Unnamed. By Joshua Ferris
Mr Peanut. By Adam Ross
The Imperfectionists. By Tom Rachman
Selected Stories. By William Trevor
Poetry
Human chain. By Seamus Heaney
White Egrets: Poems. By Derek Walcott
(lets hear it for perl one-liners.)
http://www.ipacia.com/