Xichekolas
Joined 19 years ago
Karma
4,863
Submissions
1,540
Member since
Feb 27
Recent submissions
Comment · 16 years ago
That graph amuses me. Notice the benefit to users continues to climb, even if the benefit to "facebook and other companies" happens to climb faster. So even though it benefits you more and more, you will deny yourself that benefit because it happens to help facebook too?
Of course, it's just a made-up graph, and his very first sentence implies the line is really trending downward in his opinion, but I'm always intrigued when an instance of the Ultimatum Game happens in real life:
Comment · 16 years ago
Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, a Harvard social psychologist who is an expert in stereotyping, told me, "Carol Dweck is a flat-out genius. I hope the work is taken seriously. It scares people when they see these results."
Ironic that a so-called "expert in stereotyping" attributes successful research to "genius". Doubly so considering the content of the rest of the article.
Comment · 16 years ago
> ... because they believe there is an advantage in doing so
That is one possible explanation, but I think it is really simpler than that: People like to talk about themselves, and they like to find out what other people are doing and talk about that too.
Comment · 16 years ago
He was picking an earnings number ($1 billion-ish) and a P/E ratio (20ish) and solving for the P.
Of course, the $1 billion is revenue, not earnings, so that number is likely to be lower (or negative) and the ratio is likely (if history is any guide) to be higher due to that, so this kind of calculation is pretty pie-in-the-sky.
Comment · 16 years ago
No. I'd tell him to get a Facebook/Picasa/Flickr/Twitpic account.
Dad used to get a shared hosting account for things like that, but now we have services that host content for free. They are much easier for Dad to use as well.
In this age of $20/mo VPSs and free content hosting, I'm honestly not sure how shared hosting survives. It's not as flexible as a VPS for hosting sites (and with more than two sites, isn't even as cheap), and it's not as easy to use (or as free) as Facebook.
Comment · 16 years ago
Specifically, the list including all your friends, and none of your other 'connections':
http://www.facebook.com/friends/#!/friends/?filter=afp
I thought I'd try this out to see how it felt. Using only the criteria "do I care about what this person is doing today?" I managed to axe 122 people, and don't feel bad about it at all.
Comment · 16 years ago
Maybe we have different definitions of 'personal'. I was talking about posting things about your relationship status or medical conditions... the only people I would tell that stuff to anyway are the "lucky 35". I'm not saying avoid social networking all together. Facebook is, like you said, great for keeping up with acquaintances. But you don't share personal stuff with acquaintances anyway.
Comment · 16 years ago
> But now I’m down to the lucky 35, I can speak more freely about my personal life
I see my "lucky 35" in real life quite often, and can tell them personal things in person, where it becomes a conversation. I'm not sure why I would ever need to share personal things online.
After all, the reason people become "online friends" to begin with is that you don't see that person enough in real life to maintain a friendship. If you really need to tell one of these pseudo-friends (or far-away family) something personal, there are many avenues for that, including email and the phone.
Comment · 16 years ago
I really don't get this argument. It seems that his point is that section 3.3.1 is going to scare developers away and ruin the platform.
Ok. So let the developers go elsewhere.
The only party hurt here is Apple. If they want to shoot themselves in the foot, then let them do so. It's one thing to have an intervention for a friend that is an addict, quite another to save a company from itself.
As a friend put it, section 3.3.1 pisses off an extremely small subset of iPhone users... namely, the developers themselves. No one else cares. If they app ecosystem dies because of it, then people will jump to another smartphone. But until that actually happens (if ever), Apple can get away with whatever it wants, and trying to argue about it is not going to get you anywhere.
Comment · 16 years ago
:%s/Emacs/Vim/g
Although I'd also point out that even if it did run Emacs, I'm not sure how fun it would be to use Emacs' key combos with a software keyboard.
The company that comes up with a way to have the screen close to my face and the keyboard in my lap will win my vote. That is one reason that, while I use my netbook for hours on end to surf and read, I rarely use it for coding/writing. I like the freedom of having my (obnoxiously clicky) keyboard and screen in different physical locations.
http://andrewfarmer.name/