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Archive for July, 2010
My daily readings 07/31/2010
July 31, 2010My daily readings 07/30/2010
July 30, 2010My daily readings 07/29/2010
July 29, 2010-
Hacker News | Twitter users most followed by readers of Hacker News
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Bezos On iPad: “You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets.” <span class="“> – Annotated
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“There are going to be 100 companies making LCD [screen] tablets. Why would we want to be 101? I like building a purpose-built reading device. I think that is where we can make a real contribution,” he continues.
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So the question now: is Amazon making any money on selling these devices? Some may think that doesn’t matter because they’re Amazon’s way to move their content (pretty much the anti-Apple approach). But as Bezos points out, the Kindle store and the Kindle hardware are completely separate entities within Amazon. “Internally, we view them as two stand-alone businesses that have to succeed on their own merits,” he tells WSJ. Can selling the Kindle hardware at such a low price fulfill that?
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Think Vitamin » Emotional Interface Design: The Gateway to Passionate Users
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My daily readings 07/28/2010
July 28, 2010-
Firefox 4 Beta 2 is here – Welcome CSS3 transitions ✩ Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog
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Alex Payne — Node and Scaling in the Small vs Scaling in the Large
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The Acceleration of Addictiveness <span class="“> – Annotated
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n fact, even that won’t be enough. We’ll have to worry not just
about new things, but also about existing things becoming more
addictive. That’s what bit me. I’ve avoided most addictions, but
the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using
it.
[4]Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We’re
all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it.
That’s why I don’t have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I
want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world.
[5]
My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a
better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now
the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I
spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.
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My daily readings 07/27/2010
July 27, 2010-
Hacker News | Why I’m giving up on Europe and moving my startup to China
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Hacker News | A Real Web Design Application <span class="“> – Annotated
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Neat ideas.
He mentions “true to browser type rendering” multiple times, which basically means “shitty type rendering.” Browsers, at worst IE and followed closely by Firefox, are horribly bad at performing proper antialiasing for some reason. (The only exception to this rule is Safari, which does a decent job.)
I don’t think we should bring the ridiculous shortcomings of browsers backwards into our design/mockup apps. I think we should continue designing stuff in a way that doesn’t force us to conform to the lowest common denominator. Sure the depictions we might see in design apps are not strictly “accurate”, but I don’t have problems watching the graceful degradation of my designs through the various browsers.
It’s the browsers that need improved type/graphics rendering, the not mockup/design applications that need to bow down to them.
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Hacker News | Experimenting with Node.js <span class="“> – Annotated
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I made this RPG node demo a while back: http://sleeperbot.com
I’m not using any server monitoring so it can crash at any moment.
Would love to get more than 15 users on here moving around and see what happens.
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Regardless of the popularity of Javascript on the server-side, if you’re writing a web-based application, then your architecture will benefit from:
1. Shared code between client and server.
2. Specialization in one language.
V8 and Node are at least a very good combination for server-side Javascript.
Re: “is it absolutely not suitable for production use?”
Node in alpha state is already more production ready than many “production ready” tools.
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My daily readings 07/26/2010
July 26, 2010-
Hacker News | Flipboard’s Mike McCue on the Last 36 Hours, What’s Next and What’s Coming Soon <span class="“> – Annotated
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What we’re been trying to do is set it up so that the content we’re displaying is just a portion of what they are publishing. We just give people an excerpt.
This is what killed my initial buzz for this thing. To be useful to me, a media consumption tool has to either provide a nice way to read complete articles or an efficient way to aggregate/filter large numbers of articles. Flipboard fails at the former by forcing a complete context switch half way through the article. It fails at the latter by trying to be the former.
Asking for Facebook and Twitter logins without any apparent need or explanation was also a deal breaker.
The excitement for this product was justified. The iPad reading experience is pretty fragmented and leaves a craving for some sort of universal reader like this, but Flipboard hasn’t got it right.
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Too Successful, Flipboard Flops At Launch <span class="“> – Annotated
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Flipboard had the kind of launch any startup dreams of. They had Robert Scoble and the Wall Street Journal lined up with gushing coverage as the ap went live in the App Store. Others were quick to follow with their praise. In our review Zee called the app “An incredibly elegant way of transforming your social stream links, media, images and updates into a beautifully put together iPad magazine.”
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Flipboard takes links being shared by your Twitter and Facebook friends and turns them into a magazine for you to read on your iPad.
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First look at “revolutionary” social news iPad app: Flipboard — Scobleizer
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peHUB » Flipboard’s Mike McCue on Life Over the Last 36 Hours and What’s Coming Soon <span class="“> – Annotated
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Oh my god, it was unbelievable. [The buzz] started around midnight the night before and was unrelenting. The reaction was like nothing I’d ever expected. I thought people would like it, but the incredible enthusiasm and the total rush of new people to come in because of Flipboard becoming this new trending topic on Twitter was amazing. I’m at Fortune’s Brainstorm conference in Aspen right now and pretty much none of us have slept in days.
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Absolutely. We wanted to capture a laid-back reading experience, but eventually, we’ll be able to send out a tweet; I think everyone wants that. And yup, LinkedIn and Google Buzz [will be ported into the system], as well as Flickr, which we were going to ship with. We’ll be looking at all of them: Yelp, FourSquare, Tumblr. There are a lot of different social networks that people really like and we think there’s tremendous opportunities for us to integrate in.
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I’m not sure which we’ll do when, but we’ll be looking at integrating all the social networks with publicly acceptable APIs.
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With TellMe, we tried to create a simple product for the masses out of a very complicated technology. I learned about scaling a business, scaling a network — all that kind of stuff. But the big thing I learned is how much I love creating something that works simply, and that everyday people will use on an everyday basis.
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peHUB » Flipboard Raises $10.5 Million <span class="“> – Annotated
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Ellerdale, founded in 2008, has developed a Web Intelligence technology that applies semantic analysis to large, real-time data streams to extract relevant and valuable information. To date, Ellerdale has indexed over 6 billion messages from around the social Web and currently processes nearly 70 million messages per day. This technology and data set will be become the relevancy engine for the next release of Flipboard, enhancing the reader’s experience by always surfacing the most important and personally interesting information from Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.
Designed from the ground up for iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user’s social content. With Ellerdale’s technology, future versions of Flipboard will be able to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks.
“Ellerdale has developed an impressive solution for understanding the ever-increasing stream of social data coming at us every day,” said Mike McCue, CEO and co-founder of Flipboard. “This technology will add deep relevancy for our readers, enabling us to present social content in a way that is not only more beautiful, but also more meaningful. It’s a great combination.”
Arthur van Hoff, co-founder of Ellerdale, is joining Flipboard as the company’s new chief technology officer. Van Hoff, who played a major role in the development of the Java programming language at Sun Microsystems, and was founder of six high-tech companies, including Marimba, Strangeberry and Zing, will spearhead Flipboard’s technology strategy.
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Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr: iPad ‘will rule the world’ | VentureBeat <span class="“> – Annotated
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“I hope I can sleep with it Saturday night,” Doerr said. “It feels gorgeous. It is not a big iPod. It is a very big deal.”
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Hacker News | Flipboard failure: Why are reviews ignoring the problems? <span class="“> – Annotated
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Actually, this angst about the app not working might be better directed towards Twitter, who throttles API connections to maintain performance. Flipboard can’t help it that the demand of users that want to receive tweets through their app is higher than Twitter allows.
This article should have just said “twitter fails” and it would be more accurate.
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Not surprised at all that few people are talking about the problems that Fliboard is having. Most of the people reviewing are early adopting techies (Scoble, techcrunch). They understand the and are forgiving of the problems that come with launching as a startup (think of Twitter or Mint). They care much more about the product and whether or not it has value in their daily lives. Seems they’re unanimously agreeing that it does in fact hold value.
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Well that would be ok if it were slow or worked most of the time. It just doesn’t work! Anyway, it’s a decent product but not a big deal. The main issue is that technical journalism has stopped being journalism and has become a slave to the PR ecosystem. Journalism is a cornerstone of a free society and unfortunately, at least when it comes to reporting on technical products and services, it’s controlled by PR programs. Flipboard is not a 2 man garage startup. It raised 10+M to write a page flipping UI. They did a great job of their PR launch though!
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Hacker News | Tweet Less, Kiss More <span class="“> – Annotated
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I live on a boat, and sometimes I sail out, throw an anchor somewhere and just enjoy the silence for a few days. No phone, no television, no Internet. Nothing.
It’s absolutely wonderful. There’s time to think through problems, time to reflect on life and time to think about new ideas. I can also drink my morning coffee not caring how I look or sound.
When I come back I’m refreshed and have an inner peace that’s somewhat hard to describe. But getting totally away from everything every once in a while is recommendable.
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My daily readings 07/25/2010
July 25, 2010My daily readings 07/24/2010
July 24, 2010-
Early Childhood Education: The Key to Success in Life
Some Stats about early education
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Hacker News | Step 1) Install pyre2 2) import re2 as re 3) 10x faster regex
10x faster regex
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Selectivity vs Critical Thinking – A Healthy Information Diet – InfoVegan.com
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My daily readings 07/23/2010
July 23, 2010-
Chromium Blog: Release Early, Release Often <span class="“> – Annotated
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- Shorten the release cycle and still get great features in front of users when they are ready
- Make the schedule more predictable and easier to scope
- Reduce the pressure on engineering to “make” a release
Over the next few months, we are going to be rolling out a new release process to accelerate the pace at which Google Chrome stable releases become available. Running under ideal conditions, we will be looking to release a new stable version about once every six weeks, roughly twice as often as we do today.So why the change? We have three fundamental goals in reducing the cycle time: -
- Shorten the release cycle and still get great features in front of users when they are ready
- Make the schedule more predictable and easier to scope
- Reduce the pressure on engineering to “make” a release
So why the change? We have three fundamental goals in reducing the cycle time:The first goal is fairly straightforward, given our pace of development. We have new features coming out all the time and do not want users to have to wait months before they can use them. While pace is important to us, we are all committed to maintaining high quality releases — if a feature is not ready, it will not ship in a stable release. -
The second goal is about implementing good project management practice. Predictable fixed duration development periods allow us to determine how much work we can do in a fixed amount of time, and makes schedule communication simple. We basically wanted to operate more like trains leaving Grand Central Station (regularly scheduled and always on time), and less like taxis leaving the Bronx (ad hoc and unpredictable).
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With the new schedule, if a given feature is not complete, it will simply ride on the the next release train when it’s ready. Since those trains come quickly and regularly (every six weeks), there is less stress.
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Hacker News | I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)
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When You Startup with UX | UX Magazine
How do people in startups view design?
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The Top Idea in Your Mind <span class="“> – Annotated
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I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given
time. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they’re
allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all
the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of
it. Which means it’s a disaster to let the wrong idea become the
top one in your mind. -
I’d noticed startups got way less done when they started raising
money, but it was not till we ourselves raised money that I understood
why. The problem is not the actual time it takes to meet with
investors. The problem is that once you start raising money, raising
money becomes the top idea in your mind. That becomes what you
think about when you take a shower in the morning. And that means
other questions aren’t. -
It’s not going to happen unless you let it become the
thing you think about in the shower. -
Try to get yourself into situations where
the most urgent problems are ones you want think about. -
One I’ve already mentioned: thoughts
about money. Getting money is almost by definition an attention
sink.
The other is disputes. These too are engaging in the
wrong way: they have the same velcro-like shape as genuinely
interesting ideas, but without the substance. So avoiddisputes
if you want to get real work done. -
I suspect a lot of people aren’t sure what’s the top idea in their
mind at any given time. I’m often mistaken about it. I tend to
think it’s the idea I’d want to be the top one, rather than the one
that is. But it’s easy to figure this out: just take a shower.
What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it’s not what
you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.
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My daily readings 07/22/2010
July 22, 2010-
Hacker News | A Case Study of “Designed By Developers”: Stack Overflow
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Hacker News | Why is it so hard to avoid premature optimizations?
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Scott Adams Blog: Conversation 07/20/2010 <span class="“> – Annotated
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Imagine an advanced alien life form that materializes on Earth in the middle of a popular dance club. The alien has a cloak of invisibility and observes the humans dancing. He is here to watch and learn. My question is this: Would the alien ever learn to distinguish good dancers from poor dancers?
Now suppose the alien leaves the club and finds a bar that is open late. He observes a lot of what we call “conversation” happening. The alien’s universal interpreter device allows him to understand the content of the conversations. My question is this: Would the alien ever learn to distinguish a good conversationalist from a poor one?
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With dancing, you could point out that the movement of your hips should be timed with the beat, and that the level of motion should be somewhere in a range that is neither too quiet nor too frenetic compared to the other dancers. You could throw in other rules as well, such as no finger-pointing, no white-boy overbite, no excessive repetitiveness, no monopolizing the entire dance floor, and so on. You might have dozens of rules when you are done, but the highly intelligent alien and the Asperger guy (probably an engineer) could learn them all fairly quickly. And from that point on, they could discern good dancing from poor dancing. They might even be able to imitate it, with some practice.
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