Posts

The basic currency of the Internet is human ignorance, and, frankly, our database holds a strong cash position! Christian Rudder describes the OkCupid user base at OkTrends.

Yesterday I linked to Scott Rosenberg’s pessimistic take on the AOL purchase of the Huffington Post. Felix Salmon is, on the other hand, optimistic about the deal. His argument is that the venture capitalists funding the Huffington Post and the CEO that they chose did a lot more to stifle the creativity of Arianna Huffington and the writers at the Huffington Post than AOL will. Today, he follows in by comparing an originally reported blog post from the New York Times to a Huffington Post item linking to that post and argues that the chaos of the Huffington Post will beat out the New York Times over time. Of course, to me, the Huffington Post page is Hell on the Web, but to each their own. ...

Scott Rosenberg’s simple explanation of the AOL-Huffington Post deal: The other, more likely possibility is that this whole thing is about the money, the investors needed to cash out, HuffPo’s numbers weren’t looking good enough for an IPO, and Huffington is basically improvising. She’ll spend a couple years at AOL and then move on. This means that, in 2011, Huffington Post will be playing the same role in relation to AOL that AOL played in relation to Time Warner back in 2000: selling itself at the top of a market bubble, pocketing the profit from a sale that couldn’t be earned from customers, and leaving a bigger, older company with all the headaches. ...

I didn’t link to the original “tiger mom” story that was published in the Wall Street Journal because I’m not a parent and I don’t know a whole lot about parenting. Besides, people who criticize other people’s parenting styles are jerks. (If you missed the original article, it’s here.) Today I read Paul Buchheit’s response, which discusses intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation contains a lot of wisdom. You can’t beat his basic approach to life: ...

Over at O’Reilly, Mark Sigal makes a provocative argument about Google: All of this is, of course, very funny because isn’t Google’s whole business model about imitating, co-opting and commoditizing? I don’t agree with him that the kind of copying Bing is engaging in is fundamentally different than the kind of copying Google does. Google strikes me as a market follower — they bring the Google sensibility to paths that others have blazed. In this case, Microsoft is engaging in rank plagiarism. ...

Game researcher Jane McGonigal explains how introverts benefit from playing social games: With introverts, their dopamine systems tend to work more with internal thought than with external, social stimulation. Whereas with extroverts, they have the dopamine receptors going off when someone smiles at them; for them, it’s like a hit of candy or crack cocaine, you know? And for introverts, that’s not happening. But when we’re in game world, we do get motivated. We do get these dopamine hits from the game itself. When we’re getting them around other people, it can kind of shift our neurochemistry. ...

Mark Bittman has a list of food-related political reforms that would improve Americans’ diets and be good for the environment. Here’s how he introduces them: … we’ve come to recognize that our diet is unhealthful and unsafe. Many food production workers labor in difficult, even deplorable, conditions, and animals are produced as if they were widgets. It would be hard to devise a more wasteful, damaging, unsustainable system. It’s unlikely that any of them will be enacted, but it’s nice to dream. ...

Last week I was asked to answer a question about our code base and wound up with the wrong answer for what I think are interesting reasons. Thus, a few thoughts on the power of IDEs, the importance of coding standards, and a problem with the way Java handles accessor methods. The application I work on queries an external datasource and then does stuff with the incoming data to provide a variety of results. I often get questions about how, exactly, we’re using that external data to make decisions. The incoming data is copied into Java classes which are persisted in the database using Hibernate. ...

What’s the role of the federal government? Here’s one answer, courtesy of Matt Yglesias: One of the main things the federal government does is transfer resources from high-productivity urban areas to low-productivity rural ones. In principle, I don’t have a huge problem with this. However, I do have a problem with the fact that the people in the more subsidized areas fail to understand that this is how things work, and indeed consider themselves to be exploited by the federal government rather than exploiting it. ...

BGPmon.net looks at Egypt leaving the Internet. There was some speculation as to whether the government of Egypt had some sort of central kill switch they could use to shut down the Internet, but it appears as though the ISPs are shutting down individually at the request of the government.