CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-21 17:27:55 (24 comments, 0 reshares, 16 +1s)

I'm highly likely to buy whatever it is that Microsoft is announcing as Xbox One today. The PS4, not so much.

So what exactly did Microsoft announce?

2013-05-21 05:54:09 (14 comments, 2 reshares, 20 +1s)

Daft Punk Random Access Memories

I know what I'm listening to on my commute tomorrow:

Play: https://play.google.com/music/listen#/sal/Bpc2cw3xyf7i3ffifugspb3ufti Rdio: http://www.rdio.com/artist/Daft_Punk/album/Random_Access_Memories/ Spotify: https://play.spotify.com/album/4m2880jivSbbyEGAKfITCa

So what are your first impressions?

2013-05-21 02:35:17 (19 comments, 19 reshares, 32 +1s)

This is what happens when you let junk mail subsidize the US postal system.

2013-05-20 05:49:33 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 10 +1s)

Hey, it's my old friend +Peter Rubin talking about the all-time great stories in gaming in what I think is his first video podcast with +WIRED. Excellent segment. Nice to see you on YouTube, Peter!

2013-05-14 15:33:25 (12 comments, 0 reshares, 37 +1s)

Picked a good day for my first day in the new office.

2013-05-14 06:19:16 (7 comments, 6 reshares, 25 +1s)

What an end. Has to be seen to be believed.

2013-05-13 15:27:19 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 19 +1s)

I can't believe it took me this long, but I finally found the magic incantation on Mac for removing autocompleted websites from the Chrome Omnibar:

Type the site name, "www.foo.com", use the arrow to highlight the site, then Function (fn)  - Shift (⇧) - Delete (⌫).

Thanks Gareth on Superuser.com.

2013-05-10 23:43:17 (17 comments, 2 reshares, 53 +1s)

Next week I'll be returning from leave, and my first stop is Google I/O, where we may or may not be unveiling a product I may or may not have spent the past year or so helping create. (How's that for coy!)

Then I'm changing gears and off to join the Google App Engine team full-time up here in San Francisco. I'm thrilled about having the opportunity to work with a wonderful engineering team, and look forward to meeting the many, many of you who use App Engine in your own products. Together we can do incredible things.

If you're in town for Google I/O 2013, I can't wait to see you again. And if you're interested in talking about Google App Engine, please do drop by and say hello. See you all next week!

2013-05-10 22:17:03 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Sequs Horribilis

Not exactly sure why, but problem #112 gave me more trouble than most.

The problem itself is simply stated: "Create a function which takes an integer and a nested collection of integers as arguments. Analyze the elements of the input collection and return a sequence which maintains the nested structure, and which includes all elements starting from the head whose sum is less than or equal to the input integer."

In fact, I effectively gave up entirely and used an atom (which is race-free, but breaks parallelism due to lock contention on the atom), rather than code a purely functional solution, which I know to be do-able, but I just couldn't solve it in a pretty way, no matter how hard I tried.

I believe that it might be possible to use reductions of the flattened collection, something along the lines of (reductions + (flatten... more »

2013-05-09 18:59:55 (14 comments, 4 reshares, 18 +1s)

Now this is a Kickstarter I can get behind: My friend +Dorrian Porter is raising money to bring a life-sized bronze statue of Nikola Tesla to Palo Alto.

They need to raise just over $100k to build the statue. I say we can do it.

Become a backer of the Nikola Tesla statue here: http://kck.st/ZWLzgG

Go Team Tesla!

2013-05-08 20:18:33 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 7 +1s)

I'm on a horse.

Via +Laughing Squid: laughingsquid.com/tiny-goat-rides-a-horse-and-gets-bucked-off

2013-05-08 19:55:20 (30 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

I'm curious. How many of you have your visibility set to public when you visit other LinkedIn profiles? 

I've always had my visibility off, never thought to change it. Do most people reveal themselves?

2013-05-06 22:41:29 (6 comments, 6 reshares, 13 +1s)

All of the positions of +Sauber F1 Team's pit crew identified and labeled.

And if you missed it earlier this year, here's Team +Red Bull setting a record stop of 2.05 seconds on Mark Webber's second pit in Malaysia: Infiniti Red Bull Racing sets new pitstop world record - GONE IN 2.05 SECONDS. Need to watch that 10 times just to make sense of it all.

Good luck in Spain, Mark! We're pulling for you. You deserve another podium. And Nico, your day is sure to come soon.

Ninja edit: Replaced the imgur link to the one posted directly by +Sauber F1 Team. Thanks, +Henning Hoefer!

2013-05-01 23:39:44 (15 comments, 14 reshares, 39 +1s)

This video is totally f**king ridiculous.  Check it out.

2013-05-01 20:15:00 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 12 +1s)

+Kashmir Hill's adventure trying to live off of bitcoin for a week in San Francisco is a good read. 

Though I think cheating and using cash is a perfectly acceptable alternative for the privacy and anonymity inclined. Would have made buying a cup of coffee a whole lot easier, too.

2013-05-01 14:50:37 (10 comments, 1 reshares, 12 +1s)

The Blue Bottle barista at HSM spelled my name with a "k" this morning. Not sure that way would have even occurred to me.

2013-05-01 04:47:18 (13 comments, 1 reshares, 12 +1s)

Hmm. Not sure if there's any there here.

I mean, it's trivial to recognize in hindsight that an idea that you thought wouldn't pan out actually did. Dustin Curtis here cites Pinterest and Vine as two that he missed. Happens to all of us. I was skeptical about both Chrome and YouTube, for example, and those are two of the most important developments of the past ten years.

But what do you take away from this? That all ideas are potentially good, if only the founders have sufficient passion and stick with them long enough? That you should never trust your own instinct when you think a product might flop? That you should never pass on an investment opportunity? That there are, on the contrary, no stupid ideas?

What path would that line of reasoning lead us down? Is there anything actionable here at all?

2013-05-01 01:03:06 (4 comments, 6 reshares, 15 +1s)

Step one, open Nena - 99 Luftballons 1984 in a new tab. Wait for the beat.

Step two, click the video below.

Enjoy. Via +Marco Nelissen.

2013-05-01 00:36:03 (10 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Know anybody who would like to work at +O'Reilly.  A new entry position for a Sales Associate with likely travel right out of the gate. Info here:

http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/jobvite.aspx?b=nxiPhkwK

2013-04-29 06:10:54 (9 comments, 3 reshares, 31 +1s)

I'm sure there was a good story here.

2013-04-28 15:31:32 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 12 +1s)

Thought this would be cheesy.

Nope, it was cool. Really puts things in perspective.

Via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5620893

2013-04-28 15:32:18 (7 comments, 19 reshares, 39 +1s)

VIDEO: President Obama kills at the WHCA Dinner

This was hysterical:



THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you.  (Applause.)  Thank you, everybody.  (Laughter.)  How do you like my new entrance music?  (Applause.)  Rush Limbaugh warned you about this -- second term, baby.  (Laughter and applause.)  We’re changing things around here a little bit.  (Laughter.)

Actually, my advisors were a little worried about the new rap entrance music.  (Laughter.)  They are a little more traditional.  They suggested that I should start with some jokes at my own expense, just take myself down a peg.  I was like, guys, after four and a half years, how many pegs are there left?  (Laughter.)

I want to thank the White House Correspondents.  Ed, you’re doing an outstanding job.  We are grateful for -- (applause) -- the great work you’ve done.  To all thedignitaries who are her... more »

2013-04-27 14:58:53 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Question: Do you prefer Exec or Task Rabbit for small handyman jobs?

The particular task I have in mind is securing a number of free-standing ceiling-height bookcases from tipping in case of earthquake.

Maybe a 2 hour job, between running to the hardware store, moving things around, finding studs, screwing things in and whatnot. Is either service better or worse for something like this in your experience?

2013-04-27 04:51:07 (11 comments, 47 reshares, 79 +1s)

This is absolutely incredible. High resolution (one foot) aerial photographs of San Francisco from 1937-38, stitched together and displayed in a Google Maps satellite-view-esque interface.

It's like time travelling. I can't stop scrolling around.

Via: http://redd.it/1d6sbk

2013-04-27 15:17:08 (8 comments, 2 reshares, 17 +1s)

+Kevin McShane is a cartoon genius. Thanks for sharing!

2013-04-25 23:17:22 (12 comments, 6 reshares, 25 +1s)

Position based fluids demonstration. Apparently there is a new technique for simulating water, and it is more realistic and can render in real time.

2013-04-25 16:02:22 (10 comments, 2 reshares, 12 +1s)

Looking forward to giving Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail a shot on my home machine.

Release notes: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RaringRingtail/ReleaseNotes

My primary personal desktop setup is Windows 8 on an iMac 27" running Ubuntu under under VirtualBox. I find that Win8 is fast and required for gaming, the iMac is pretty and looks great in the living room, VirtualBox is stable and easy to use, and Linux is still the best way to get the OS out of the way when you want to focus (I use wmii and an xterm and emacs, none of that silly Unity or IDE stuff).

Anyway, off to take a snapshot of the running 12.10 install and begin the upgrade.

2013-04-19 19:05:03 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

I had never considered donating bone marrow before, but that's exactly what my cousin-in-law +Adam Diesburg did. 

The contemporary method sounds intense, but arguably less traumatic for the donor than the old surgical technique:

"You are administered a drug called nupogen that allows your white blood cells to increase in your bones. They run out of space and are pushed out into your blood stream. The marrow physically runs out of space in your bones."

Intense indeed. But for a very good cause. Huge props to Adam for volunteering.

2013-04-19 18:57:33 (5 comments, 13 reshares, 29 +1s)

What happens when you wring water out of a washcloth in zero gravity.

I did not expect that.

Space is wonderful.

Via http://boingboing.net/2013/04/18/what-happens-when-you-wring-ou.html via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5575469.

2013-04-19 03:29:11 (2 comments, 4 reshares, 25 +1s)

Some of the most talented people I have met have some form of a disability.

I've never seen this video before but it is incredible. 
http://youtu.be/Lv2xtXSMup0

2013-04-18 18:55:55 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

So excited that my old friend +Fiona Maazel is here in town for a reading of her latest novel, Woke Up Lonely, this evening at 7:30 at The Booksmith in San Francisco.

  http://www.booksmith.com/event/fiona-maazel-woke-lonely

Hope to make it over there tonight!

2013-04-18 16:23:32 (6 comments, 2 reshares, 24 +1s)

I'm excited to announce something else we've been working on: Google+ Comments, launching today on Blogger. This provides you with some features that you won't have seen in other commenting systems; my own favorite is that it brings the conversation from G+ into your blog, so that the social media conversation doesn't get segregated from the comment thread.

This is a purely opt-in launch for blog owners: if you have a blog and want to try it out, follow the instructions in this post. We'll be rolling it out over the course of today!

2013-04-17 16:23:34 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 5 +1s)

Reinventing Regulation

I'm doing a Google+ Hangout next week (April 23, 11 am PT) on a subject that I've been thinking about for a while: how should government regulation be updated for the 21st century?  Regulation has a bad name, largely because it is so easy to think of so many examples where it's done badly. When regulatory systems work, we take them for granted.

For example, without the "regulation" imposed by anti-spam efforts on the net, email would be unusable, search results would be useless, and reasonable discussions on blogs and other online forums impossible. Without the regulatory efforts of credit card fraud detection, e-commerce would be impossible. Without the regulatory efforts of the fuel injection system in your car, the traffic control system on a subway system, or the autopilot in an aircraft, transportation would be reduced to a... more »

2013-04-16 23:46:45 (24 comments, 3 reshares, 26 +1s)

Bundaberg.

We may have found the perfect ginger beer.

Brewed and bottled in Australia. We get ours at Haight Street Market in San Francisco.

2013-04-16 22:13:08 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

"Instaparse aims to be the simplest way to build parsers in Clojure."

This looks very promising. Simply write plain-text context-free grammars in EBNF notation (with or without PEG extensions) and Instaparse will transform it into a performant parser that outputs native Clojure trees (following the hiccup conventions).

Homepage: https://github.com/Engelberg/instaparse

I can see myself using this all the time if it works even half as well as advertised. Great stuff!

2013-04-16 21:55:25 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

 Join me in a live Google+ hangout hosted by Sensible Politics today,at 4pm PST (7pm EST) we will be discussing my new book Citizenville. Participate in the conversation here http://goo.gl/z3UE9

2013-04-16 17:21:18 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

How do you follow up when you've released one of the greatest albums of all time (Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots)?

A: You can't really. But I'm enjoying The Terror anyway.

Play: http://goo.gl/9xm5R
Rdio: http://rd.io/x/QFuHPmh1jQ

2013-04-16 05:13:49 (7 comments, 11 reshares, 32 +1s)

Grimpoteuthis, the Dumbo Octopus

"The octopuses of the genus Grimpoteuthis are also known as Dumbo octopuses from the ear-like fins protruding from the top of their head-like bodies, resembling the ears of Walt Disney's flying elephant Dumbo. They are bathyal creatures, living at extreme depths of 3,000 to 4,000 metres (9,800 to 13,000 ft), with some living up to 7,000 metres (23,000 ft) below sea level, which is the deepest of any known octopus."

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimpoteuthis

Video: http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-videos/dumbo-octopus-dance

Photo credit: 1999 Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

2013-04-14 18:57:42 (47 comments, 84 reshares, 255 +1s)

Incredible stuff. This video from 1986 shows the special-purpose 1200+ bhp turbo-boosted 4cyl BMW engine built specifically for qualifying laps. And just the qualifying laps. Back then, you were allowed to run a different engine and different tires for qualifying than you did on race day, so the sprint engine was built to burn itself out after just four laps.

Footage from the 86 Australian GP starts with a walkthrough of the cockpit and gauges, then a description of the engine and tires, then Gerhard Berger's qualifying lap itself at 10:36.

Via http://redd.it/1calid.

Edit: This is a single turbo 4 cyl, not a 6.

2013-04-12 15:09:17 (4 comments, 13 reshares, 13 +1s)

For programming language fans. This is pretty dense stuff, and a truly impressive amount of work by the +Meeting C++ team to produce the following summaries of the many dozens of feature proposal being submitted for consideration in the future C++14 standard and beyond:

Part 1) http://goo.gl/mH15R
Part 2) http://goo.gl/9PbPP
Part 3) http://goo.gl/48RRV
Part 4) http://goo.gl/lLMxz

(Apologies for the short URLs, it was hard to get the originals to fit cleanly.)

I'm not in any way involved in the standards process itself, so if anyone who knows more than me about what happens next wants to jump in your insight is appreciated.

2013-04-11 22:17:41 (8 comments, 6 reshares, 25 +1s)

"This April 3, 2013 photo provided by the Greeley Police shows the text message University of Northern Colorado student Alexander Heit was typing to an unidentified person when police say he lost control of his car and ran off the road. He was taken to North Colorado Medical Center where he later died. Now his parents are hoping to convince others not to text and drive."

I get so sad and so mad whenever I see someone looking down at their phone while driving. Cars are scary enough when drivers are paying attention. When drivers are distracted they become lethal weapons.

And not just teens either. More often than not I see full-grown adults, sometimes with children in the car (!), staring at their phones rather than the road. Texting while driving should be a criminal offence, like any other form of driving while impaired. A lose your license and go to jail type of offence.... more »

2013-04-11 19:41:05 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 13 +1s)

In 2008, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared that his top priority was to ensure that Barack Obama was a one-term president. In his failed pursuit of that goal, he has lead his party to unprecedented obstructionism, abusing the filibuster to bring all Senate business to a halt.

In the 2012 election, Americans overwhelmingly re-elected President Obama, cast more votes for Democrats than Republicans, and increased the Democratic majority in the Senate. 

Millions of Democratic voters urged Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to change the Senate rules in response to Senate Republican’s unprecedented filibuster abuse. Unfortunately, Senator Reid ignored the warnings of his own party and the Democratic base. Unfortunately, Senator Reid reached a meaningless agreement with Senator McConnell that has done nothing to restore the rights of the majority. The Senate is asdy... more »

2013-04-11 19:19:46 (15 comments, 12 reshares, 27 +1s)

......

2013-04-11 11:56:00 (3 comments, 7 reshares, 17 +1s)

San Francisco Urban 

"Unlike the rest of California, which in the early twentieth century saw an influx of people from the South and other parts of the West, San Francisco continued to be settled by people from the Northeast and Northern Midwest, and elements of their dialects (North Midland, Upper Midwestern, Inland Northern) can be found. Mission dialect, spoken by Irish Catholics in a specific part of the city is very much like the New York City dialect"

Fascinating chart of American dialects and their histories.

I don't know, though, I don't hear a particular accent in San Francisco. But then, I'm from the Northeast, so maybe the accent I don't hear is my own.

Via http://redd.it/1c47u5.

2013-04-11 07:52:08 (4 comments, 3 reshares, 15 +1s)

Steve Sutcliffe demonstrates the benefits of traction control using a $200k Lamborghini Gallardo.

He certainly makes the point.

2013-04-11 06:34:42 (7 comments, 4 reshares, 9 +1s)

"It is a never-ending condition of war within and war without, fraught and constantly changing as one faction or another vies for control, riven along racial and ideological fault-lines and held together only by the intervention of foreign interlopers, propping up the dominant superpower and whose ultimate motivations are shrouded in secrecy."

I think +Daniel Suarez should use the above description as the backdrop for his next book. (Without first following the link below to see where it came from. The rest of you, you can look.)

Discovered thanks to the ever-brilliant +Jeff Bates.

2013-04-11 04:44:27 (6 comments, 2 reshares, 12 +1s)

I like to think that Niccolò Paganini wrote Caprice no.5 knowing that in 200 years Alexander Markov would exist to play it.

2013-04-10 23:24:43 (36 comments, 2 reshares, 18 +1s)

Bulletin board systems with downvotes are weird and strangely demotivational. For example, almost every time I post on HN (and I assume the same thing would happen on Reddit, Slashdot, etc.) there's at least one person who really doesn't like me (or my employer?) and mass downvotes everything I've said. Seems like this behavior is easy to detect and eliminate if the system wanted to, but why allow for it at all? 

I much prefer the Google+, Twitter, and Facebook way of doing things, with just the +1, favorite, or like, and an orthogonal "report abuse" mechanism.

Is there any upside to having a "thumbs down" button?

2013-04-11 14:32:15 (24 comments, 0 reshares, 9 +1s)

Life with OnTrac:

9:40 AM - Out for delivery
… wait around all day …
8:00 PM - Crickets

I love Amazon, especially Prime, but the broken relationship with OnTrac is going to cost them loyal long-term customers eventually.

Update: After three emails and two calls over 24 hours to OnTrac, they finally told me they lost the package. Calling Amazon now. We'll see how they handle this.

Update 2: OnTrac just called (7:30 AM PDT, two days after the "service commitment time") to let me know that "it has been discovered in the missing state and not been located. We wanted to let you know. Have a nice day."

2013-04-09 20:29:56 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 12 +1s)

I'm with +Matthew Inman, the mantis shrimp is right up there with the three-toed sloth from that Ellen show episode with Kristen Bell, the axolotl (any axolotl), and the bird of paradise doing a mating dance on episode one of BBC's Planet Earth with David Attenborough for animal of the year.

References:

1) http://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp
2) Kristen Bell's Sloth Meltdown
3) http://google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=axolotl
4) Astounding Mating Dance Birds of Paradise -- High Quality

Via +Marijke Muller Clinton