Disqus - Friends of jayridge

Re: Fred Wilson Dot VC

kortina — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 12:46:49 -0000

I use whatsize : http://www.macupdate.com/in...

I think I have a copy from when this was free, but it looks like you can still get a demo version for free.

Re: Can The Y Combinator Idea Turn Into A Movement?

kortina — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:37:45 -0000

Fred, how much have you looked at the program and what's your opinion of it?

My roommates are one of the groups, and according to them, dreamit looked at a lot of complaints about y-combinator and tried to fix them. They're definitely doing some cool stuff. For example, each group gives up a % of their company for a common pot that everyone has a stake in. So you're vested in all the other groups and it becomes a community / encourages collaboration. My roomies are now in the process of courting advisors--finance, legal, and strategy guys. All of the potential advisors have pretty solid CVs.

I was pretty impressed from everything I've heard about the program so far, given that it's in it's first year. I can't wait to see what comes out of it.

Re: Meetups

kortina — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:15:28 -0000

Sounds fun. I'll definitely come check out some of these soon (especially the outdoor ones--another glorious day today in NYC).

Re: kortina's tumblog

kortina — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:30:10 -0000

I was walking across the Manhattan bridge looking down on the park where we eat lunch.

Re: kortina's tumblog

kortina — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:26:17 -0000

Agreed. I don't think I necessarily click on Facebook ads more or less than Google ads, and my combined total for ANY type of ad is about 1-2 clicks per month.

Honestly, I have to say some of the best ads that attract my attention are Amazon ads on random sites that see my cookies, know what I've been shopping for, and advertise related stuff.

Re: kortina's tumblog

kortina — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:34:02 -0000

Never tried that bookmarklet. Good call.

Re: kortina's tumblog

kortina — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:59:20 -0000

Yea, I can see that (and I'm definitely glad you saw that ad), but I can't say I'm the same way. I rarely click on ads when I'm in 'Browse' mode (i guess today's post was an exception). I click on more ads when I'm in search / product search mode--so from Google searches, or, if I end up on a music blog looking for good music, I will be more likely to click on an ad.

I'm trying to recall now whether I've ever clicked on a 'buy this song' ad. Don't think I have, but I could see myself doing that.

Re: kortina's tumblog

kortina — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:15:51 -0000

Dude, awesome.

Re: about tinydb.org

kortina — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:38:53 -0000

Dan, security wasn't really a concern yesterday afternoon when we built this. We were more just learning python / appengine.

What do you mean "break your xml syntax" ?

Re: Discuss tinydb

kortina — Thu, 08 May 2008 23:53:13 -0000

Good question. We'll figure out what the license and publish it. We haven't thought that far ahead yet.

Re: Discuss tinydb

kortina — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:24:55 -0000

I was thinking about some sort of API key system, but I want to take some time to think about exactly how it will work. I don't want to create barriers that make it difficult to use tinydb, but I imagine we will have to do something soon to block bots.

I like your idea of using keys for write access and leaving read access open. We will probably add that soon.

Re: Discuss tinydb

kortina — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:43:01 -0000

Andy,

I was just debating this with CC. I took that line, "if you put garbage in, you get garbage out."

Also, I am hesitant to do a lot of processing on your data that you're not expecting. We are a dumb IO db. If you put something in, we want to give you exactly the data you gave us to store. I feel like url / entity escaping could be a cause of unanticipated confusion for people using tinydb.

I can't imagine a case where you putting invalid data in is going to be a problem for us. Do you have a specific example of how this would break something that you are trying to do? I parsed your example, and got back json that I could use:

http://kortina.net/tinydb-e...

It successfully does an alert of the data you put in. For tinydb to be more useful, just put in more useful data.

Andy, that's how I see it right now. What are your thoughts?

Re: Discuss tinydb

kortina — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:46:43 -0000

As for XML, your data will probably break a parser. Any suggestions for options to get out valid xml no matter what you put in? _entities=true for reads? Some people may want to put in actual xml that gets nested, others may not, so I guess we'll just have an option.

Re: Discuss tinydb

kortina — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:30:20 -0000

Why not just POST this to /_write as a BOOKS parameter, then grab your xml out of that element ? eg:
<books><book>
<title>Book Title 1</title>
<cover>http://example.com/image.pn...
</book>
<book></books>

Re: Discuss tinydb

kortina — Tue, 13 May 2008 01:58:37 -0000

Sounds like a good idea to me. Does anyone have objections to this?

Re: salad fork

kortina — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:16:20 -0000

This is my favorite place to eat at Union Sq. Love the food and the service ;)

Re: Winetweets - A Self Organizing Twitter Group Bot

kortina — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:06:51 -0000

Regarding, "2) put a hashtag (#) in front of the varietal" and hashtags in general: do you think non-techy people care to do the hashtag thing? Hashtags to me have always seemed like a lazy way for engineers to push indexing / search tasks onto the engineer rather than coming up with a good way to parse data themselves.

I know it's not much of a burden ( just one extra character and the knowldege of how to use the # sign), but it still just irks me that the engineers are passing this work onto the end user.

Thoughts anyone?

Re: Winetweets - A Self Organizing Twitter Group Bot

kortina — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:52:18 -0000

But there are a finite, relatively small number of varietals. If the site was built to know the names of these varietals, you could create archive pages without requiring extra work from users and the hashtag nonsense. Although, as you say, it's not tough to add a hash tag and it makes sense if explained, (1) it requires more work and (2) it has to be explained. I personally would rather build things that are intuitive and don't require more work than things that ask my users to do work for me and require explanation.

To me, the whole beauty of Twitter is how natural it is and how little effort it requires. This is also why I think a service like Summize is so valuable. I don't (and I suspect many people don't) want to go to niche sites to review restaurants, music, wine, scotch, cars, etc. I just want to tell my friends when I taste a scotch that I like, and I can do this on Twitter. Summize is great because their engineering team has taken on the burden of parsing and understanding all the conversations about wine / restaurants / etc on Twitter and making these conversations searchable and useful. In my opinion, Summize (or something like it) will replace sites that require more work or dedication from users like yelp and citysearch. (Notice, too, the local search that Summize recently added: http://summize.com/search?q... . I've talked with Summize guys about this point and they totally get it. I'm sure we'll see even more useful views of the data from twitter there soon.)

As I'm writing this, I'm thinking even winetweets is asking a lot from users--why even make me type @winetweets at all? Just enter the finite number of varietals into a database and use the Twitter API to pull and index all tweets that mention these varietals or the word "wine" and come up with an algorithm to spit the relevant ones back onto the wintetweets twitter page. That's how a real engineer would solve this problem.

Granted, the concept of winetweets and creating a micro-group on Twitter is cool because it can be accomplished without any technical expertise, but if you're going to go so far as to build a twitter-bot, you might as well do it right.

--
Def like the idea of viewing this data via mobile at the wine store, btw. That's probably the number one place I would want to see this info.

Re: Hello, world!

kortina — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:05:16 -0000

Congrats, and good choice of a place to work--disqus rocks!

Re: Nathan Myhrvold Ted Talk

kortina — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 09:56:46 -0000

Yea, dude, I thought you would like that vid. Kindred spirit.

Re: Trying Zemanta

kortina — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 10:43:44 -0000

Another blogging extension I've found myself using quite a bit lately is DasbBlog ( https://addons.mozilla.org/... ). It scrapes videos off of any page you're viewing and grabs images, text, or even screenshots (kind of like Jing). I actually just used it last night to blog a few Ted Talks, which I was able to do while continuing to watch the videos. This extension makes wordpress blogging a lot simpler, easier, and more like Tumblr blogging. I would recommend anyone who digs Zemanta check it out.

On a slightly unrelated note to ff extensions, but more on the topic of tools like Zemanta, one of the best UI experiences I can remember is writing a note on Facebook, mentioning a friend's name, like Mike, in the body of my note, and seeing the option of tagging the note for Mike before I was even done writing. Absolutely brilliant feature. I'd love to see Zemanta or Wordpress add something like this using XFN or even just hyperlinks in general. Parse all of my previous posts and create an index of words to link targets. Eg, say in a previous post I linked "Fred Wilson" to http://avc.blogs.com . If I am writing a new post and the text "Fred Wilson" is in the body, I should get an alert on the side asking me to autolink this text to the same place.

Re: Discuss tinydb

kortina — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 12:01:08 -0000

I just added JSONP callback option, eg: http://tinydb.org/19b?_f=js...

Re: a Scottish Dilemma

kortina — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 14:36:03 -0000

Decent, but I'm more interested in Islays.

Re: a Scottish Dilemma

kortina — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:37:07 -0000

Lagavullan 16

Re: Reacting to Steve Jobs WWDC keynote

kortina — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:42:45 -0000

bijan is right, where is the video recorder?

Nav, when I upgrade you can have my old one ;)