DISQUS

Your image should link to http://twitter.com/140novel (right now it's pointing to http://twitter.com/140book).

I think this is kind of counterproductive. It's sort of like people who become teetotalers because alcohol was "controlling their life," and therefore no longer participate in social gatherings because they might be tempted to drink... whether you obsessively overuse something or go out of your way not to use it, it's still controlling your life.

Seems like a smarter approach would be to exercise some self control, turn off unnecessary notifications, and only log on to these sites when you need to. They're certainly useful, and are time savers in many situations -- particularly for people demographic-, psychographic-, and geographically similar to us. Like my dad always used to tell me -- everything in moderation (including moderation).

It's satire, therefore it's fair use. End of story.

People need to remember that the goal of IP laws is to "further the progress of science and the useful arts." Fair use doesn't require attribute (despite what your high school teacher might tell you, plagiarism is not illegal), and it doesn't matter if it hurts your feelings.

Re: your third point discussing the distinction between "the consumer" and "the consumer's friends," I think you're misinterpreting the statute's use of the term "the consumer." In the statute cited, the term "the consumer" is referring to the specific consumer that data is collected for. In other words, a video rental shop may divulge the subject matter of my previous video rentals in marketing materials that are directed specifically to me ("the consumer"), not to all "consumers," and not to "the consumer's friends."

There's no way this will hold up. The phrase has none of the characteristics required by trademark law. It has no distinctive character, and people don't associate it with Fark (except, maybe, heavy fark.com users). I don't think Fark even came up with the term. And if they did, they would have lost trademark protection a long time ago since (as far as I know) they haven't actively defended the mark against infringement. If this is true I have no idea WTF they're thinking...

I'm with the above (anonymous) poster in expressing my shock that people actually believe Facebook is worth $15 billion. Just because ($ from MS / % MS Bought) = $15 billion doesn't mean the company is actually worth $15 billion. I'm sure an independent valuation advisor would come up with a much smaller number, given their earnings and the risks associated with the business.

Sadly, this acquisition would actually make sense...

"Sure, Facbeook users can opt-out of it, but MoveOn claims it should be the other way round"

There's no global "opt-out" for beacon. You have to do it on a site-by-site basis, and you aren't given the option to opt out of a sponsor's ads until you've actually seen a beacon ad by that sponsor. So there's really no way to preemptively turn off beacon at all.

Uh, last I checked Java ran on OS X.

I think Matt's talk was among the best, if not _the_ best, at WordCamp. I got a chance to talk to him there (I think you were there too, Scott... can't remember) - he's a really friendly and approachable guy. Matt was the last speaker on the first day of WordCamp, and I was particularly impressed that he was able to incorporate a lot of the questions and concerns that people brought up to him throughout the day into his talk. Definitely worth watching if you're interested in SEO or wondering how various SEO tactics may affect your ranking.

Though he didn't do anything illegal to obtain the code, reposting it could still technically be a copyright violation. In the US, copyright is pretty much presumed (e.g., Facebook doesn't have to _say_ the code is copyrighted, it's the default). I wouldn't call copyright infringement criminal, since (in general) it's a civil issue. So it depends on what you mean by "illegal".

Plus, all of the vagaries of US copyright law come into play here. There are all the typical claims of fair use -- for example, since he reproduced only a portion of the code, one could argue that it's not infringing on Facebook's copyright. The interesting thing is that copyright law is the only real legal avenue Facebook has. If it was an internal leak they could go after the leaker for violating trade secret law (and, presumably, their NDA).

Hey David, nice post. I'm always interested in hearing how much traffic people are getting from various sources. I've noticed a lot of the same things you have: Digg users don't stick around long, and tend not to comment. StumbleUpon is a great source of interested users (possibly because they use collaborative filtering) and can provide as many page views as Digg.

StumbleUpon Buzz will definitely give you a nice traffic boost too. And if you can get on del.icio.us popular (you'll need ~15 bookmarks in a few hours) then you have a pretty good chance of making it to the delicious home page, which will give you a few thousand clickthrus.

Also, the type of content you're promoting can have a huge impact on the number of people who click through, particularly on Digg. I've been on Digg a number of times, and most of the time I've gotten around 10,000 or so referrals from various digg.com pages. But yesterday a post I wrote that turned out to be very controversial (I didn't consider it that controversial when I wrote it, just an opinion) made it to the Digg home page and my site received over 70,000 page views in a 12 hour period. The story made it to #1 in the top 10 list, which probably helped. It's by far the most traffic I've received from a single source. Just another interesting stat you can add to your list.

Awesome post Jesse. I'm very interested in using computers to work on this sort of problem, but my math background is a little weak (at least compared to yours). I think one of the biggest stumbling blocks to understanding complex mathematics is the notation. There are similar problems in almost every field/industry, but the notation and lingo in math is both powerful and complex. If you don't understand all of the notation, you have absolutely no hope of understanding the equation. Oftentimes when a complex equation is explained to me in simple English (I know that's often tough to do) it becomes incredibly obvious and simple to understand.

I look forward to the rest of this series of posts. I really enjoy reading your blog man, keep up the good work! Another area I'd love to see you write about that's also closely related to set theory is neural networks and other learning algorithms. Particularly as they apply to collaborative filtering. I think there's huge potential in collaborative filtering for web 2.0ish websites, but there are few sites that are really focused on the problem (perhaps because it's very complicated).

Also, one completely unrelated side note: I was at Facebook a few days ago and they all knew of you/your blog! Your reputation precedes you =p.

I'm wondering what, exactly, made American Movil's stock jump 27% last quarter. He may be the richest man in the world today, but with that kind of volatility there's no guarantee he'll even make the list by this time next year. As the article states, Ellison hit #1 during the .com bubble.

Gates, on the other hand, is pretty diversified. Last I heard he had less than half of his money in Microsoft.

SYiT97BGRLpSMESw@spambox.us

Where's the novalty? Any good cryptographer will tell you that encrypted data is safe as long as the cost required to break the encryption is greater than the value of the encrypted data, or the time the encrypted data must remain secret is shorter than the time it takes to break the encryption. This is just a re-hash on an old adage. WTF?

Oh yea, one other thing... preincrement is faster than postincrement b/c postincrement requires the creation of a temporary copy of the variable to return as the result of the statement. Unless of course your compiler optimizes away the difference :).

Hey Jesse,

I just scanned your post (it's past 2AM and I have an early flight tomorrow), but it looks like a _huge_ improvement over the Jaslabs list. In fact, it looks like the kind of post I would have written had I had more time! Great job.