Entries Tagged 'web' ↓

So, VIA gives you a 50% discount on train travel if you jump through a few hoops. I expected pain, and got a gem instead. Behold:

At this point regular VIA users might be thinking it’s a phishing attempt; they usually aren’t this nice or clueful. Let’s hope things keep going in that direction (ha, ha, ha).

If you are reading this on the day I post this; go get a coupon now and you can book later.

Microblogging, ambient awareness and maintaining weak ties has the sideeffect of making it impossible to move away and “reinvent yourself” as your past will always be with you.
If you don’t “get” Facebook and Twitter, read this NY Times article

The very idea of being limited by the folly of our youth should itself be a sufficient motivator to reinvent ourselves loudly and publicly.

It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already… If anything, it’s identity-constraining now

People in villages change. You can’t get a new bunch of friends to ‘reinvent’ yourself every few months, but then again you are more accountable.

Romanticism, mixed with hatred of the freedom that the city gave us won’t help us understand phenomenons like Facebook. There is a moral panic in some quarters, people worried that your booze party pics of university days will somehow prevent you from getting a real job and becoming a responsible adult. That’s wrong: Facebook and Twitter will simply chronicle the transformation.

Ubiquity is a mind-blowing HOLY FUCK. Check out the video here:

http://www.43folders.com/2008/08/27/ubiquity

I followed the command author tutorial to see if I could adapt the Twitter command for Identi.ca. It took me less than an hour to grok Ubiquity and modify the command to work with Identi.ca

Source code lives as a gist on github, and if you have Ubiquity installed you should see a bar at the top of the page inviting you to subscribe to the dent command.

The work involved was trivial, in no small part due to the fact that Identi.ca has a Twitter-compatible API. Most of the “programming” involved was search-and-replace. The fact it’s so easy to do something cool with Ubiquity pretty much guarantees it a bright future.Now watch the pundits go on about Web 3.0.

(Y Combinator is one of the best of the VC bunch. These essays are to help me articulate the conflict hackers have with suits, and how we could go about having a healthier relationship. I haven’t made up my mind yet if that’s even possible, but these salvos are written to help me think it through. If you find them amusing, great. If you think they’re trollish, feed me.)

YC is a cult resulted in a lot of traffic and many comments:

Source	pageviews	comments
reddit	12,757	150
Hacker News	3,010	115
total	17,990	285+

Wow, did I ever piss off the Hacker News crowd!

Some interesting blog posts followed, including New hire cannon fodder which itself resulted in Dare’s critique of “Built to Flip” companies.

Michael Parkatti, whose diary triggered all this also clarified what he means by working 18 hours a day in A Note on Cults & Productivity.

The original entry resulted from a draft about group-think in the VC ecosystem. Reading about 18 hour days reminded me of sleep deprivation used in cults, and the resemblance was too strong to ignore. I deleted the last part of the draft, slapped “YC is a cult” in the title field, pressed publish and went home to sleep knowing the devotees would be writing apologetics the next day.

It would be tempting to reserve the word “cult” for the JW or the scientologists. As some of the commenters pointed out, many intense pursuits would fall under the heading of cult if we accepted the mainstream definition. Rather than re-define cult until only the people we don’t like fit it, we can ask if we’re being slightly cultish in some of our pursuits.

This isn’t a YC thing. This is a startup thing. Startups work a lot of hours, it’s the nature of the beast. By being as accusatory as you’ve been, you’ve highlighted your inexperience with startups in general. icey on HN

Definitions again - what is a startup? I bet we can’t get a good definition either, no more than specialists can agree on something that’s called a cult. Well, that is, if we could agree on who we don’t like, we can’t find a definition that doesn’t have false positives. One suggested definition is whether it involves sex with minors. This is outrageous, as it would also apply to the Catholic Church. The humanity!

The discussion is absurd. Without anything resembling a commonly accepted definition circular reasoning is harder to find. It’s spaghetti reasoning you can’t debug or unit test.

While YC is doing interesting things and generally advancing the field, it’s still broken. If Paul Graham would suck as an evil cult leader, YC borders on paternalism. His sycophant groupies vote up every little thing he says on Hacker News and create mostly forgettable web-apps. Most are young and enamoured of their brave leader, ready to move wherever he wants them.

For all their claims of being outsiders and having dangerous ideas, their values aren’t so different from mainstream corporate America to shock. Many a lawyer has started a partnership with similar financial payoffs and identical work ethics. Doctors, accountants, bankers - the only difference is you get a higher signing bonus if you win the YC lottery.

Paul Graham see these kids as social outcasts (see the first chapter of Hackers and Painters). Is he toiling as a good social worker, merely helping them fit in to the corporate world? That seems like the most common ’successful’ exit: an early acquisition by a corporation.

You’re successful and well-adjusted now.

Money alone doesn’t define wealth. Control matters. Values matter. Changing the world matters.

Maybe it’s a French thing (and a resulting genetic predisposition to commie and anarchist ideas), but the idea of working for a corporation for a year or two while options vest strikes me as abhorrent. The only thing that would make me want to go work there is having a great resignation letter in mind.

Just signed up for a new service and clicked on the terms of service to see them; I’m masochistic that way. The culprit today is Freshbooks, but they’re by no means unique.

At 3230 words, and with an average reading speed  of 230 words per minute, that’s 14 minutes of lovely legalese. For services to be easy to use, we try to shave seconds of the signup process and some companies think they can demand 14 minutes of my time for this shit?

I know it’s CYA for them to have these terms. Yet enough companies have absurdly bad clauses in their TOS that I feel dirty every time I click “accept” without reading. What’s buried in those terms that could hurt me?

Considered as part of the user experience, it’s frankly baffling that companies continue to demand our time and leaving us fearful of their intentions.

Evan’s latest initiative is identi.ca. Edd Dumbill describes the importance of the new twitter clone: it’s open source, open data and federated.

Another advantage of being good is that it makes other people want to help you.
Paul Graham, Be Good

Identi.ca’s design philosophy could not be better designed to appeal to its early adopters. A project so open only makes geeks want to help, sign up and spread the word. The idea of federation alone is so long-overdue and powerful that it is probably unstoppable.

Like wikitravel and librivox, Identi.ca is going to be yet another local success story.

It may be too early and too few actors, but it seems Montreal could become a magnet for idealistic startups. Every new idealistic startup helps inspire us, and creates real, sustainable value.

Mulling Patrick’s proposed “bunsen burner fund” and the answer it provoked, it’s clear that there’s a core of community-minded people that would like to make that kind of thing happen.

If you haven’t done so yet, go sign up on identi.ca with either openid or a regular username / password. I can be your first friend: http://identi.ca/daniel.

The terms of service used to forbid linking:

  You are prohibited from creating links in other Web sites leading to this Web site without prior express authorization from the Site Owner. (To obtain an authorization, contact our Web site administrator at info@tourisme-montreal.org) — retrieved May 21st

Today I checked again, and lo! the terms have changed:

  The Site Owner reserves the right to request, at any time, that any link to this Web site created from a third party’s website be deleted if, in Site Owner’s sole discretion, such link causes the Site Owner a prejudice.

We can assume some clueless nitwit insisted on keeping the provision, no matter how often it was explained to them that it was ridiculous and unenforceable.