I used to have a boss who would tell me how I had the power to do anything, to change the world, with my magical software-writing abilities. He didn't understand why I wasn't out starting my own business, with no one to tell me what to do. But there is always someone to tell you what to do. Whether it's your employer or your customer (and even that distinction is dubious), whoever has the money makes the rules.
I just get tired of people's laziness and lack of attention to detail. Not because I'm a perfectionist, because it causes problems. It often falls to me to figure out how exactly someone else fucked up. It gets old.
2. If one produces valid text and the other does not, choose that one (this will get you the correct answer almost every time, even if the source text is Chinese)
3. If both happen to produce valid text, use the one with the smallest number of scripts
(Note that this just determines byte order, while Patrick was talking about the more ambitious task of heuristically determining whether a random string of bytes is text and if so what encoding it is. My point is just that you really don't need to be told the order of the bytes in most cases.)
Simple in theory, but hard enough in practice that companies like Microsoft screw it up from time to time.
Try saving a text file in Windows XP Notepad with the words "Bush hid the facts" and nothing else. Close it and open the file again. WTF Chinese characters! Conspiracy!
That's not Microsoft "screwing it up", that's you not feeding the algorithm enough characters for it to be really sure. While that short string is below the threshold, the threshold is actually quite surprisingly small; if I remember correctly it's just over 100 bytes and any non-pathological input will be correctly identified with effectively 100% success.
This is actually the reason why I'm downloading it right now and giving it a chance. I don't have a (personal) Facebook account and I don't ever plan on having one. That effectively lowers the barrier of entry for me significantly.
Didn't know that. Interesting. So are you generally sharing with friends or strangers? I've never had anyone ask me to join instageam to see a picture, which is why I ask.
You post them in your stream, you can choose to only show your photos to people who you've friended or you can choose to post them all publicly. There is no middle ground.
You can share the photos outside of instagram on Twitter, Facebook, Posterous and via mail. People can view the images in their browser if you send them a URL or if they use a third-party website to browse photos.
It's quite flexible and a lot of fun sharing and commenting on other's photos. If you want to get more activity on your photos, you need to #tag them. Some people go overboard with obnoxious 20-30 tag posts.
But you can link it to FB and get notified when friends join.. which I must say has likely been a large driver of their growth. How else would you know which friends are already on the service?
Taking a photo is a creative endeavor, not necessarily an effort to flawlessly recreate how something actually appears to the human eye. Engineers frequently do not get this.
Really? Because it seems to me that a lot of engineers at instagram figured out that using the same set of preprogrammed filters over and over again allows users to feel like they are being creative.
And is there anything wrong with people feeling like they are creative?
Same argument applies to Guitar Hero. People may make the argument that they're not playing guitar and therefore should stop playing Guitar Hero, but many people find it fun. You can disagree with them, but that doesn't make it less fun.
>And is there anything wrong with people feeling like they are creative?
Yes, there is, when they aren't being creative. When they're just choosing a cookie cutter, telling them they should feel creative is cheating them of the real thing.
1. Creativity is a man made concept and so by default is subjective. Who is to judge what's "creative" and what's not?
2. If filters - which could just be an analogy for a technology tool - has no place in "creativity", where do you draw the line? Pulled to the extreme, how about when I use photoshop, or a korg synthesizer, or an elaborate framework to make art, music, or programs?
3. It's a consumer entertainment app after all. People have fun with it. What gives?
I actually have a feeling it makes peole dumb. Seriously.
No more self thinking, it's all about riding the wave, feeling like you're doing something "cool", yada yada.
But people will do that anyway. Not everyone is creative. There are people who legitimately think pop music is the best music they've ever heard. They're not wrong, that's just what they like. Forcing them to listen to indie would just make them hate indie more. (as an example)
Perhaps we should start calling this Casual Creativity. I think it's a good analogue to Casual Gaming which to me has the same advantages and drawbacks compared to real gaming.
> And is there anything wrong with people feeling like they are creative?
Sometimes they take pictures of things I'm interested in or curious about, and the picture is obviously mangled compared to the original, and you can't make out as much detail as you'd like. Mangled in exactly the same way that thousands of other people mangle their photos: the first few times I saw it, I thought it was clever/cute, but then it got old, and now I loathe it.
I don't think Google is on a good path right now, but I would majorly hesitate to compare them to Yahoo. Yahoo has dawdled for years with no clear vision of what the hell they are doing. In fact, you could argue that Page's current strategy is a play against turning out like Yahoo. It's a pretty clear vision, even if I don't like it, and it's certainly product-oriented. They're focusing on one product and streamlining all the random crap they used to do just for the hell of it.
I don't know what will happen with Google, but I don't see Yahoo's fate in their future.
Wait, Android boosters always point out that it was around before the iPhone's release. Now we're saying it was created to keep Apple from controlling the mobile industry? Hmmmmmmm.
Strange that there is still so much daily-deal stuff being worked on. Is this really fertile ground for a business? (Honest question.) Is everyone still reacting to the Groupon IPO, even though that business has all sorts of smells?
At this point, there are a couple of heavily funded daily deals sites that can afford to hire armies of sales people to literally pester their way into multiple local markets. My friends that work at one of these firms say there's about 60 devs supporting 4,000 sales people. My friends that own local restaurants constantly complain about the incessant daily deal sales reps that won't leave them alone to sign up.
These larger firms make their data available to smaller sites via APIs, allowing for firms like Yippit, Sqoot, etc to serve as aggregators. These sites then skim off the top of the deal sales, sometimes getting 50% of the commission on purchased deals.
The danger is that the larger sites that are the life blood of the system run on enormous deficits to maintain those armies of sales reps.
As DHH put it, local deals is like finding oil on the moon: a valuable resource that might ultimately prove too costly to extract.
That's quite interesting. I'm in a non-US market where deals have traditionally tended to be not that attractive, perhaps because of product import costs and perhaps because of a captive-market situation, and I'm wondering if the pestering-salesperson approach is the right one to induce more businesses to open up to the possibility of offering good deals.
We have group-buying (Groupon-style) deals, which has opened up the way somewhat, but I'm playing around with a more traditional deal-listing model that doesn't push merchants as hard. Do you think salespeople is the only way to keep merchants offering deals, for a listing model? It seems costly but also the only way to keep merchants listing deals even when the revenue outcomes of previous outings haven't been that spectacular.
I appreciate any thoughts you or anyone else might have on the issue - thanks!
The daily deal business can make a lot of money and consumers (particularly women) love it.
However as Groupon has proven they are typically very dependent on expensive marketing channels in order to achieve growth. Over the last year or so the market has become really saturated with daily deals sites and so the competition for customers is fierce. I think as Groupon's woes become increasingly apparent, the daily deals bubble will start to implode (if it hasn't begun to already)...
Well, I guess that is pretty much what I'm thinking. The barrier to entry is low, but that just means the barrier to having your userbase taken by Groupon or LivingSocial is equally low.
