The Secret to Better Netflix Recommendations... and Better Decision Making (1)
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Jeff Stibel (7)
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Jeff Stibel (0)
1 month, 1 week
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Ever heard of the Netflix Prize? It is a contest to help Netflix build a better movie rental recommendation engine or, in other words, to help them recommend Die Hard for me; The Princess Bride for my wife; and When Harry Met Sally for us both. It turns out that this is not an easy problem, which is why after years of trying, Netflix turned to the outside world for help and created the Netflix ...
All of Facebook’s a stage, and its users merely players? (5)
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MG Siegler (192)
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VentureBeat (541)
1 month, 2 weeks
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While VentureBeat writer Eric Eldon is rather skeptical about how the new Facebook redesign will appeal to most users, I quite like it. Of course, I also live in the Bay Area and am a “minimalist snob about decor,” as Eric so eloquently put it. One thing I don’t like is the redesign’s bugs. I’ve been looking at the new version for the past 24 hours and I still cannot get my imported items to ...
Feature suggestion for Twitter (14)
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Scripting News (211)
1 month, 2 weeks
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"Like" Is a FriendFeed feature that Twitter should have. It's a misnomer, it's not about liking something. When you like something that means you recommend it. Everyone who follows you gets the recommendation. How it would work in Twitter. 1. You're reading something I wrote in Twitter. 2. You say you "like" it -- which is like adding it to your Favorites (same UI). 3. It goes on your output stream. All the people who ...
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DOCBook Howto said:
Why not just use openid as your identity management system like identi.ca uses?
Spicing Up Embedded JavaScript (2)
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John Resig (197)
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John Resig (192)
2 months, 3 weeks
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One thing that I absolutely adore is the sheer embeddability of JavaScript. It's a (comparatively) simple language that is fiercely flexible. I tend to liken JavaScript to water - alone it's painfully simple but it can take the form of its container - and mixing it with anything enhances its flavor. Since JavaScript, alone, is so dumb (we've become spoiled by browsers which provide DOM, setTimeout/setInterval, and even a global object reference - none of ...
Anonymity Preserved for Creator of MySpace 'Spoof' Profiles (1)
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Rebecca Jeschke (4)
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EFF.org Updates (20)
2 months, 3 weeks
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Cook County, IL - The president of a Chicago suburb has dropped his attempt to obtain the identity of an anonymous MySpace user after the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed an amicus brief detailing how the petition violated both the First Amendment and a federal statute that protects the privacy of online users. In May, Cicero, IL, Town President Larry Dominick asked a Cook County Circuit Court judge to order the disclosure of the identity ...
Guide to hacking Rubinius (1)
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RubyFlow (25)
2 months, 3 weeks
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Adam Wiggins has put together a quick start guide to hacking on Rubinius, an alternative Ruby implementation.
Converting The US To Electric Vehicles: Priceless (1)
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Ron Evans (2)
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Dead Programmer Society (2)
3 months, 1 week
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A non-scientific, but clearly well thought-out back-of-envelope calculation by MIT CS professor Philip Greenspun is food for thought: the cost of replacing the entire fleet of U.S. passenger cars with electric ones would be zero.Here are some of his numbers:* total spent per year: $1 trillion* percentage of oil consumed by passenger cars: 40* total spent per year on oil for passenger cars: $400 billion [refining into gasoline, distributing, and retailing add even more to ...
Where in the World Can We Do the Most Good? (1)
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rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) (2)
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Reason Magazine - All Reason Articles from the Past Year: Page 1 (33)
3 months, 1 week
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Copenhagen, May 25—The opening press conference for the Copenhagen Consensus Center's 2008 conference took place in one of the gilt-edged ballrooms at the Moltkes Palace. The action unfolded beneath a bas-relief depicting heroic Danish burghers in top hats carrying a banner supplemented by bas-reliefs on pilasters portraying such everyday tools as hammers, pliers, squares, and drawing compasses. The PowerPoint question displayed on the screen behind the head table of notables was, "Where can we do ...
May 26, 1908: Mideast Oil Discovered -- There Will Be Blood (1)
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Randy Alfred (22)
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Wired Top Stories (1363)
3 months, 2 weeks
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1908: A British company strikes oil in Persia (now Iran). It's the first big petroleum find in the Middle East, and it sets off a wave of exploration, extraction and exploitation that will change the region's -- and the world's -- history. Englishman William D'Arcy had obtained a license to explore for oil in Persia in 1901. He sent explorer George Reynolds, who searched fruitlessly for seven years. Fresh investment from the Burmah Oil Co. ...
28 mod_rails / Passenger Resources To Help You Deploy Rails Applications Faster (6)
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Peter Cooper (162)
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Ruby Inside (157)
3 months, 2 weeks
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Passenger (often known as “mod_rails“) is an Apache module developed by Phusion, a small Dutch IT consultancy, that makes it easy to deploy Rails applications on Apache-based stacks. Passenger follows on well from the popular “No True mod_ruby Is Damaging Ruby’s Viability on the Web” discussion of January 2008 in that it mostly solves the Rails deployment issue (see SwitchPipe for an alternative that can deal with non-Rails frameworks). Since its launch in April, Passenger ...
Fees and customer loyalty (1)
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Ben McConnell (22)
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Church of the Customer Blog (40)
3 months, 2 weeks
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American Airlines announced today it will charge $15 for many passengers to check their first bag. I can imagine the word-of-mouth griping that's spreading from airport to airport. Since American is the largest domestic carrier, this new fee may lead others to do the same and usher in an entirely new, fee-driven flying experience. The question for you is: Will American's new fee cause you to question your loyalty and switch? Or, is this fee ...
merb-slices (3)
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ezmobius (13)
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Brainspl.at (13)
3 months, 2 weeks
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There is a great tutorial/screencast about a new merb feature that I really like a lot called merb-slices. This is now part of merb-more, contributed by a long time friend of mine, Fabien Franzen(worked on ez-where with me) merb-slices are “Little slices of MVC cake”. These are self contained merb apps with models, controlers, views and assets that you can distribute as rubygems. You can mount a merb-slice at a specific point in your router ...
Vertica Webinar (1)
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AWS Editor (66)
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Amazon Web Services Blog (63)
3 months, 2 weeks
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I will be participating in a webinar on Thursday, May 22nd at 11 AM PST. Hosted by AWS user Vertica, the webinar will cover Vertica's cloud-based approach to analytic data management. The webinar is free, but you will have to register in advance if you would like to attend. The Vertica Analytic Database runs on Amazon EC2 and S3 and is hosted completely within the Amazon cloud. Using this approach, they are able to smoothly ...
Twittering from the Command Line (2)
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Office 2007 to gain native ODF support early next year (1)
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jacqui@arstechnica.com (Jacqui Cheng) (352)
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Ars Technica (1664)
3 months, 2 weeks
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Microsoft announced plans today to add native support for Open Document Format (ODF), PDF, PDF/A, and XPS to Office 2007 sometime early next year. It's a significant step for a company criticized for interoperability issues with its popular office suite.Read More...
PolicyMap (API): Demographic Data on Your Neighborhood (1)
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Marshall Kirkpatrick (944)
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ReadWriteWeb (3760)
3 months, 2 weeks
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PolicyMap is a new website that offers more than 4,000 points of data about any location in the United States, including demographics, real estate markets, crime, schools, housing affordability, employment type, energy consumption, and public investments. It's powered by a new Application Programming Interface (API) from commercial mapping service PushPin. That means that outside developers can access the same data that PolicyMap does and integrate it dynamically into other services on the web. Making this ...
Surrogate: McCain Wants Hearings, Apologies Before Granting Amnesty to Spying Telecoms (1)
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Threat Level (33)
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Wired Top Stories (1363)
3 months, 2 weeks
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Advisers to John McCain, and rival Barack Obama, expand on the candidates' technology positions at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference, revealing a surprising change of heart from McCain.
Huba Huba (4)
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Chris (277)
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Err the Blog (15)
3 months, 4 weeks
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Surely, by now, you’ve heard of GitHub. (Don’t call me surely.) It’s totally the Indiana Jones of repository hosts. Feel free to stalk Pj and I to see what we’re up to. Blogging be damned! If you haven’t heard of GitHub, there are tons of posts explaining the hows and whys of its awesomeness. This is not one of the posts. Instead, I want to quickly share some oft overlooked but tasty GitHub tidbits. The ...
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Derek Mahar said:
GitHub is a fantastic resource for Git projects!
Linux Journal - The Original Magazine of the Linux Community (49) permalink
Incessant status updates to your cell phone from the command line? Sure, with a little help from curl and Twitter. read moreShared by Dan Croak (17) Katherine (22)Contribute comment
