Tapdancing Goats

There is an interesting article in Slate about how hard it is for tech startups to find good employees.  They claim that the talent pool has been drained by big companies, but I think the more likely reason is that people are less likely to take a risk with a startup during a recession.  The article is right that recruiters are practically useless these days, but that’s probably bad for everyone.

Comments have long been the monkey’s paw of blogs. Comment threads can foster a sense of community, and they add value for both blogger and readers. Comments are also breeding grounds for flame wars and spam. Moderating comments on popular blogs can take an enormous amount of time, leading many sites to eventually disable comments altogether.

Dave Winer’s latest idea to solve this problem would force comments to be short, direct responses to the blog post. He’d eliminate discussions in his comments by having a 24-hour blackout period during which all comments are hidden. After that time, approved comments are shown, and new comments are forbidden. He would also enforce a character limit to make sure that comments are short.¹

The character limit sounds like a good idea. I think he’s right that long comments should be separate articles rather than an overwrought argument dangling off someone else’s work. But I don’t think I can follow him on condemning discussion threads.

It’s easy to say that most blogs shouldn’t have open comments. They certainly encourage spam bots and flame wars. There are some sites, like Slashdot, where the comment threads are more interesting than the articles, but those are an exception. Sites that give how tos or advice often collect additions and errata in the comments, but the Stack Overflow paradigm works better for sites like that.

I like open comments for a more visceral reason. Active commenters make the blog lush and vibrant, and they grow into little communities. Commenters reach out in different directions, they intertwine and compete for space. It’s something spontaneous and intimate, and it would be totally lost if people took it to their own blogs or always kept on-topic.

Comments on a blog following Dave Winer’s prescription will be dull and sterile. The whole blog will affect an exaggerated narcissism, where only talk about the blogger is welcome. Maybe that’s Dave Winer’s vision of blogs, but it isn’t mine.

I like universal health care not for any moral reason but because it encourages job mobility, enterpreneurship, takes the burden off our manufacturing industries, and leads to cheaper health care costs. I like to spend money on education because it makes our workers competitive in the international market. [...]

I’m a goddam 1972 Republican.

Jon Rogers really nails how I feel about politics these days. I usually describe myself as a neo-prudentist, but “goddam 1972 Republican” is a bit more accessible.

At some point conservatives need to ask themselves about the larger meaning of this kind of conduct [...] for their movement. Beyond the ethics of lying and smear[ing] one’s opponents, I would think conservatives would worry about the fact that a large portion of conservative media is dedicated to lying to conservatives. They regard their audience as marks to be misled and exploited, not as customers to be served with useful information.

–Yglesias

For some reason, the Democrats have let themselves be bullied into secrecy. Irrational fears of being branded “socialist” have led the party to hiding assistance programs as byzantine tax incentives. This just doesn’t make sense.

As Yglesias writes about the recent HIRE program, an assistance program doesn’t win any political leverage if no one knows about it. This same thing happened with the economic stimulus credits last year: instead of just giving people money like Bush did, the stimulus plan called for temporarily reducing Federal payroll withholding rates. While the fiscal effect is the same, taking less money than usual hardly feels like a credit. It’s no wonder that few people even realized they were getting a tax rebate.

There are some rumblings about an Americanized Doctor Who feature film, maybe even starring Johnny Depp¹. Most people forget that we already had an Americanized Doctor Who.

Amazon released the Kindle reader for Android today. It looks nice, and integrates very well with Amazon. Maybe too well: you have to register an account just to use it. You can browse through books on the Kindle store. Purchased books are downloaded by the app the next time you load it. The Kindle store seems to have a decent selection, but one of my favorites is missing. Although Amazon makes them hard to find, the Kindle store also has a number of public domain books for free. I prefer Aldiko for ePub books, so I don’t think I’ll get much use out of this app for now.

I have a severe allergic reaction to paying $10, often more, for a book that I can’t loan or resell. Since the Kindle uses a proprietary format, buying ebooks from the Kindle store is an investment that locks you to the platform. At least they’re trying to make the platform widely available. Dave Winer is right, Amazon knows they’re business is selling ebooks, not ebook readers. I just hope we can keep the concept of owning a book, instead of owning a non-transferable license to read a specific incarnation of the aforementioned book (heretofore referred to as The Book) on one of a class of reading devices.

The Fly was on TV yesterday, and it reminded me of an important, often overlooked rule of programming: the Rule of Repair

Repair what you can — but when you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible.

A corollary rule is to always check for errors and inconsistent program states, even in prototype code. A simple assert(genetic_codes==1) would have saved Seth Brundle a world of trouble.

Is futurism over? We mock the fantastical visions of future utopias that defined science reporting in the “nuclear age.” We’ve developed a feel for the slow pace of real technological development,¹ so it only makes sense that we’ve all but abandoned the “Kitchen Of The Future!” style showmanship.

What I didn’t realize is how jaded we’ve become to incredible breakthroughs in science and technology. William Gibson writes,

Say it’s midway through the final year of the first decade of the 21st Century. Say that, last week, two things happened: scientists in China announced successful quantum teleportation over a distance of ten miles, while other scientists, in Maryland, announced the creation of an artificial, self-replicating genome. In this particular version of the 21st Century, which happens to be the one you’re living in, neither of these stories attracted a very great deal of attention.

Think about that. I did it, too. I read these headlines on Slashdot and didn’t even read the summary, because apparently quantum teleportation and artificial life aren’t surprising enough.

I wonder if my kids will even understand the kind of dreams we used to pin on the future. Will their generation develop its own version of futurism? Maybe they won’t have to dream of a fantastic world, because they’ll be able to make it real.

Facebook has been playing around with their privacy settings a bit, making users’ formerly private data public by default, and in some cases with no options for hiding the data again. They’ve even brought other sites into the fray. Pandora, for example, will now show your playlist to your Facebook friends unless you opt-out.

This didn’t seem like such a big deal to me. You just update your privacy settings. But then I remembered an episode of The Wonder Years where Becky Slater, Kevin’s ex-girlfriend, tells Kevin’s friends that he made fun of them behind their backs. They’re mad it him for being a jerk. He’s mad at her for violating his trust. Hilarity, tenderness, and narration ensued.

Facebook is the world’s ex-girlfriend.

That’s why everyone is so angry. People trusted Facebook with their secrets. Now that some of those secrets are slipping out, they have no idea what else Facebook will talk about.

This really was inevitable. Facebook’s business model is based on selling your information to advertisers. Mark Zuckerberg has made no secret of his intention to eliminate privacy on Facebook, but I don’t think you ever had any to begin with. Sure, there were all the little rules you could tweak to throw up a customized walled garden around your life, but those walls were built on quicksand. It seems obvious now, but once they have your data they can do anything with it.

Do you have any options for keeping your data private? You could help Diaspora get off the ground,¹ then keep your social network data on your own server. That’s not perfect, because I guarantee that there will be bugs that leak data which should be private. You could abandon social networks, stick to your personal blog, and smug your way to Smugtown, but anything you write down could end up in the public record through litigation. Robert Scoble knows first hand:

Remember, I worked at Microsoft. What happened in 2000? The DOJ took all of Microsoft employees’ supposedly private emails and put them into public. So I knew back then that anything I put on a computer could end up on the front page of the New York Times.

We need to start thinking differently about privacy. Zuckerberg is right: privacy is ending. I know, it’s scary, but it’s good for most of us. Tim O’Reilly reminds us that we’re trading our privacy for benefits like convenience, rewards, and security. Our entire lives are already out there. We’ve let the smoke out of the privacy bottle, and it’s not going back in. You can’t have privacy anymore.² Now you have to be aware of who has your data, and make sure that you get enough value for the data you’re giving up.