Dave Winer is doing some interesting work towards a new real-time content protocol he’s calling FeedHose. It’s like a feed aggregator combined with a subscription hub. It’s similar to the PubSubHubBub/rssCloud to XMPP bridge I made last year, but better. He’s pretty good at forming communities around his protocols, so hopefully this will gain some traction. We need some progress in open, real-time content distribution.

A mob destroyed a wildlife sanctuary in Belize after a “psychic” claims that two missing children were fed to the crocodiles there. Disgraceful. Read more: Psychic destruction in Belize : Pharyngula.

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.