MetaFilter

Just went back and read the article in a not-on-my-phone way and looked at the linked article by their community manager. A few interesting things jumped out at me.

1. There's a big difference, to me, between online communities and "places with comments sections" and this article doesn't quite outline that. Like here on MeFi the mods are all longtime users who people know, for the most part, and are also commenting. Same was true with Slashdot. The same is NOT... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:23 PM on September 24, 2013

Hi there. My name is Alex Goldman and I'm a producer for On the Media. Our transcripts usually make it to our website on Monday afternoon, and I'll post a link in the thread when it's up. If you have questions for Sarah about this piece, I can have her hop on later and answer them for you.

Thanks for listening.
posted to MetaFilter by Alex Goldman at 7:53 AM on September 23, 2013

Happy birthday, awesome coworker! I got you a me going to the beach while you work.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:14 AM on September 5, 2013

The Jews who write G-d are building fences around fences. It's called Gezeirah: It's a law that isn't a law, but is intended to keep people from accidentally transgressing a law. There is only one real name for god in Judaism, the tetragrammaton, the four letters yud, heh, vov, and hey that nobody really knows how to pronounce but is sometimes rendered Jehovah and sometimes Yahweh.

Jews are supposed to be careful about this name -- there is a variety of prescriptions and... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Bunny Ultramod at 11:28 AM on August 29, 2013

One of the great failures of the Internet boom has been giving up on end-to-end encryption. PGP dates back to 1991, 22 years ago, and gave us the technical means to have truly secure email between two people. But it was very difficult to use. And no one has ever meaningfully made email encryption really usable. Instant Messaging encryption is a little bit better, with OTR support in Adium and the like, but in practice isn't used much.

A big part of the problem is the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Nelson at 8:55 AM on August 20, 2013

Helvetica is other people, Ad hom.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:00 AM on August 7, 2013

Similarly, my outside name is Unflappable Rabbit.
posted to MetaTalk by Rustic Etruscan at 8:28 PM on August 1, 2013

Oh god, and this is going to sound SO STUPID, but it works.

Do you have a nice bowl? Like a really nice bowl? One that you'd put fruit or something in if you had to pretend like you were a fancy person? Pull it out and fill it with brightly colored fruits (bananas, oranges, apples, etc) and put it in your well lit photos.

Selling a table? PUT A BOWL OF FRUIT ON IT.
Selling that crock pot? Put it on a table and PUT A BOWL OF... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by phunniemee at 9:28 AM on July 31, 2013

Here's an updated version of the script that should treat titles properly. Thanks to not_on_display and mathowie for pinging me, and to azarbayejani and ob1quixote for making first passes at a fix. (And the rest of you for your patience.)

Userscripts.org appears completely dead, and I was never adequately satisfied with gitorious as a new site for my scripts. I guess I'll probably end up moving them all to plutor.org, since there's no simpler solution. But for now,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Plutor at 12:24 PM on January 12, 2013

for posterity:

to get metafilter chat working on android:

1. using xabber from google play
2. add account: type XMPP
3. user name is as described here:
4. password etc
5. it will log in and go to the main page.
6. use the menu button to "join conference"
7. under Multi User Chat Server put: conference.chat.metafilter.com
8. in the conference box put:... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by chasles at 10:21 AM on May 22, 2013

I have been looking up content deletion policies because taking a day of vacation obviously means sitting on my couch reading boilerplate. Surprise: there are no industry standard guidelines that I was able to find, so I went looking for the larger content platforms on the assumption that their policies flow downstream to other sites and were probably at least reviewed by lawyers.

* Reddit allows users to delete or modify their own content at any time in addition to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by winna at 7:31 AM on May 10, 2013

So it's been long enough now I can tell this story about how I met Stewart Brand. Back in 1995 I was a fresh-out-of-college programmer at the Santa Fe Institute, a research place that attracted all sorts of interesting people. And one of the staff asked me if I could give a ride to Esther Dyson from the Albuquerque airport. "She's quite interesting!" I was no dummy and said yes. I mean, my little Honda was big enough for two! And so I got the car washed and met her at the airport. And... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Nelson at 1:15 PM on May 5, 2013

Context: I'm a professional screenwriter. I wrote the movie SYLVIA. The following works for me. I'm not saying it will work for anything else.

Start with three sentences representing the beginning, middle and end of your story.

Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back.

Woman buys house. House turns out to be haunted. Woman defeats ghosts.

Those are dumb examples but you get the idea.... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by unSane at 5:48 PM on January 15, 2006 marked best answer

Do it the old fashioned way like I do.
Every morning at 7.30am, my assistant runs a script which sends every unread blue, green and grey thread to the laser colour printer. He collates them, punches holes in them, and puts them in three folders, one for each subsite, each discrete thread kept separate with a numbered carboard divider. These are couriered to my house for reading in the car while I'm being driven to work. By the time I get into the office (via four laps of the pool,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Fiasco da Gama at 3:18 PM on February 25, 2009

I think that because Metafilter is so radicalized towards liberalism

Oh bless your heart. MeFi politics played in many other parts of the world that are not the US make us look like a bunch of centrist pro-business free marketeer empathy failures. People who think MeFi is really liberal may not know what really liberal looks like in places that are not the US.

I think that a lot of our members do tend to be naturally on the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:27 PM on April 30, 2013

Cue ColdFusion errors in 3...2...1...
posted to MetaTalk by Bugbread at 5:24 PM on April 23, 2013

You know, Google, the web already had this feature.
posted to MetaFilter by Gary at 7:06 PM on April 11, 2013

Here's Tim O'Reilly's response.

I think of Tim as a friend as I know several other MeFiers do. He's definitely got a bit of the promoter to him; one of his skills is finding an idea and polishing it until he communicates it clearly to a large audience. It's weird to look at that role he plays and ascribe malice. But mostly I just want to say that in person, and in business, Tim has always been honest and friendly and generous with me. I think he's genuinely a kind person,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Nelson at 10:27 AM on April 1, 2013

I sincerely love this layout, and it makes me wish people could suggest an image while writing a post for those of us who keep using this layout. What about showing this design to folks who've never visited the site?
posted to MetaTalk by anildash at 10:23 PM on March 31, 2013

OK, this is the last straw.

Remember earlier when I was speculating about how many active users Reader had based on public feed subscriber counts? The sky-high numbers for the most popular feeds (like CNN, with 24 million) prove it was very popular at one point, but I allowed for the idea that these could be legacy numbers from when the service first launched and that the remaining userbase was a shell of itself (even though newer niche feeds like The Verge have still... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 11:49 AM on March 20, 2013

Localized blogspot addresses is all about being able to take down a blogspot.co.fr post when the French government demands it (for example) but still keep the post up in practise. See here. It's a good thing. And before someone says it, ignoring the government (or the courts) of a country in which you do business isn't really an option.
posted to MetaTalk by markr at 5:46 PM on March 19, 2013

mathowie: " I should ask someone at Google why they do this."

Please don't. They might kill off blogspot if you bring it to their attention.
posted to MetaTalk by boo_radley at 2:58 PM on March 19, 2013

I was involved in the original specification of Atom. Both Atom and RSS suffer the problem that they're trying to stuff HTML, an XML-like syntax, into an actual XML syntax. Typically unencoded and unescaped. It gets way too easy to get confused; is that < opening an RSS tag or an HTML tag? Doubly so when people start using less-examined parts of the XML spec in an effort to escape the HTML, like CDATA and the like. Sadly only half of Postel's Law was ever applied; the feed readers do a lot of... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Nelson at 7:53 AM on March 18, 2013

Awesome, I took the time to write up a really long response to Zunger's post, and while I was doing so "The comments have filled up! ... I know that many of you are coming to this thread after it’s filled up, and still have feedback you want to leave. I’ve decided not to open a second thread, because 500 comments -- over 53,000 words! -- is already a lot for me to read through, and it seems that we’ve uncovered the key points already."

Given what I'd written,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Riki tiki at 1:07 PM on March 15, 2013

It's not even just that Google's destroying a tool that's shaped internet consumption for a lot of people. It's that a big part of why people got so excited about Google in the first place is that it was one of the few big businesses that seemed willing to invest in innovation and development, even when there wasn't a clear, immediate payoff. 20% time, the Ngram Viewer, flu trends--not since the heyday of Bell Labs has there been a corporation that was doing so much to try to advance... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kagredon at 7:11 PM on March 14, 2013

So I haven't read every comment here, but...

Would it even be possible to persuade Google to open-source Reader's code?

Googlers have floated this idea internally but it's essentially impossible to disentangle Reader from the rest of the guts of Google. Even if you had all the code it would be next to useless without all the backend systems it relies on.

FWIW, man, you have never heard such a shitstorm inside a company as I did today.
posted to MetaTalk by GuyZero at 12:14 PM on March 14, 2013

Now the old man is dead we can get some new blood and see some competition and innovation

I DON'T WANT INNOVATION.

The whole point of Reader is that the brains is IN THE ARTICLES, which come from a thousand different writers on a hundred different sites. That's what it's all about. The only thing Google could do with Reader that would be worse than killing it is fuck it up by adding bells and whistles every five seconds to the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fnarf at 11:15 AM on March 14, 2013

Is it so expensive that they just couldn't keep it running in zombie mode?

Every once in a while, Ben Darnell would tell me how many items we would store in the Reader backend that he designed and implemented. Then follow that up with an estimate of data size.

After a while, I realized it was better if I didn't know. I didn't want him to say a unit of measure I didn't recognize.

e.g. it's fhtagnbytes... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by massless at 6:12 PM on March 13, 2013

Reading between the lines of massless's comment on the data storage needs of Reader, could it be that it is being shut down not because usage has been declining, as claimed, but because usage is actually instead trending towards a point where Google will actually start losing serious money attempting to maintain it?

Permanently archiving the full text of everything everyone ever subscribes to and at least one person reads, plus metadata on a per user basis, plus whatever... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by motty at 7:11 PM on March 13, 2013

Here is a sample access log entry from my place of employment:

209.85.238.99 - - [10/Mar/2013:10:29:02 -0600] "GET /commerce/rss.php HTTP/1.1" "Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 34770 subscribers; feed-id=1098621359875358532)"

34770 subscribers. Who pay us money for things they find on our site by virtue of reading the things we syndicate.

Did I mention we spend $15-20k a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brennen at 9:23 PM on March 13, 2013

brennen's comment reminds me that Reader lets you see per-feed statistics... including subscriber counts. A sampling:

Webcomics (keep in mind that RSS is a huge avenue of readership here)

AmazingSuperPowers: 20,726
Cyanide and Happiness: 108,458
Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics (which uses the RSS title for one of its daily in-jokes!): 45,213
Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant!: 27,924
indexed: 10,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 9:45 PM on March 13, 2013

Uh, I must have missed this memo. People don't use RSS?

Not normal people. Nerds like you and me do, and I love it, but RSS is still a foreign concept to ordinary consumers. Instead they go to shovelblogs with 30+ articles a day. It's a big reason why individual blogs with only a few posts a month are such a backwater; no one knows how to read them, because they don't understand RSS.
posted to MetaFilter by Nelson at 5:01 PM on March 13, 2013

Since this is the last Reader post that'll appear here (probably), I'm going to finally chime in early.

Here's the very first version of Reader with an early version with sharing.

And then one with a "lens" with an item-focused UI.

I find I do feel a little sad about this. Need some moments to figure out how to respond more thoughtfully, though. It's awfully odd watching this.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by massless at 4:52 PM on March 13, 2013

UNSUBSCRIBE GOOGLE, I UNSUBSCRIBE FROM YOU
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 4:46 PM on March 13, 2013

We are never ever ever ever going on an away mission together.
posted to MetaFilter by The Whelk at 10:02 AM on March 5, 2013

I joined Quora for one question. Then the post I made on Metafilter that the Quora question helped me a little bit with, well, heck, y'all, it was swiftly deleted. So... I took that as a sign: Quora is not for me.

But since I joined I've had several emails informing me that this person and that person and the other person are following me on Quora.

Damn. I'm not really so sure I wanna be followed.

Anyway, fuck all that,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by flapjax at midnite at 3:55 AM on January 27, 2013

For philosophy -

I study big questions about the world and being a person -- questions about how to be good, what there is, and how we can know things. I read the best things people wrote about these questions in the past. I also talk to students about how to write about these questions themselves, which is a good way to train their minds for all kinds of study.
posted to MetaFilter by LobsterMitten at 12:32 PM on January 18, 2013

Jesus, this sucks. I was just thinking about Aaron the other day, and how I hadn't heard from him in a few weeks. I was going to tweet at him to see if he was well, but then I remembered he didn't answer me the last time I tweeted at him so I never went posted anything.

I met Aaron around the time of that photo with Lessig above, when I was working at Creative Commons. We were playing around with an invention of a RDFa spec for licenses that we could embed in web pages... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 6:22 AM on January 12, 2013

I remember Aaron from his precocious early teen years when I was working at LiveJournal, coming out of nowhere with proposed modifications for RSS to make it friendly and usable for weblogs. We exchanged a few emails, comments, and the like over the years.

It's hard to even talk about the early years of RSS and web-based syndication without mentioning the fact that Dave Winer basically ruled over it like an 800-lb. gorilla. I can't tell you how influential Dave Winer was... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by markkraft at 3:14 AM on January 12, 2013

Congrats to the winners!

I'd like to take a moment to recognize Bunny Ultramod's awesome Road House post, which had my vote for best.
posted to MetaTalk by mokin at 3:02 PM on January 3, 2013

In most discussions about gun control, the pro-gun advocates like to pretend a technical superiority, which they believe entitles them to decide the issue. They know the jargon, they understand the mechanical design, they're really into ballistics and product specifications, and they believe this somehow makes their opinion more informed, and therefore correct.

Hi. I'm a gun nerd, from a time when "nerd" meant something. I'm intensely interested in the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Slap*Happy at 8:19 PM on December 14, 2012

pb: "Thanks, I took that picture!"

"Paul, I feel like contemplating the fuck out of something. Get the camera."
posted to MetaTalk by boo_radley at 9:26 AM on December 12, 2012

Part of his legacy is his six children, four of whom are professional musicians who have worked with their father and with one another. They surprised him at his Kennedy Center Honors event, performing Blue Rondo.
posted to MetaFilter by gladly at 10:21 AM on December 5, 2012

some sort of sorcerer...
posted to MetaFilter by jessamyn at 9:16 PM on November 6, 2012

Get On A Raft With Taft

We could do worse than Taft, he had a giant four person bathtub installed in the White House. Get In The Bath With Taft!
posted to MetaFilter by jessamyn at 9:32 AM on October 31, 2012

That's a great question. Thank you so much for asking that. I think a lot of us, these—we look at these comments, the comments that are in the threads today, and what we want to know is, how can we trust a moderator who spent 43 months with the horse-to-duck ratio over six to one? Six to one! That's unbelievable, that's—I, I, I think most mefites believe, like I do, that there's a real need for change in the horse-sized comment supply, but more than that even... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 8:01 AM on October 17, 2012

it's way more effective to just use the contact form - a simple flag doesn't tell us what's wrong

This is generally the case, though as a stopgap if you can't get to the contact form what you can do is flag the post while communicating the details to us via the substrate of the collective consciousness. Before you click the button, begin meditating and visualize the appropriate all-suffusing color appropriate to the reason and sub-reason for the flag.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:34 AM on October 15, 2012

The question of humanness ties at least in part to the Butlerian Jihad, which was a human revolt against computer oppression about ten thousand years before Dune took place. Sort of a classic sci-fi premise, man uses machine to improve his life, machine acquires responsiblity, machine acquires agency, machine starts calling the shots.

The difference is that, while in Terminator you had the machines do something a bit obvious like start a nuclear war and use big robots... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:37 AM on October 12, 2012

Okay, I noticed the following, in the code that removes the link to the editing page after 5 minutes have elapsed:

var d = a - Number(c);
countdown = setInterval(function() {
0 >= d && b.fadeOut();
d--
}, 1E3)

That's going to keep spamming events every second forever, calling fadeOut over and over again on the already faded element.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Rhomboid at 2:56 AM on October 2, 2012

I'd love to hear about these people that aren't dependent on the federal government. Do they have their own standing military? Do they hire out someone to test all their medications before they take them? Certainly they use private aircraft (since they don't drive on federally-funded interstate highways), but what private service is doing air traffic control for them? It must be a very interesting life.
posted to MetaFilter by 0xFCAF at 4:07 PM on September 17, 2012