dangoldin

Very true. I visited New Delhi in December and noticed how heating/AC wasn't built in to the buildings yet it felt normal to just bundle up/unbundle up depending on the temperature. Getting rid of boilers and only boiling water when you need to is another approach that helps with energy cost - especially if they get smarter and can predict usage (on in the mornings, off when people are out of the home, etc).

Same here. I just chatted with customer support and it's currently not supported. The guy I spoke with didn't know whether that was something they were working on.

Did you end up going back to Pinterest to find them or did you just have it in your head after pinning it? The entire attribution of a pin to a purchase in a store is tough if there's no obvious path from Pinterest to the retailer.

Well if people are searching for piano lessons and end up on that site instead of my mom's they might just give up rather than try to find the real site since they most likely will assume that's the site itself. Google's responsible for helping the human visitors get to where they need to go.

Matt,

Thanks for the response - I guess my mom's site is good enough to ward off a cheap attack. Thanks for passing this on to the team - that host has a ton more sites similar to my mom's so anything that can be done to help the original owners would be awesome. It sucks worse for people who aren't familiar with the web and just have to deal with the consequences of someone else's actions. Anything Google can do to help is appreciated and I suspect this problem will only get more difficult.

I'll past that video on to my mom as well. Thanks again.

Hmm. That was not the intent. Let me take a look and see if I can fix the css.

Thanks for letting me know.

So I was wrong when I said it was a DMCA request. It was actually Getty images telling her she was using an image without licensing it. When she asked which image they sent her a link to the rip-off site since they assumed it's her. Now she just needs to tell them it's not her site and she'd be glad to have them issue a DMCA request.

So I just dove into it and that notice was actually from Getty images which claimed she was using an unlicensed photo. When she asked which photo they replied with a photo from the rip-off site which she has no control over. Getty is actually responding correctly in this case but falsely targeting my mom since they assume it's her site. Now if only they can issue a DMCA notice to that other site..

Thanks for the advice. I'll work with my mom on getting these done.

I'm actually confirming it was a DMCA request. I might have jumped to that conclusion and it may have been something else just trying to extort money from her. I'll update once I find out.

I removed the links but kept the text. I want to make it easy for people to compare the two without actually giving them the benefit. Surprisingly difficult.

Based on the Google analytics the traffic's steady but who's to say that this won't happen in the future? I think the fact that this behavior is allowed to happen is the problem. Even if this adversely affects one real business it should be fixed.

To note - my mom found out about this site when she received a note telling her she needs to pay close to a $1000 to license the photo that was ripped off from her site. Otherwise she wouldn't even have found out about this.

Yea - I have the rel="nofollow". Do you know if that's enough? Obviously I don't want to give them any extra juice.

Thanks. I'm helping my mom file it.

Turns out that they actually filed a DMCA request against my mom's site for the photos she took. That's some chutzpah.

Meta:

I love this style of presenting journalism content and hope to see more of it. Finally seeing the web being used to do things that print cannot.

Great job to the NY Times team.

Just two quick tools I put together in JS that I'm annoyed no one else has done yet. One just takes some delimited text and creates a Bootstrap HTML table out of it and the other generates a BCG style "growth-share" matrix that can then be screenshotted and used wherever. I need to improve the UI on the second one but it works passably well.

The code's up on GitHub if anyone's interested in providing other ideas or adding additional features: https://github.com/dangoldin/js-tools

LinkedIn has gotten worse and worse for me. As he says, the most basic features are poorly executed and I have such a distaste to use it whenever I get any notification from them since I know they screwed something up with the execution.

A fun anecdote - I had a recruiter for LinkedIn reach out to me via Quora whereas almost every other recruiter does it via LinkedIn. Not even eating their own dog food.

Problem is that it's trivial for these services to collapse the emails into a single one for merging purposes. I doubt many do though..

I think given the volume of software out there now it's a lot easier to replicate than it used to be. You'd have to be pretty clever to achieve some of the things that were done before the 90s but now most products can be copied pretty easily - not necessarily scaled though.

I might be completely wrong but I think you can make the argument that back then the challenge was in the implementation since there were so many technical difficulties and there was no need to patent an approach since it would be difficult to replicate. Now with modern tools it's pretty easy to replicate most software so getting a patent makes more sense.

I don't think software patents should be granted but clearly there's an incentive to patent as much as you can.

We had that going for a while too and it worked well. Someone with a SQL knowledge would write the query and then hand it off to the people with the read only SQL accounts. The issue we ended up running into is that the schema ended up evolving quite a bit so the queries became outdated and gave incorrect results. Then we had to have a process to centralize the queries and turn them into maintained views that could then be used as a the bases for the queries.

The danger I've seen with Excel is that people who start using it have a very hard time letting go. At a prior role, I tried rewriting a ton of Excel reports into SQL queries that would run much faster and would be maintained to deal with various schema changes. Unfortunately, the people who were currently putting them together in Excel did not like that loss of control.

Do you think Excel with built in version control would help in solving the problem? I remember reading about some company that was trying to do that but no idea where they are now.

Interesting idea. It's such a difficult usability problem that it's tough to solve it for everyone. I had a job where I was responsible for getting business folk the data they needed and kept on trying to come up with a way for them to extract data from the database without having them to write queries. I got this nugget from the CTO: "To get the expressiveness of SQL you will be writing SQL"

Just need to figure out where the tradeoffs are and I think Excel made a pretty good one. I think Excel shouldn't be used for recurring jobs but for the one off it can't be beat.

Haha - when I was a quant I used it all the time too. We had Perl jobs that would generate Excel reports that would then be distributed to the various PMs so that they could look into the details.

I think the finance industry runs on Excel.

Maybe I'm in the wrong circles but many of the "hardcore" quant folk will belittle it. That's why I decided to write something up. I don't think Excel's the right tool for every job but it's a lot more powerful than many people give it credit for.

Thanks! Just trying to get more people on HN involved in the program.

A little off tangent but this year I started volunteering for an organization called TEALS (http://tealsk12.org/) that's trying to address this by having developers teach into and AP computer science in high school. I'm currently teaching AP CS remotely to a school in Kentucky - it's extremely challenging and a huge time commitment but being able to get students excited about computer science and seeing them succeed in their programs is worth it.

I suggest everyone to check it out - if you're near a local school you can actually teach a class in person.

Also - if you have any questions feel free to email me - username @ gmail

There's also http://kennethreitz.org/why-i-left-medium/

Not on Medium but relevant to this discussion.

Neat - I completely forgot about this. If anyone's interested in these different views on top of HN I created http://yahnr.com/ a while ago that just shows the top stories by vote from the past 24 hours, updated every 15 minutes.

I mostly did it as a way to generate a "pseudo-static" site that is entirely hosted on S3 with a job that just dumps JSON files to it every 15 mins.

It's ridiculous that sites like Facebook and LinkedIn would do this. They really should know better.