noahth

The rules around Credits, virtual currency, and the platform in general are still changing and it seems sometimes that Facebook is still learning what it needs to do to run a serious and dependable payments system.

Until very recently, Credits have not really been supported beyond the level of an experiment. That's starting to change, but a lot of functionality and support is still missing. The phase-out of free promotional credits (for which developers were not paid), which was originally slated to occur on February 15th, is ongoing. A functional reporting and management interface for Credits partners would be very welcome - currently this consists of an incomplete API and two .tsv files (a detailed list and a digest of transactions for the previous day) automatically emailed to publishers nightly. These emails started being sent about six weeks ago. There is currently no mechanism for responding to disputed payments or fraud claims but they say they're working on it.

There are positive aspects to Credits though. We see decent adoption but still process many more transactions and many more dollars (at a much lower fee, it's worth reiterating!) through Paypal. The checkout flow is pretty good, and while some people are less trusting of Facebook, some already regard them as a trustworthy steward of CC info, and the latter group is probably more closely aligned with target audiences than the former.

I'd say that right now (and at least until off-site, FB Connect implementations of Credits has been in use for months), it's a question of whether your project requires the other benefits of building on Facebook - user data, social hooks, etc - to the extent that it's worth swallowing the fee & quirks of the platform. Then again, isn't that true of projects built on any proprietary platform, especially one that's still maturing?

Interesting piece pointing out some possibly non-obvious considerations about future food supply. However, it fails miserably at answering "How" the suggested change in diet for first-world eaters will come about. Sure, most who care to look realize that feeding grain to animals is an inefficient way to produce edible calories, but in order for there to be a mass shift away from meat consumption in first-world countries, that inefficiency has to be accurately reflected (if not exaggerated) in the relative prices of meat and grains. Should there be a meat tax? It seems that the alternative is years of fluctuation in food prices (as we flail about seeking the new equilibrium) that mostly have a negative effect for the world's poor.

That was a pretty specific issue, with 2 complaints. One was the name, and the other was that the board layout was identical (location of bonus squares, etc). It relaunched very quickly as Lexulous with a different board. Damage done, but it wasn't an instant kill or anything.

Miscrits.

Yes. Quite a few of us.

Gotta wonder if this is an "adaptation" in the same sense as the "tiger mom" piece.

it was only a weekend project, only running for a few days before takedown - under those circumstances I'd call $500 a solid outcome, especially when the alternative is $0.

i've lately been espousing the opinion that colleges should add some scripting and data manipulation to gen ed requirements in order to adequately prepare students for the next generation of white-collar work.

then again, i barely remember a thing from my entry-level stats course.

worth downloading just for the increase in max number of rows in Calc, imo.

But in all seriousness, if you want to make a lot of money, it is in your interest to understand these people and make something that they want.

You may not like the idea but that doesn't necessarily have any bearing on its truth. None of us does anything on our own - water, power, roads, schools, the list goes on and on (not all directly attributable to the country itself, but certainly national governments are high on the list of contributors to these projects in almost all cases, and I haven't even mentioned things like tax policy yet). I think the days of the nation-state are numbered but we can't ignore what those entities did for human progress. Maybe not in the form of a literal debt, but it's short-sighted and antisocial to pretend that the elites didn't have a hundred million helping hands on their way up.

user acct is free; hollow, single-use email addresses are free. you can either be silly or more informed, take your pick.

I'm a big fan and modest (but above-average! :D ) supporter of these Humble Bundles, but it's hard for me to imagine that the potential upside on this is big enough to warrant a YC investment.

I suppose time will tell; either way I'll be happy to see the next bundle.

don't you think that a bunch of donations might be useful for this? call it crowdsourced vc if that makes it easier to understand.

for a while I tried to start a collection of those "free install!" discs from various ISPs. it got too depressing.

Extreme version of counterpoint: By putting all of this knowledge online, we're building an organism bigger than ourselves.

Weak version: We're learning new types of information, and in many cases creating it rather than simply seeking to retain it.

My version is probably somewhere in the middle. But overall this is needlessly alarmist hand-wringing. Hooray for trend pieces!

I think Silicon Valley has both broad and narrow meanings. The broad meaning mostly applies when mass-market magazines or people from the East Coast are speaking. But from where I sit in SF, the Valley is that area down south where the big boys have their big campuses, and all that.

Of course, when I go home to Mississippi and folks say I'm living in or otherwise associated with Silicon Valley, I don't correct them. Close enough that it's not worth being a smartass.

Enormous unspoken point in the article: masterful publicity scheme! Kudos to you dude.

if you build it...

Is a recap of a TV show really worthy of an NYT op-ed slot?

And is it really worth posting here?

IMO, no on both counts.

And if you use the Recently Closed Tabs feature on the New Tab page, you can reopen sets of tabs that were all closed at once.

why do people link to these? Friedman is a cheesy, uninsightful, mostly bogus commentator.

This is entertaining. Is it intended to be serious at all? because having these 2 Q&As consecutively in the faq:

--- Q : How/why did you make such a great OS? A : I thought - what would attract young users to Linux? So I created this idea after a lot of reading and work.

Q : How can I watch DVDs and other Media? A : click the Hannah Montana menu, then Utilities, then Konsole, then type: sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 kubuntu-restricted-extras ---

is comical. to me, this says, "it's for kids, and the first thing they should learn is that linux requires you to learn obscure things to do stuff that's easy as pie and very commonly used on other computers."

One thing that I've found entertaining in my short time on this site is the surprising number of semi-hidden features. It's almost like the In-N-Out of tech sites. And now I know where to find the secret menu :). Thanks!

Ah, but now we have to discuss the definition of smart: I think there's a distinct type of intelligence involved in not being a weird, smelly loser. In fact, the vast majority of people are at least moderately smart in this regard.

For the About page I'd probably go with a modified version of #3 myself... but then again I too am pretty reluctant about self-promotion and would rather talk about what excites me now than what I did 5 years ago.

The whole sig struck me as over-the-top and obnoxious, personally. "HERE IS A LIST SHOWING HOW IMPORTANT I AM."

Hint - if you're really important, all you need to sign is your name.

1 point for irony. But seriously, this is a FUD headline. The statement that 39% of kids surveyed agree with is: "The information I find online is always correct."

It's no stretch that this statement allows for children to silently consider it to be assessing their own assessment skills - easy to translate to "I know not everything online is true, but I know how to find the accurate stuff."

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the children who answered yes were thinking of the question in those terms.

When I hear "creative cover letter" I think of something more than three to four paragraphs that cover an applicant's background, interests, and goals. It's an excellent cover letter, sure, but I fail to see much creativity with the form or structure. There's "only" the creativity that underlies all concise, punchy, effective writing.

obviously there's a lot of variation between teachers, but I think this will only work for kids who wouldn't have tried in the first place. my HS latin teacher would probably have given those a B- or more likely a C. not bad, not great.