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spravin

39 karma · joined August 16, 2010

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spravin··on Defining Property
Imagine a florist who sells roses along with a air-tight cardboard box, and stipulates that the buyer sit inside this box every time he wants to smell this rose (so that others who haven't paid for the rose cannot not "steal" the smell).

That would be a good analogy for DRM (at least the way it is implemented today).

spravin··on Why I don't use recent travel startups
When I look for flights, I check bing, kayak, orbitz as well as hipmunk. Which one do I prefer? Simple: the one that gives me the best fare. Unfortunately it ends up being a different one each time.
spravin··on Amazon launches as Junglee in India
Interesting.

1998: Amazon acquires price comparison site junglee.com from Indian cofounders (later of kosmix/walmart labs fame).

2012: Amazon launches price comparison site for India called junglee.com

spravin··on Google+ With 60M+ Users And Growing… But Active User Count Still Unknown
Give them a break. Facebook first started reporting the active user counts at least 5 years after launch. Let us give G+ at least a year.

A separate issue is how to accurately track "active users" given that G+ is getting so tightly integrated with almost all popular Google services.

spravin··on A new type of social network: Wormhole links MIT and Stanford
More pictures (Wormhole launch party at the Stanford cafe): http://www.flickr.com/photos/stanfordeng/6323012297/in/photo...
spravin··on Mozilla Launches Firefox 4 for Android
Here's an easier url (goes to the same .apk): http://j.mp/firedroid
spravin··on James Gosling joining Google
Meanwhile Facebook is out talent-scouting at the White House: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/facebook-may-hire-rob...
spravin··on Results for: Pick a number from 1 to 10
The positioning of the dropdown clearly has a lot of influence on the results. People are horrible random number generators! In this case, people are unlikely to choose the ends (1/9) or the center (5) leading to a bimodal distribution with two modes at 4 and 7.
spravin··on Understanding and using Amazon EBS - Elastic Block Store
I liked the tenant-rent analogy xlarge:large:small::house:room:couch.

tl;dr version: The author is insinuating that Reddit doesn't have enough money to rent a house, so its renting a couch, and so it can't complain if the other occupants have an all-night rave party.

spravin··on An update to Google Social Search
It is because Twitter posts are public, and free for Google to use, unlike Facebook posts.
spravin··on An update to Google Social Search
I hope Google learns from Buzz, and makes this an "explicit" opt-in. The blog post says that it will be only enabled if the user's Google account is signed in. But a user's Google account could be signed in simply because he is logged in to Gmail.
spravin··on Google Books: Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books
Here's the tool: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/

I just found that misunderestimate was not invented by Bush but the word predates him by a century http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=misunderestimate&...