jobenjo

In the future, I hope there's a blood test to check for susceptibility... There is already talk of a gene that many people who get fluoroquinolone toxicity have in common.

I had a single pill of levofloxin about three years ago (for pneumonia). I woke up the next day, barely able to walk, with mass tendonopathy (tendon loss) in my arms and legs. I did the research and found out the dangers immediately, but one pill was enough to cause massive damage for me. My recovery took about ~2 years and was slow and challenging, but I'm now part of a facebook group where I see I'm one of the lucky ones. Many people have horrible symptoms and aren't recovering years out. New people join daily.

As an "anti-fluoride person", I just want to go on the record to state that it's ridiculous to be more concerned with riling up a particular group than having safe drinking water.

In fact, counter to common opinion, we have a solidly science-based view on this issue--I'm not sure how we got grouped in with anti-vaxxers and others.

There simply isn't good evidence that adding fluoride to drinking water is a justifiable public health method to reduce cavities, which is why 97% of Western Europe doesn't do it[0]. And because there's no opt-out, it may be dangerous for bottle-fed babies [1].

I'm not saying it's the world's biggest problem right now (by a long shot), but dispensing medicine in water is not good policy.

[0] - http://fluoridealert.org/content/water_europe/ [1] - http://fluoridealert.org/issues/infant-exposure/

All these physics-debunking conversations seem to assume a single source. I naively assumed that UBeam will work sort of like the Gamma Knife (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiosurgery#Gamma_Knife), where there are many sources that intersect just at your phone or device. This completely changes all the physics assumptions, and is a good reminder to keep an open mind.

That being said, I'd be highly skeptical of the health risks of this technology, especially given the only benefit is convenience.

Well said, Josh. It's about constant iteration and improvement.

Likewise. It amazes me how long it's lasted.

I agree with your sentiment about famous people. It feels really generic. I'm sure there's something better. We tested lots of interest-based versions, but they also underperformed.

Twitter is becoming more of a consuming platform for most users, so getting followers for the average user is much less important than finding great content.

I wrote this flow about 3 years, ago, and my face is still the Twitter teacher (see twitter.com/finkel). I haven't worked at Twitter for over a year.

A few things. At least when I wrote it, the very first step you'd see the friends who tried to connect with you, if you have any. I doubt that's changed, so this may be a special case.

After building this flow, I helped my team design multiple better/more modern flows, but all performed worse than my original when we measured for retention over time. It turns out it's much trickier than it looks to build a better flow, and it also hard to prove that it's better due to bots/spammers.

Even though this flow is far from perfect, I still take pride that my face has been shown to hundreds of millions of new users, and that it greatly outperformed its predecessor. But I just want to remind users here that it's easy to say: "This is crap, I could do better." When it fact, many other "better" things have been tried, and it's surprisingly harder and more nuanced than it looks.

With my knowledge now, I believe more of Twitter's energy should be spent improving the product, because the new user flow is much less important than the product people see when it's done.

Love this essay. I read it years ago when my brother was working with Paul Lockhart, who deeply influenced him as a math teacher.

My brother and his wife have since started an organization called Math For Love (http://www.mathforlove.com) focused on changing the way math is taught. They run workshops for teachers and provide great material for students.

If you're in Seattle and interesting in pedagogy and math, you should check them out.

That's a great solution, actually. Think of it more like a credit card processing fee.

Anyone tried snapixel? http://www.snapixel.com/

Looks like it could be a decent Flickr alternative.

What card is that? (Just curious--sounds like a great deal).

I've been happy with Backblaze. Good cpu usage, and I restored files easily with a nice web interface.

I switched from Mozy because the client was much more efficient. If you're looking at Mozy and Carbonite, definitely check out Backblaze.

(Also, I met the CEO a few years back--seemed like a smart guy).

I agree that this is a crap study, but I still wouldn't be quite so dismissive of any possible effects of WiFi just because it is so low energy.

Why? Because the assumption that everyone makes here is that the only cause of this damage is from heat/high energy, and that could be wrong. I think the more troubling possible danger (to trees, or humans) is _interference_. Living things are complex systems that use low energy electric signals throughout. If some radiation were able to interfere with one of this processes, even at very low energy level, it could do far more damage than something with higher energy.

I'm not claiming to say any of these threats are real, or the science is good, just that we shouldn't dismiss concerns about X because it's less energy than Y, and Y seems to be safe.

We have to learn more about how the things we're trying to protect work, and particularly what types of radiation we should avoid.

For example, here's a PDF talking about the potential risks of low energy radiation on human cells. http://ec.europa.eu/research/environment/pdf/env_health_proj...

And a longer article about some possible dangers of electromagnetic radiation: http://www2.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/EMF-Hazards.html

San Francisco, CA

Fluther.com is looking for an new designer and a server engineer.

We're in the mission, and we love darts.

[email protected]

After a long stint with Vim (and a brief one with eclipse), I too have been using Komodo Edit.

The vim bindings are good. The app is OS X is fine. (Though I had to hack the source to make the "Go To file" not look in the history, which was bothering me with my many branches). Also removed anti-aliasing, which is awful for code IMHO.

It crashes from time to time, but I think it's the best all around choice right now for good vi bindings, sensible auto-completion, multi-language support, etc.

Plus I like that it's cross-browser and open source, in case I ever want to leave OS X for something better.

Fluther (http://www.fluther.com)

We've been using bazaar at Fluther for a while and I have to agree with the author's sentiment for the most part.

The whole "Git is better" thing annoys me. Dvcs _are_ better, but I think it's mostly a wash between bzr, hg, and git. Yes, bzr is slower here and there (used to be annoying, now it's fast enough that it's a basically a non-issue). The parts I like more than git (though I'm no git pro) is the very flexible work-flow options (we use multiple, and they're awesome), the excellent merge algorithm, and the directory/branch structure, to name a few.

Git is great. So it bazaar. It's all this machismo that bugs me. We should really be on the same side trumpeting why dvcs are better.

We've been using a different nagios alternative, zabbix, for quite a while and I'm always surprised how few people have heard of it. The UI takes getting used to, but it's full featured and dependable.

Thanks, jimmybot.

Yeah, something tailored would definitely be better. Google custom search is pretty weak, but it gets the job done for our users until we find the time to improve. We'll probably switch to lucene or solr (with some secret sauce), but we've been too busy with other stuff. I set up a branch with Haystack (we use Django) a few weeks ago and was pretty impressed.

If you want to chat more specifically about search (or something else), you can drop me a line: [email protected]

- We've been matching questions using an a sophisticated algorithm since before Aardvark launched.

- We've been using real-time interaction also for years, and more recently added IM notification and chat (not saying I don't think parts of Quora's interface is slick, just we were doing it first).

- We have similarly distinguished backers and advisors: http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/24/fluther-raises-600k-from-to...

- We have a large, thriving community and a healthy amount of traffic (around 800k uniques).

- And at the end of the day, we have a lot of smart people giving great answers. Try asking a good question good question.

- Having talked at length with some of the other co-founders, ceos, and investors of these very companies (and others not on the list), I can say pretty confidently, that we are indeed, "in the fray"

Not trying to sound defensive. I love how our company how's grown, where we're going (we have some amazing stuff in store for this year). More I'm saying how it can be frustrating to not get included in discussions like this (which can shape opinion over time) that are written by people who don't actually have serious insight about the space.

Quite frankly, we're a lot more in the "in-crowd" than some of the other Q&A companies, but I don't think that makes them irrelevant.

I agree with you about the Q&A wars shaping up, but I think you should include Fluther, which falls smack dab in the middle of this fray.

It's also worth noting there are a number of other large incumbents like WikiAnswers (which is now bigger than Yahoo Answers by some accounts), Answerbag, and Yedda, to name a few.

I agree that there is a movement of next-gen Q&A companies going for something special (because I'm one of them), and I know it's a complex field of companies to navigate. But I'd be careful not to oversimplify the pool "major players" to just the few companies playing silicon valley publicity game. The actual Q&A space is much more vast.

Disclaimer: I'm the CEO of Fluther.

Yeah, I tried to address that in the end of the post. You'll notice links to two other site's data where the chunking is present but not nearly enough to make a horseshoe.

Without Google's chunking it would look different. but it actually makes it easier to see what's happening. Everyone will see a 1-log like function here (without chunking), what matters is the rate of decay, and that is well-captured in the chunking.

Well done. I've been craving this kind of tool forever. All the previous implementations I've seen failed by having stale data. If you can solve that, this will be a hit.

Fluther.com is looking to hire someone with backend/architecture/database/python experience.

(You will be employee #2).

[email protected]

Any way I can do this in Django? (Or--how hard is this to do by hand?). Seems really promising.

We've been using MogileFS for the last few years to host all our avatars. It's fast and powerful, and has had very few issues.

It's definitely a solid system, though was certainly overkill for our needs (if I could do it again, I would just use s3).

I was just thinking about this. Slicehost hasn't changed their prices in the 3ish years we've been with them, but the price of computers and memory has dropped considerably.

As their profit margin expands, I hope Slicehost will lower their prices, too (and if they don't I suspect that'll be a window for someone else).