I've been following the news about SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, for the past couple of weeks. Yesterday there was an interesting development when 83 of the most prominent engineers responsible for creating the Internet signed an open letter voicing their opposition to SOPA. This in and of itself is hardly surprising. Since the law was introduced anyone with a shred of technical acumen has stated that a.) It will not work. The law will not hinder piracy. b.) It will be hugely detrimental to the normal operation of the Internet.

But, this made me think. If a ...

By hook and/or crook I managed to wangle an invitation to Google+ yesterday. After messing around with it a little, I really like what they've done and I think it has great potential.

The circles are clearly the defining feature. The ability to compartmentalize friends into different groups and share things with only certain groups (or combinations thereof) is what everyone has been wanting from social networking sites for a while now. I think they might have solved the dilemma everyone has faced when their boss or parents want to friend them. To be fair, I don't ...

I heard on the radio the other day that Top 40 songs have gotten more self-centered recently. Supposedly, songs in the past used to be about ideas and now they're just all about the person singing the song. The DJ picked a few examples, found that it was the case, and declared this to be true.

Is it though? It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to test. I plan to do just that in the following manner.

1. Get a list of every Billboard #1 single going back as far as possible
2. Get lyrics for each song ...

I never thought this day would come. For years now, I've chuckled at the naysayers who lamented that "Reddit has gone downhill". People have been saying that for about as long as I can remember, and I've been there for over four years. Sooner or later, though, I guess we all become what we hate, because here I am.

Reddit has gone downhill.

Maybe that's not even quite the right way to put it. It's more like Reddit has hit a plateau. From my perspective, it's tough to tell if it's actually changed or ...

Crooks and Liars is parading around a twelve year old article wherein Trump proposed a one time 14.25% tax on the top 1% of Americans (then defined as households with a net worth of greater than $10 million) to pay off the national debt then $5.7 trillion.

The rest of Trump's politics aside, this doesn't sound like such a horrible idea, if the math works out. In 1999, if a 14.25% tax on the net worth of the top one percent would have paid off the $5.7 trillion national debt at the time, that ...

For a while now I've been interested in data mining and visualization. When someone posted a link to a dataset of UFO sighting information on Reddit, it seemed as good an opportunity as any to jump in and get my feet wet. There's a lot that could be done with this data, but to start I decided to make a heat map indicating the number of sightings by county, throughout the US.

With the help of this excellent guide over at Flowing Data, this didn't seem too hard at all. The only hiccup was that I needed ...

Is it me, or are the similarities between Facebook and Microsoft becoming downright eerie? I know Microsoft is a major investor in Facebook, so it's probably not all coincidental. But sometimes it seems like Facebook is running the MS playbook step by step, including the mistakes.

Origins

Gates and Zuckerberg both dropped out of Harvard to start their companies. Superficial and coincidental, sure, but a little weird in the Kennedy-had-a-secretary-named-Lincoln-and-vice-versa way. Additionally, both founders have been depicted in the press as being cold and calculating, with concern for little else besides the success of their company. Gates' image has ...

One thing I really slacked on while developing GreaterDebater was testing. Maybe that's not the right way to put it. It's not like I didn't test. In fact, I did a lot of testing. A lot of painstaking manual testing. For every change. So, in a way it was really the opposite of slacking. It was working a whole lot harder than I really needed to. It was also dumb. What I did slack on, was figuring out how Django's unit testing framework worked. Well, no more! In fact, it's really easy to set up ...

I like them quite a lot, thank you. In fact, they're pretty great! Ever since my esteemed colleague over at Killa Blog introduced me to Jazz apples almost a year ago, I've kept a close eye on the produce section at my local grocer. This past weekend a new challenger appeared.

It seems Australia, ever the bitter rival of New Zealand, is not content to let those lousy Kiwis dominate the world of boutique apple varietals. The Pink Lady is a bit more tart than the Jazz apple, but very very tasty. She'll be appearing in my ...

I knew this day would come. GreaterDebater experienced it's first wave of spam this past week. In a way, it's almost flattering that the site is considered worth spamming now. In another much more prevalent way it's incredibly annoying. I know I'm only about the billionth or so person to complain about spam, but I have to wonder if the fact that spam is a worthwhile activity for some people is not an indication that there's something seriously broken about the way the Internet works.

The blessing and the curse of the Internet has been ...

I think every programmer must have some bit of code they wrote that they absolutely hate. Maybe it's something that's brute force where it doesn't need to be. Maybe it's a block of code that's been copied and pasted a few more times than is advisable. Sure, it works. It's perfectly functional. But you know it's in your codebase, lurking. It's waiting for the perfect time to strike, when it can rear up and bite you in the ass at the worst possible moment. Of course, you didn't want to write ...

Google is the undisputed champ when it comes to internet advertising. There's no shortage of companies on the web pursuing the same model. Obviously, not every product can be offered for free and funded with advertising, at some point somebody has to pay for the products being advertised in order for there to be any money to buy advertising with. Google's great insight has been the ability to specifically target advertising towards what people are looking for at the time. This advertising is much more valuable to both consumers and advertisers and it has enabled Google to make ...

Python is the language of one, and only one, obvious way to do things. This isn't quite the case when it comes to concatenating string though. There's three obvious choices. First, you can use the + operator. Since strings are considered a sequence type, along with lists and tuples, this works just like you would expect:

>>> str1, str2, str3 = 'abc', 'def', 'ghi'
>>> str1 + str2 + str3
'abcdefghi'

String formatting is also an option. This comes with a host of advantages, including type coercion when necessary. In this simple case it looks like this:

>>> "%s%s%s" % (str1, str2, str3)
'abcdefghi ...

Other social news sites(Reddit, Hacker News, Digg to name a few) use a voting mechanism to rank stories and comments. On the whole, these work pretty well. The top rated stories and comments are often the most interesting, or at least the most amusing. It seems that there is always a certain level of disagreement about the proper voting etiquette though. Inevitably something gets voted to the top that some people feel should not have been. Said people make their feelings known, trying to educate everyone else on why this story shouldn't be at the top. Better stories ...

For now, let's disregard the cynical response: "If you're arguing online, you've already lost". Sure, there's no shortage of unproductive flaming happening on the internet, but let's assume for the moment that it's possible for people to disagree constructively.

The question then is that in the fortuitous event of such a disagreement, how should it be resolved? In a perfect world, sooner or later one party would be convinced and accept...

Ok, I'll wait until you've stopped laughing.

...

So, it's exceedingly rare for a participant in a debate to admit error ...