I think we kind of know. I mean, wolves and dog like creatures live along side humans all over the world. They hunt with us and eat what we leave behind and we use things or did for a long time, things they left behind. It's only natural that the ones that shared knowledge with each other among the group benefited more along the direction of a shared ability to communicate amongst themselves than would members of groups that did not care to share such a bond. ref: http://tolweb.org/treehouses/?treehouse_id=3804
We see avatar and see how far into the future he saw those animals and they had evolved these complicated neuronal cross species connections. Now if you believe in evolution, then you can't argue with that as a potential reality in the future. In a way, it does exist across species now in more trivial forms, including, if you will allow me, eye contact. I would offer to suggest that eye contact may actually be one of the first forms of cross species and even family. Birds, fish, all kinds of mammals... You can make eye contact and communicate with them if you have the patience. The more primitive the organism, the more patience is required to communicate with it -- if it can communicate.
First of all, I really like it. I think it is nice.
Some questions, then some thoughts, and some prognostications. What is the OpenID box? I don't know what to put there. I don't have an openid. Will openid be a link to the numbr? Is it my email address? I tried to click on the OI icon inside the box to get some help, but alas, I never figured out what that box is for and I'm a computer guy! (A ha, just got to firefox and it told me my email address wasn't a valid openid. hmph, did it still create? Nope, not on the first page...) Why does OpenID matter? Let me use my Email address.
Well, it's a good idea. I still like it.
When I am in Opera and I click the "Create Numbr" button, nothing happens. In IE 7, when I enter the url and click the "Pick a numbr on the Page" button, I get something about it not being displayed and then it was aborted and I see a blank nothing. On my way to firefox (see above...) Couldn't save my numbr...
What I wanted to save, was the number that appears in the link at the bottom of the first section on the cover of http://news.google.com. This number is the number of articles about the "top ranked" article at google. It would show whatever google's algorithm puts there.
But it could come from Bing or any aggregator. How popular the most popular story at Hacker News is, etc...
I tried with text too, but it said it wasn't a number. Considering the one I tried to create, it would be nice to see what that article is, though because of this particular topic, you could do a little research. For today, the top article may be obvious, but what was the world talking most about on Jan 17, 1987?
Of course the Internet wasn't around back then really, I mean, it could have been, but WebNumbr wasn't and we can't take WebNumbr back to 1987 to figure it out ... okay, we could do research today about how many newspapers in the world had a particular headline for dates past, but that would be a tremendous amount of work. It would be an undertaking so vast and incomprehensible that we just wouldn't even do it at all.
And here, you've created a piece of equipment using the power of technology, that without even thinking about it moving forward into the future is going to do that very task, with almost no human interaction -- 100% automated. A task previously thought insurmountable, on your site is being done, right now 300 times an hour or so? Could be thousands, millions, even billions really. It is able to do it with a lot of numbers, like the dow, or a stock price, or the weather on a particular day or time of day and that's very, very cool and useful for a lot of people who track things using the web.
A lot of people have to track things, so they go to the web and type them in and write them down, or enter them into a database. They don't have to do that anymore.
I can understand the technical reasons to keep it to numbers only and why the limitations are there now, but if you'll allow me to indulge in a bit of speculation about what types of things your users will request in the future, beyond what I've already mentioned, would be the ability to pick a particular number within a group of numbers. The numbr in the top articles I mentioned was actually in a span with text in it, but it accurately picked the correct number (nice work), however, what if there are multiple numbers and I want the second one, will it still work?
What about dates and times? Maybe you want to track the numbr of days since the last injury, which is a number, but what if the only number on the page would be the date of the last incident? Like the X's on one of the keep motivated articles we take in once in a while.
You also may want to alert people if the values change, I'm sure you've thought of that. Give them thresholds to fire an event or call a web page or post to a page, etc...
Those are just some ideas. Keep in touch. Remind us of you going into the future so we can monitor changes and keep track of how things are going.
Leave it blank if you want (maybe I should write "optional" somewhere). I didn't want to make a username/password scheme and openid seems like a perfect fit.
-- Opera, IE7
I never tested it there. Adding to list...
-- Text associations
I've been tossing this idea around, but couldn't come up with a good way to do multiple related extractions and plot some as labels and others as graphs and correlating them. Maybe v2.
-- Nicer way to query
Well my interface just lets you click and it gets that numbr. If you want something fancier, you can write some code (XPATH) and it can happily get your numbr. Go ahead and do substring-before and after. See this one : http://webnumbr.com/semantic-sm-video and look at the xpath
Google's board and executives have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to do what is in the best interest of shareholders -- not Chinese dissidents. It doesn't matter if those executives are founders are not.
All the warm and fuzzy about leaving China won't stop shareholders from suing google if it turns out a decision to leave China has impacted them negatively.
This would be an unwinnable lawsuit. For all the hype, China is a tiny market for Google, and Google can provide a good business rationale for the move (hurts the brand, threatens their infrastructure etc.) Courts are loath to second-guess management except in cases that are exceptionally clear cut.
See Yahoo's refusal of the Microsoft takeover bid for a far more dramatic example of the latitude management has to take decisions that appear to lose the company money.
I could be totally off base with this, but sometimes I think Neal Stephenson is at fault here for putting so much emphasis on the idea of fiduciary responsibility and lawsuits resulting from perceived neglect of that responsibility. I remember he made a big deal out of that in Cryptonomicon, and I think it's become kind of a meme. My impression is that it's not such a large concern in most cases, especially for a large company with different voting rights for different classes of shares like Google.
Corporate boards do have tremendous latitude under the so-called "business judgment" rule, i.e., the rule that says they are to act in the best interests of the company and its shareholders. Under that rule, boards have huge latitude to exercise discretion without being at risk of violating fiduciary duties unless they engage in what is called a "self-interested transaction."
To underscore the difficulty of pursuing a lawsuit claiming breach of fiduciary duty, consider this: I have seen first-hand public companies where a VC-controlled board will use a company's resources to cause the company to acquire bum companies in which the VCs had prior investments (sort of like privately funded bail-outs at company expense); even something so extreme proved to be a very tough case to prosecute given that the VCs who controlled the board had so-called "independent directors" bless the deals.
Taking a corporate action based on so-called corporate responsibility would very likely fall on the safe side of the line for the voting directors in most cases. Business judgment is business judgment and it might be argued that it is good for business for a corporation to position itself as being "green" or "fair to dissidents" or whatever else might be perceived as a good thing to do apart from pure financial motives. If they did so where the economic impact were obvious and highly negative, however, this would certainly subject them to class-action lawsuits and would, in my judgment, be irresponsible conduct by the directors - but this would have to be an extreme case, e.g., (to put it in absurd terms) the Google founders suddenly determining that there are higher purposes in life besides making profits and thereby pulling Google out of its core business because it led to the sin of making profits. This is just another way of saying that, though the business judgment rule gives directors extreme latitude, such latitude is not limitless.
I think, on balance, that the social-responsibility stuff falls in a gray (but relatively safe) area under the technical terms of current corporate law. That said, directors do not want to be seen as doing anything contrary to the shareholders' interests in making profits and that is why recent proposals have all focused on giving shareholders the right to impose these sorts of things on the board via extraordinary votes. Such proposals have gone nowhere to date and, where shareholder advisory votes have been taken, the social-responsibility stuff tends to go down in flames. Shareholders do want to make money, after all. The post here, then, is correct that it takes a pretty extraordinary situation, such as a dominant founder or two controlling things, for this to happen.
With the way Google's corporate structure is set up I do not think the general shareholding public have the power to sue Google in such a fashion.
Separately, I think that as more of the story comes out we will see that this move is in Google's best interest; as difficult a decision that leaving China is. I've mentioned in other places that there is probably a lot more going on here. Today Techcrunch reports, http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/14/google-china-holiday-le..., that Google is sending their China staff home on early holiday. One can imagine a scenario where someone planted hard/soft hacks or network snoops directly at Google China HQ.
Boards and executives have more responsibility than that: they must obey the law, look beyond the next quarter, and behave in a moral fashion. Corporations turn into soul-less carnivours if "fiduciary responsibility" is the only driving force.
That was Fred's point -- Sergey and Larry hold a controlling stake still in Google. So Google's best interest is still to meet their best interests which aren't necessarily financial.
Sergey and Larry hold a controlling stake because there is a dual class of Common stock where the Founders' stock has 10x the voting power per share compared to normal Common stock.
Sergey and Larry have something like 30% of the equity combined but held 85% of the voting power.
Does "fiduciary responsibility" mean "represent the voting stockholders" or "represent all the stockholders"? I believe the latter. Which puts executives in a bind when those two populations differ.
If they put it to a shareholder vote and everyone decides leaving china is good that is fine. If they make a vote among a few insiders at the top and leave china and then it turns out billions in market cap are lost as a result, I'm almost certain there will be a lawsuit.
If one were to set out on such a path and accomplish the goal out of hobby or desire to learn a new language, or for whatever reason, how long would something like that take? How long did it take 37s to build ROR? How long did PHP take?
It's a matter of privacy. You have created this feature to reward participation, but someone who should be receiving that reward is telling you it is actually a curse.
It may be a narrow appeal, but it is being requested by someone who has demonstrated significant contribution to the community to be rewarded in about the only way one can be rewarded here and you won't free him from that which he considers a punishment.
Not really. It just means that when people type "How do I" in front of a search and then click on a link with how do i and then whatever it was, then google picked the right result, even though it doesn't know that you are asking for instructions on how to perform a task.
The people who click those haven't seen all the answers (that would be listed with a non-human query). I want the best answers, not the most popular ones.
Further, typing long phrases or questions unquoted gives a lot of false positives. I don't want that, I want to capture the essential minimum I need to look for something specific.
Google doesn't give you the best answers, they give you the last answer someone else chose. That's how google works, because google believes the best answer is the one after which the searcher does not click on anything else.
It's like one people saying "I don't want to use guns, because they are difficult to understand and I can do bad things with them."
Meanwhile, the people who are taking the time to learn about and use guns are dominating the world.
Any developer worth his salt will understand how to do SQL Statements to get back the right dataset or perform the correct updates. Harping on the benefits of an ORM is a bright red flag in my book, because none of them are better than the power, performance, and flexibility of actually understanding SQL. If you concentrate on learning the ORM, then you are learning yourself into a box and won't even know that there are great things outside it if you had only spent the time to learn SQL.
First of all, you can't do ORM without knowing SQL it's an inherently leaky abstraction and that's not changing anytime soon.
Using SQL is great except what do you define as 'SQL'. Is it MySQL, Oracle or Postgres? How do I migrate between them? Forget data migration, I'm just talking about the data model and constraints. Today I run my app on MySQL but tomorrow the environment will demand Oracle.
I have an app that can run on any database that Hibernate supports with zero code changes and 1 line in a config file including my data constraints.
What if, like physics, each "improvement" to mankind has an equal and opposite negative impact on the world?
If we think about benefit and harm, these are usually with respect to energy. It takes time to heal wounds, it takes more energy to overcome injury. Benefits, like the car for example, enable humans to expend less energy, but they take more from the environment.
If we extrapolate that to the world around us, then for example, taking a prescription drug will have a corresponding negative impact on the environment.
If what I suggest here is true, then any improvement we could make to human evolution is merely an illusion. Perhaps the improvements we do make are merely improvements, or perceived to be improvements, because we can't see the harm created somewhere else, like the destruction of landscape, deaths in mines, pollution, etc...
We see avatar and see how far into the future he saw those animals and they had evolved these complicated neuronal cross species connections. Now if you believe in evolution, then you can't argue with that as a potential reality in the future. In a way, it does exist across species now in more trivial forms, including, if you will allow me, eye contact. I would offer to suggest that eye contact may actually be one of the first forms of cross species and even family. Birds, fish, all kinds of mammals... You can make eye contact and communicate with them if you have the patience. The more primitive the organism, the more patience is required to communicate with it -- if it can communicate.