Having more megapixels allows you to crop more without losing detail and effectively zoom in on different areas on the photo in post processing. It frees you from needing to perfectly compose your photo when you take it and it makes prime lenses almost as versatile as zooms for getting closer to your subject. It has an important effect on ergonomics because it lets you carry around a lightweight prime lens instead of a big heavy zoom and still be able to achieve similar results, or even better ones if you can take advantage of the prime's higher max aperture.
Readit Newsyariv commented on 2017 Camera News tbray.org/ongoing/When/20... · Posted by u/Tomte
Is it Erlang’s semantics that really rub people the wrong way?
... after seeing O’Caml, Haskell, and Clojure before, Erlang feels
a bit easier to get the hang of. Erlang’s semantics indeed throw
people off, especially those who know a C-style language.
The problem with Erlang is not one of semantics, it's one of syntax. I find the syntax of Erlang jarringly bad.
Try this for a longer rant: http://damienkatz.net/2008/03/what_sucks_abou.html
If Erlang's syntax bothers you and like Clojure you should check out LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang). It's Erlang with a Lisp sytax.
yariv commented on We are in the AOL days of social networking buddycloud.com/cms/conten... · Posted by u/imaginator
Facebook on the other hand, embraces the open web
No offense, but I find that to be an odd definition of "open web".
They don't support a distributed protocol and they don't support data portability in any meaningful way.
I work on the Facebook platform team.
Facebook Platform supports OAuth as a standard authentication protocol for 3rd party apps. It also provides APIs that developers can use to export data users have entered into facebook (with the user's permission, of course). What do you think is missing in Facebook's support for data portability?
So their theory here is that when I add a friend on Facebook, I am really saying this: "I share some of my contact info with you, but only as long as we both use Facebook?"
That's a convenient notion if you happen to work for Big #3b5998. But I think almost anyone would agree that it's really two people making a connection, and Facebook is just the middleman.
The theory is that by accepting someone's friend request you're not automatically granting them the ability to export your email address to any application that asks for it. If it were possible there's a good chance your inbox would quickly be filled with spam from apps your friends use. I know of no social network, including Google's own Orkut, Twitter, and Myspace, which allows this kind of mass exportation of friend emails via its API.
yariv commented on Facebook Finds A New Way To Liberate Your Gmail Contact Data techcrunch.com/2010/11/08... · Posted by u/stevederico
Ah, but if I remember correctly, the terms of that OAuth usage explicitly state that while data may be accessed and used, it can't be stored indefinitely (with good reason, sometimes I don't want some app toy to indefinitely store all the information I trust Facebook with). So if a third party uses that API as an export mechanism, their API access should be (rightfully) shut down.
BUT - what if I actually want to export all of my photos into SomeApp.com, and I want to give SomeApp the right to store my photos indefinitely? Is there an API they can use to pull it from Facebook directly?
It used to be the case that apps could only store your data for 24 hours, but we removed this restriction in the last f8 conference.
You can definitely export all your photos into SomeApp.com using the graph API and they can store your photos indefinitely. These APIs are documented at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api.
yariv commented on Facebook Finds A New Way To Liberate Your Gmail Contact Data techcrunch.com/2010/11/08... · Posted by u/stevederico
genuine question (this sounds a little smarmy but I know nothing about Graph API or web dev at all really): How is it not easy for other web services to access this stored data when a random guy can easily throw a script on GitHub to do it?
The Facebook API allows 3rd party applications to access most of the user's data, including the user's email, if the user grants the application the required permissions. More details are at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissio....
(I work on the Facebook platform.)
yariv commented on Facebook Finds A New Way To Liberate Your Gmail Contact Data techcrunch.com/2010/11/08... · Posted by u/stevederico
Not sure if this is the right answer, but a guess: it's easy for other web services to access this stored data if the user provides them with their Facebook login and password, which no self-respecting service would ever ask for. Even if Google did at one point get users to give up their facebook credentials, the API's they access will probably block IP's that try to access multiple users' data in a short amount of time.
The best solution, IMO, is to use the browser as a platform: a Chrome extension can allow users to seamlessly sync data between services, because Chrome already has access both to your Facebook account and your Picasa account.
With the Facebook API, the user doesn't have to provide any third party his credentials to allow the third party to access his data. Facebook uses OAuth to securely pass an access token to the third party while protecting the user's credentials. See http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/ for more info.
(I work on the Facebook platform.)
ErlyWeb, an open source web framework: http://github.com/yariv/erlyweb/.
Twoorl, an open source Twitter clone: http://github.com/yariv/twoorl/.
Vimagi, a graffiti-like facebook app: http://apps.facebook.com/vimagi-paint.
Also, parts of Facebook chat (I work at Facebook).
yariv commented on Is Entrepreneurship Just About the Exit? techcrunch.com/2010/06/12... · Posted by u/mun411
Entrepreneurship overall isn't about the exit, but VC-backed technology startups are very likely about the exit. To me, entrepreneurship is the chance to build something that people want, the chance to lead and the chance to have a voice in one's own destiny.
Corporate jobs often don't offer those things. You usually build what others tell you to build, follow orders and have little voice in your own future.
Can you imagine if the team at 37 Signals had corporate jobs? They wouldn't be rock stars, they'd be cube-dwellers with no blog, no chance to make big changes, with vague titles like "Lead Web Designer" or "Enterprise Architect." David Heinemeier Hansson wouldn't be known as the designer of RoR, he'd be that kid who came up with the non-corporate-standard framework that got mothballed after he was laid off. The people left would complain when they got assigned to port his weird "Ruby" apps over to Struts.
Entrepreneurs, from the person who opens a McDonald's franchise to an Ivy Leaguer seeking millions in VC want more or less the same thing, and for them an "exit" is often just icing on the cake.
On the flip side, if the team from 37 Signals worked for a great technology company like Facebook, Google or Apple, they could have built products that tens or hundreds of millions of users and hundreds of thousands of developers use every day. They could have worked with some of the best engineers and designers on the planet and have had a huge impact on the products they've built and their company's success. They also could have also created popular open source software that runs on massive infrastructures, written their own blogs, and achieved industry fame.
I'm not trying to argue that entrepreneurship isn't a great path to pursue for many people, but I disagree with the simplistic picture that people sometime paint wherein entrepreneurship is always glamorous and employment is always dreary.
Disclaimer: I work for Facebook.
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