#breaking2
差了25秒破二，可惜！感谢 Eliud Kipchoge 和 Nike team 带来这么精彩的一场秀。
What an inspiration!
Nothing is impossible! 下次再来！
夏虫不可语冰
春天来了，湾区一片郁郁葱葱，那些东湾黄黄的山也是绿悠悠的。今年是大选年，雨水充足也许是个好兆头。跟着大选也开始关心起了政治，但在民粹主义盛行的今天，意见相左的两个人要说服对方是一件很辛苦的事情。
先说前两天美国华人圈里的大事，220大游行声援 Peter Liang。Peter Liang 具体的事情我就不说了，网上讨论的很多。简单说就是一个倒霉的华人(实习)警官和他的搭档在危险的黑人区不小心开枪走火杀害了无辜的黑人群众，结果被陪审团判二级误杀罪。恰好那段时间 NYPD 和黑人社区的警民矛盾非常严重，很多华人们认为梁警官是有被“替罪羊”的嫌疑的。这篇文章我觉得讲的还不错: 梁警官案件深度评析，对案件不是很了解的同学可以看看。
我是支持游行和发声的，游行也去了（插一句，这次游行组织的非常不错）。与此同时，也能看到不少的反对者。站在受害人的角度上，或者白人“上帝”视角，都会觉得游行是一件有点不能理解的事情。受害人族裔会觉得应该严惩是没错，而从来没有受到过歧视的族群当然也是很难体会一个常年被steorotype 的 model minority 的感受。
正如同一个朋友说起曾经在Google发生的一个故事：一个厨师在公司食堂提供的甜点里叫Free Tibet，一名华人员工以辞职来抗议，结果他的抗议被更多人抗议，认为是over react，整个email thread有上万条回复。今天这个事情还被拿出来作为不要抗议的反例，也证明了发声本来的重要性。试想同样的厨师，他敢拿LGBT，敢拿其他族裔的事情来做甜品名么？
前些天，一名 Yelp/EAT24 的客服写公开信给CEO，抱怨湾区的生活成本太高，而工资太低，几乎无法生活，结果最后被公司开除。 (more…)
写在Google Reader关闭之后
前两天还在抱怨好久没什么更新呢, 结果今天就关了. 互联网上好多的好的服务真是可惜, 各种死法, 服务太好成本太高垮掉, 大公司调整产品砍掉, 小公司被卖掉后产品被砍掉, 当然还有一种可能就是会被墙掉.
Google Reader的前PM在Quora上说:
Brian Shih, Former Google Reader Product ManagerLet’s be clear that this has nothing to do with revenue vs operating costs. Reader never made money directly (though you could maybe attribute some of Feedburner and AdSense for Feeds usage to it), and it wan’t the goal of the product.Reader has been fighting for approval/survival at Google since long before I was a PM for the product. I’m pretty sure Reader was threatened with de-staffing at least three times before it actually happened. It was often for some reason related to social:
- 2008 – let’s pull the team off to build OpenSocial
- 2009 – let’s pull the team off to build Buzz
- 2010 – let’s pull the team off to build Google+
It turns out they decided to kill it anyway in 2010, even though most of the engineers opted against joining G+. Ironically, I think the reason Google always wanted to pull the Reader team off to build these other social products was that the Reader team actually understood social (and tried a lot of experiments over the years that informed the larger social features at the company)[1]. Reader’s social features also evolved very organically in response to users, instead of being designed top-down like some of Google’s other efforts[2].
I suspect that it survived for some time after being put into maintenance because they believed it could still be a useful source of content into G+. Reader users were always voracious consumers of content, and many of them filtered and shared a great deal of it.
But after switching the sharing features over to G+ (the so called “share-pocalypse”) along with the redesigned UI, my guess is that usage just started to fall – particularly around sharing. I know that my sharing basically stopped completely once the redesign happened [3]. Though Google did ultimately fix a lot of the UI issues, the sharing (and therefore content going into G+) would never recover.
So with dwindling usefulness to G+, (likely) dwindling or flattening usage due to being in maintenance, and Google’s big drive to focus in the last couple of years, what choice was there but to kill the product?
Personally, I think that there is still a lot of value a service like Reader could provide — particularly in a world with increasing information overload coming us from many different sources. But Reader at Google was pigeonholed as an RSS-reader explicitly, and didn’t have a chance to grow beyond that to explore that space. But that’s neither here nor there.
[1] See Reader’s friends implementations v1, v2, and v3, comments, privacy controls, and sharing features. Actually wait, you can’t see those anymore, since they were all ripped out.
[2] Rob Fishman‘s Buzzfeed article has good coverage of this: Google’s Lost Social Network
[3] Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision? I was a lot angrier then than I am now — now I’m just sad.
真的好可惜啊, 还有这么多用户呢. 也开始对各种云产品更加不放心. 现在disk这么便宜, 好歹maintenance mode可以搞上很多年嘛, 干脆搞个snapshot也行啊.
暂时还没有打算找替代品, 好歹还能用到7月1号, 这段时间里应该会有很多替代品出现吧. 不知道有没有办法把我所有follow的blog所有过去的文章倒出来, 很多朋友的blog都没有了.
话说既然都到了云时代, 或者不如全自己架云host吧…
Google就要离开中国了
今天，Google在其blog里提到有可能离开中国的意向，原文链接在此。看起来，Google是准备打道回府了，和中国政府讨论censorship不就是自己一个台阶下罢了。至于中国网民来讲，其实损失也不是很大，本来嘛大家都是要多翻翻墙运动运动的，不爱运动的，那就换更懂中文的百度就好。
转一句唐骏的话，“对中国网民来说，无所谓的，退和不退，但是这将是他们做出的历史上最蠢的决定，放弃中国等于放弃半个未来世界。”
Anyway, we are all in the big game, which will never end.
看paper，写代码
近日总是做着的两件事情就是看paper，写代码，而且似乎总是做不完，paper是永远读不完的，代码则是写完了没两天又有新proj。总有些心有余力而不足，却又有点庸俗起来。人生轨迹似乎本不该如此，冥冥中总有个自己在哭笑不得，连近来的作梦也是如此。
借用某office的22’大显，和自己电脑接了起来，再借以Awesome的强大功能，配起了双屏，写代码那是相当的爽了，看网页却反而是大片的白晃眼。
今晚回来了早半个小时，吃了figo同学煮的面，想想自己有两周有余没动过锅碗瓢盆了，当大厨的日子告一段落，原因很多自己都数不过来。
昨天元宵，上课的时候Terrance和我说大火的事情，狠震撼。大家都说，央视这下真火了。非常详尽的报道点这里，可谓互联网的强大！就算那些报道都隐藏在国内新闻的阴暗角落里又能怎样？！
再前些日子，知道了“热中”而不是“热衷”，“林阴道”而不是“林荫道”，感谢国家语委，感谢国家，感谢党，还有，感谢纳税人们。
又某天，听说了一种动物，叫“草泥马”，还有首歌，叫“草泥马之歌”(视频点这里)，吃的是“卧草”，反的是“河蟹”，住在“马勒戈壁”上，和“法克鱿”，“雅蠛蝶”等并称十大神兽。若有兴趣可任选一种搜索引擎搜索之。
近日又学习到一组短语，No Z-turn。我觉得这是看到现在最贴切的解释了，无论是“dont get sidetracked”，或者“dont fuck up”，亦或者“bu zheteng”，都不及“No Z-turn”又贴切又形象又诙谐。
看人说GAP YEAR，我很想要，如果可以的话。那么，如果给你一年的gap year，你又会去做什么呢？