thesethings's posterous

thesethings's posterous

thesethings (andy)  //  @thesethings
portland, oregon
lately: #datascraping #bash #python #design #fun #delight #twitter #tumblr #screencasts

Jan 7 / 1:32am

Never fall for the compliance trick.

From Facebook, Goldman Sachs & How Money Seeks Regulatory Free Zones

After the dot com bubble burst, quickly followed by major accounting scandals such as Enron, Congress, in the way that it normally does, overreacted with a kneejerk response. The most obvious part of this was the Sarbanes-Oxley rules, which didn't do much (if anything) to actually prevent future frauds, but did make the cost of being a public company much, much, much higher -- effectively creating a serious tax on startups looking to go public. It also built up an entire industry around SOX compliance, that almost guarantees the law can never be repealed. In response, an already weak IPO market went almost entirely dormant... 

Never fall for the compliance trick.

Filed under  //  artificial value   compliance   enterprise   social software  
Apr 23 / 8:46pm

Aardvark threatens Yahoo! Answers Most Crazy status

Making a social website is more art than science.

We don't understand exactly why people on Flickr are super polite, and people on YouTube are horrible to each other.

Answer sites have proven to be an especially confusing petri dish of people.

A few years ago, Yahoo! Answers attempted to create a more accessible spin on the incredible, but slightly insular Ask Metafilter.

We know how that turned out.

How is babby formed?!?

how to get girl pragnent?

Yahoo! Answers is not dead. It's churning out the crazy like never before. But it better watch out. There's a new insane answers site in town. Google is determined to clean Yahoo!'s clock even when it comes to ridiculous questions.

The recently acquired Aardvark has had some crazy threads lately, including this one:

I have a friend who is a vegetarian because she thinks meat comes from dead animals. For example, she thinks a chicken leg really comes from a real chicken that has been killed.
Where can I find some documentation to show to her to inform her on the real origins of meat?

You might be tempted to think this user is joking, and it's possible.  But I've been sent some depressing questions from there lately (you get questions sent to you based on "matches" like city, expertise, etc). I'm guessing that it's real.

Your move, Yahoo! Answers.

Filed under  //  aardvark   babby   community   crazy   google   social software   vark   vark.com   yahoo! answers