Patrick Collison » blog

Things I want my bank to have, in order of increasing wishful-thinking-ness:

• An RSS feed of my account activity (aggregated for all accounts). Especially desirable for credit card transactions.
• SMS alerts, if fishy activity is suspected.
• A Dashboard widget with a quick overview of my accounts.
• Spending analytics—I should be able to categorise the businesses on my credit card statement, and this data should be shared between all customers. 95% of businesses will be categorised very quickly.
• An API.
• Customisable actions—direct debits, standing orders, “Keep the Change”, and the like, are (relatively) expensive and awkward services that would be much better implemented in a customisable way with something akin to mail filters (as done in Gmail and Apple Mail).

The Economist has a great summary of the tension in the Wikipedia community around the correct threshold for article inclusion.

My brother, John, is an admin, and so I’ve gradually been made aware of the kind of disputes that the article alludes to. (Does the “Traditional Irish Breakfast” deserve its own article, in addition to that about the “Traditional English Breakfast”? John spent many hours resolving such questions.)

It’s cool to see an outlet like The Economist give such accurate coverage of an issue that actually is pretty important (the battle for overall policy in arguably the largest collaborative project yet undertaken by humanity), but full of such arcane technical detail that very few outside the web community have much understanding of it.

If you’re interested in reading more, Andrew Lih (currently working on a book about Wikipedia) has a blog full of lucid posts on Wikipedia policy.

I created Y² Combinator last year in response to the Y Combinator clones springing up around the world. It reached the top of News.YC twice—back in April of 2007, when it launched, and then again, randomly, today.

The browser data from these two events, 10 months apart, give an interesting picture of how the operating system and browser habits of Hacker News readers, and therefore some segment of the startup/programming community, have changed. The figures:

• Linux usage is down! (From 14.8% to 13.2%)
• Mac OS X is up 29% (from 26.1% to 33.6%)
• Internet Explorer use is down 34%
• Safari is up 48%, which suggests that many erstwhile Firefox-on-OS-X users have reverted to Safari

Because I was lazy and didn’t write an install script, some people have been having trouble following the instructions I posted for installing the Wikipedia iPhone app. If you’re one of those, fear not—ipodtouchhackster has created a pretty good video tutorial that covers installation on Windows.

I’ve always been a fan of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, and once Avi suggested putting Wikipedia on the iPhone, it seemed like a good chance to realise the books’ namesake—”a comprehensive, collaboratively-written encyclopedia on a small hand-held computer”.

And so, warts and all, here it is.

(See also: Damien Mulley, Avi Bryant.)

Giuliani, in last night’s GOP debate: “That [Bush’s offence on terrorism] led to Iraq, The Patriot Act, electronic surveillance. All that is very, very good”.

Dan Weinreb (of Symbolics fame) has just posted two excellent entries on his blog. Drawing from his experience working on ObjectStore, they cover the technology and business of OODBMSs. Cool stuff.

The movie adaptation of The Golden Compass (a book I loved when I first read it) does not mention the word “Church”—despite the Church being at the core of the novels. Instead, they use the word “Magisterium” throughout. Why the obfuscation? In an interview, director Chris Weitz writes:

And as for those who are concerned that I have not used the word “Church” but only the word “Magisterium” for the bad guys, and that sort of thing, I would advise them to do a little research into the meaning of the word “Magisterium” for starters.

So, Weitz acknowledges that the meaning of Magisterium will not be immediately be clear to most people, and later claims that “some people will only be satisfied if the film I’ve made is an outright attack on religion”. And here we go! “Magisterium” is a shibboleth. Most people won’t understand the word, and thus the broader message of the film (see this speech lest anyone doubt Pullman’s position here). But for the die-hards who care, Weitz weasels around the issue with the toned-down phrasing. Sigh.

I’ve now spent two days in Sapporo, which is the biggest city in Hokkaidō (Japan’s biggest island apart from the mainland itself).

• It’s colder than I expected. Then again, Sapporo is less than 500km from the coast of Siberia, and shares its latitude with Владивосток (Vladivostok), the last stop on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
• It’s more Westernised that I expected—somewhere between a third and half of the storefronts in downtown Sapporo sport American or European brands.
• No tipping. Coming from the US and Canada, this is almost jarring (and, coupled with the undervalued Yen, makes eating out very cheap).
• Excellent food is everywhere. At the local mall, instead of finding random franchises interspersed between the shops, the top floor is dedicated to restaurants—around 20 or so—with the cuisine ranging from French (patisserie-style) to Mongolian and Singaporean.
• Everyone has 3G mobile phones, so internet access is hard to find. In Vancouver, it was rare to come across a café which didn’t have free wifi; here, I still haven’t found a café that has wifi, free or not.
• Manga and Anime are everywhere (the internet café where I’m writing this, like most internet cafés here, has about half of its floorspace devoted to manga bookshelves). Manga-style imagery is also pervasive in advertising (used by the local slot-machine arcade, the corner store, and on the pack of chewing gum in my pocket), and usually has some sort of erotic undertone (see Ecchi). Sex in advertising isn’t exactly new, but here the focus seems to be on idealised schoolgirls.
• Seán (with whom I’m staying) described Japan as “brightly coloured”, and now that I’m here, I see what he means. Most downtown intersections feel like a combination of Times Square-style flashing neon and oversized displays, along with vaguely demented midi-ish songs and high-pitched voiceovers. While shopping for a sleeping bag last night, the brilliantly pink sign pointing to the second-floor escalator was more a wildly over-the-top ad for the numeral “2″ that an informational fixture. The balanced and ascetic elements of Japanese culture seem to compete with the ostentatious and sybaritic parts, and I can’t really get my head around it. Can anyone explain?
• Although I was sceptical in the beginning, chopsticks truly are a superior tool for transporting food from plate to mouth.
• Japanese people and cars seem smaller than their Western counterparts in roughly equal proportions.

I’ll probably post more thoughts in a few days.

…but apparently myself and John now feature in an Irish textbook.