> As for programming queries, my email's actually pretty useful. I'm subscribed to a few mailing lists, and it'd be nice to not get Perl or Win32 results when I'm mostly in C and Linux.
My email isn't very useful because I don't subscribe to mailing lists. But somehow I end up being there and I keep trying to get rid of them with the "unsubscribe" and if that doesn't work I start reporting them as spam. But the point is, essentially, no matter if you do a scan of recent emails of emails from a longer period of time there's a lot of stuff that I WAS NEVER INTERESTED IN to begin with.
More frequently I've been deleting these emails and the only emails that stay are photos (when your relatives don't quite use FB you do send photos over using Gmail) and other personal conversations. My friends and family don't program but I do, and enjoy doing so. But that never shows up in Gmail.
Even if I WAS subscribed to mailings lists, when I'm mostly Python and PHP - I would love to hear about Node.js when that suits my situation. I've nothing against learning new things. In fact, that's my second objection to you learning how I behave _now_. I WOULD LIKE TO DISCOVER NEW THINGS - DON'T TRY TO KEEP ME IN MY SHELL. (Sorry, had to use caps. I think there was a TED talk as well on this. Keep the world open - not limited - don't build walls around my current tastes to limit my future tastes.)
> For other interests, my youtube play list indicates a lot of what I mean. I like cats, and I watch them on youtube. When I type in jaguar, I'm actually probably asking about the cat, not the car. Lots of other people are asking about the car. It's particularly obvious if they were watching a review of a car recently, and not watching cat videos.
I like watching videos of lions and whatever little footage of tigers in the wild that's there. I love those kind of cats, yes. But I never really was interested in a jaguar. I like watching Top Gear but that doesn't happen on YouTube. But if I search for Jaguar, then most probably I'm looking for the car - but since you don't know what TV I watch you are going to get it wrong. Again, don't take this as a specific case but what I want to highlight is that you will never have enough information about what I consume because Google isn't the source of even, say, 70% of my consumption. I consume more from HN than from Google-originated sources for example.
My email isn't very useful because I don't subscribe to mailing lists. But somehow I end up being there and I keep trying to get rid of them with the "unsubscribe" and if that doesn't work I start reporting them as spam. But the point is, essentially, no matter if you do a scan of recent emails of emails from a longer period of time there's a lot of stuff that I WAS NEVER INTERESTED IN to begin with.
More frequently I've been deleting these emails and the only emails that stay are photos (when your relatives don't quite use FB you do send photos over using Gmail) and other personal conversations. My friends and family don't program but I do, and enjoy doing so. But that never shows up in Gmail.
Even if I WAS subscribed to mailings lists, when I'm mostly Python and PHP - I would love to hear about Node.js when that suits my situation. I've nothing against learning new things. In fact, that's my second objection to you learning how I behave _now_. I WOULD LIKE TO DISCOVER NEW THINGS - DON'T TRY TO KEEP ME IN MY SHELL. (Sorry, had to use caps. I think there was a TED talk as well on this. Keep the world open - not limited - don't build walls around my current tastes to limit my future tastes.)
> For other interests, my youtube play list indicates a lot of what I mean. I like cats, and I watch them on youtube. When I type in jaguar, I'm actually probably asking about the cat, not the car. Lots of other people are asking about the car. It's particularly obvious if they were watching a review of a car recently, and not watching cat videos.
I like watching videos of lions and whatever little footage of tigers in the wild that's there. I love those kind of cats, yes. But I never really was interested in a jaguar. I like watching Top Gear but that doesn't happen on YouTube. But if I search for Jaguar, then most probably I'm looking for the car - but since you don't know what TV I watch you are going to get it wrong. Again, don't take this as a specific case but what I want to highlight is that you will never have enough information about what I consume because Google isn't the source of even, say, 70% of my consumption. I consume more from HN than from Google-originated sources for example.