Schemas for the Real World
summary
Argument: start at the schema, let identity fields be nullable and accept free-form text fields so real people can name themselves; MetaFilter has used gender-as-text for over a decade and users embrace it, Diaspora landed a similar commit, Flickr adds a singleness status, Facebook later expands its list and about 60% provide relationship status when given options. Use minimalist auto-suggest and document‑style or NoSQL storage, collect messy data now, analyze later with clustering or machine learning, and avoid early rigid constraints that produce garbage analytics.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Start
- 1:47Sociological Normalization
- 2:28Database Normalization
- 3:54Social network
- 6:26Mental Schema
- 6:40Database Schema
- 19:45What is your religion?
- 26:28Facebook
- 27:44Marital Status?
- 27:57Relationship Status?
- 28:35Singleness Status?
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