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Okay. This is mostly my final comment here. Sort of replying to all the various comments here...

Typically, I don't have a tough time. As I talk to people on the Internet, as if I would talk to them in real life. I don't take advantage of the anonymity. You can see all my prev comments as a proof.

I maintain: down-voting, should only be used for spammers, or for clearly defined things (like profanity being used etc.) . As it does feel quite insulting, to be down-voted. The up-votes, itself, can handle everything.

In any case, I am not really upset now, or anything (thanks for trying to make me stay, as a commenter, in good cheer) :)

You can consider, this as my way of protesting, about things I don't agree with it. (And I stand to gain, no advantage, out of this as I have been anonymous, on this from the beginning...).

Yes, I don't like the elitist negative voting policy of this forum.

So I want to quit. The community by and large is good, so I will be a lurker still. But I shall not be down voted.

PS: Would hate to bother PG with this. Have a lot of respect for him. So request any other admins to just remove my account. After deleting all my posts.

I agree. Actually, at my age (approaching middle age), that 'retirement' word, doesn't sound right ... it may mean either 'resigned', 'lazy', 'tired' and other negatives... and success can indeed make you 'lazy' and 'fat'... so may be I read more into it. Personally, don't like that 'retirement' word. At-least not till I am actually forced to do :)

So my role models are people like Vishy Anand, who at 41, is still the world chess champion (I believe, hacking is also as energy-needing as playing chess)...

Thank you, for reverting the decision. Or it could be a two other high karma, good people, voting for me. Either way, I am happy.

Also I think, its quite cowardly, to down-vote without giving a reason, when there is no obvious spam. Look at my profile, do I even give a link to my website?

Come on show some guts. Give me the reason for down voting. I deserve a reply.

May I know the reason, why my above comment was down voted?

Its quite insulting to be done so, after having written the comment, with the best of intentions.

PS: If I don't get a satisfactory answer. Will quit HN. It may not matter to you of course.

Loved the story, as of course, so many of you did.

At the risk of being sounding judgmental on other people, I will still say, that his now leading a retired(ish) life doesn't jell well with the story of a person, who can do such heroics (like putting a job needed board, on his chest and standing the whole day).

Again, apologize for being preachy, life is a journey, and stagnating at any point, doesn't help...I am about as old as him...have had my share of moderate successes in life... looking for more...some of the best code I've written in my life has been in the past couple of years...look to write lots more ...:)

Some of my good friends, have suffered, from the problem of stutter. To the best I know (we never discussed this), they overcame it, by simply stop getting embarrassed about it. Its hard to acquire that feeling in one go. It needs to be cultivated.

And BTW, Do you know, Hrithik Roshan (Indian Movie Star) has been struggling through an acute stuttering problem, since he was a child. In an interview of his I saw, he was saying he practices on his vocals for about an hour or two daily. Also he occasionally did stuff like: Once he had to do a stage show in Dubai, he shut himself in a cabinet, and screamed at top of his voice. The reason he did it was, so as to not alarm the other people in the hotel.

Some thoughts:

1) Am I the only one thinking, that some of the terms used to describe introverts: "guarded," "loner," "reserved," "taciturn," "self-contained," "private", have since long been stopped to be considered as negatives?

2) Think, Introverts easily command more respect, on an average, than extroverts (no data to back this up. Just my perception). Even extroverts, based on my anecdotal experiences, regard introverts with a lot of respect, as high achievers often tend to be introverted.

3) I like the definition though: "introverts are people who find other people tiring"

4) Think, >=70% ppl on HN are introverts. [ A poll could confirm this ... or break this :) ]

Man, very rarely do I get water in my eyes!

So far, I have been a advocate of the cloud in general and EC2 is particular, to all my tech friends. Many of them look up to me. for tech advise/views. But in this Wikileaks incident, all indications show them to be 'spine less' to say the least. I will definitely stop being their free advocate. And will consider moving out of EC2, if possible. Unless, I get to see some convincing, response on this matter from Amazon. Or a publicly announced regret etc.

Here's one in Hindi :) http://translate.google.com/#hi|hi|%E0%A4%AC%E0%A4%AE%20%E0%...

Steve jobs may be a much greater innovator. But surely, can learn a thing or two, on integrity, from Derek Sivers.

Also this is a lesson in on how to have only loosely-coupled relations/dependencies with other companies (particularly, if they are big).

When need to go for tightly-coupled ones dependencies, expect it to break, and have a back-up plan.

Hi! Thanks for reading my suggested approach. I can understand how Map-reduce can be used to process the things faster (by processing them in parallel and later using reduce to aggregate the results??)

  But can't imagine how reduce (of map-reduce) can help in dropping of word-pairs (i.e. in Step 3)

One way of doing this:

1. Get some million tweets from twitter API (each tweet is exactly like what the article describes as a 'document')

2. After ignoring common words (e.g. 'a', 'an', 'the' ... ) in a tweet , start assigning some kind of relevance rank to all the other word pairs found in the tweet e.g. its likely that 'Cricket' and 'Sachin' (Or 'NBA' and <top NBA player) will both increase each other's relevance rank, WRT to each-other.

3. Process all the tweets like this, while maintaining the output of step 2 in a most suitable data structure. You would also need to start dropping word-pairs (to avoid having the problem of storing Million-C-2 words! ) based on some logic/heuristic.

4. If we have a good logic for having reasonably not-big storage (by avoiding the million-c-2 explosion), then what we have is at the end of processing: A simple look up of a million words, where each word has its 'top' max_allowed(k) semantic words.

PS: The most complex piece in the approach is to come out with a solution for dropping word-pairs (in step 3)

Not exactly BS, I think. I think they are all well intended but naive points (first two of them) and some over-idealistic and simplified - "Do not go into any competition".

To grant him some benefit, in his last point he did say, to take his advice too with a "pinch of salt".

Isn't the Demand Media world, an outcome of the inherent shortcomings of the Google search engine? -- There will be people to exploit every loophole in any system.

In mid-late 90s (for all non-google search engines) you had the problem of link stuffing. Now its SEO!

Wonder, if the success of Adwords, and lack of real competition, is holding back Google from innovating fast enough in search technology.

That's why we need some real competition in search. And fast. Will it come for Blekko, Bing or Facebook?

Say, you want to let people know that you are going to be in their city. Email will be too intrusive. So indirect communication is advantage (which social group allows). A contact in the city can see it and choose to ignore it. Another one, may jump at the opportunity, and welcome you and want to meet you.

But we are still left with the problem of broadcast to all, which the PPT articulates very nicely.

Think it may go in cycles, for both search engines and social networks.

For search engines: First we had specific directories (Yahoo, others), then a single search engine (Google), followed by need of vertical search engines

For social: First we had all those nice forums; then (now) Facebook; again we could go to context specific verticals (e.g. HN a hacker vertical version of FB, which has the context for hackers)