grasshoper

I was going to donate to aid organizations to help supply food and water, but I guess I should send some nuclear engineering textbooks and maybe my old exams from Nuclear Engineering 101. That's obviously the best and only way for the average American to help, what with our expertise on these matters.

I've also included this link[1] to the wikipedia article discussing the current situation involving the threatened nuclear reactors; hopefully, this will elucidate matters for Japanese officials. Maybe someone can help with the translations.

We should also send them the most insightful reader comments from CNN.com, reddit, and YouTube.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Japanese_nuclear_incidents

Gates was already the world's richest man when he married Melinda; he also met her through Microsoft.

Bezos was already well beyond f-u money when he left D.E. Shaw to found Amazon.

Jobs did not have a stable personal life during Apple's early days; he did not meet his wife until several years after he was removed from Apple.

You're comparing their 2010 year-end valuation with their 2009 year-end net income...

In December 2009, Facebook repurchased shares at $25 for an implied valuation of $11 billion. That's a 55 P/E.

I cannot rightly apprehend the confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement.

It's definitely Reddit most of the time. It's a larger site.

American Chinese vs Chinese Chinese is the only fair way to do this; otherwise, it's apples and oranges (and oranges are better).

He had to do Math 55 to realize that there were people smarter than he was. Not too many people can readily appreciate what this means. I think you have to have participated in national-level math competitions to be able to understand the quality of person it takes to do this.

It reminds of the line from Good Will Hunting where the Professor says that only a handful of people in the world were smart enough to even tell the difference, even though it was grand, between himself and Will.

If your definition of a 'really-smart person' is someone who can ace the SATs or get into Harvard, then you probably won't be able to tell the difference between such a person and Bill Gates. There is a world of difference between the level of intelligence required to ace the SATs and level required to handle Math 55.

your comments are so nonsensical that I doubt you'll ever have the "problem" of paying taxes that you fear

Like Joe the Plumber, in this guy's imagination he has to deal with the burdens of a progressive tax system. Reality is a different story.

80% of Winter 2010 .... so the ones that have made it a few months.

Nor would I classify all introverts as being Isaac Newton.

I'm wondering why a non-programmer uses Git.

How about for an entry-level web developer in the Bay Area?

Rails is not a programming language ...

Me too. Go Ooshma!

Twitter is all about asymmetric 'relationships'. You can follow whomever you want. This makes it fundamentally different from Facebook.

Thank you!

Yahoo Video is awful. It doesn't show you how much of it has actually loaded, and once it's done it has to load all over again to play a second time.

If you let them, they can directly measure the traffic of your website. If you sign up for their service, Quantcast's numbers will be very close to your own Google Analytics.

But, if you don't sign up, they'll still "measure" your traffic and come up with results that are no better than the other web traffic rankers. I don't know why anybody takes sites like these seriously anymore. Everybody I've met who had a website with decent traffic has said that these sites are always way off. I'd imagine that Alexa's main reason for reporting a ridiculous statistic like % of global/country traffic is that it makes it harder for website owners to realize how wrong they are.

With Django, I've learned to avoid anything that tries to do too much. Small apps or collections of code that aim to solve very specific problems seem to work with the least hassle. With a carefully defined and limited scope, these apps have a much easier time integrating into existing projects. You want something that handles OAuth. You want something that handles Facebook Connect. You do not want something that handles "integration with social networks" or anything so grandiose.

That's because Python is actually used extensively in the West outside the context of web development. Ruby really isn't. Rails became popular, and people decided to learn Ruby so they could use Rails. Most people who choose Python web frameworks do so because they are already familiar with Python.

It's easy when you can see the future.

The admin will definitely be extremely helpful to someone who is new to databases.

That's true and all, but Rails and Django were built to run on SQL dbs right out of the box. Getting them to work with MongoDB takes some work, and I don't think it's a diversion that someone just starting learning frameworks should try to deal with.

As for migrations, I don't think he's gonna be dealing with anything too complicated schema-wise. Django South will write your migrations for you. Maybe Rails has something like that? But honestly, I'd recommend using SQLite and just starting a new file whenever he really felt the need to alter the schema.

Well, Mercurial is written in Python, so I guess it belongs on the right side lol.

I think you really need to understand that there are people who use Facebook in a very different way from how you use it. There are those who, like you, don't care about their account. They have no personal information on there. They made it just for the sake of having a Facebook account, so they could feel as though they were participating in social networking. These people are fine using Connect because they have no investment in Facebook. To them, it's really no different than a scarcely used email account.

For others, Facebook is a very strong online representation of their actual real-life identity. They joined when they entered college. It became THE platform for staying in touch with friends from home and new friends on campus. Photos on Facebook catalog their entire lives from that point onward. They have literally more on Facebook than they do off of it.

Asking these types users to Connect with Facebook is no different than asking them to login to sites with real information only. It's akin to requiring HN posters to use real names for usernames, real contact info, include real pictures in their accounts, etc. This is something the vast majority of HN would not accept.

Quora wants to be a QA service where every account is linked to something real. That's how they intend to deliver a quality product. That's what makes them different from other QA sites. This obviously slows their growth, but they need to do this to make their site worth anything. Eventually, they will try to convince more and more Facebook users that it's okay to reveal themselves on Quora. Until then, we will just make the Facebook-account-equivalent of spam-only e-mail accounts, and use those for sites like Quora.

Awesome. How will this relate with the current django-nonrel project?

Thanks, guys! I don't know why I hadn't even seriously considered Amazon for this. FPS Marketplace seems to have all the pieces I'm looking for. It does seem to involve a few more steps than Paypal. barmstrong's point about people not thinking of Amazon as a third-party payment service also seems valid.

Thanks for pointing me to Amazon though. I'll look into it some more.

It's a marketplace, not a money-transferring service or anything like that. Thanks for reminding me to clarify that.

Paypal is definitely very easy to set up, but I keep hearing stories of accounts getting frozen. If I do opt to use it to hold the earnings of sellers, and that account got frozen, it could be disastrous. The second way would be far less risky because it would just be the site's cut frozen, but splitting up payments doesn't seem to flow well with Paypal (maybe I'm wrong about this?).

There's almost no selling going on on the website, so probably most of their business spreads through word-of-mouth, with visitors to the site already having been referred by happy clients. They also probably need to control how many new clients they adopt to ensure they have adequate capacity before scaling.

The boss he's talking about is David E. Shaw.

Her list is ridiculous. The male equivalent would be Alan Turing, Dennis Ritchie, Steve Wozniak, a guy who worked on TCP, and, I dunno, Guido Van Rossum's boss or something. The true founders of the internet.

The original list is kinda silly too. Three spots for PHP? Really? PHP is important, but not that important and shouldn't even be above JavaScript anyways.