steveblgh

On a slightly related linguistic note, I find the following sentence annoying: "Put yourself in the shoes of that Early Adopter. Does she want to see useless garbage phrases or does she want to hear about how you totally understand her pain?"

It's safe to bet that among the early adopters of a version control data mining tool there are overwhelmingly more males than females. Probably the poster feels that using she will somehow compensate this inbalance. I see the he/she problem as a bug of English, but using she in all technical text where a he would be more probable is just fake.

Sure, but on the whole they make a profit, so the money they take out of the country will be more than what they bring in the form of products, rents, wages, etc. or otherwise they would go bankrupt.

Of course state protectionism might help local furniture manufacturers to catch up and grow their own business and that might actually benefit the Russian economy even more. Perhaps the legal, administrative burdens are there with a purpose, or maybe I'm reading too much into it...

The article makes the implicit claim that IKEA does a favor to Russians by selling them stuff and not Russians do by buying the stuff. I'm not saying the opposite just that this is not as obvious as the article makes it sound. It says that they invested x billions of dollars. Obviously they are planning to make a profit, so on the net money will leave the country due to their presence. If I understand correctly they want to open retail stores not manufacturing plants. Did I miss some finer point ?

Another aspect often overlooked is how great help grandparents can be. Even though nowadays that is often seen as a big no-no, in some cultures, and if they are willing to help, they can make young parents' life much easier.

Watched until 1:40. That chart could be taught in school as "how to lie with data": reduction from 20 to 10 made to look more dramatic by changing the scale.

http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/

this is quite similar.

http://browsershots.org/ can be pretty useful as well.

Lush is a LISP-style environment for scientific computing:

http://lush.sourceforge.net/

It is another name for snake-oil cryptography: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-9902.html#snakeoil

11th grade for me seemed quite intellectual. In those 1300 hours of busy work I learned about infinite series, analytical geometry, differential calculus, basic group theory, basic linear algebra, and this is just maths. While I had to relearn most of this in college in more rigorous format, most of my intuition in maths I have from this time.

In many countries it is already common practice that poor people buy glasses on the market without any prescription. They try on several different lenses and buy the one that seems most suitable. In essence that's what the doctor does as well.

Is anyone else here who thinks that the first rejection of the bailout plan and the subsequent agreement was done on purpose to generate the stock market fall, where insiders could snatch up valuable stock ?

Yeah, let's factor in per capita: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_laureates_per_capita

I wish it was only how it looks, but it's also how it sounds.

What, no 0% option for tips? If it's mandatory then it's not really a tip anymore is it? Seriously, I thought taxi is about getting from one place to another, what's the point of tipping rather than giving them decent salaries.

It's just part of their business model, that's how they stand out from the crowd. Otherwise how do you think yet another to-do list would be a viable business app. Same thing holds for Joel Spolsky and Fog Creek. Yet another bug tracker. It wouldn't go anywhere without Joel's writings on how to do software.

My estimates weren't ex-recto as you said. I took a brief look at Xobni, and thought that even I could have done it in a few months. Then a few engineers from MS could do it even more easily.

Well, you implied one was more difficult than the other. Then the other one has to be easier, otherwise it doesn't make much sense.

Nothing wrong at all. I think he used it to finance wikipedia/nupedia in the early stages though. I just tried to give examples of things that started not necessarily with the thought of making the world a better place.

I think even YouTube/FaceBook/Flickr started along those lines. Hell, even Jimmy Wales was running a porn website ring before focusing on Wikipedia full time.

In the same time a feature idea for news.yc & reddit:

the number of votes on a comment should become visible only after someone voted already, similarly to online polls. This would prevent people from mindlessly agreeing with popular opinion, and in the same time it would encourage more people to vote, out of curiosity to see the result.

Come on, building a working OS is a gigantic effort. Last time I checked Xobni was regex-ing phone numbers and names from e-mail texts, plus some fancy GUI of the kind that you said in one essay that you hate (messing around with obscure Windows APIs). Following your reasoning, the Xobni guys could have more easily built a full OS, which, with all respect, I seriously doubt.

I think you nailed it with the line: "they get a little street cred back in the hacker community for picking up a YC startup".

Exactly what I was thinking. If it's not the features, not the engineers, it must be the positive buzz they get for it. Probably this is some lame attempt by Microsoft to appear cool and show that they understand the new wave.

Paying millions of dollars for a few talented engineers, who will probably work half-heartedly for a few months/year, depending on the clauses in the contract, then move on to the next startup? Come on, USD is not that weak.

I'm not sure how this makes any sense for Microsoft. If they assigned a few engineers to work on this, they could replicate the functionality within few months, especially since they know the internals of Outlook.