billroberts

I don't agree with Stallman. Like probably most HN readers, I use a lot of Free/Open Source software - Linux, MySQL, Rails... and it's incredibly valuable. However I don't expect all software to be free, and to a large extent many major bits of open source software are 'market distortions' created by the big commercial IT companies. Eg OpenOffice is largely StarOffice, bought by Sun and open sourced, mainly in order to (IMHO) piss off Microsoft.

Writing good software takes time and skill (as we all know) and I don't think it's unreasonable that the people who do it should be able to charge end users for their efforts. Expecting all software to be written by public employees or in people's spare time is unrealistic.

I think it was because they just got everyone in the company to work on it and those are the people they've got: with lots of PR people because their main business is running events.

The UK Ordnance Survey (government mapping organisation) opening up its data is a big step - and not before time. Until now they've been very precious with releasing any of their tax-payer owned information.

I'm not sure that your experience of feeling smarter contradicts cperciva's point about intelligence being determined early in life. I can see that there could be a difference between intelligence as some kind of innate capacity and how that capacity is applied to various tasks.

You can certainly learn more stuff and so be able to do more difficult things, but your ability to learn and apply knowledge may not be changing.

I agree - it's overdue for someone numerate to analyze the options. I've downloaded the book and will read it this weekend. It's always astonished me that most mainstream journalists focus on stuff like not leaving your TV on standby, but never suggest turning the heating down a bit (or turning the A/C off for any of you lucky enough to live somewhere warmer than where I live)

I used it for a week or two earlier this year - even when it was up it could take a couple of hours for a message to be delivered. I don't use it any more.

IE and FF handle column widths in tables rather differently, which can cause some problems with table based layouts. I've been round this circle recently and ended up back with a 'pure' CSS approach

I think it was about as in-depth as you are likely to get published in a (UK) national newspaper. One small but well-written step in the fight against the innumerate sensationalists that dominate the press and no doubt contribute to the populist over-reactions from the UK government.

When I was studying for my PhD in Edinburgh around 1990/91, the group I was working with (Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre) bought a Connection Machine. Alas it was just being set up when I finished, so I never spent any time on it. So Thinking Machines had at least one customer!

I agree with the main point of this article. It always feels wrong to me when you see an app that offers an upgrade to get rid of ads. It seems to say we're gonna piss you off with minor irritations to make you upgrade, or at least that we know you don't want these but it pays the rent. Neither of those are offering users what they want.

Yeah, fair enough. The definition of what should be on or off topic is always a complex one. And I did enjoy reading it.

Isn't this rather off-topic for HN? It's a well-written interesting essay, as always from Paul Graham, but is it at the top of the list for any reason other than it is written by Paul?

I understand the difference between cash and profit, but to survive 39 years without making a profit must be some kind of record! Those are patient investors.

I second the Steve Jobs Stanford speech.

And good advice from my wife: "get outside more and do some exercise". So time to switch off HN and go for a bike ride!

That's true, that they get a lot of publicity for their apps, but that's not an accident: they have worked hard at building up their blog and no doubt paid DHH and others for spending their time on developing open source software. Clearly 37signals realise that marketing is important - and they are good at it.

Yes, I think you have identified the main point. The shortage of available men for 30-something women is counterbalanced by all the 18 year old guys who can't get a date because their female peers are hanging out with college students, and so on up the age scale.

Never mind Paul Graham, where is Rick Astley?

In a previous life I spent a lot of time writing and working with software to solve partial differential equations to describe various types of fluid flow. It's a big and complex subject: very roughly speaking the accuracy of the simulation tends to be proportional to the amount of computer power and time spent on it.

A really interesting question in the context of fluid dynamics for games is what is the simplest thing you can do which makes the movement of a fluid look realistic, without worrying about all the details of mass conservation, numerical diffusion etc etc that cause the computational fluid dynamicists to pull their hair out.

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I don't think I could pass Steve's interview - that's why I had to start my own company :-) Hmm, I wonder if I should sack myself...

In what kind of job interview would asking any of these help you select an employee?