cosmo7

Much as I love the tweets, Twitter's signal:noise ratio has always been very close to zero, so I don't think spammers will be able to ruin it the way they ruined Usenet.

Straw polls are interesting, but full of bias. For example, older users are more likely to be in a relationship and/or have children, making participation on a weekend less likely.

Excellent social commentary.

The rather neat dynastic results table at the end show percentages but no legend; does anyone know what they represent?

Can we draft a law preventing journalists from trying to interpret statistics?

You have a choice in life:

You can smoke dope, get stoned, start dozens of unfinished projects in Ruby or Scala or Haskell or whatever you've just read about, wear bad clothes and think you're doing something worthwhile just because you're up to date with xkcd and know how to jailbreak your iPhone.

Or you can learn a real language - one with braces, as God intended - preferably C# but Java is acceptable, build a business and hang out on yachts with beautiful women covered in cocaine. It's your choice.

Hap is a middle English word meaning luck or fate. Things happen, mishaps occur. Perhaps.

Hapless means being in a situation with no logical way out, such as being stuck in quicksand, or being good at Ruby on Rails.

That's surprisingly ironic considering Disney's attitude towards the public domain and copyright extension.

Adobe would rather you didn't know, but fonts can't be copyrighted.

That's kind of like saying "I went to Afghanistan and I didn't get my head cut off."

Adobe has horrible installers which break frequently. Just google for "CS3 install problem" and you'll see what I mean.

FTA: Safari dropped from 7.70% to 7.42%.

The (rather poorly explained) thrust of the article was that the beta release temporarily increased the proportion of requests using that browser to 10%.

This is probably from people trying it out; I tried it but went back to Firefox when I needed to do some work. I did the same thing with Chrome.

To be cynical, all marketing is untrue. If it was true then they wouldn't have to tell you otherwise.

Try listening to advertising and considering how plausible the _exact opposite_ of what they say is. You'll be surprised.

Situation: Microsoft is in court with a GPS company over some patents.

Problem: News story is boring.

Solution: Headline "Microsoft Sues Linux", add picture of Steve Ballmer looking mean. Sprinkle with spelling mistakes and "no word yet" unprofessionalisms. Lame.

Way to jinx your company dude.

Adobe is it's own worst enemy.

Turns out, to install CS3 you have to uninstall Flash. Their own products hate each other.

Apple is the new Microsoft, Google is the new IBM, Palm is the new Apple.

Would that be such a bad thing? Some of my best friends are scripts.

a lot of people who would be an _asshat_ to the community are prematurely excluded

FTFY.

The problem with staying free and censoring unpopular opinions is that sometimes those opinions turn out to be right.

Ow! My eyes!

Seriously, hire a designer to smooth out your site, it's well worth it.

Interesting to see them using ASP.NET MVC.

This isn't about PHP winning, it's about Ruby on Rails not winning, ie: losing.

Obviously C# beats the pants of both of these hippy languages so the argument is moot anyway.

Hacker News is still different to Digg and Reddit because those sites have a sense of humor.

It's more start than up.

Bad spelling and foul language. Is this a parody?

Reminds me of "two years ago I couldn't even spell engineer, now I are one."

Jeez, you're modding me down for questioning a 10-minute download for a 4.6M file?

What is this? 1995?

I've used Silverlight on Firefox (Vista, Windows 7) with no problems, not even having to restart the browser.

Silverlight is actually pretty good; it's a much easier experience for developers than Flash/Flex. You might hate Microsoft, but you shouldn't hate the tech.

If it took 10 minutes for you to download the plugin you might want to try replacing your 14.4k modem.

So you're saying that C# is high level and Objective-C isn't?

I'd quite like a comment system that requires users to solve a series of logic and verbal reasoning problems before being able to submit.

Well this explains all the crazy moderation my comments get.

As someone else who has regularly hit #1 on digg and reddit without even being aware that the stories were submitted, I have to disagree.