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What are the market forces driving deeper space exploration? There aren't any I can think of except recreation and science experiments.

What's hot right now in aeronautics seems to be better communication and navigation satellites. Maybe these will push the boundaries of space technology?

It's a brilliant and thought-provoking video, though.

Unlikely. I doubt that's the real reason -- it's just the excuse the recruiter told you.

You probably just had a bad interview. Either you're not completely qualified, or they didn't feel you were a good fit for the team. Maybe they didn't like some of your answers to the interview questions. Or, somebody else beat you out for the position.

Using careful wording you can spin any negative experience into something positive. I'd recommend doing that with your startup.

Not necessarily -- I think if Google only advertised on their search engine they'd still be a multi-billion dollar company. I don't think anything has higher CPM than Google's search.

Adsense, however, does make the platform more enticing to advertisers.

It's no mystery how facebook is going to monetize their users -- by advertising. It's what they've been doing since a few months after their launch.

There was an interview with marc andreessen a couple months ago, and he plainly said that facebook could become a billion dollar company if it turned on aggressive advertising. But it's trying to figure out the most effective way to advertise without alienating users.

In general iPaper does a good job for smaller documents (press releases, etc.) that you just want to skim. It sucks for very complex documents, or for reading longer books online. It was never designed to be a replacement for Adobe Reader -- that would take years considering the pdf spec has the same magnitude of complexity as HTML/CSS.

Also I'm not sure what metric of 'quick' you use. The iPaper swf is around 150 kb, and the Adobe Reader binary is around 30 MB. Take a look at http://www.dearadobe.com/top_rated.php - most of the top five are related to Reader bloat.

How would you explain to a non-technie writer (with no knowledge of HTML or web hosting) how to share their word or pdf files? Seems whatever solution you come up would probably be similar to Scribd.

It's funny how they never say how much RAM this computer has.

Vista has a feature called 'superfetch' which pre-caches applications in memory so they're never actually loaded from disk. Also, it's hard to tell, but if this computer has sufficient RAM, you could conceivable load everything directly from memory.

Also, the fragmentation test was a little dubious. A computer that new would have very little file fragmentation, so of course defragging would be fast.

That said, it was an entertaining video!

Fair enough, why don't you create some variation of twitterpedia.com and put a lot more definitions on there?

What problem are you trying to solve exactly?

Yeah, after reading that article and watching Schmidt on Charlie Rose, I feel that he's a little out of touch with technology. His idea of monetizing youtube involves micropayments of a few cents per view, and his idea of the 'next thing at google' is some weird wikipedia mashup on mobile phones.

While free throws is an important part of the game, it's relatively minor compared to other factors that make basketball players great - athleticism, basketball IQ, ball handling, height, playing under pressure, defensive ability, etc..

I wouldn't be surprised if other metrics have been steadily increasing over the past 50 years. Basketball players in college and the NBA simply aren't selected for their free throw ability.

Very confusing. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do.

The most important feature in a blogging platform is the content that's already on it, and in that sense, Posterous still has a lot of catching up to do. More content drives organic growth through links and other SEO mechanisms, which in turn drives more users to sign up.

This is the same Zack Anderson that built the warcart (http://web.mit.edu/zacka/www/warcart.html) and created the fiasco with the charlie tickets. He is quite an impressive hacker.

I wouldn't use Ocaml (and, to a similar extent Haskell or Erlang), for anything beyond research projects or small prototypes. These languages are research-driven, not community driven, and they have plenty of features that nobody wants except the maintainers. In the case of Ocaml, just take a look at crap like camlp5 and polymorphic variants.

Language shootouts are poor benchmarks for the quality of a languge. Better metrics are community activity and the quality of the libraries.

A large number of ultra-wealthy people living on a vulnerable platform in the middle of the sea. And because they live in international waters, they aren't protected by any nation. Could there possibly be a better target for pirates?

I completely agree. They claim this is a 'quantitative' analysis, but it's really anecdotally describing a graph. They should have removed seasonal variations, used a larger data set, and tried a couple time series models. Maybe in a couple years, when they actually have more data, it will be more meaningful.

Nobody is stopping you from using latex,beamer,and emacs and taking a weekend to finish your slides. But if you want something done in fifteen minutes that looks good, use powerpoint.

It's funny you mention that. In flash, text can be formatted with simple HTML markups for styling (tags like <bold>, etc..). It also uses CSS styling for components, although it's a fairly limited form of CSS.

The AIR runtime already has an HTML component*. All Adobe would need to do is stick it into the flash runtime and you could make it work with Flex :)

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/mx/controls/HTML.ht... )

There's a lot more detailed information at http://www.scribd.com/jobs .

The most important thing is being good at your specialty - either rails or flash (or for whatever position you interview), and being knowledgeable in CS algorithms. Having cool side projects that you can demo is a huge plus.

There's a lot of startup-minded people inside the company, so any prior startups is a bonus.

Also, pillow dodge ball and razor scooter racing skill always helps :)

Do you download it every time you post Youtube links on your blog?

It's not that simple. You need a format that can represent any kind of document. Good luck trying to convert a powerpoint with complex shapes and background images into a RTF. There are only two formats that can really do that, while being viewed inside a browser - swf and images.

Just kindly ask someone to watch your laptop while you're away.

I used to work at Microsoft, and their corporate web site it's largely informational and is maintained by operations guys. I think it's under the HR division. The development structure isn't the same as msn.com or live.com, which have dedicated product teams and management that gets held accountable for mistakes like that.

Something equally impressive is Facebook's growth last month, which was around 21% (according to compete). For a six-year old site as massive as Facebook to experience 20% growth in one month is tremendous.

Looks great! I tried uploading a pptx and it worked flawlessly. This is probably the most impressive demo I've ever seen on HN.

Has anyone tried running Windows 7 in VMWare? The boot sector got corrupted when I tried, so it's hard to answer the question. ( I suppose it runs great in Hyper-V, but who actually runs Virtual Server?).

Actually, the flash platform is largely open source. The AIR framework (along with the rest of Flex) is open source. See http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Get+Source+...

The AIR compiler is also open source. The only thing that isn't open source in the stack is the flash player runtime, which executes the resulting SWF file. However, the SWF file format is open.

There are already open-source router firmwares, it wouldn't make much sense for Google to try this. One of the well-known ones is XORP: http://www.xorp.org/