matstc

"There are a number of plausible candidates for the next bubble, but only a few meet all the criteria. [...] There is one industry that fits the bill: alternative energy, the development of more energy-efficient products, along with viable alternatives to oil, including wind, solar, and geothermal power, along with the use of nuclear energy to produce sustainable oil substitutes, such as liquefied hydrogen from water. [...] The candidates for the 2008 presidential election, notably Obama, Clinton, Romney, and McCain, now invoke “energy security” in their stump speeches and on their websites. Previously, “energy independence” was more common, and perhaps this change in terminology is a hint that a portion of the Homeland Security budget will be allocated for alternative energy, a potential boon for startups."

I went through "dive into python", "learning python", and the python cookbook by oreilly, in that order. If I had to do it again, I would skip dive into python which I found a bit easy. Cookbooks are usually dry and this one is too, but it does beef up your skills.

I found the python challenge incredibly hard. Not programming-wise but it's just really hard to know what to do next in most puzzles.

I'd rather recommend http://projecteuler.net

I'm not sure I understand your concern about the 37signals article: 99% of articles will be irrelevant once you've read them.

Also do you not think the top stories should be the same for everyone? It's the easiest way to keep the community focused and self-serving.

Sarcasm is hard to convey in writing. We used to have smileys to help us but they are going out of fashion. We're gonna have to stop being sarcastic :)

or not reading the signs correctly.

I'm not sure if you're mocking me or giving me too much credit here.. Really I was hoping to be more rigorous and go more in depth but at some point it just felt silly to hammer a website, scrape the page and never have access to the whole data. Doing this got me thinking about issues like "time of day" though as there must be a way to take into account the rate of new posts and make old posts more 'sticky' when the rate accelerates, in the morning for instance.

I feel like starting my own social news website just to have a play with different algorithms!

Yeah his approval rating is ridiculous, above 13 points per post on his last 180 posts. But that's just one of many things messing up the statistics. It's only good if you want to have a general idea.

There is a lot of talk about what should be done in order to keep the community as it is, about what is a relevant post and what's not. But we have no metric to measure the cohesion, except for 'pleasure'. The analysis in the post is of course incomplete but I believe there is value in a metric that could tell us whether or not we are being steered away from the initial community.

It works both ways: it shows that the allocation of resources is not rational.

By just looking at the title I would agree with you, but did you read it? I think it's substantive enough.

"every three weeks, workplace conditions lead to a fatality toll greater than 9/11"

The youtube video the author is referencing is this one: http://youtube.com/watch?v=juOQhTuzDQ0

"You should realize that in any field the time lag, the delay between a significant scientific progress and its acceptance by the scientific community at large not to mention the moment that it finds its way into a product should be measured in generations."

"Although the Classmate costs $285, it includes a branded Intel chip and Microsoft software, both of which the XO lacks."

ish.

YUI has a small unit test framework that I use. Also http://www.thefrontside.net/crosscheck can be used to emulate browsers.

I just searched for my handle and I can see all my previous conversations. This is nuts.. and really cool. By looking at the tag cloud on the homepage irseek.com, it's nice to see that the unix world is strongly represented!

I've been using YUI for the past few months and it's impressive. Not quite as out-of-the-box as you'd hope but the capabilities are endless. Also, I think it's time we stop mentioning Scriptaculous/Prototype in the same sentence as YUI, jQuery and Dojo.

the original post was not very pertinent anyway, as far as ruby/rails is concerned. All 7 reasons have almost nothing to do with ruby/rails:

#1 - "is there anything rails/ruby can do that php can't do? ... (thinking)... no."

#2 - our entire company's stuff was in php: don't underestimate integration

#3 - don't want what i don't need

#4 - it's small and fast

#5 - it's built to my tastes

#6 - i love sql

#7 - programming languages are like girlfriends: the new one is better because you are better

a preview in the editor looks like a must indeed, for that and other reasons.

More comments: If I'm editing a presentation, switch windows, and go to the presentation list, if I choose one and click edit, the working presentation is automatically saved (gasp) and the editor does not come into focus either (although that might be KDE's focus stealing prevention at work).

wow. a pleasure to use and look at. And there is already more than enough features to be useful.

Only one thing: it would be better to me if the site would fit in one or two windows. Now I have:

 1- the web site
 2- the working presentation
 3- the running presentation 

That's a lot of windows for one website.