megaduck

From the article: "We need great weight loss drugs that adjust the metabolism to keep weight off without side effects."

Or we could encourage healthier lifestyles. A good start would be introducing requirements for pedestrian footpaths and bike lanes in new communities. Trying to walk or ride a bike in many recently built communities is either impossible or scary.

That's just one idea, there's a lot of others out there. The bottom line is that if we sit on our butts all day and eat high-caloric sugary foods, then we're going to get fat. That's simply the way our biology is wired. I have a hard time imagining that any new wonder-drug is going to change those fundamentals.

Not at all, the thanks are sincere. There's enough sloppy thinking out there, I'd rather not add to it.

For the record, it was a simple mistake. I read the article, glanced at his bio on the left, saw that he led with his academic credentials, and incorrectly inferred a teaching position.

I'd like to say 'Thank You' to the HN community for brutally enforcing both clarity and accuracy. You guys are the best proofreaders ever.

There's three possibilities here:

1. They always intended to add the new 'explicit' category, and the recent 'adult' app purge was a stupid and ham-handed way to force developers to change over. 2. They are rapidly back-pedaling after seeing the hue and cry that arose from the app purge. 3. They're not going to do it, and this is just a trap for unwary porn peddlers.

Personally I think #2 is the most likely, but none of these are particularly flattering for Apple. At the root of it, they were either being malicious, stupid, or some mixture of both.

Plus, no matter which one it is, Apple owes an apology to the developers that had their apps pulled. Suddenly pulling the rug out from under your developers is a bad business practice, no matter who those developers are.

Yeah, that made me do a double-take too. Can you imagine what a gram of the stuff would do?

I've never had much interest in chemistry, but after reading this article, I found myself digging through the archives. And then I found myself thinking, "Chlorine Trifluoride is scary stuff! He says that's because it's a damned impressive oxidizing agent. What exactly does it mean to be an 'oxidizing agent' anyways? Hmm..." I'm now sorely tempted to spend the remainder of my day sifting through chemistry stuff online.

This is exactly the kind of writing that the scientific community needs. This is outreach and recruitment at its finest, and we could use a lot more of it. People ask, "How do we get kids interested in science?" Prof. Lowe's blog isn't the entire answer, but it's a hell of a good start.

Correction: As noted below, Dr. Lowe is not a professor. My error, but everything else still stands.

If you classify options as derivatives, then you're right. However, if you use that definition then the Berkshire/Goldman warrants are the simplest derivative that I've ever seen.

The Goldman warrants are an option to purchase an additional $5 billion of stock at $115 per share, any time in the next 5 (now 4) years. Basically, they're a plain vanilla call option.

What's really interesting about those warrants is that they behave identically to an equity purchase, only without the downside. Berkshire literally can't lose money. Plus, if the warrants are ever exercised, then Berkshire simply gets more equity. It never gets tarted up with default swaps and tranches and triggers and all that crap. The deal is the complete opposite of the 'casino' mentality that Munger is decrying.

So, yeah, you might be technically correct. However, you've also got to look at the spirit of the thing.

There's no question that Goldman had to pay off those dividends with some kind of shenanigans. IIRC, they were up to their eyeballs in default swaps and CDOs, both of which were beyond toxic at the time. That 10% payout was going to have to come from somewhere.

However, my understanding was that from Berkshire's perspective, it was a straight equity investment for preferred stock. They didn't really care where the dividend cash came from, so long as they got paid. So, if it was a derivative play, it was an indirect one. Berkshire never had those default swaps on its books.

That's how I remember it going down, at least. It's entirely possible that I got some of this wrong.

All absolutely true, but note the lack of derivatives and hedges. The Goldman transaction was a straight equity deal, with a big emphasis on dividends. In a nutshell, it was a chance to squeeze one of the 'casinos' hard, while still staying out of the whole CDO/default swap/derivative mess.

Both Munger and Buffett have a habit of stealing your wallet while telling you you're an idiot for letting them do it. The article and the Goldman deal are reflections of that attitude.

I wouldn't dismiss this piece out of hand. As co-captain of Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger's got a pretty good window into the global financial system. Both he and Buffett have a pretty folksy manner, but behind the goofiness is usually some razor-sharp analysis.

To make it more palatable, substitute 'United States' for 'Basicland', and 'investment banks' for 'casinos'. Then it becomes a pretty accurate picture of our current situation.

I'm happy to be corrected on this particular point. From appearances, it looked like they'd taken the Windows Mobile model and made it even worse. Good to hear that it's actually sensible.

Apologies for spreading bad info.

He's right about one thing: Multitasking on Android is something of a disaster from a UX perspective. There's no intuitive and obvious way to see what's running, and 'quitting' an application is often inconsistent and non-obvious. Most people just push 'home', and treat it just like an iPhone. Of course, performance and battery suffer.

This leads to weird contortions in user behavior. For example, my father-in-law's favorite application on his Droid is 'Advanced Task Killer'. From my perspective, the fact that the application even exists is horrifying. A phone should not require sysadmin tools.

In stark contrast, look at how WebOS handles multitasking. You know exactly what's running at any given point, because you have a visible card up. To close an application, flick the card up and off the screen. It's intuitive and obvious, even to non-technical people. It's really an amazing design.

My suspicion is that Apple will never allow multitasking on the iPhone unless they can make it Palm-like in it's simplicity. However, that would probably require a major UI refactor, which is not going to happen any time soon.

EDIT: This contains some bad info. See thread below.

I think you misunderstand me. If war was eliminated, people who fight wars would have to do something else, regardless of their feelings on the issue. That thing would necessarily be more economically productive, because war is a net drag on the global economy.

If you wish to debate this, then you'll need to prove that in aggregate, war is economically productive. That's a difficult argument to make, and likely to be empirically false.

For a more robust explanation, check out the "parable of the broken window": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

I'm sorry, this is a dangerous and wrong line of thinking. War's primary purpose is to destroy economic output. You win by eliminating your opponent's ability to produce the goods and services that enable them to engage you.

You are correct that world peace would result in massive layoffs. However, those millions of newly unemployed people would now be free to do other, more productive work.

World peace would be the most beautiful and perfect example of creative destruction in the history of economics.

War will be casualty-free for societies with drone soldiers until both sides have this technology.

Building an AUV is ridiculously cheap, and can be done with off-the-shelf components. Moreover, other countries have learned from the success of our drone programs, and are rapidly developing their own. It is almost a certainty that we will have drones deployed against us in our next major conflict.

People tend to forget that there was a brief period where America was the sole nuclear power, and we could destroy whole countries with negligible risk to 'friendlies'. We had very similar discussions then. However, that monopoly of power didn't last, and the costs of deploying those weapons suddenly became infinite.

I suspect that a similar symmetry will arise with robotic weapons. War will get weirder, but it isn't going to get any less risky.

I have incredibly mixed feelings about these technologies. On the one hand, it is infinitely safer for our pilots to be in an air-conditioned control room somewhere outside of Vegas. For saving the lives of american soldiers, this is an amazing step forward. This is good.

On the other hand, it abstracts warfare to an uncomfortable degree. While the drone pilots may grasp the full ramifications of their actions, it's a certainty that the general public does not. We see no body bags and hear no casualty reports. There are no lists of the fallen. Sending out a platoon of 18 year old kids is difficult. Sending out a squadron of MQ-9 reapers is easy.

War is horrific beyond imagining. The emotional toll has always been shared by both sides to some degree, and I would like to believe that such costs act as a deterrent. I worry about the decision-making of a society that has their portion of that horror comfortably abstracted away.

Actually, the situation is identical to Apple, if not worse. gDial worked just fine until recently, when Google pulled the rug out from under the developer.

As a gDial Pro user, I feel very much harmed because my app worked great and then suddenly it was broken. Google is within their rights, but they're still behaving badly.

Not likely. They have female TSA employees frisk females, for exactly that reason. We've got plenty of safeguards in place to protect against sexism.

Racism, not so much.

This is outrageous. The TSA has had a blank check for far too long, and they've become abusive. It's time to put a leash on them.

This isn't an isolated incident. My sister-in-law has to deal with this crap every time she flies. What makes her suspicious? She's black. That's it. She's beautiful, fashionable, and extremely educated. She'd get a free pass if she was white, but instead she gets frisked. Every. Goddamned. Time.

Talk to anybody with an arabic last name, or dark skin. These kinds of abuses are absurdly common. God help you if you're a Sikh that wears a turban, you might as well write off air travel. The stress is amazing.

This is the kind of bullshit that makes us less free, and less healthy as a society. I'm also pretty sure it doesn't make us any safer. Hopefully, Mr. George's case will get enough press attention that some changes get made.

I've been using Ubuntu Netbook Remix on a Dell Mini 9 as my primary setup for over a year now. UNR is dangerously close to being mass-market ready, and it's certainly ready for developers and power-users. Virtually everything 'just works', and the Netbook Remix UI is far preferable to Windows or OS X on a small screen.

The most remarkable thing is that you never have to drop to a command prompt, unless you want to. All of the linux infrastructure and tools are there, but it's all been abstracted away with a nice clean GUI. For the first time in my life, I actually prefer using X over the shell for managing my machine.

It's also amazing to look at how rapidly Canonical is improving Ubuntu. Every six months, I get more functionality and new software, with an improved UI and fewer rough edges. I'm anxiously awaiting 10.04, and I know that 10.10 should be another big improvement. That kind of predictability is nice.

I jumped ship from Linux to OS X nine years ago, when OS X 10.0 came out. I hated wrestling with X, battling device drivers, and constantly missing basic functionality. All those problems are finally solved, and I'm back on board. 'Desktop Linux' may never happen, but 'Mobile Linux' is definitely here, and it's pretty darned cool.

This is a fantastic development for people who want a general purpose linux on netbooks.

I've tried several times to use Moblin as my primary OS, and it's just too half-baked and incomplete at this point. The browser is buggy, and email lacks a lot of basic features. The network services are also unfinished or missing. The calendar doesn't sync with google calendar, there's no facebook integration, there's no address book synchronization. There's also a lot of missing UI niceties.

What's frustrating about is that all of the infrastructure is there to have those things. They've developed a nice abstraction layer for hooking into web services, as well as a great UI toolkit for building slick-looking applications on a small screen. They've also got awesome power management, and an amazingly fast boot process. Moblin makes your little atom-based netbook feel amazingly responsive.

My hunch is that Moblin has been building things from the 'bottom up', i.e. power management, networking, display drivers, and tools. Maemo seems to have the opposite approach, where they have a lot more UI polish and finished applications, but they might not have the robust underlying infrastructure code.

If both companies play to their strengths, then we might get a pretty nice linux for small screens. If that happens, I'll jump ship from Ubuntu in a heartbeat.

There's another good reason to incorporate early: It permits you to set up your financial infrastructure. In order to set up corporate bank accounts and merchant accounts, you'll need to be incorporated. This is critical if you're planning on charging from day one.

If you're not incorporated, you can hack together something using your personal accounts, but this is usually a Very Bad Idea. It's far better to keep things clean by separating out your business and personal finances.

The piece seems to be targeted at startups that are both venture-backed and deferring revenue. Delaying incorporation is probably good advice for those folks. For those of us that are bootstrapping and charging money from the outset, it's far easier to incorporate as soon as is practical.

You know, some of us actually like the Pre. It's highly pocketable, and WebOS is a genuine pleasure to use. I've been using the Pre heavily for a few months now, and I definitely prefer it to the iPhone, Droid, or Nexus One.

What makes you think that Palm is somehow being fradulent? That's a rather extraordinary claim.

I feel like we're talking at right angles. Your central point seems to be that most people will never build software like this. That's totally true, no contest.

However, I think it's still an interesting topic, and a significant minority can learn something useful.

There should be room for both perspectives here.

Whoah, there. While your software may have nothing in common with games, there's a lot of software that does.

Products like TurboTax have similarly tight schedules and limited ability to patch. Business platforms like Oracle have massive game-like performance-intensive C++ codebases. Operating systems like OS X or Windows 7 also have big teams, tons of art assets, and a fixed ship date. There are a ton of software shops out there that can learn something from the author's original post.

Many of us on HN have the luxury of building server-based web apps. We live in a very pleasant world with minimum viable products, small codebases, and rapid iteration. However, let's not fool ourselves into thinking that this is the world that everybody else lives in.

I hate sounding paranoid, but all of these things are possible. Given the tight relationship between Chinese companies and the Chinese government, such shenanigans would be trivially easy.

For anyone looking to do manufacturing in China, this is something to consider.

emacs is an extensible Lisp runtime, and Apple has shot down all such applications in the past. I don't think they're going to change their tune for the iPad.

I can't speak for thras, but if I can't do software development on a device, that's a pretty big problem.

I'd love to replace my netbook with sleek little tablet, but the odds of Apple selling something that runs Java, Ruby, or emacs is slim-to-none.

It seems that a lot of people are looking to extend twitter with email-type features, but I wonder if the reverse strategy (extending email) might be more fruitful.

Email has some great properties that make it the ideal foundation for a communication service:

  1.  You can send arbitrary text with arbitrary encoding.
  2.  Attachments can be any type, size, or number.
  3.  Virtually any device on the planet can send and receive mail.
  4.  Everybody already has a unique ID that they've memorized.
  5.  There's a boggling amount of infrastructure already in place.
  6.  Spam filtering is quite mature, and remarkably effective.

Where email falls down is that it's stupid and slow. All intelligence is in the mail client, and email clients don't share information other than the mail itself. A smarter mail server (like Posterous) can do some really cool stuff. Couple smarter mail clients with a smarter server and the potential is huge.

I love all the new communications platforms and protocols, but I wonder if there isn't some life left in good old email.

I have to disagree. While it is definitely possible to use the language of politeness in an offensive manner, there is still a place in the world for "please" and "thank you", so long as they are sincerely offered.

I do agree with the OP that insincere politeness may do more harm than good. However, I believe that our words usually reflect our true thoughts and intentions. If you never say 'thank you' or 'I'm sorry', then I'm forced to conclude that you rarely feel grateful or regretful for inconveniencing others.

Politeness isn't simple verbal formalities, it's a way of thinking that influences all our human interactions. The words of politeness should follow from sincere feelings. It's never been easy, and may indeed be getting harder. However, to my mind, that makes politeness even more critical than ever before.