rontr

Only if you first answer it.

If Symbol#to_proc is so great, I'd like to see how it can elegantly express something that can't be hidden behind a simple library function. In any decent language the programmer would write "sum(1,100)". Even if the function's implementation in Python/Java/C++/Smalltalk/Lisp/etc required a few more characters, it wouldn't be a meaningful difference. Does Symbol#to_proc add any real power to Ruby or beyond enabling such linguistic brain teasers?

A&F: revenue - $2 billion a year, valuation - $5 bil

Facebook: revenue - $150 mil, valuation - $15 bil

At least for me, Google is the Google of personal information.

Xobni makes Outlook search less painful, but my Outlook only has my boring work emails. Gmail and Google Docs (and Facebook) is where I keep my personal information.

Also, don't forget that Google has desktop search, which goes even farther than Xobni in searching Outlook as well as all the documents on your hard drive.

Ugh. The Diebold bot is voting me down.

I think that it's impossible to state firmly (especially in a forum called hacker news :) ) that George Bush Jr beat either Gore or Kerry. This is because electronic voting machines were used to count many of the votes.

Electronic voting machines leave no paper trail which means the results are unverifiable.

What makes you think it's written to stdout?

People believe in weird things. This could succeed.

I think a lot of people like those apps.

Slide is on MySpace too, and they probably make more money there than on Facebook. It's easy for us YC news hackers to forget about MySpace because we probably all use Facebook but MySpace is where most users are.

Let's also not forget that all other social networks are going to open up, creating a massive opportunity for Slide that probably far exceeds what Slide makes on Facebook. $500 mil may not be such a high valuation when you think about it.

I don't think running your own software on EC2 qualifies as building a CDN.

The cool kids won't move on to Scala for a number of reasons, the primary of which is that Scala's actors are not as powerful as Erlang processes.

See Virding's First Rule of Programming (http://www.nabble.com/Erlang-concurrency-to14747956.html):

"Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program in another language contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Erlang."

Javascript is simpler - but more importantly, much more popular than Objective-C. It's also garbage collected, a feature that Objective-C may also have these days, but not when I last used it a couple of years ago.

That's true to a degree. However, Google also follows the mantra, "what's good for the Internet is good for Google." For example, they provide the monetization system (ads) to ask.com, which is a direct competitor. Why not also provide compute clusters?

I think Google and Microsoft are asleep at the wheel while Amazon is forging ahead becoming the leading provider of internet infrastructure for the next generation of startups.

"This is cute, but doesn't really do anything which isn't already possible with EC2 and S3."

EC2 doesn't give you durability, and S3 doesn't give you speed. SimpleDB gives you both.

Baysian filters requires quite a lot of training to start working effectively. People don't want to rate hundreds of articles before they start getting good content.

Problem is Google penalizes pages with duplicate content by lowering their PageRank. If comments are duplicated on your blog as well as on discus.com, your blog could pay a price.

Having the source code wouldn't be much of an assurance. How do you know that this code is really the code that is deployed on the machine during the elections? How do you know that the memory cards that store the votes are not tampered with? How do you know that the machine's hardware works "as advertized"?

Without a paper trail, we should assume every voting mechanism is rigged. The stakes are just too high to do otherwise.

I actually think she's creating something very different from drones. It sounds like she's pushing kids to do extraordinary things that they wouldn't think of doing by themselves, but as long as those are the things about which the kids are passionate (music, science, photography, etc). Even if the end goal is to get into a good college, I don't think it diminishes from those kids' achievements under her guidance.

In the end, it sounds like if the parents and the kids were a bit creative they wouldn't need that woman's services. But she helps the would-be uncreative drones be less drone-like, and that's what helps them get admitted.

It's just about speed as much as how much abuse your server can take before it stops serving.

Ugh. I tried to order one but couldn't get past the 'enter desired serial number' page due to a Javascript bug.

I hope it doesn't take another 2 years of research to find the forumula for a correct implementation of a Javascript event handler.

Lots of parentheses?

When I moved from reddit to hacker news, I was hoping Coding Horror wouldn't follow.

It would be much more compelling to say, "Joe Schmoe picked up this language in a weekend and used it to create a dating site that got 3mil users in a year" than "a few superstar genius programmers who built things you'll never ever build swear by it."

Most people are convinced by examples they can relate to and feel they can achieve, not by the feats of the top experts in a field that feel outside of most people's reach.

I have the same impression. Plus, I think poor usability will kill it. I can't imagine my mom (the mom test is always important) clicking on objects in a video to see "relevant" offers. And the frustration level will be very high once a user clicks a few times and doesn't get what she wants or expects. Some people would click on an actor to see his bio and others would be interested in his shirt. Others will click on the wrong thing because the scene will have changed at that instant.

It seems like cool technology, but a bad product. I wouldn't invest. Go Justin.tv :)

Aside: the other startups in the challenge -- the ones the didn't get a lot of votes (apparently the voting has turned into a popularity contest) look both interesting and promising. Their founders may not be in their 20's, but I would invest in them over Ooyala and Justin.tv -- especially Commerce360.

I don't see what's game-changing about Ooyala. Can you please elaborate?

Some people get too excited by micro benchmarks.

I wish the author said why programming in Ruby makes him feel good. His statements could be made about any language. Many people program in language X because they like language X, and that doesn't apply just to Ruby. "I program in Ruby because it makes me feel good" is an empty statement.

Did you program in other languages? Did they also make you feel good? Why/why not? Do you think languages in which you haven't programmed could make you feel even better than Ruby?

I hope most people who program in Ruby have better reasons than "it makes me feel good." If they didn't, I wouldn't feel good programming in Ruby.

At the risk of getting downvoted due to a negative-sounding comment, I must say that I don't find Xobni's plugin so useful (at least to me) by what I've read about it. I use Outlook at work and Gmail for my personal email, and I think that the main feature that's missing from Outlook is good search. All the other features that Xobni provides sound, like, well, features. Just because my emails my contain implicit information about my "social graph" (whatever that means), it doesn't mean I care about it in my daily work. All I want from Outlook is to give me a decent search feature like Gmail and I'll be happy. It's great that Xobni provides better search than Outlook, but that's not enough to get me excited about the rest of the product. I certainly don't see myself using a plugin that "enhances" my Gmail experience -- it's already quite good as it is. Gmail is my inbox 2.0. It came out a couple of years ago.