sampsonjs

I remember fellow Americans speaking approvingly of Singapore in the 90's. "Ah, now that's the way a country should be run" they seemed to to be implying.

Since the MPAA got rid of the X rating, I'm glad we have this. Now the phrase "Triple X" won't become obsolete.

I haven't looked at Minus yet, but is the "but, but ... Dropbox!" argument going to be brought up every time some form of online storage is advertised? I, perosnally, decided Dropbox was not the right solution for me at this time. I don't need the starving man's repository; I need my crap backed up. Without having to move everything under one folder(some commercial software doesn't cotton to you just choosing where you want to store your data). I don't play musical chairs with multiple computers. On the off chance I was using my laptop away from home and needed to access something, web access is sufficient for me.

The world, chico, and everything in it.

"remember that vast swaths of land in Central Asia, Siberia, Canada, Alaska, Australia and Antartica are virtually uninhabited: we don't even need to go the moon or Mars or something to find space for humans." Uninhabited for a very good reason, with the exception of Canada and Asia, maybe. Seriously, Antartica?

It's an opportunity for HN'ers to hold forth on programming.

"Your comment is a classic instance of people on a forum rushing to judgment based on incomplete information. It's isomorphic to the sort of thing one sees on reddit, except that it's about startups rather than the federal government or international bankers." Hmm, pointless interjection of comp sci jargon like "isomorphic", I dunno, that doesn't sound like Graham at all.

Earth to asteroid: Negative Ghost Rider, the pattern is full.

Hilarious! Anyone read the Wikipedia article about "The Junction Boys", a college football team that Bear Bryant took to the town of Junction, Texas in the middle of summer? He made them do grueling practice in the blazing heat, and withheld water in order to toughen them up. At the end of this brutal regimen, the players who were left went on to... continue to suck and lose almost every game in the season.

When I see "ad hominem" hauled out on HN, I always think of the following from Daniel Davies: "There is much made by people who long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the fallacy of "argumentum ad hominem". There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of "giving known liars the benefit of the doubt", but it is in my view a much greater source of avoidable error in the world."

CS majors are going to be bookkeepers, not mathematicians.

I thought this might be interesting, John Cassisy at the New Yorker claims: "One more cautionary note: Don’t take too seriously the headlines you will see about the market valuing LinkedIn at $8-9 billion. Using the oldest I.P.O. trick in the book, the underwriters only issued 7.84 million shares, thereby creating an artificial shortage. Even at $90 each, the value of LinkedIn’s publicly issued stock is just $706 million. The $8-9 billion figure comes from taking the market price and applying it to the rest of the company’s common shares, more than eighty million of them which haven’t been issued yet. It may well be several years before all of these shares are trading on the open market. At that point, we will have a better idea of what LinkedIn is really worth."

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2011/05/li...

Acting like a college admissions board, instead of seeking out and meeting entrepreneurs year round?

Lisp and Haskell programmers would both worship the lambda. Instead of making the sign of the cross they would draw the sign of the lambda across their chest to show reverence..

Uh, because the '10 times more productive programmer' is folklore, at best? It may be true, but there's not much hard empiricism behind the claim. See https://www.readability.com/articles/5egv0hme?legacy_bookmar.... Cook admits it's hard to tell who's more 'productive'. Well, if it's hard to tell, why take that claim for granted in the first place? I am sure Cook and everyone else likes to think they're the 10x programmer, however.

I know EDW is a legend in CS, but that doesn't make everything he wrote insightful. If you thought this was a long-winded, hard-to-read, pointless rant, let me assure all his essays in his later years(i.e. since he took up residence at UT Austin) are not worth your time. Perhaps some earlier stuff might have more value.