The only improvement I can think of is to set the pre areas to wrap. Right now they completely ruin browsing on the iphone, as they make the screen way too wide and this makes the font way too small.
Am I the only one who thinks HN works really well on the iPhone? I've never had any problems using it, but as there's like 2-3 of these iPhone versions I guess I'm in the minority.
Yea, I don't want to get into a huge debate about this either, and the names you mentioned are definitely in the same class as the first picks. My main thought was that while its not a science, the scouts are definitely not just randomly picking players like Gladwell makes it out to be (saying that "there is no way to know who will succeed at it and who won’t" and that "college performance doesn’t tell us anything").
Out of the 9 years listed it really only happened 3 times that a better QB was left - 2000 (Tom Brady), 2002 (David Garrard - debatable, but he's starting and Carr isn't), and 2005 (Aaron Rodgers). So 6 times out of 9 the best one was taken first - that seems pretty good.
If you go back even further I'd imagine this trend would continue - even Gladwell's main example (Ryan Leaf) was taken second to the best QB playing today (Manning).
I'd noticed this sometimes too, but I think it's something that you can change if you want to. When I was learning german, after a couple years of high school classes I went to a month long full immersion program. When I finished that, I was thinking entirely in german. This stopped over time as I went back to English, but I can still make myself do it sometimes. So with practice/time, you could probably teach yourself to think in something besides English. Though English seems like it might be the most efficient mode for a native speaker.
Is there a way to log in/sign up besides OpenID? I don't have one, but wanted to use your site. I spent about half an hour trying to figure out which accounts of mine are OpenID enabled, and to get the url for my ID. I keep getting errors like "Open ID server can't be found", etc. so I imagine the urls that I'm putting in the sign up box are not the right ones. Then when I finally get signed up and logged in, later I try to log in with the same url and I get an error. Very frustrating.
Anyways, to summarize: Open ID seems to suck, and its very confusing (though to be completely honest I'm a little drunk which might have made this more difficult for me). I'd imagine most users would appreciate a simple, traditional login (I would have). Anyways, I really wanted to use your site, but after 30 min of failure I've given up. Good luck though.
I do tech support part time for students at my school, and I have to agree with the parent. I'm astounded every day by how bad some people are with computers. We have normal email accounts here, and people still have trouble figuring out to use them. I personally think its a great idea (the first thing I did when I got to school was forward my school account), but I'll bet 75% of the people wouldn't be able to figure it out.
I haven't done any iPhone development, so I may be wrong here, but doesn't his version not do what the Google one does? How does his code prove that Google's feature could be done with documented API calls when his version uses touch instead of proximity?
Above-average compared to other professors or compared to the general population? I haven't read anything about their findings but I'd imagine 94% being above average compared to the general population would be on the low side.
Seconding these criticisms - they make it very difficult to browse the site. A related problem is that you can't right click links to open them in their own tab from the browse page. All in all a cool idea though (not sure I see the business potential though).
I've never done any serious development on Windows, but I'd imagine you need/want a shell for the same reasons you'd use one on a unix system - using vim, scripting, an array of useful programs (e.g. whatever the Windows version of grep is), etc.