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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.