Is there anyone who have really invested time to learn proper unit testing and still thinks it is not one of the best programming inventions ever? Seriously, there are lots of naive posts lately on HN...
This guy must have been joking.
The fact that HE always types his passwords alone in his office does not mean that any sane person would like a possibility that anyone ever has a chance to see his password. Apparently, some people are not always alone...
It is not very object-oriented the way HE used it, but, being a long time Spring user I can assure you that it is a case of misuse. Spring does not force you to use setter injection (it supports constructor injection) and it certainly does not force you to use anaemic domain model (although many people are doing it).
A fool with a tool is still a fool, I'd say.
If you want to learn to speak French and use it actively, not just to prepare for some exam, I can recommend French In Action from my experience. It is a base for a 2-year course at Yale University. The whole course revolves around a story about an American student on vacation in France, a French girl, and their families. A complete multimedia course consisting of 52 30-minute video episodes with commentaries, 2 textbooks (500 pages of transcripts, visual aids and readings), 2 workbooks (1000 pages of exercises), 1700 audio files aiding the workbook and 2 study guides (400 pages). There is material for roughly 2 hours a day study for year and a half, but it'll get you to the level where you can easily live in France (or Quebec :).
I've just tried Wolfram and I would say that Wolfram is to Google as a Statistics section in a library is to Google. In other words, nobody except geeks will care.
Impressive technology, BUT...
I've just tried Wolfram Alpha with a preview account, and I have to express my complete disappointment. It seems to me that Wolfram Alpha is a classic example of geeks building application that is useful for them but that is irrelevant to the other 99% of the world. And that 99% are the buying customers.
I tried some usual web search phrases, and for each of them "Wolfram wasn't sure what to do with my data". It even suggested some alternative searches, but when I clicked, it still wasn't sure.
Of course, it was happy to analyse some sinus function for me, but imagine how many people would like that?
In my opinion, Wolfram will be an excellent niche search engine for mathematicians, statisticians, and the geeks alike, but nothing near Google in any respect.
That little learning for technically literate (small percentage of users) could be a show stopper for the rest. Many people are scared of even the simple maths (sad but true).
I'll probably waste some time contributing to open source projects and then invest into hookers :)
Really, if your only reason to do a startup is to do something else after that - why bother?
If you like contributing to open source projects - contribute now! You like drugs and hookers? What stops you now?