gord

Absolutely not - he has defined a new paradigm in education by force of will. He has proven that one person can make a huge practical difference. Arguably he has achieved more good than facebook. To put it bluntly, the man is a force of nature, if not a god :]

I think part of his magic, is that he didn't wait to polish his presentations to conform to the powerpoint school of banality. He got the content out in an honest me-to-you no-bs way that students can relate to - he seems authentic in a way most teachers are not, and he seems to put no effort into making him self look good, as there is no faculty to impress.

MIT OCW is fantastic content and well presented, but the standards of communication are lower not higher than Sals, imo.

I disagree, after seeing a video of him give a talk in front of a medium size crowd. He came across as excited, informed, innovative, an excellent communicator and a great guy. I think he's in the best-of-TED bracket already.

a) Look to buy innovative startups. b) Solve the no-appstore-for-web-apps problem, win over developers by making this a nice rollout platform with simple cloud JSON data storage, search integration, social integration etc.

What is $xxxx in practice, for IE6? [or as a percentage]

Nice link.. seems like HTG have taken the first step towards a pluggable infrastructure, where the plugin is the quant/programmer + their algorithm implementation.

ps. I never really understood the difference - Hedge Funds seem to be more about speculating via leverage than 'hedging'? [using their own proprietary algorithms to do that]

I assume their business model is roughly : to implement algorithms that find near-arbitrage opportunities by sifting through vast amounts of market data, then use those to multiply investment funds. This sounds like the perfect domain for a startup.. where a nimble small team of quant/developers would have huge advantages, by being faster to rollout.

This is almost a pure software business, so why aren't these companies more like startups? Is it because of the expense of getting fine grained and low latency market data [eg. exchange colocation]? Or is it due to the contacts needed in the biz to get the 'investment' funds to trade with? Or is it because only large financial entities have access to these risky speculative trades?

Side note : I see Jane Street Capital use Ocaml, and some other quants use KDB/Q for implementing these kinds of algorithms, so it seems innovative languages give leverage here. I was thinking Node.js + a js BTree api to access streaming data would be a nice dev environment.

I thought OAuth2 solved this?

I dislike admitting that Chrome is a lot faster than Firefox in some useful ways. One useful way I ran into is with 2000+ svg objects in a custom UI.

SVG + Javascript is a fantastic platform for user interfaces, in my experience... compared to both HTML divs / css /js and also Cocoa native.

Please google, turn on svg in Android...

You know CSS, so it seems logical to learn Javascript.

That opens up both server and front end web programming [jQuery/DOM and Node.js on the backend]

For books, try Crockfords 'Javascript the Good Parts' and mimic some of the nicer idioms as you see more jQuery code.

Im saying theres not much more we could put on a mobile device that is a game changer [and yes I entertained the tricorder idea with a DNA sampler & diagnosis, but I guess thats out of range for a decade ]

Agreed longer battery life has room for improvement, but would it change usage, given current devices can be used for 4 or 8 hours already?

re decoupling hw / sw : Ill give an explanation, rather than a citation :

We write in high level languages that use logical abstractions, not machine specific ones. These can be ported across various hardware platforms, and thus reused, saving work.

I think everyone prefers to have the same HTML5/javascript api work on all devices.

I think its more like 5months. I do get it.. they are driving amazing innovation, and exceptional polish that everyone else will have to copy. But they will catch up, because its fundamentally about engineering - its better when you decouple hardware and software.

Most people wont pay for the difference of that extra level of superb integration that Apple offer.. the gap will close as there is so much volume and competition in the mobile and tablet space.

I actually think we are close to optimizing the mobile form factor.

What other hw features could you have on these devices.. [natural spoken language translation in realtime?] its all software from here on up.

I'm moving from native iPhone to web apps for mobile. The tools will catch up to flash rapidly. The browsers will kick themselves into line, so its viable to have one code base. But most of all... Javascript is just less verbose than Objective-C, and you go straight to market, bypassing appstore/signing madness.

I don't think its iOS4 specific, once you have geo-location + offline + appdata + GPU graphics you've got the killer features you need, so why go native?

WebGL will happen, theyll have to support it & its easy to do so. Now I guess you might want to do AI in-game as the device gets more powerful, and write effects shaders for rich games.. But a lot of that can be deferred to server-side, so I think even for 3D games it will soon make more sense to go web app.

What apple have is slickness and consistency... but I think the slickness of web on Android will approach that asymptotically. The web dev platform is more scaleable, less pain, and wont go away.

What is missing is a good appstore + billing system for web apps [and google will probably be there in a year]. I think it needs to support a SaaS model where I rent a group of apps at a discount on a yearly basis. That way you have people invest more effort over time, innovate, and reach beyond the iFart apps.

I actually wonder whether marriage should have a time limit specified. Its a better fit to reality : people living longer, large proportion divorcing after 5 years, sequential marriages to different people.

"I love you darling, will you spend the next 12 years with me to raise a child together?".

This is not purely cynical... I think its so cool when two people who have been married for 15 years decide to celebrate with second marriage ceremony to launch them into the next 15.

The time commitment should set the financial arrangements when you divorce - Ending a life long marriage might split 50/50 whereas ending a 10yr marriage might confer a 15% mix of wealth shared.

Truly obscene video of him being stalked.

Can we say with some certainty that 'Parkinsons is not caused by a virus' ?

My reasoning goes as follows :

Assuming "You can't install IE7 or 8 alongside 6"

You can virtualise Windows XP on Windows 7 and run both browsers. This alleviates pain and provides for legacy apps that rely on 6.

Of course, infinitely better to just ditch IE completely and the dependent apps, and simply write that off [amortizing against future pain]

yes, but that would not be enough to do something useful [yet, and less so with lisp]

Theres lots of housekeeping [~bs] in programming, maybe some in math too.

virtualization

Not important whether its normal... if we all said yeah sure its normal, would you still feel comfortable doing it?

So, ask is this a rational, fair, acceptable, professional, moral request on their part, and are you agreeable to it?

Id tell them to go take a flying fuck at the moon, but I've read Kilgore Trout!

perversely that illustrates my point...

I think its due to conditioning and the inertia of the surrounding environment.

Many [most?] smart people work 9 to 5 even though this clogs the roads at those times, so is optimally bad resource usage.

Even more so for religion or political affiliations, due to social circle.

It might be a rational response - the cost associated with overcoming these environmental factors is high, they are at a local minimum ?

Better that millions of users worldwide see this :

<canvas>Please install a standards compliant browser, we recommend : Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome</canvas>

The reality is, M$hit are so far behind, that if they were to do the right thing and add canvas, it would just prolong the inevitable.

Let IE die with dignity, please.

Does using vi to edit my program comply with 3.3.1 ?

Gottman does seem to be a great relationships artisan/artist.

btw, heres a blurb on Asimovs Foundation series fictional character http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hari_Seldon, the founder of mathematical psychology of masses, 'psychohistory'.

It would be nice if psychologists would be honest and introspective enough to call their field an Art... at least until the appearance of a Hari Seldon.

Im not keeping track...

I upvoted your comment to nullify a downvote, because I believe that downvotes should be reserved for offensive content.

[ Its a political position, context free, and orthogonal to your intent, so I hope you can forgive the upvote... its not personal. ]

yes, I agree perversely. Im assuming HN users value freedom of speech, and I think less down-voting helps preserve the value of HN by encouraging open discussion.

Im hoping that down votes happen less when people speak their mind.. and that downvotes are on average reserved for clearly offensive content.

I think the issue needs some introspection, hence I risked being downvoted.

Without knowing exactly why, my feeling is iframes are broken. If not.. why arent iframes used in say yahoo and google customisable home page mashups?

Differences :

granularity - share one div, not whole page

scope - how should javascript interact between the inclusion and the whole page? [ Im not sure.. this wasn't on the radar when iframes were designed I guess ]

I do find the article interesting.

However I tend to agree with this comment - is this 'Hacker News'worthy?

I especially object to the downvote on this post - I think downvoting shouldnt be used unless the post is clearly offensive.

It think this is legitimate comment - HN needs to preserve Freedom of Speech and not become a self-serving myopic site where people are afraid to speak their mind for fear of losing karma brownie points.

I was going to say cut-n-paste your blurb... [so you get keywords]

But then it occurred to me that maybe doing cut and paste from webpage A to webpage B is a missing feature.

I dont think microformats or frames answer this need well.

It seems the most basic feature of a web mashup, so why dont we see this as a trivial standard?

<div src=url id=div_id />

Ive used plone before as a companywide repo for project docs, but one feature I wanted was to do this for subsections of a page. This would have solved that problem.