I've really got to learn to stop posting anything to HackerNews that in any way can be construed as an admission of weakness or vulnerability. I sensed that was the case here when I was writing, but didn't think it was necessary to hide it. I will be more careful in future to not reveal more than is absolutely necessary, and so avoid this typical, casually condescending reply. It's annoying because it's the "mistake" that gets seized on, instead of what I'm saying... as if there's more interest in correction than communication.
Maybe I am alone here in disliking unsolicited advice, but ironically, when I ask a question here, I usually don't get any help...
...so perhaps the secret is not to ask, but state something that incidentally reveals the lack of knowledge, so the scent of inexcusable ignorance rouses the instinctive hacker display of superior knowledge. I will try this.
Or maybe, I am just not a hacker. Although I love coding (especially to help other people) and I'm not a corporate type, I am coming to think this more and more; because behaviour like giving unsolicited advice seems to be totally acceptable and approved of on sites like this, but by my values is a form of trolling, and has never sat well with me.
EDIT I just checked the site mqt lists in his profile (http://mark.nirv.net/), and judging by his May 26, 2007 entries, he does troll at times ("What a f______ p___"; "Use a spell checker next time, a______." - to me, that's really abusive). Trolls have sometimes gotten under my radar by combining genuine knowledge and apparent helpfulness with their trolling. Oh well, you live and you learn; without risking mistakes and uncongeniality, one cannot learn.
> I think you need to be aware that not everyone who disagrees with you or fails to kiss your ass is trolling.
?
EDIT I can't believe I've gotten drawn into this. Your use of loaded terms "bitchiness", "ass", "whining", giving your opinions as if they were truth, issuing commands, all in terms that didn't relate to the comment you were replying to, should have tipped me off. No more responses from me. Bye.
I don't know what the rest of these guys are talking about. That guy sure was a jackass for trying to show you how to get the thing you were complaining about not existing.
And those other guys were total jerks for not waiting with baited breath for you to post your questions. And the guy with the blog where he said a dirty word? THE NERVE! I am totally with you, people who state opinions on their personal websites without being asked for them first are total trolls!
The internet SUCKS! Let's go to the real world where everyone is nice!
You're doing the "text communication has no sense of tone, body language, or other important indirect communication, so I'll just assume you're being a dick" thing.
It's all cool. Try and assume people aren't just being dicks.
You mentioned that "units" wasn't part of your system and he pointed out that it's actually a Unix base program (i.e. part of BSD/Solaris/Darwin) that's installable separately for GNU-based systems.
What's the problem here? Did you really need to comb through his blog and call him out like that?
There's a famous economics essay about the size of the firm by Ronald Coase (winners of the Nobel prize for economics), in which he discusses why firms (companies, organizations) exist at all (instead of individual contractors), and the factors influencing their size.
FP is the future of programming, and always will be.
The argument that many-core will lead to FP adoption used to appeal to me, but then I studied Erlang, and saw that its concurrency power was due to shared-nothing pure-message passing, and not due to it being functional. FP is a way to not need to share memory, but Erlang doesn't actually use that for concurrency. The thinking seems to be that inter-core communication should be coarser-grained (e.g. at the module level, not the level of recursion over a list), because it will always be slower than communication within a core.
Also, surprisingly to me, the over-hyped web services, SOA and ESB etc arguably also aim at pure-message passing concurrency.
By what criterion did they decide if a field looks "good" or not? It matters less what you see than how you see.
It looks like market assessment, probably based on likely growth in demand, existing competitors and the HP founders' capabilities to make a "[technical] contribution" (as they later came to call it).
Business model is the question: (1) Trade sale to spreadsheet makers. (2) Sell a plug-in to spreadsheet users. (3) Or... let users lead you to a problem that only you can solve.
I don't think it's patentable[1]. It's a cute idea, kind of obvious; I'm not sure how well it really generalizes on all the cases that come up in huge datasets. If you continue along this path, you might come up with some patentable detail. I think in the US, you can file up to a year after inventing, so public demos don't destroy novelty (IANAUSAPA).
I think your strength is less the technology than the interface, which is nicely wrapped up and works[2].
You'll get interesting user leads from this demo. Maybe: who is suffering from what problem in what specific context who really needs your help. It's hard to get this market research any other way,
I can't see a really neat or natural way to monetize it - it's just not big enough. But the world's imagination is greater than my imagination. If you stick at it, I think something will come to you. That would be really cool!
[1] a patent isn't for suing people, but to have something to sell to Microsoft or Google etc.
[2] of course, you can improve the GUI further once you know what people need - imperfection is a good thing, because a head start on the competition is worthless when you run out of track.
Deuterated bonds can be up to 80 times stronger than those containing hydrogen.
That seems likely to alter chemical behaviour (as researchers found). I'm not a chemist, but it seems reasonable to consider compounds with such bonds as different compounds. Why should we think of carbon-12 and carbon-13 as variations of carbon, instead of distinct elements - if they have different chemical behaviour?
The blackbox testing tells us that 35% heavy water is lethal, but doesn't tell why. It's possible - and even likely - that it is the very bonds we wish to protect that become lethal if strengthened 80 times.
The final "heavy babies" grayed paragraph at the end is fascinating (in case you skipped it: babies have more carbon-13, and their mothers are unusually depleted with it around the time of birth.)
They are both variations of carbon because they have the same electronic structure, i.e. the configuration of electrons about C-12 and C-13 is identical (or similarly H-1 and H-2).
I'll make a bad analogy now.
The electronic structure is like a set of hooks attached to the atom. Hydrogen has 1 free hook, carbon 4, and these hooks form chemical bonds. Hydrogen and deuterium have the same set of hooks, as do C-13 and C-14. But deuterium is heavier than hydrogen, and this makes it harder to unhook it when it attaches to another atom, even if the set of hooks is identical.
Sorry, that was a suggestion phrased as a question (i.e. I know what isotopes are). I was suggesting a name that signifies operational properties rather than "the" definition of what it is. If heavy water became commonly available, this would undoubtedly occur.
It's like features vs. benefits, which I've been working with over a few weeks, to understand the need for my product, and the gaps left by existing offers in the marketplace. Quite possibly, I'm thinking too much in those terms :-)
I have one of these (or had - lost somewhere) and they are fantastic. A real pleasure to use. They fit snugly in hand, and you can drive force into the work. The metal itself somehow feels soft. There's even an integrated component for removing eyes from potatoes (I never use that; but I like the idea).
I don't know if they are really all that great - however, they are so much better than the standard ones (pencil shaped).
As in the old saying, you don't have to make a perfect mousetrap - just a better one.
Google could arrange and track etc the ads quite easily I think.
They already have Adwords, and they acquired that huge banner ad company, doubleclick. They also acquired an in-game ad company (which is probably the most similar to this concept, in terms of technology).
A missing component is them paying the creator of the video...
