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That's both amusing and concerning at the same time. I have always felt a little unsettled when I have happened to watch Thomas the Tank Engine, both as a child and as an adult.

There does seem to be something of a history of rather severe children's tales. Look at Roald Dahl or the Brothers Grimm. Not that I'm directly equating Roald Dahl or the Brothers Grimm (whom I generally like) to Thomas and friends (whom I generally do not like) but there does seem to be some strand of commonality in terms of the extremes of the underlying messages in long surviving children's tales, even if the lesson/message is not necessarily pointing in the same direction in all cases.

A little severity in ones entertainment as a child is a good thing in my mind (though lessons enforcing conformity do not fall into this "good" kind of severity for me). I remember watching Star Wars as a young child and being freaked out by that scene in the bar where Ben Kenobi cuts the alien's arm off with his light sabre. But it was moments like that which made the movie memorable to me, gave it impact and helped to make it more than just a series of movies, it became it's own mythology in my mind.

Conversely, I believe the lack of this was primarily what made the new Star Wars films crap by comparison. With the new movies, they made the mistake of trying to make them "kid safe" and easily digestible to as wide an audience as possible. In doing so, they ruined any chance of a new generation having a similar experience with the new movies as I did with the old, and of the the new films ever having any true soul.
MS must be spending a lot of money on their ad campaigns. the last month has been filled with a lot of MS related/mentioning articles all over the web.
Ugh. Not the sort of person I'd expect to suddenly turn around and release a good movie. This story re: the graphics was interesting, though. I might give Avatar a shot.
Reminds me of discussions which purported to prove, not that a particular number was prime, but that there was a 1 in BigNum probability that it was not prime.

The mathematicians in the audience seemed to consider that unacceptable to the point of being useless. Nonetheless, someone pointed out (to much laughter) that the chances of any given proof being incorrect were significantly higher than that 1 in BigNum. Of course, we've all been there--thought we proved something we didn't.

I regard the chances of machine malfunction similarly, and have a similar standard for proof. If you can examine the code and the processes sufficiently, there is no reason not to trust the machine. At least, no more reason than there is not to trust your and others' minds. I suspect this view is common, given that most folks consider the Four Color Theorem proven.
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why not just enter randomly guessed Iranian names into the site... to overwhelm it with incorrect data.
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Have you tried TokyoCabinet? It serves a similar purpose (a persistent key/value store which speaks the memcache protocol) and I've only heard good things about its performance.
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That's also solved by the collective intelligence. Is it better to have simple devices which do only one thing each, or something big which does all, or something simple which can do a lot of things but with more labor? The market has tried all (or a lot of) choices, and the winner is still the toaster.
I think this type of content shouldn't be posted on HN. It's not news and it's been a long time since there was any shortage of study aids online.
I'm tempted to say that HN is ruled by grammar nazis (or prescriptive linguists, if you prefer) who don't respond particularly well to the fact that language evolves which was what I was trying to say.

About the semantic structuring: Valid point, but people (who are ultimately responsible for language change) tend to ignore such things.
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I'm reminded of Paul Erdos. Never married, perhaps he died alone. But he never settled either.
"Last September, Goldman agreed to sell Berkshire $5 billion of preferred stock carrying a 10 percent annual dividend, and warrants to buy $5 billion of common stock at $115 per share."

Would it been so hard for the gov to allow the little guy to have bought into this deal?
Well, I think it's a worthwhile endeavor. The beauty about the self-described geek is that they believe everything can be learned with enough persistence: code, math, chatting to strangers or chatting up girls.

While I don't see any particular need to do this myself, it might be worthwhile for me too because I am living in a foreign country (Switzerland) and don't speak the language _that_ well. That might ratchet up the difficulty a notch.
I think you're missing something very important when you talk about the centralized planning in companies:

Failure.

A toaster company doesn't have to get it all right in order for toasters to be produced. It merely has to come close enough that someone else realizes that a toaster is a good idea, tweaks some features, and does it better. Eventually we end up with a working toaster, even if 99.9% of toaster companies didn't produce a working toaster.

It also helps that the toaster company can rely on the metal-casing company already have gotten most of that right, and the heating-element company having gotten most of that right, and the timer coming having gotten most of that right. It doesn't have to start from scratch for every component of the toaster, only the toaster-ish ones.

The difference between governments and corporations is that corporations can fail. When they can't (eg. Citigroup, GM, and AIG in the current financial crisis), central planning in a corporation is every bit as harmful as central planning in the government. But most of the time, when a corporation fails, other people pick up the pieces, tweak them a bit, and try again with a newer and better corporation. Hell, most of the time the newer and better corporation comes along first and makes the outdated one fail. (See: Toyota vs. GM, Google vs. Microsoft, Microsoft vs. IBM, etc.)

When a government fails, usually lots of people die. At the very minimum, there's lots of misery and uncertainty.

You could argue that one of the greatest things about the U.S. government is its ability to tolerate failure without bringing down the whole government. When a president royally screws things up, like the last one did, he's out in eight years, there's a peaceful transition, and someone new picks up the pieces. Could you imagine something like that happening in Castro's Cuba, Saddam's Iraq, or Communist Russia? For most of history, the modus operandi of governments has been to continue growing in power until they're so big they can't do anything but fail, then have a bloody revolution where the new radicals throw out everything the old guard did - even the parts that worked - and start from scratch. It's hard to make progres like that.
I'm sorry to hear about your friend.

I see, and appreciate, your link to Hamming's article and raise you Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape in counterbalance:
https://www.msu.edu/~sullivan/BeckettKrapp.html
There's something very annoying about revolutionaries of all kinds, something programmers should know instinctively: you don't throw away good entropy.

It's very nice to criticize a system because a worker in Bolivia has it rough. You feel very good when you say "Something must be done!", but if by any chance you'd get any power all you'd do with this attitude would be to destroy. The current system works. It puts bread on the table of that Bolivian worker, and on pretty much everybody else's. If you want to change this you _must_ start by understanding the current system and its strengths and weaknesses. To try and replace it, or change it without understanding it can only end in ruin.

And if you look closer at that specific worker you may find interesting things. You may find for example that the reason mining is the only thing he can do is not due to capitalism, but because some local politician decided (much like you) that capitalism is not the way to go. And that the evil foreigners who only want money must be kept far away, and let in only on a leash. So the greedy foreigners can't come to that part of Bolivia and build a car factory which makes cheap Fords and Fiats because well, nobody really wants capitalists to make more money of their backs. So the poor miner keeps on going down into the mine every day.

Free trade is good for poor people. Globalization is good for poor people. Capitalism is good for poor people. When you see them failing, there's usually some politician who thinks that if he controls every aspect of the economy that's still called capitalism.
No. No thats not how it works. Not when you already had a form of slow-metastasizing pancreatic cancer that usually shows up in other organs... like the liver, within your lifetime.

They knew he had cancer. They knew he needed a liver. They lied. So be it.

To be honest, when he started talking about 'nutritional imbalance' and sounding alternative mediciney... I assumed he was terminal. Thats how people get when medical science gives them VERY bad news.

I've thought he was dead, or nearly dead, for six months. I am very pleased to be wrong.
What makes that better than MHTML, which is basically a standard multipart/related MIME document as used by bazillions of email messages a day?
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Yeah but especially on open source platform you could argue that most of the software stack wasnt created because of capitalism, people who made it had different motivation than money. If everybody in Soviet union acted as open source programmers ...
this is such a bad idea -- people will set up bots spewing fake information and boiler-room 'stock tips' of the sort already passed around in junk emails
Pet peeve:

"As for "pre-toaster" lives, most people who lived in the age before the toaster could expect to die by about age 40 (the toaster was invented in 1893, when life expectancy in the U.S. was about 43 years)."

I hate when people talk about how people in the last century could expect to die when they were about 40, because that is skewed by the ridiculously high infant-mortality rates. The data that that paragraph links to says it all: if you lived to age 10 by 1900, you could expect to live another 50 years more, i.e. you would most likely die when you were about 60.

Take a good look at the data. At birth in 1890, your life expectancy was only 42 years. At 10 years old in 1900, your life expectancy is now 50 more years, i.e. you've aged 10 years but now you can expect to live an additional 8 years on top of that. Your total life expectancy went up by 18 years just by virtue of having made it through the first 10 years.

By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, this means about 1/3 of babies died before age 10, which seems about right...
The material looks fine for a quick refresher ... would need good books, in-depth stuff and code if you really want to learn OSes internals.
I'd agree with your dislike of ugly solutions. I guess the benefit of this being accepted as a proof is that all the conjectures that begin 'Assuming that x is true...' can now be converted to theorems saying 'x is true, therefore...', which might tidy up a lot of loose ends.
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"Word enables Outlook customers to write professional-looking and visually stunning e-mail messages"

As long as they're sending the e-mail to someone who also has Outlook and who isn't using the Outlook Web Access on their exchange server :)

Seriously though Microsoft's obviously trying to shift the issue to Outlook's use of Word when really the issue is how bad their Word engine renders HTML (though I do think "fixoutlook.org" picked the very worst example for their comparison). It's a good way to win an argument but a bad way to take product suggestions.
democracy is schizophrenic. if you're saying that voting reflects the preferences of the people we already have a system for that, it's called the market. so under democratic central planning you have people signaling one preference with their dollars and a different preference with their vote. except the majority of people aren't deciding what to do with their own money when they vote, they're deciding what to do with other people's money. producers are a minority.
What? What part of what I wrote is wrong? That's exactly how it works.

I have liver problems. It's not liver transplant liver problems but it's a problem nonetheless. Here is how I found out about it: I felt vaguely crappy for 6 months but just thought I was fatigued because I stay up late and don't have a very good diet. I finally went to the doctor for something else, they did some tests which initially signaled some problems that could be related to my liver or could be from something else. Then they do some more tests and I waited 3 weeks and they say "yeah it's your liver."

So Jobs loses weight through 2008, he goes to the doctor in January and they say "whoa initial tests show you are messed up, you need more tests." They make that announcement to the press. Then he gets more test results, he announces a week later that the problem is way worse than he thought, he needs a transplant, time for a leave of absence.

Of course if you're the kind of ghoul who plays death pool games it's more fun to imagine corporate conspiracy theories hiding his problem for months or years to keep the short sellers at bay. However, Occam's Razor would suggest that a typical male relationship pattern with the doctor's office is a more likely explanation.
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The primary source was posted 10 hours ago. Please up vote that instead of this blog spam:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=672745
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Ask HN: What technology is used to build the Y Pipes Canvas
What technology is used to build the Yahoo! Pipes Canvas (editor) portion?
What others can be used?
-Thanks
I really wish no one had ever thought of putting HTML into an email in the first place.
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I think the term Blog Spam refers to people who post their own Blog's posts. I don't see any obvious affliation between this user and the site they linked to.

Moreover the merit of this piece is that it's a short synopsis of the entire story. You can think the article you link to has more validity as the original source and it's your choice to vote that one up and not this one. But it's kind of rude to call this post names simply because you deem it unworthy.
I think you underestimate the effect of his previous cancer on his diagnosis. That type is a ticking time bomb that usually spreads. I think if you had that form of cancer, they would have immediately been all over your symptoms. At no time do I think any doctor would have said anything about nutrition being the problem. That was a lie.

I don't think your experience is the same as his. For your symptoms, as a healthy guy... sure, six months is reasonable. For him? Not at all.

I just don't buy it. I don't think it makes him a bad person or anything, but I don't think I'm stating some kind of conspiracy theory either. He knew he was sick and lied about it. I still like the guy. :)
While elaborate spam email is annoying, you don't really believe we should all be using plain text, do you?
I have a book called "The Rainbow Fish", which I refuse to let my kids read.

I think it has a horrible message, that individuality is bad, and you must give away all that is special about you in order to conform.

I never bothered to look it up till today, and I see that wikipedia has an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Fish about it, with almost exactly the same criticism I made.

Why do adults write such books (including the ones you mentioned) for kids? And why do other adults allow them to become popular (AKA buy them)?
I agree. Though I doubt that the modus operandi you described was prevalent. For most of histories external power struggles (including war) served a check on inefficencies of governments.
I believe that we should all be using plaintext for email. Plaintext and simple attachments. So MIME. But not HTML.
> If everybody in Soviet union acted as open source programmers ...

... then they would have more efficient Gulags?

The most important feature of a market is not money, but decentral decision making and feedback. Also freedom from tort plays a part.

All things that the Soviet Union surely lacked. (And they did have money. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_ruble)
"The Giver" was pretty cool. It had a thought provoking premise and a good buildup, despite the homoerotic undertone.

I must admit that I didn't get "The Catcher in the Rye". Sure, I get that he's frustrated with everyone, but it annoyed me that there were only about three scenes playing on repeat.
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This article (1) from Macworld says:
"According to the hospital release, Jobs had the highest MELD score—Model for End-Stage Liver Disease—among patients of his blood type at the time of the procedure".

1) http://www.macworld.com/article/141336/jobs_transplant_confi...
I agree with your notion of "proof as conversation". That's the way presenting proofs verbally works in practice. (And I am a mathematician.)
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But what is capitalism if not the freedom of people to freely trade the goods that they acquire or create for other goods that they value more? There's nothing that says that it has to explicitly be money that is traded; it could be something as amorphous as trading your time and effort in return for public recognition and acclaim.

As software developers, the software stacks we use are a great example of the decentralised 'invisible hand' aspect of markets. Nobody planned the transition from Assembler to C to Java to Python (etc), there's no panel of experts deciding that we're all going to start programming in X language from next year or some government department building the One True Language/Framework/OS. The fact that most of what we use is free is largely irrelevant, because time and effort are not free and all trade is about each party's perception of relative, not absolute, value.
If your objects have a wide variety of attributes, either you need lots of columns with many of them empty, or you need some sort of attribute table with object-key-value triples. Both are bad relational design, but the structure is inherent in the data. If you're having to use a fixed DB schema, I can't see any way around bad design.

When you mention object databases, can you name any examples? As far as I know object databases where talked about a lot some years ago, but never really gained significant widespread adoption.

Also, the article makes the point that non-relational databases are not just about scalability. In fact, in the case of graph databases, scaling problems are just as pronounced as with relational databases. The different data models can enable you to make good database designs, even if the structure of your data is against you.
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Dare I say that you started on postgres? :)

The commands are more obscure.
Basic HTML is nice, and that is what should have been supported in email.

Just for things like headings and bullet points.

I can very happily live without tables (attach a spreadsheet if it is important), css (let the text of my email be dictated by my client) and images (again, attach).

But the need for headings and lists means that I do use HTML or Rich-Text (depending on the client) when it's available even though I seldom use anything beyond simple formatting.

Oh, and we use RT as a help desk/support software, and that uses plain text. And I speak from experience that when you get a lengthy description of an issue turned into plain text it's very difficult to read. Headings and bullet points are pretty important.
That would be: Harmonie zuerst.

But "Harmonie" does not have the same (con-) notation in German as "harmony" has in English.

And "Verdamung babelfish." could be taken that you wish babelfish would turn into a lady ("Dame"). ;o)
I've always used the term "blog spam", with respect to social link aggregators, to indicate a blog post which adds no apparent value to the source it is citing. I feel that is true in this case.

Furthermore, I think that this blog is unfairly omitting details from the source material. The official blog post includes significant details about the editing experience of Microsoft Word. The quote in the intermediate blog post does not capture the nature of the Outlook team's argument.

Even if the intermediate post did represent the argument accurately, it includes editorialization which I'd rather see in comments.

Both HN submissions used the official title, as they are supposed to. I posit that this secondary source was upvoted more because of the more dramatic title. The posters are to blame for the discrepancy, not the HN submitters. My apologies for the meta-discussion, but I don't think I'm the only person who doesn't like intermediate, no-value-added blog posts.