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Stories from March 8, 2009
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1.How to stop the drug wars (economist.com)
129 points by arjunb on March 8, 2009 | 155 comments
2.Wolfram Alpha is Coming -- and It Could be as Important as Google (twine.com)
97 points by toffer on March 8, 2009 | 73 comments
3.Trailer now available for Ray Kurzweil's movie, "Transcendent Man" (transcendentman.com)
75 points by gourneau on March 8, 2009 | 56 comments

For a system like this, I've been trained through repeated disappointments to ignore hype and only look at results. I might also be influenced by knowing a bit about AI.

  it doesn't use natural language processing, it *computes* the answer. 
Gibberish
5.Why the Wii will never get any better (hackmii.com)
58 points by dfox on March 8, 2009 | 29 comments
6.Reilly’s Right - Tickets Are Cheap (ticketstumbler.com)
49 points by fallentimes on March 8, 2009 | 3 comments
7.What Colour are your bits? (sooke.bc.ca)
48 points by blasdel on March 8, 2009 | 11 comments
8.Ruby-style Blocks in Python (espians.com)
46 points by tav on March 8, 2009 | 42 comments
9.Dolphins blowing bubble rings, and playing with them [video] (metacafe.com)
44 points by DaniFong on March 8, 2009 | 14 comments

(Web) design is hard. For us programmers, it's a pain in the ass, and when it comes to create UI elements for a (web) app, we are stuck with two choices:

1. create something very basic, or

2. spend countless hours searching the web for Photoshop tutorials on how to create a bubble or depth effect, then spend even-more-countless hours fighting with Photoshop to implement it, and finally, maybe adapt the image with some external tools to make it be a CSS sprite or whatever)

Yes, 1. is not necessary a bad thing (HN is a good example :-)), but we all know that for most softwares, some attractive eye-candies are useful. Even GMail uses more than a simple <input type="button"> to display their buttons.

So here comes Da Button Factory. It aims at making it easier to create pretty buttons, which are one of the key elements of an user interface (especially on the web), in an quick and human-friendly way (not tons of options/menus/concepts like in an image processing program). And because using plain image files on the web often sucks, it (will) provide solutions that makes good use of CSS.

Currently it's just a beta. There is only a very simple CSS solution implemented. It may looks ugly in some browsers. Things are not polished.

But I would be very glad to hear any comments of yours on this "draft". Do you find it interesting? Do you have any critics/ideas about it? Did you notice any bugs or problems?

Oh, and I am french, so please excuse me for any grammar/spelling mistake in this post, and don't hesitate to correct me, of course :-)

11.The Importance of the Facebook Redesign (unalone.tumblr.com)
40 points by unalone on March 8, 2009 | 17 comments
12.How to rewrite files in Linux (launchpad.net)
40 points by kqr2 on March 8, 2009 | 20 comments

"Remember, when Nintendo fails to deliver new Wii features, it won’t be because they aren’t trying. It’ll be because they’ve killed their chances from the start."

So what? They've outsold the X-box 3 to 1 and the PS3 7 to 1, and unlike either of them, they're making a significant profit rather than subsidizing the hardware. The Wii has already won its generation hands down and has generated enough profit to fund a more powerful successor.

14.Big Music Will Surrender, But Not Until At Least 2011 (techcrunch.com)
36 points by vaksel on March 8, 2009 | 26 comments

A new kind of hype.
16.Nice book on convex optimization techniques (stanford.edu)
33 points by carterschonwald on March 8, 2009 | 21 comments

I want to believe you, but the fact that you signed up just to leave this comment anonymously doesn't do much to alleviate my skepticism.
18.Dear Speakers: things that interfere with getting a message across to an audience (duncandavidson.com)
30 points by sarvesh on March 8, 2009 | 10 comments
19.PostgreSQL: What happened to Hot Standby? (toolbox.com)
29 points by jawngee on March 8, 2009 | 36 comments

Sounds like another Cuil hype type campaign. When Google came out they didn't make any claims. Only factual performance counts.
21.CSRF vulnerability found in Gmail; Google not willing to fix it (seclists.org)
27 points by nickb on March 8, 2009 | 17 comments

Exactly my feeling while reading this. Who cares? Not Nintendo. They didn't set out to build a platform that would please console geeks. They did the opposite. They set out to build a console that everyone else would love and buy, and which would make a solid profit for Nintendo. And they succeeded, big time.

Turns out nobody but console geeks cares about the architecture. And at a couple of hundred quid a pop, I'm sure most Wii owners will be more than willing to upgrade to a new version when the hardware is upgraded. They're not upgrading a small computer, they're upgrading a console.

PS3/XBox, on the other hand, have take the road of literally building a whole, powerful computer in a box. The market has shown that this is a less successful way to build consoles - whatever console geeks may have to say about it.


This would probably work for about 1 month. After everyone finished reeling in horror from the senseless murders of many of their families and loved ones, some subset of the people would quickly realize that all the competition had just been eliminated from the drug market, rendering it extremely profitable and lucrative. Time to stop whatever they were doing to start producing and selling drugs instead.

(Were you really being serious?)

24.Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times (nytimes.com)
25 points by nickb on March 8, 2009 | 32 comments

"Ruby does it this way and people like it" isn't an argument that will work. You can accomplish the same things in Python with an extra line of overhead.

If you want to get this past python-dev you'll need to explain the benefits, here's a start:

1) Lower cognitive load: Users can understand blocks but the extra naming/reference is one too many things for their brain stack to handle.

2) More descriptive: with blocks the first line says "I'm about to define a function for use with X" instead of the existing way which says "I'm defining a function. Now I'm using that function with X."

3) Show me: take a chunk of an existing project (stdlib is best) and rewrite it with the proposed block syntax. You get to cherry pick the example so if the new version doesn't read much cleaner than the old version maybe the idea isn't so hot.

I'm -1 on the idea but if you want to change my mind you have to make an argument that doesn't start with "In Ruby..."


> I don't recall Google saying anything beyond "here's how many pages we indexed".

I think that's the point shimonamit is making.

27.Hack your life for fun & profit with Mitch Altman (creator of the TV-B-Gone) (video.google.com)
25 points by gourneau on March 8, 2009 | 4 comments
28.The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (kottke.org)
25 points by kf on March 8, 2009 | 4 comments

I had a chance to see this in action a while back. While I, and none of the people I saw this with, were not at all impressed by NKS, this project blew our minds. We watched as it pulled up and manipulated everything from Egyption fraction expansions to historic weather data to the human genome. If the author of this article is exaggerating, it's not by a whole lot. While Wolfram may not be bringing about the revolution in science he hoped to, don't forget that he and his crew made Mathematica, and are very capable of creating impressive software.

I think you missed the joke.

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