beosrocks
If you don't know what a word means, the first step is to check the dictionary! "tar baby: a difficult problem that is only aggravated by attempts to solve it".
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4044219
The only difference in the URL is the unnecessary "www." prefix. Perhaps news.arc could be updated to treat both URLs the same?
http://spencertipping.com/zeroconsulting/
You email me with a problem you'd like me to solve. (Be sure to put "zero" in the subject so that my email filter catches it.) This could be anything: a debugging project, advice about something, a library you need, end-user code, etc. Anything you send me is confidential. I'll then follow up with you with any additional information I need and any initial impressions I have.
I will then try to implement a solution _and will never send you a bill_. I may or may not be able to implement something, depending on a variety of factors including my skill set. If I'm successful, I'll send you what I come up with. You may, at your option, pay me whatever you think my solution is worth. It's fine if this is nothing at all; that's useful information for me (I won't nag you about it, for instance).
Perhaps Wikipedia can help clear your confusion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Gould
"Glenn Herbert Gould was a Canadian pianist who became one of the best-known and most celebrated classical pianists of the 20th century. He was particularly renowned as an interpreter of the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach. His playing was distinguished by remarkable technical proficiency and capacity to articulate the polyphonic texture of Bach’s music."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB76jxBq_gQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVODxskoHFQ
He was perhaps the greatest piano player of the 20th century and had a strong hacker/genius/Aspergers aspect. My favorite quote about him comes from Composer Dimitry Tolstoy: "Gould was an alien on this Earth. People simply cannot play the piano like that!"
http://www.wqxr.org/#!/articles/wqxr-features/2011/jan/06/va...
EDIT: panarky has now updated his post above to make it clear that the advice was to Zhou Tong.
Trying to run a financial site without the chops to do it was seriously wrong. Of course, it was wrong of users not to do more due diligence on the service, its record, the team (you, I guess), etc - after all, it was (was) their money.
The recent hack is not my fault.
You've got a lot to learn.
Is Your Brain Really Necessary? http://www.rifters.com/real/articles/Science_No-Brain.pdf
tl;dr: "the brain can work in conditions we would have thought impossible".
BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the GL teapot thing, etc. simultanously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he pulled out the showstopper.
He yanked the plug on the box.
Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened.
If you've never played with BeOS on an old Pentium II, it's hard to imagine the kind of performance it was able to squeeze out of that hardware. Here's a rough idea: