skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn't the true metric is always time? "How long will it take me to implement algorithm X in language Y?"

Paul assumes that program size == coding time. However, do we really spend most of our time typing? And can we honestly say that shorter programs take less time to read than longer ones, even if all are written by ourselves?

In my opinion language's power should be related to its capabilities for abstraction, more precisely - higher orders of it. High degrees of abstraction give you better code rewrite/reuse ratios, which means as your program grows, you gain more power since you can reuse various abstract concepts you've already implemented.

Is there a sound relation between language's ability for abstraction and size of programs written in it? I am not so sure.
As much as I like elegant languages, sometimes (when crunch is on at work), I feel like I'm paid to copy-and-paste code (80%) and do the 20% (or more) modification that differentiates me from a trained monkey...
Finally a Adobe Flex AIR Application that makes sense! - let normal people create their own personal/personalized widgets. +100 for the execution
The joy of iterators
You're suggesting that greed (YC acting in their financial interests) is a bad thing. I don't think it is.

What makes investors successful, is the same thing that makes startups successful: Figuring out a pattern that works.

What YC is doing is betting that lots of small investments in hackepreneur types is better than what VCs and other early-stage investors are doing.

Also, I don't see much evidence of them "desperately trying to prove themselves". Looks like they're doing what any smart investment group should do: Trying to attract great entrepreneurs that they think they can help. If Paul and company were good at detecting and promoting talent in the life sciences sector, that's what they'd do. But they aren't, and so they don't.
The idea was that while they sub is tapping the line, another ship actually breaks the line a distance away. That way, there isn't any reason to wonder why the line failed for period of time and when they go to fix it, they will be a ways away from where the actual tap is.

It's probably not true, but an interesting theory anyway.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=105889

Sometime in March.
The ratio of noise to signal on community news sites alarms me more than the possibility of this kind of conspiracy. I'm getting more worried that it'll start to happen here.
I've heard some positive things about having them embroidered professionally or otherwise printed by a national outfitter.
Fog Creek has had good responses [1] doing this, and it's something that we're considering at Darkened Sky. The downside is that we would need to maintain our own inventory, which would get costly, as well as potentially wasted if we move to a new design, but have a lot of of the old shirts already printed.

SpreadShirt actually looks decent, but I'd love to see a blog order a shirt from each of these services, and then write up their experiences.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html
The problem with XMPPs pubsub is that they don't have a clever multicast strategy. All they it does unicast, twitter something to your 200 friends @ example.com? 200 unicast messages to example.com. (See http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html 1.2.)
Hey, it's a somewhat entertaining story for a Sunday morning.

And CVS does suck. The store, not the version control.
9.99 for 12 is a sale price? I buy them by the gross for King Size savings:

http://www.amazon.com/Lifestyles-King-Size-Condoms-Pack/dp/B...
Microsoft and Yahoo's shotgun marriage
Sure. There are lots of pathological counterexamples to the length test. I took that as understood.
Do mobile phone retailers have the worst retail experience?
How to Lie with Design Research [video]
It's not so much about typing as thinking. It's not just to save typing that you use high level languages instead of machine languages, right?
Yahoo says it needs time to mull Microsoft offer
Ships did not cause Internet cable damage, 4 cables involved
Google clout seen aiding Microsoft antitrust OK
It's good to see someone 'famous' preaching free/open-source in the mainstream press.

Notice that he is on-message with rms:

"... combines GNU software with a Linux kernel ... ".
Firefox market share climbs 20 percent in Europe
First hints of an Open Source biotech revolution
E. Dijkstra: Computer science is paralyzed by accepting this moron as their typical customer.
Learning Math
I am in my early thirties and honestly, I cant claim to have a good background in math.

But, I now have a burning desire to learn it from the ground-up.

What are the 'canonical' sources for math, both online and offline? I am lost as to where I should start. I want to have a fundamental, intuitive understanding of it.

To clarify, I would not consider it shameful to start at whatever level necessary (even the lowest, if required).
Did life evolve in ice?
Meanwhile back at the Yahoo ranch, Flickr Video is coming soon
Interesting.

Have you got any more info on your custom libcairo setup and the settings you've used?
I have always admired Dijkstra and feel sorry for myself for arriving to Austin too late. And this quote is something I wish I could have had a discussion with the man about:

"I feel that the effort to use machines to try to mimic human reasoning is both foolish and dangerous. It is foolish because if you look at human reasoning as is, it is pretty lousy; even the most trained mathematicians are amateur thinkers. Instead of trying to imitate what we are good at, I think it is much more fascinating to investigate what we are poor at. It is foolish to use machines to imitate human beings, while machines are very good at being machines, and that is precisely something that human beings are very poor at. Any successful AI project by its very nature would castrate the machine."
This one is timeless: "I have said it before in public and I am perfectly willing to repeat it that someone introduced to computers via Basic is in all probability mentally mutilated beyond redemption. That is no joke. A major branch of the Siberian Academy of Arts and sciences is aimed at keeping Basic out of Siberian high schools."
Have you released every line of code you've ever written?

Since people seem to be interested, I'll try setting up a repo and writing a little doc early this week.
Monkey Boy's three-legged race
Just don't get on the one to Naples, or they'll hand you some trash to take when you go back:-)
I bet they won't use many core users. People are very much invested in flickr.
Would be awesome if they let you build simple forms that could be POSTed too.
Search for "Turner patches" on google. They enable native font hinting.

My font rendering settings are set to: (a) native hinter, (b) automatic subpixel rendering, (c) slight hinting, (d) subpixel smoothing.

Settings a) and b) are set in dpkg-configure fontconfig-config and settings c) and d) are set in Gnome.
To determine the safest way to go from A to B, you need to incorporate both distance and time accident rates, no?

I'm sure walking is actually a pretty unsafe method, when you consider distance.
From your description, its not clear what level you are at, or what level you want to be at. What do you know now? And what do you want to achieve with math?

If you are going for the roots of it, after Arithmetic then basic Algebra in a prerequisite for all further math learning - manipulating and solving equations using variables. Be very comfy with that before proceeding.

Then try geometry, basic stats, and understand the ideas behind calculus. Linear algebra.

If you are still interested, look at dicrete math at least to know what it is. Learn about frequency domain and Fourier analysis, and numerical methods, at least to know what they are about. All these areas go much deeper than I care to venture. I think a breadth-first search will arm you with the best perspective. But as you get further in you see how these different types of math overlap and combine in various ways.

And that's as far as I ever got =) Like you I still want to learn lots more math, and I believe that's a life long process.
I'm in my late twenties, and even though I did comm systems as a EE undergrad (lots of math), I still don't feel like I really have a deep understanding on probability/stochastic processes, differential equations, and complex analysis.

www.betterexplained.com has some good tidbits for math.

I've found MIT's opencourseware to be a pretty good help:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm#Math...

Only the undergraduate courses tend to have video lectures though. The ones on linear algebra and diff eq are quite good. When I first learned matricies in high school, the teachers just went through the mechanics of how to manipulate them and how to calculate a determinant. It wasn't until years later, and when I started wtching these lectures that it crystallized for me what it actually meant.

These are monthly lectures on math topics, which have been enlightening.
http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/index.html

If you like exploring, there's this:
http://www.jimloy.com/math/math.htm

some free online texts
http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html

If you haven't had a course before, you can just follow the usual sequence of courses that high school students and college students take. calculus, multi-var calc, diff-eq, linear algebra, probabilty. And get a textbook and work through the problems. If you code, discrete math will probably help somewhere along the way. Probability/stat for machine learning.

If you've already had the stuff before, It might help just to pick one small topic in a math field, like gradients in multi-var calc, and just focus on that for a bit, and inevitably, it'll mention some other math tool that you don't know about, and just follow your nose and interests.

What I didn't learn until after I finished undergrad is that if you want to really understand conceptually what things mean in math, and not just how to manipulate symbols, there's no getting around working on problems paper (or matlab/mathematica) and just playing with it.

Hope that helps.
So to maximize success, maybe providing the most number of these qualities as possible is the next killer app. For example: a realtime, customizable, certified widget, that comes in a box, and is installable on your iPhone where you can show your friends, and call for support if you need it, as well as tip the creators if you like it.
My friend got one the other day. He seems to be pretty happy with it - if I wasn't strapped for cash right now, and, let's face it, if I actually spent a significant amount of time on the go, I'd definitely go for it.

Rumour has it they'll release a model with a larger screen (but identical chassis size) soon.
There are just so many sub-branches? Can you please specify one, e.g. Number Theory, Graph Theory, and etc?
Are you looking for resources to learn theoretical computer science?
First of all, kudos on the turnaround. I think the most important thing to keep in mind is except for a few scattered geniuses, no one is inherently good at math. I know it sounds like a tired metaphor, but math really is a different language (which takes a lot of study and practice to achieve fluency).

If you lack fundamentals, skip the sources and look for the people. Find a good teacher and take their class. This will probably entail an intense week of course shopping at a local school. Friendly fellow students can be a huge boon, at least for me, since I solidify concepts best in conversations with peers.

If you, for some reason, absolutely cannot take a class in person, I would encourage you to find a study partner and watch online lectures together. I really like MIT's Linear Algebra and Differential Equations videos (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/av/index.htm#Mathemati...), but but I don't know if those are at your level.
I think this sort of thing is awesome---but I have a hard time explaining why. There's just something magical about it, and, judging from the applause at the end, lots of other people feel the same way.
I find it helpful to just explore the areas of math that "stand in the way" when I am studying something practical. After all, math is rarely a target, math is a language that you use to solve a problem.

Sometimes a wikipedia article (along with sources at the bottom) is enough, sometimes I'd need to buy a book, like in case with statistics. Amazon book reviews are usually very helpful and good math books are quite expensive (easily in $100+ range) but can be had for a fraction of original price when bought used.
Four Things Airlines Can Do to Improve Customer Service
This is really just a very early prediction on my part of where YC may be headed. I, personally, feel very little animosity towards YC or their current methods but have become more wary of their direction.

But yes, placing _too large_ of a priority on financial interests is always bad.

Finding a pattern that works is a good strategy, but what's their fitness function? This seems like an easy way to fall into the trap of only looking at the short term. With the volatility of software startups, I can't blame them too much for that.

It would serve their publicity greatly to show that they are still interested in improving the situation for us regular hackers and startup founders who are still at the bottom than appearing to just focus on their bottom line. This does not require lots of money or diving into unnecessarily risky investments.
That's not true.
We have implemented multicast during the Google summer of Code (See for example of the related patch: https://support.process-one.net/browse/EJAB-329).
It being test and optimised but works today if you apply the patch. It will be in ejabberd 2.1.

It is implemented in the server for multiple things, including pubsub and multi-user chat.
I highly recommend starting with Theory of Poker by David Sklansky for basic prob/stats knowledge. It makes a good primer since it's all real-world applications and I know of multiple universities and corporations that use it as such.
Simplegeek, thanks for the reply. I believe I am not at a level where I can go depth-first into a certain sub-branch. I want to start with the basics.
Comparing Python to Other Languages
The YC model is probably not generally applicable in countries spanning all stages of economic development. Even though kiva/prosper are not exactly the same thing, they may be the equivalent workable solution in the countries where they are active.
Its not really clear how you are suggesting YC change. What are you suggesting they do?
Microsoft-Yahoo Deal Raises "Troubling Questions" Says Google
Alright. Well, I would suggest you to take a look at Martin Gardner's work(http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/102-4845988-2776161?url...).

I think Martin Gardner did the same for Mathematics that Jon Bentley did for computer programming (or vice versa :o)). His books are fun to read. Some of the puzzles will be difficult for you, at first, but once you get the ball rolling you will be hooked. There are couple of usenet groups that you will find helpful while finding for hints for the solutions(notice that I didn't say ask for solutions on those usenets). Please also read the following

- "How to solve it" by George Polya.

- "How to prove it" --hmmm, cannot recall the author name.

As others suggested, learn Algebra, Trigonometry, Calculus, Discrete Mathematics and etc. After that, try to settle on a sub-field and focus on that for at least 10 years. Another thing that you can do is to try to talk to some professors at a university nearby and tell them you can do some research as a volunteer (10-15 hours/week). I think you will find at least one professor interested in this idea out of 100. Don't give up, this can work.
There was this Nobel Laureate at University of Utrecht and he has a very good collection of pointers on background information that a theoretical physicist should possess. I'm sorry I cannot recall his name. So good luck. I know if you will persist you will have a lot of fun doing it.
This might sound silly - but I've found the best way to learn anything about math is to start w/ Wikipedia.

Search for a topic you are interested in, like Calculus. Start there. Spend a few hours reading and clicking through links, finding books that are cited, etc. If you don't understand something, usually some link will have the background information you need.

Do this every week or so.
The book 'Calculus' by Michael Spivak.

In the same way that SICP transforms you from a high-schooler into a wise adult when it comes to programming, so too does Calculus when it comes to maths. If you find the book to be heavy going, then read whatever preliminary material you need, and go back to it.

Edit: I should also stress that maths requires a fair amount of discipline (a lot more than programming), so it's really hard to study maths while also having a day job.
If you want fundmantal, intuitive understanding I suggest What is Mathematics? by Courant and Robbins. I got this after pg recommended it in an essay, and it's wonderful.
Is Microsoft a "true believer" or a "savvy huckster" regarding its bid for Yahoo?
That's an improvement, however, after looking at it I must say that that's not multicast. This is multiple recipients for a message.

You shouldn't need to address the recipients, presence already involves people subscribing to your "presence channel". Thus your homeserver should know how to distribute the efficiently - for example by multicast. XEP-0033 just adds redundancy.
YouTube - so called virus stick figure
You don't have to say "thanks" 6 times.
Why Microsoft Acquiring Yahoo Could Suck For Everybody
StrokeDB goes public
I'm sorry but it's bullshit. I taught myself programming with BASIC when I was a kid, my first programs were horrible, unstructured things with GOTOs everywhere and redundant code and yet I was able to teach myself Scheme as well a few years later.

In fact, I find that I understand the point behind useful programming language constructs (and, yes, their beauty) after spending some time suffering due to the lack of them.
The Power of Great People (why "good enough" won't cut it)
"... if the formal definition of a feature gets very messy and complicated, then you should not ignore that warning."

-- sounds like pg taking about Common Lisp loop.
Bill Gates on how Yahoo takeover will challenge Google
Desperately seeking the "killer best way"
Steve Yegge says some interesting things about various branches of maths and how they relate to programming:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/math-for-programmers...
Sounds like a good way of measuring things, although I harbor some doubts as to the conflicts inherent in "creating" vs "maintaining", with Perl being the whipping poster boy for throwaway code.
Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, said that business is a game, money is the way we keep score.

There is no better validation of your ideas than market validation. Your traffic statistics are a proxy of value but you have to make some final steps.
If you want to go to the fundamentals, I'd suggest The Principles of Mathematics by Bertrand Russell. It won't tell you much about the specific sub-branches of mathematics, but it's a good introduction to mathematics the way mathematicians see it, as opposed to mathematics the way high-school students (or teachers, for that matter) see it.

To give you an idea of the flavour of it, here's the opening sentence:

"Pure Mathematics is the class of all propositions of the form p implies q, where p and q are propositions containing one or more variables, the same in the two propositions, and neither p nor q contains any constants except logical constants."

It's way out of copyright, so there's an online version:

http://fair-use.org/bertrand-russell/the-principles-of-mathe...
Wow, a link to Killer Cain's site at Tech. That is awesome. I had Cain's Calculus classes at 8:00 am for my first year at Tech, and that's a hell of a way to get welcomed to college. He's still one of best professors I ever had.
I've been doing the exercises at http://projecteuler.net and that seems a good way to stay (or get back) in practice. I'm doing these problems in OCaml so I'm killing two birds with one stone.
Because of UniHan?
Try Euclid. Though difficult (which is not that much of a problem given that you are not a complete beginner), it's all there.
Until it supports Unicode instead of translating my unicode into random entities/replacements, it's still a prototype ;)

A great, usable prototype :)
raw text or json is even more extensible than XML. And about half as verbose, less prone to errors, easier to write parsers for etc etc....
One could also develop a separate kernel API for version control. Filesystems without version control would just have null operations in this API, while filesystems with version control would root around in their database for the change information.
Look for core technology that can be re-purposed. It gives the company shots at different markets before it folds. It also demonstrates modularity which will make your role easier and more productive.
The only way to learn math is to do math, and you should learn to do math the same way you learn to program: solve problems that you find interesting.

Personally, I like to do contest problems. You can find tons and tons of them on John Scholes's website: http://www.kalva.demon.co.uk/ but they tend to be on the hard side. The AIME is possibly the easiest on there, and those are the sort of problems where the average high school only has one student every decade or so that can solve any.

There are contests for junior high students and less advanced high school students, too, but I can't find the problems online. There are books, though. You might want to look at the AMC 8, 10, and 12.

Or, you know, make some up. Think of a problem you've always been curious about, and try to solve it. There are forums online that can offer guidance. For example, I work on http://math2.org/mmb/ .
Have you ever seen one of those REA problem solvers books? They are thick books full of problems and solutions (and explanations) and are organized from beginner to advanced.

Do you think this would lead to a more solid foundation (from less frustration), for self studying, than reading from a thorough but dense text? I don't know Spivak's Calculus, but some reviewers on Amazon compare it to Apostol, which I found so abstract, and so unpractical, that I promptly forgot everything. It is now on my to-read list, but like you said, I won't be starting until I can dedicate myself to studying it, and now that I have seen the REA book, I wonder if it would be better to work on that book, as a refresher and foundation builder.

Oh yeah, dwaters, if you happen to be interested in Apostol, and want a study buddy, I nominate me.
the point is that it could be written. Python can be just as terse as arc for this problem if you use a similarly designed library.
Why not on the East Coast this time?
PG's patent on Continuation Based Web Servers (as used by Arc, Seaside etc)
Using Git within a project (forking around)
Art Of Problem Solving Forum - http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/index.php
The Closures Controversy by Joshua Bloch (video)
Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig
It's a book, so it'll take a while to read, but I found it very interesting and informative, so I felt I should share it.
My god! He's going to sue everyone who answers the Arc Challenge!

It's a trap!
Programming in Schelog : Prolog Embedded into Scheme
Introduction to XMPP and XMPP4R for Ruby Developers
The patent appears to predate PLTaEURXs work.
If he hacked the system to make 7 billion dollars, let's say by betting badly and having a friend take the opposite bet, maybe he would have been a hacker, in the criminal sense.

But as it stands, he was just addicted to gambling with someone else's money. The whole situation is just kind of sad.
"The patent appears to predate PLTaEURXs work."

Boy, that extra character support sure would've come in handy. :P