skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Game theory is a prescriptive theory, not a descriptive one. It's designed to find the decision that maximizes or optimizes the return, based on the availble information about the circumstances. In doing so, it sometimes arrives at counter-intuitive results. The fact that the results are counter-intuitive should immediately imply that it will not predict behavior. The fact that game theory is a poor predictor of behavior is an object of study for psychology, not for game theory[1].

So yes, game theory is useful for making decisions. It's just not useful as a predictor of human behavior.

[1] Except insofar as if you want to apply it, you have to make different assumptions about the behavior of your opponents. But game theory is still perfectly amenable to adding those constraints.
Siqi and Alex were just like the rest of us. Two dudes, one simple idea- they even posted Friends for Sale here on News.YC (someone please find that post) just so they could get a YC interview initially.

Little did they know, they wouldn't need YC because their little facebook app took off, then raised $4M to grow their company.

You'll be hard pressed to find anybody else in the social gaming space that has has both the right combination of confidence (the startup brashness) but also the humility (of someone who actually started in the apartment). You'll find many on one side or the other, but Zynga just got themselves a great team.
I was thrilled with that auto-setup feature. It was very easy to get everything up to speed. If I hadn't used social networks before I might have wanted a slow ramp-up, but I'm already comfortable with Facebook.
I've been using Opera for years, and I go back and forth between Dragonfly and Firebug. Firefox + Firebug is sooo sloooww. But, Dragonfly isn't quite as full featured.

BTW, Opera 10.5 is really fast. The Beta RC is still crashing quite a bit, but I really like the new features that have been added.
How much will Google's fiber network cost?
And, as of right now (1:39pm 2/11 CST), a link to this stingraycharles' comment is #1 on Google if you follow his link.
I see how it can be read that way.

By "merit," I meant actual accomplishments and not some ethereal quality of a person or group just sitting idle.

I'm glad you chimed in though because you're one of the cases that kind-of fits the model above. From a complete outsider's point of view, it looks like friends giving friends tens of millions of dollars for nebulous reasons.

* Disclaimer: Text is a poor medium of communication and usually comes across more hostile in the reader's eyes than intended. There is much levity here.
Explore your GitHub social graph with python
I think this would have Wolfram Alpha's problem of trying to be too general, without having invented general AI. How will the system understand what I want?

Auto-gifting would be particularly useful. Is there a way to use it without an iPhone?
I totally agree. I was really annoyed by the distraction until I discovered that I could just drag it into the [X More] group under my labels. No more pesky buzz reminders for me!
That seems impossible for me - taxes and other deductions are over a third of my gross salary.
FAQ for programming.reddit
IBM researchers increase efficiency of thin film solar by 40%
I think that Google (basically) knew what they were doing. They probably foresaw a certain amount of backlash, but felt that giving their new network a big head start was worth the risk.
Apple has other products which could incorporate this behavior (not trusting their customers) like itunes content, iWorks or potentially jail broken iphones. I mean there are various ways for Apple to gain more control over their users.
Exercise & fun for Kids,Fun activities to keep kids healthy and Fit
Only to a certain extent. I mostly work on things to solve problems. If I aim to make money from a business it is to build my personal power so I can solve more problems. I've already met my needs in other forms of material wealth -- now this is what makes me happy. And there are so many problems in the world -- there would be no peace for me if I just let them go.
I stopped using Facebook, Myspace etc. for this same reason. Too much stuff to keep on top of. Here's what I just did to disable Google buzz:

1. Scroll down all the way in your gmail
2. click 'turn off buzz' in Gmail view section
Guitar Hero cutting music game releases in 2010
There's some parts of economics that have used game theory as an analysis tool based on the set of assumptions: 1) humans, at least when they engage with markets, are rational actors; and therefore 2) markets will converge to the equilibria specified by game theory. Some of the empirical tests of game theory have had a not-so-hidden subtext of casting doubt on that kind of economics.
Ah, so you're arguing on behalf of the perfect as the enemy of the good.
There are also the small links at the very bottom of the page for turning off Chat and Buzz.
Another reason why you should use MixPanel, besides that they're gonna want to make you money.
Perhaps I poorly worded by saying "ten minutes in", I meant starting from 10 minute and 10 second mark Sergey brings up how he's been using the service internally.

Edit:But going back to your point, I not sure Pagerank is relevant to twitter/facebook, and I don't think Sergey was saying that it was. But I do think their could be search problem emerging in social networks when people start having several hundred friends and you want to find relevant conversations to your interests going on within your network.
That's great news!
I think the "backlash" is just tech-blog noise.

I actually look in Buzz, and I see people using it to talk. They may lose interest in this venue in a few months or a year, or it may remain viable, but they aren't raging about it.
The advantage when working with Smalltalk is that your application is alive, all your objects are alive ... it's like working in "irb" or "ipython", but with a true IDE that can do all sorts of things.

An exception got thrown? The code browser takes you to the method that did it. You fix the error, and repeat the action that triggered the exception, and since the application doesn't completely die, you only need to repeat the last step.

It's crazy ... with the obvious disadvantage that it's hard to export / import source-code. That's why frameworks are distributed as already built images.
Microsoft hints at Office for iPad
Google Buzz and the Future of Social Networking
I could definitely see Apple doing it on the App Store. If you jailbreak your iPhone/Touch and install one of the piracy app "stores" the whole process is just way too easy. I was perplexed why anyone would waste their time trying to steal a 99 cent app but after using the tools I understand. It's way too easy right now.

We can blame Microsoft for this but we should also blame the pirates. When piracy is hard and obscure it doesn't really hurt much. When these people go out of their way to create super easy methods of piracy and bring it to the mainstream they are forcing companies to react. They don't have to stop piracy completely but instead make it harder so the mainstream isn't so tempted.
The Dancing Guy never fails to amuse. Almost as good as the Hitler subtitle meme.

Of course, a "lone leader" is an oxymoron. By definition, a leader requires followers. The concept of "first-follower advantage", as opposed to "first-mover advantage", is interesting to think about in the context of technology. Haven't most or all of Apple's really big things been "first-follower" or "early-follower" products?
There's some truth to what you're saying (I'm afraid), though a lot of it is more general than just "rich people will help you get rich". You'll learn more around smart people and you'll be more likely to be a criminal if your friends pull you into it.

But overall your negativity throws me off a bit. One definitely notices when a company with many ex-Googlers is bought by Google. But if you think that's how the world is, nothing really stops you from joining Google: what were these guys doing before joining Google in the first place?

Networking definitely helps in a lot of situations (to find a job, to make a deal, to get in touch with the right people), but you can do something to arrive at a place where you can easily network with the right people.
Dragonfly is particularly interesting because it uses the "Scope Protocol" (http://dragonfly.opera.com/app/scope-interface/) to access Opera. In other words you can remotely debug a page on a headless machine running Opera. Or, if other browsers implemented the Scope protocol then you could debug them with Dragonfly too.

On the flip-side you could build your own debugger for Opera which used the Scope protocol to access what was happening in the browser.

I think this is something that the industry really needs, to decouple browser debugging, from browser plugins. I'm glad Opera are making this step.
I Just Dare You to Crash This WebApp (Interactive Python Thread Visualization)
Gosh. Lets just hope that we don't suffer the same fate. Of course it helps that almost none of our friends or family are industrial scale power users.
ZURB Launches Competition to Benefit One Design-Challenged Startup
Private schools aren't a panacea either. I went to a private (Christian) school through 10th grade and my public school experience in my Junior and Senior years was like a breath of fresh air.

Granted private schools vary widely, but I felt I had more educational opportunities at the public school with the availability of advanced Math, Science, and English classes.

EDIT: I also wanted to say that bullying happens in ALL schools public or private.
GTmetrix: web-based pagespeed/yslow reports
It seems unlikely that there was even a solid value proposition.
Could you point to this health insurance? The cheapest I've found was ~250/mo.
Upgrade your Kernel the easy way in Ubuntu | LinuxMint
If you go into a technical field, you can never have too much math. That is, until you decide you've had enough. My CS program made us take enough math that we were only one course away from a math minor, so many of us elected to take an extra course and make it official.

As for physics, I just liked it. I don't think it has ever directly helped my CS studies, but it has enriched my life.
> So I try to just be extra cognizant of the fact that most people just don't _get it_ like we do.

Your experience actually strikes a hopeful note. The latest generation is born into an information society (unlike yours and mine). As long as we (geeks) do not demand [from] the users to code to interact with the software, it is highly doubtful that this batch will have any problems with intricate UIs, and that the problem highlighted by the OP is transitional.
Incorrect statements are incorrect, whether or not anyone's around to hear the tree fall in the forest. I'll accept ramchip's explanation through simile, but quite literally that's the first time I've heard it (I may live under a rock in that, though).

Are you then implying that anything that the majority believes - heck, lets make it 99% - is true, and should be accepted?

Lets put it in geek-friendly terms, dating it back a number of years, so it strikes a chord with yc users: "Windows is the only operating system."
What's special about this ONE cue? Ummm... how about the fact that it can trick your brain into believing it's viewing 3D without including most of the others? I mean... you just said a 2D image doesn't have this one cue, but has the others. That, by definition, makes it special.

But your second paragraph show's me this is all based on confusion. The parallax cue and processing different images for each eye are the same thing, not 2 different things as you're implying. And that's the one of the cues that's NOT turned off.

I'm not defending what the author is saying. I just feel you should read the article again, because your statements don't seem to address anything said in the article.
Agile software development-state of affair
It gives a look into the dynamics among XP, Scrum, and PMI camps as seen at the Scrum Gathering 2009.
This article is very true.Normally when a person is fresh out of college the responsibilities are less, he might not be married or might not have a housing loan etc, so it is the right time to start a startup.
Once a person joins a big company he comes into something known as a 'comfort zone' , its easy to get into that zone by following a defined path or trend i.e to say good college + good marks + some contacts and you land up a good job with good pay.Its difficult to get out of this comfort zone.
I personally feel innovation happens mostly in startups.It does happen in big companies but in bits and pieces but in startups it happens all the time because innovation is the only thing that can make a startup a success.
The Future of Reading: iPad: Apple Upsets The eBook Apple-cart...
Box2d for Flash Compile Errors Fix
An article that should save you hours of hair pulling madness when starting to develop with Box2D - a Flash (AS3) physics engine. Very detailed explenations and steps that any fool will understand.
Palm orders halt on production of Pre, Pre Plus, and Pixis?
The biggest benefit I see to this tool is that it's usable by people who don't have (or want to use) Firefox, or who don't want to install Firebug, Pagespeed, and ySlow and do all the testing themselves.

Also, since having Firebug installed actually disables the Javascript JIT in pre-3.6 Firefox (http://antennasoft.net/robcee/2009/12/15/firebug-and-the-jit...), it saves having to take that performance hit everywhere if you haven't upgraded for whatever reason.
I disagree. Users aren't necessarily leaving your app because they don't like it. You can always offer them an option to opt out of the survey, but a 2 question survey is very valuable to you as a developer. "Please rate your experience, 1-5" "Would you suggest this to a friend? Why"

Also, did you blog about it? Try getting other bloggers to review your product and offer then an incentive for it.
As far as I know, Apple doesn't even make a product with online activation. They use serial numbers or nothing at all. They just don't care about controlling their users.
Your medical expenses will grow as you get older, even if your thought processes don't ossify.

Sidenote: I don't think "conservative" is an appropriate term here; in fact, I don't like the word in almost any context. Desiring to enrich oneself and/or being careful with one's money do not correlate usefully with, for example, opposing abortion; libertarians and the CDU-type ideology opposed to libertarianism (Roosevelt, Chesterton, Dorothy Day, etc.) are both refutations of that.

As far as population goes, we are not close to the carrying capacity of the planet. The only starvation in the modern world is in extremely undeveloped countries governed by the likes of Robert Mugabe; I don't know what a fully-developed Earth's carrying capacity at American or at European levels of consumption would be, but I'm unwilling to guess, since I'd probably low-ball the number severely.

Malthus was right in one sense, and there are real examples of Malthusian crises in the late 18th century (that's probably where the French Revolution came from, in particular); but these days, land in the Malthusian sense is expanding faster than population is -- _much_ faster. And remember, too, the (very Y-Combinator-y) point that each new person brings a new mouth to feed, but also a new pair of hands...
Though in their case, with 4 founders, $6M invested and a $50M exit, it's not "that much" money.

I wouldn't spit on it obviously, but considering some of these guys' former positions at Google, they had probably made a good amount from stocks and such. What I'm trying to say is that it's probably in the same order of magnitude of their worth before that.
> I too find it a bit disturbing not to be able to import/export changes to the base image as text-files and being unable to build a clean image from source-code only.

I also find that disturbing. Another vthing i find disturbing, which may be a related problem is that although Smalltak lets you do all sorts of cool things like rotate its menus 30 degrees while the application is still running, often it just doesn't do what I expect for no apparent reason (other Smalltalk programmers seem to have the same experience). I suspect this progem is related to the fact that you can't simply get the state of the system as a set of text files. For me, at least, developing in Smalltalk feels a bit like walking around wonderingg whether I'll fall in the quicksand.
ScrumPad- A project ecosystem, first of its kind
ScrumPad is gearing up to disrupt two markets- project management tools and IT projects marketplace, by combining the two. The value proposition is allow companies to source and manage projects- internal or outsourced from the same place. Ultimately, ScrumPad wants to be the hub of IT project activities.
> I refuse to accept the idea that I'm predestined to get slower, dumber and more conservative as I get older.

Do you also accept that magic fairies stop your brain from being physiologically affected at all by the process of aging?
If you don't know your customers needs, you have no way of doing efficient "site optimization / keyword optimization".

The lesson everyone should take home is this ... for any buck you spend on marketing / sales / R&D, you need to have feedback (OK, so you've spent $2000 on Google Ads ... but what's the ROI on that?). Can you measure that return? If not, it's money going down the drain (startup or not).
EXo Platform releases open source CMIS implementation
France's Areva Buys 100% Stake in Solar Thermal Startup Ausra
Programming Paradigms for Dummies: What Every Programmer Should Know
Seems like a pretty large founding team and a lot of ex-googlers there. I counted 11 senior/founding members on their site.

$50 million sounds like a lot initially but considering the size of the founding team and that they raised 6 million from VCs I don't think any of them would want to retire just yet.
Java Was Strongly Influenced by Objective-C
I'm not sure if this was meant to be humor or not, so if it wasn't, I apologize; but if it was, you win an internets.

(Is that an acceptable expression around here?)
$50 million is the same price as GrandCentral, which became Google Voice. It's all but impossible to tell how important strategically any one acquisition is to Google until they execute on it. This feels more important than Jaiku/Dodgeball, but really, only time will tell if $50 million was a bargain or a giveaway.
Hey there, there are a few things the author got wrong but the KB will be KB971033.

I work on Windows Update, so can't really comment on anything else about it... but if you want to keep an eye out for it, that's the KB to look for. Anything else you need to know about it (i.e. release dates) can be read about on the Windows Team Blog.

Disclaimer: I don't represent Microsoft.
It's definitely fair of Microsoft to try and protect its intellectual property. However I'm a paying customer and I expect that if I pay for their product I will not be hassled by their anti piracy measures.

Personally I rather have them invest the money they get from paying customers on creating more value for other people to buy their products than to create more "measures" against piracy. We all know that products with any form of DRM have a worse user experience than those exact same products without.
Try some unrefined salts before claiming it's identical to table salt. In the stuff I have, there are clods of red & grey minerals. Sticking your finger in & tasting a bit, you can extremely easily taste a difference. Dissolving it in water, you can see the precipitates, and easily taste a difference. Double-blind in all cases, compared against two other kinds of "regular" salt. I'm careful with what I eat. It's even easily detectable in clear soups.

It's the flavor. Really. There is a difference. There's a definite marketing spin to try to sell it, but that doesn't imply there's no difference.
I knew I could always turn off all the "distractions" and go back to real work. My e-mail client always represented "real work" -- with Google Buzz sitting inside of my e-mail client, it becomes nearly impossible for me to "turn off" my distractions.
Interning for a YC startup? Seeing as YC doesn't really pay anybody enough to live in San Francisco, I have to imagine your best bet is going to be a cardboard box under the freeway in-between 2nd & 3rd and Harrison & Bryant.
Scary.. what would happen if Google deletes my GMail account because I shared some random YouTube music video on my Buzz.
Same with startups. One moment you're in college starting a startup, the next you're 3 years older still doing the same thing. Startups are a more difficult path because they don't always have forward momentum because of the high risk.
That's great to hear, and it sounds like that's helping build a strong, honest culture.

What bothers me are when I see good, capable people who stay with a sinking ship only because they're holding onto hope. I feel like some startups exploit that hope in a negative way. I don't know how often this happens, but I have seen it a couple times.
I just make mine up on the spot. Does no one else do this?

It depends. There are some advantages to winging it: true spontaneity, an ability to have a more interactive presentation that is tuned to the rhythm and responses to the audience.

The oft-materialised risk is that it turns into a rambling incoherent mess.

In front of an unknown audience, the risk is too large, because if they don't feed you the right response, you are dead in the water. At least with a prepared talk you have something to fall back to.

If you know your audience, or if you are determined to engage it whatever it takes (school talks come into this category), a certain amount of off-the-cuffness works well, provided you are confident you know what you are talking about.
Maybe. The advantage of private schools is more choice. The problem (at least here) is that public school teachers are unmotivated and discipline (of both teachers and students) is often lacking.

It seems that public schools cater for the lower 40% of the population.

My problem is not bullying per se, but the atmosphere around it. A school should not be sport centric (as many schools are).
Wait just a second, didn't we have an article about the exact same thing, but about how it was _worrisome_, not _amazing_, just two weeks ago? (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1086492)

What is this, Pravda?
Congratulations Tim and Suhail
> it may just be that the UK government is a bunch of idiots who think it's a good idea to give foreign legal systems this much power over their citizens

Sadly, this appears to be the case.
I seem to recall hearing (from the GNU Smalltalk author) that the text representation of Smalltalk isn't even standard. See http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/manual/html_node/Synta..., for example.
Google Paying Apple More Than $100 Million Annually For iPhone Search Deal
You're a lucky man if your e-mail box is only for "real work." Mine tends to end up with all sorts of distracting crap inside it, plenty of it from people that should be working instead of mass e-mailing links to ridiculous Youtube videos...

Personally, I'll be kind of happy to have a lot of "fun" stuff that previously would have polluted my e-mail folder show up in the Buzz tab instead, which I consider, for all intents and purposes, ignorable.
Video de Akon
Video Music. About the World Cup
True, hence "I wonder" when they do..is wondering something enough to downvote comments?

And yes they do care about controlling the users, they just use other ways to enforce that (appstore, hardware lock-in)
10, Maximalize the number of posts shilling your minimalist book, website, coffee mug, seminar, etc.
> I think one of the reasons Buzz has garnered so much back lash is because it really feels like this sudden intrusion.

The NSFW factor was also a surprise. Who knew some of the people I had exchange an email with had a proclivity for buzzing 'porn or art?' images ...
Web Laureate Classic: "AML (All My Love)"