skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Did you do any sort of memoization of the minmax evaluation?

None. Considered it, but didn't really think it was worthwhile. I was mostly focused on having a good evaluation. I know a lot of my competitors did that, though, but without changing the evaluator it is, as I said, self-deluded.

> For example the expected value of moving up and left should be the same as the the expected value of moving left then up?

That isn't true; that ends up with the wall from the middle move in a different spot.

At any rate, there was a lot I could have done to improve the search speed/depth but I didn't have time, so instead I worked on a better evaluator.

It was pretty interesting -- I would frequently see stronger moves (as best I could tell, after analyzing a losing game) found at shallower levels of search depth discarded in favor of weaker moves at deeper levels. Presumably it assumed the opponent would maximize its Voronoi territory at a time when it was actually a bad thing to do.
Additionally the reviews underneath the movies further down the page are light grey and non-obvious.

That would strike me as something to make obvious - over the film blurb.
Touche. Mea Culpa.
Best practices in web development with Python and Django
A major problem with this graph is that it mixes data from substance-deficient groups with data from normal groups, despite claiming that it shows benefits when taken by "an adult with a healthy diet."

For instance, the data on creatine found an increase in cognitive ability in vegetarians. Since creatine is found primarily in muscle tissue, it makes sense that the vegetarians (who were most likely to be deficient in this substance) would see improvement. However, when they tested the supplement in normal adults, there was no improvement. Yet creatine is above the "worth it" line.

Contrast that with vitamin C. It's below the "worth it" line, and it probably is for any normal person. However, if you were to test it on sailors who had eaten nothing besides canned meat for the last 6 months, it would probably be at the top.

Sure, we can assume that most of us are not vitamin C deficient, but we can also assume that most of us are also not vegetarians and therefore not creatine deficient.

(Maybe they considered vegetarianism a "healthy diet"? But it should be obvious that it's not, since it's almost impossible to get many of the top nutrients on this chart from your diet. For instance, if you want to get omega-3 fatty acids from a vegetarian diet the only way is consume supplements extracted from algae.)
and it weighs just 20 pounds! How far we've come...
My grandma deleted all of the emails from her gmail account because she thought that they were kept on the hard drive and she was getting a new computer. :(
The contest site had a problem with their JVM which interacted badly with their sandboxing environment. The 1-second time limit would disqualify any Java entry that took something like 50ms or more for some unknown reason.
I would suspect they are private for the duration of the Games.
Great idea.

But: what I see there are not reviews, they're summaries. One-sentence reviews would be great, but a review should help me decide if I should see the movie, not summarize the plot. "Intertwining couples and singles in Los Angeles break-up and make-up based on the pressures and expectations of Valentine's Day." is not useful to me at all.
As long as this isn't the first step toward a more iPhone-like development model for Mac.
Achievement Porn Follow up: Meaningful Work
Try unchecking the "Remove Ads. Fix Page width. Reposition print button." setting in Better Gmail. Does that help?
My home town Atlanta was a total ghetto before the Olympics, it forced the city to reinvest into the downtown and it has been vibrant and a nice place to live since then. Perhaps cities shouldn't wait till an olympics comes to rebuild the city ;)
Lesson learned for that interviewer. Lead with the math problem, then go over resume, boost Google, and end the call.
wouldn't it be easier to change your taste buds so that carrots taste like pizza?
Not really a reason. Just stop using their marketing names, and refer to their chips by their chip names/harvest percentage/clockspeed/bus speeds. So, 9800GTX+ is a full G92 running at 738MHz with a 70.4 GB/s bus. See, easy! ;)

Just to update -- if you are buying a card now, ATi is quite probably the better choice, at least until NVidia gets GF100 and it's derivatives out.
"You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it.

I think this qualifies as gratuitous editorial spin. Perhaps not if you changed it to "may", though it's still borderline.
This is something that could definitely be useful but I don't know if I like the idea of having to write everything in pen, couldn't there be some sort of plain-text chat option?
What does this do that Rotten Tomatoes doesn't do better?
I couldn't enter the stock symbol for Sirius XM - SIRI.

When I got to the R it seemed like it would autocomplete to a random stock.

FF 3.5.8, Win XP
Ah hang on.

I see now that you do have reviews. The reviews should be front-and-center on the homepage (and make it simpler), NOT the summaries. I wouldn't even show the summaries, they just get in the way.

Overall, the design is slick but there's too much going on, conflicting with your goal of simplicity in 1-sentence reviews.
Thanks, this will definitely be on my list of things to fix.
When you've been working on something for so long the non-obvious stuff tends blur as you know the site like the back of your hand. Getting a fresh pair of eyes on it really makes a difference.
From the page: "The survey doesn't have an explicit end. You can continue for as long as you'd like or come back later to do more." So, no, it doesn't have a point at the end.
Time To Get Out Of The Bubble And Design For The Average User (Part 2)
Some of the reviews of movies were two sentences, unlike this review of your website.
I wonder how far non-sponsor items goes. If I bring a Pepsi to the games and Coca Cola is an official sponsor, are they going to make me throw it away? What about clothing?
Ask HN : Have you ever programmed with threads?
Everyone knows about how threads are hard to program with but I don't know a lot of people who really used them.

If yes, tell us on which occasion (personal project, enterprise app, startup).
Koper, maybe? :) i come from that city as well but now i live in UK
I've seen in some companies I've worked with that it is seen as more positive if you arrive a few minutes before start time (or before everyone else), even if you do nothing at the time, than to arrive slightly late but stay and do some productive (unpaid) overtime (yes, I'm the kind that likes to sleep until the last possible minute - I wish I didn't have to be at my desk by 8:30 AM sharp but I do).

Edit: and yes I sometimes have to stay late because I got distracted by HN or Slashdot or whatever... I guess I should use the noprocrastinate option :P
Agreed, although my reason is more to do with losing the better part of a days work trying to fix it.
Chile as a silicon valley alternative?
Who actually paid to beautify your city? Was it cost-effective? Were there other ways the money could have been better spent?
Why and How Universities Should Embrace Startup Culture
I've worked on projects that use threads before, but this week I started actually writing threaded code myself for the first time on a pet project (real time ray tracer).

I understand much of the theory but without practice it's hard to know what to do, and so far my profiling has shown that my attempts at threading are slowing down the program, so I've still got a lot to learn.
How to Reclaim Your Attention
I didn't really click the wrong story. But on reflection, I think you're right-- the edit was a little heavy-handed.
Good Lord. I thought I'd go represent the color-weak population. Those were very hard colors to name.
Web teams still need graphic designers to communicate visually appealing messages. And graphic designers moving from a print team to a web team should stay graphic designers.

What a load of crap. Graphic design is to print what web design is to the web. You cannot take a print designer and expect him to design websites. It is two _completely_ different fields.

Design has specialties, and it just so happens that the term graphic designer has evolved into describing designers that are good at working with the physical print medium. On the other hand the term web designer described people that are good at working with interactive display-based design.

Web designers, because they are working in an interactive medium, is expected to know UX design theory. It is part of the job. It is one of the many things that sets them apart from print designers. If they can't handle it perhaps they are just a crappy designer?
The same type of legislation was discussed for the 2010 Olympics here in Vancouver.

-- http://www.leg.bc.ca/39th1st/1st_read/gov13-1.htm --

“specified municipality” means any of the following:
(a) the City of Richmond;
(b) the City of Vancouver;
(c) the Resort Municipality of Whistler.

32 (1) Subject to this section and section 34, an officer or employee of a specified municipality or a person authorized by the council of a specified municipality has the authority to enter on property, and to enter into property, without the consent of the owner or occupier for the purpose of enforcing, in accordance with subsection (4), the specified municipality’s bylaws in relation to signs.

(1) Subject to subsection (2), the Council may make by-laws for the purposes of enforcing its by-laws, including establishing one or more of the following penalties to which a person convicted of an offence in a prosecution under the Offence Act is liable:

(a) a minimum fine;
(b) a maximum fine of up to $10 000;
(c) in the case of a continuing offence, for each day that the offence continues either or both of
(i) a minimum fine under paragraph (a), or
(ii) a maximum fine under paragraph (b);
(d) imprisonment for not more than 6 months.

---

This conversation occurred despite the The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Fundamental Freedoms section 2b: "Everyone has the freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication."

My understanding is that said conditions were removed in the revision of the bill.
There is a point, but it won't be revealed until it's over. http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/03/01/color-name-survey/
There will be - we're working on a text tool.
PlaySpan Partners With Gaming Community Nonoba To Power Micropayments
Is this the site you were asking about in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=622042

What did you choose ?
I absolutely agree with this. The company I work for was forced to take this approach as our designers were unable to come to grips with coding, in the end it worked out to be a great thing!

One additional benefit is that if the graphic designer has less of an idea of the restrictions on design that web-design impose then they are more likely to think outside the box and come up with creative designs...
It's really interesting to look at the trends of the covers.

If you start looking in the 1930's, you have occasional military themed covers, but primarily civilian themes: http://books.google.com/books/serial/wzsEAAAAMBAJ?rview=1...

Then, starting in December of 1940, you only get military themed covers. Between December of 1940 and December 1945, you get exactly two non-military images on the covers (Jun 1944 and Mar 1945), but both have prominent war themed text on them. January 1946 is the first fully civilian cover in over 5 years.

It really makes me realize how distant war seems to us now, even though the US has been involved in international wars for most of the last 60 years. Imagine if PopSci had images of Iraq and Afghanistan on the cover of every issue today.
UK seek to ban web-lockers (YouSendIt, Rapidshare, etc)
There is nothing worse than being the person who gets called in to fix the failing threaded code that was written by someone who sort of knows threading but not really.

I've been saying it for years, most people can not hold all the information they need together to write a complicated threaded system. It is hard and most people do not keep the level of concentration and focus required to use threads beyond trivial to simple use cases.
They're offering a lower price membership to ADC, which previously started at $500/yr.
I am Bulgarian as well, and I had absolutely no trouble reading and understanding the passage on the home page. However, I also studied a bit of Russian when I was a kid.
I was recently on a trip through Eastern Europe (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria) and did not have much trouble communicating with people in these countries.
Mattel Mindflex hack shocks you into serenity
I hear what you're saying about the UX part... I think that this can be solved if the developer has knowledge in this area and can consult with the designer during the design process.

This is the process at the company I work for and it works quite well. For more complex projects that have a lot of interaction the designer comes up with a look and feel and a color palette and then the developer requests additional graphic elements as he feels they are necessary...
Yes! Super excited to get my pre-order in
I'm bulgarian too, and no problem reading (the third column - with the cyrillic text).
"If it fits in a tweet, I don't want to see it anyway."
With mutli-core CPU now almost ubiquitous Threading is completely essential (outside of a GUI). I can't imagine developing a scalable application without threads.

There is a language called Fantom which purports to be "thread safe" I believe by serializing objects between threads, so the data in the objects could easily become stale if not designed correctly.
Interesting background effect on Tick Talk - A Web Conference About Time
I do agree that many times companies try to force their "print" designers into the role of web designers because it's usually cheaper than hiring another designer for the web. Most of the time this causes the project to fail. Either because the designer's work isn't usable online or they don't understand HTML and CSS so they can't implement it themselves and will then hand their work off to a programmer who doesn't know Photoshop.

It all depends on how motivated the "print" designer is in becoming a "web" designer. If it's their choice, they can be successful. "Usability, information architecture (IA), and user interface (UI) design" can be learned as long as the web designer knows that this is a whole different ballgame than the print world.
The Mariposa botnet included PCs inside 50% of 1000 biggest US companies
Interesting -- I'm getting different color names in the sentence, "'<color1>' and '<color2>' are both good answers", every time I refresh the page. I wonder if he's seeing what answers people will give when they're primed with different color names.
We have a lot of turkish/altaic, or just old bulgarian (before our tribe came to the Balkans) words. I'm no historian, and even they do not agree, so take my words with a grain of salt.

I have noticed that we have for a lot of things - two words, one slavanian - that russian/serbian/polish/etc would understand, and one turkish-like that arab would understand.
Generally speaking, a language where every phrase contains the connotation "I am barely refraining you from killing you where you stand", excepting the phrases that flat-out contain "I am killing you where you stand", are not the best languages for international human peace and brotherhood.
I typed in TM, but didn't get Toyota.
This site reminds of MG Siegler's (the TC writer) site Reviews in Haiku: http://reviewinhaiku.com/

While I like the idea of your site, I think the minimalist approach of Reviews in Haiku is ideal for micro-reviews. I was a little distracted by everything on your site.

Good luck!
What about the new Courier / digital journal and what about the surface and project Natal?

http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/05/microsofts-courier-digita...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natal

I know it is hard to compare to things like street-view, android, book search, etc, but it isn't just office and winxp anymore.
As written, one thinks of a poster on a person's wall; but it might be about a person with a stock of bootleg posters for sale. Such rules tend to be specific, but we can't know without seeing them. EDIT or they could even be non-sponsor posters, the commercial concern being an organized attempt to cash in on the free publicity of the games.

BTW: Non-police search for IP infringement has long been allowed, as an Anton Piller order. I am guessing that the test may also have been lowered - and this is cause for concern. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Piller_order
A few years ago, when Rotten Tomatoes began, it was beautiful in its simplicity. Now it's a bloated slow-loading mess. Just a few days ago, I was looking for a simple b.s. free site like this--and here it is!
If the Vancouver olympics are any indication (and I suspect they are), then you won't be allowed to bring competing products (e.g. pepsi vs. coke), though they can't/shouldn't do anything about clothes (turning you away because you're wearing the wrong shirt seems excessive).

We were once told that we couldn't bring in the chocolate bars we had stashed in my girlfriend's purse because they weren't sponsor products, even though there's no official chocolate sponsor of the 2010 Olympics (I suspect it was just a general 'no outside food or drink' rule). The Minute Maid cranberry juice I had, was ok, since it was a coke product. Her Dr. Pepper was not.

That said, the security guy was just doing his job, and was human - after a half-hearted plea ('Seriously? Come on man, we'll be done it all in like two minutes.') he let us through regardless.

I guess what it comes down to is what kind of people they hire: helpful, courteous people, or power-hungry rule jockeys.
Go Daddy Wants Patent for Selling Business Cards with Domain Names
Here's my portfolio

50% Google

15% Nasdaq

53% Microsoft

After 4 Years I finished with 14% increasing, going through picks of 60% and loses of %37.

Good app and a very useful one. I don't invest, but I like stats and to play with numbers.

The leaderboard is also useful to know combination that are successful.

Just one notice: The %number are always in Red, make them in green when there's a win and Red when there's a loss
"What's the website number for your startups?"
-My Mom, yesterday, on the phone.
A founder has to do only two things right
It's easy with CSP http://www.usingcsp.com/
Esp. if your language has primitives for it e.g. Erlang, Limbo, Go

Or C libs e.g Plan9, libtask
:) That was for another website. In the end I used the advice I got here and told them to up the offer or to forget about it.

They didn't up the offer enough so it never went any further. It's been about 8 months now and I don't believe they have done anything with their idea so I guess I made the right decision. If you're interested the site mentioned in that link is this one: http://www.lost.ie
The fact that GoDaddy expects to be able to patent this process again highlights the need for patent reform.

I mean patenting upselling on checkout? Give me a break.
For a startup, Visual C++ in 1997-8. Challenging, certainly, especially when supposedly thread-safe libraries turn out not to be, but quite rewarding.
Ahh yes, as we discuss and create the future, it is so easy to forget that some of us haven't even it made it to the present.

Love ya mom!
No. What I'm saying is that P=NP is a problem, so don't put O(2^N) algorithms into your production software. People seem to be offended by the fact that you can't run certain queries in realtime the moment you start talking about scale. It isn't my arbitrary definition, it's a fundamental limit in the physical universe.
Surprisingly easy to understand for me (I'm Pole). Interesting idea.
Ask HN: Niche ideas for a scalable platform project?
Hi all,

I am currently working on my final BSc paper, which deals with the design and implementation of a scalable platform. By "platform," I refer to the type-3 platform, as per Marc Andreessen [1]: "the platform provides the ‘runtime environment’ within which the app's code runs." Well-known examples of such platforms include Google AppEngine, Heroku, and Force.com. You might as well assume this platform is running on an infrastructure cloud, such as Amazon EC2.

Now, as you can imagine, this is a complicated topic. My initial approach was quite pragmatic: I could try to build a platform for running casual web applications and document the design decisions. Optimizing resource usage is integral to this as well.

However, I then started to think that I could approach the problem from the practical side. What would people like to use a platform for? How would it solve their problems? Therefore, I'm looking for your crazy ideas.

Web applications aside, these sound interesting:

- A platform for high-frequency trading (I know this is hard);

- Hosted voice applications (like Twilio, but code runs inside the platform);

- A platform for service integration (providing/consuming web services, mainly).

In the end, this might involve creating a domain-specific language, providing a tight integration with other systems or hardware, etc.

Looking forward to your comments.

[1] http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-three-kinds-of-platforms-you-meet-on-the-0
Alternative title: "Change the title you your web designer's business card." This is all stuff that the web designer is supposed to do.
I can't believe your comment was downvoted. These are very valid questions.
If you want to be a startup founder, you either need to be young enough that you have little or nothing (financially) to lose, or you need to have a spouse with a steady job and income, like a doctor or dentist, along with decent benefits.

You also need separate finances to impose a loss limit. The spouse's income, except for a pre-agreed amount, is not to be used for a startup. That's for paying the mortgage and the kids' expenses.

To answer your question: I think so. Overnight success at 28 is the exception, not the rule, because the experiences and contacts one gains as one gets older are valuable. There's a tendency to focus on these outliers, but most successes happen in the 40s. The same is true in research: a few mathematicians are known for peaking (or dying, like Galois) in their 20s, but most will do their best work in middle age. That is less true in the era of post-tenure burnout, but that's a result of the bullshit one has to endure in order to get tenure; after it, most are discouraged and spent.
I don't see why this would make a difference. The only reason it would, is if the tenancy agreement of those private individuals banned them from using their space for commercial reasons. Even then, this would be a civil offence and not a criminal offence.
:) That's fantastic. I haven't seen that site before.
The difference between WWII and the wars of the next 60 years is that WWII was one the people rallied behind. The American people have never supported a war since then.
<---- the joke

o <---- your head
Right, and neither does Windows CE. :) Chrome OS certainly does ship with apps preinstalled, just like Windows.
Greed kills: Why smartphone lock-in will fail and open source win
I assume you are moaning about not being able to develop iPhone/iPod/iPad apps on non apple hardware?

I know what you are saying but do you seriously expect Apple to port XCode to non-osx platforms?
Well in a sense the security at events in Vancouver were supposed to enforce that. They did, with a thankfully human touch (you could persuade them to let you bring in things like chocolate bars, etc., but nothing overt like a bottle of Dr. Pepper).

At most (non-sporting) events in Vancouver, you didn't even get a pat down. Dump your change in a bin, go through a metal detector, get your stuff and leave. Anything non-ferrous in your pockets went unnoticed.

I somehow doubt the UK will be similar.