skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are right that for a individual investor focused on the long term, a algo-order probably wouldn't make a difference in comparison to a market order with your E-Trade/Schwab account (most likely, your order-flow won't go directly to the market anyways; it is either crossed internally, or re-routed to a broker/dealer that's paying retail brokers for the order flow such as Timberhill).

However, I respectfully disagree that humans are better at making trading decisions than computers. The world of algo trading can be divided into two sides, a) high frequency traders, who through fast cancel-and-replace limit orders and colo with the market centers, try to act as virtual market-makers (or scalpers, depending on your perspective), b) buy-side institutional fund managers who want to complete their orders, without HFT predators and negative market pressure. Large block orders are spliced into small lots (i.e., VWAP) and sent to the market using intentional limit price over time to hide the movement of a huge buy or sell order on the market.

Human beings might be better than machines at picking single stocks for long term investing (although most people are probably still better off investing in an ETF). But that's not how sell-side traders make money in the first place. Guys like GS/MS/Timberhill make money by having the unfair advantage of faster execution speed, more capital and specialized trading algo's against the small retail investors.
Get a blog and a Twitter account and just start. Soon enough you will discover what works
Great idea in theory, but what are you supposed to do in the meantime? "Online Dating Can At Least Be Practice": http://www.onlinedatingmatchmaker.com/online-dating-can-at-l...
> This is what happens when you play a zero-sum game. Even if you win, someone has to lose.

How is it always a zero-sum game to win? Fundamentally, trading stocks is not that at all. If I buy one of the first issued shares of "Tasty Ice Cream" for $1 because I want the company to spread their goodness as well as get a return on my money, no one has lost. If I lose my job the next week and need to sell my share which may be valued at $1.10 the person that buys has not lost, especially if he receives a dividend long enough to cover the $1.10.
I agree on the article but not on the API. In my opinion the real reason your startup should have an API is because it's good design.

The thing that always bugs me about the API debate is that an API is just another word for "Business Tier with User Authentication". So 90% of the work that you put into making an API is work you should already be putting into your business layer to begin with.

Startups should create an API/Business Layer up front and then use that to build their own app. Then they can decide whether they want to open it to the public
Spend some minutes thinking about how people talk/search about your topic then include some keywords in the title. It does help if what you want is traffic.
I hope this isn't the case, but you may be right. Too much money/fame at too early a stage in the project might not be such a good thing.
Missouri is not in crisis (yet). The (Democratic) Governor has laid off more than 2,000 state employees and he and the (Republican) Legislature have proactively cut the budget in other ways (local education funding is about to take some significant hits, e.g. busing). Or in the case of state higher education they struck a compact with the schools that if state funding didn't drop they wouldn't raise tuition (that's lasted two years but is not expected to hold for too much longer).

Except for the usual borrowed from the Feds unemployment deficit I don't think we're in bad shape (yet).
Practice, practice, practice.. it's the 10,000 hour thing, but magnified. Back in the dot com boom, I was first a writer and then an editor and yet while I excelled with the writing, my titles sucked and were always rewritten! A decade later, I'm finally getting some great headlines now and then and I've been trying hard.
Google's VP8 video codec (and ffmpeg)
Even people with very high level math knowledge fails to predict the market (remember the two noble prize scientists who failed?).Since you're out of school when you were 17, I doubt you'll able develop complex schemes (unless you are a very very rare genius).
Mafia wars updates
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Look to none other than Long Term Capital Management[1] back in the 90s to see how dangerous a game it is to either algorithmically predict or automate a thing as emotionally wrought and, at times, institutionally manipulated as the market.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management
In case it wasn't clear, his game isn't just a web app that lives on the home screen as a bookmark. It uses the Titanium Appcelerator, which is a thin native wrapper around a Webkit view. The app logic is written in JavaScript, rendering is done using HTML/CSS and/or SVG or so. FWIW, this actually obeys the arbitrary App Store rules: C, Objective-C, C++ and JavaScript (if run in Apple's supplied runtime) are allowed.
~$100/day is ~$100/day. Its nothing special, but if you have a couple apps that sell like that, you can make a decent living.
There's no reason it should take you 6 months to find a date online (though you are using OKCupid, which tends to attract emotionally unavailable women, IMO).

I don't want to write too much, because it's all pretty much been written.

PROFILE: be funny, but most importantly, end with a "call to action": http://www.onlinedatingmatchmaker.com/how-to-write-an-online...

FIRST MESSAGE: keep it short. It's called "the one-line hook" http://www.onlinedatingmatchmaker.com/match-messages/

CLOSING THE DATE: make very specific suggestions, pick a place in her neighborhood http://www.onlinedatingmatchmaker.com/how-to-get-a-date-onli...
Ask HN: Creating banner ads, need some help/advice
Our startup is looking to use banner advertising to help increase sales. So I have a few questions for the HN community:

1) We have ideas of what the theme of some of these banner ads will be, but we don't know the best wording that should be used. Should we get a copywriter? If so, where? How much should we expect to pay?

2) We can do the ads ourselves from a creative (art) perspective, but it may make more sense to have someone else do them for us if they are better. Where can we find a good designer for banner ads? Again, how much should we expect to pay?

3) Is there a resource online where we can gauge the potential success of these ads? We're interested in knowing what we can expect for CTR rates and/or CPC.

4) Any additional information that we should consider?

Thank you for responses ahead of time!
Ask HN: Hackers in SF looking for a room?
Greetings! My roommate and I are looking for a new apartment in San Francisco around the time our lease ends August 13th. We are thinking about finding a 4-bedroom apartment, and splitting the rent 3 ways. The 4th would be a guest bedroom/office/crash pad for visiting hackers (which would be frequent since my sofas are always busy during conference season).

My roommate is just a nice finance guy, and I'm an ever-enterprising tech entrepreneur. It would be awesome to find another hacker/entrepreneur to move into the 3rd bedroom.

If you're interested, please email mhalligan@dnsworks.com
Run your own openid server in 2 minutes
Seriously?

I hate trolls like you. A lot of us work really hard on making it the best damn platform ever, and it is, and then some quack who doesn't know anything says "it's just like Windows 95" which shows that they didn't even bother to try it out, or take the tour on ubuntu.com or even watch a recent video of the latest release on youtube. And that just sucks the fun out of life.

Please, actually take a look at it before saying something ridiculous.
I remember reading about someone saying that Google should do this for their home screen. Then someone else proving that black actually costs more than white.
Some of the drawings make me wonder if the kids were coached towards a specific message...

http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/david.html
Some problems just can't be solved with the current toolkit. Sometime you need a different toolkit.

For example, ESR derives a development methodology for open source software using Austrian economics.
Look on the bright side. Many people dedicated their lives to the search for a process to turn lead to gold. This seemingly fruitless search lead to all kinds of neat discoveries. You've learned lots of valuable things that you wouldn't have learned otherwise as well. Keep searching if you must but start benefiting from that knowledge.

The real secret about turning lead to gold is that it is possible, but by the time you have mastered the skill to do so, you no longer need to or want to.
on Apache, SSL and VirtualHost don't play together.
Digg 4 open for the next hour or so
Head over to http://new.digg.com and request access for an invite. They'll let you right in. Not sure how long it will last. Kevin Rose said on TWiT today that it will be available until the hour is up. What do you all think about it?
Hey congrats on doing this. NLP on tweets is not trivial at all given just how colloquial it is. I like being able to navigate a visual map of what people are talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Trout
SF is notoriously anti-business and the center-of-mass of Silicon Valley is probably somewhere between Palo Alto and San Jose (depending on the sector) which is why businesses have offices on the pennisula and not SF. Also, costs are much cheaper outside of SF. Its not your company's fault if you choose to live in SF and commute.
bowbow. As people have said, this is incorrect…unless you're using an OLED or a CRT.

Wrote a thing regarding Blackle and energy efficiency a few years back:
http://euphemize.net/blog/archives/2007/10/23/the-blackle-ho...
I recieved a chat request from a women 30 minutes after I signed up, while I was editing my profile. She looked like a model and her profile picture was her in a bikini. It took her 5-10 minutes to respond to my IMs, which were mostly me asking her if she was a legit and "her" saying "yes, I'm real." uh huh.
I think the article is somewhat disingenuous.

The author complains that running Clojure per the simple instructions in the distribution is not a valid way to program, yet, then tears into the complexity of much more complex setups, which due to the fast-evolving nature of Clojure are often extremely fragile.

The command-line invocation of Clojure will work if you have a valid Java setup, and with the addition of jReadline, you have a decent, albeit bare-bones, environment for experimenting. Copy and pasting code and running it directly works, and once you figure out how to 'source' in a file, you can start building something modularized and significant.

I wrote about a 5000 line Clojure program, fairly early on, and ran development cross platform with just an SVN server at home on my mac, svn clients on mac and Windows, and notepad for Windows development, and TextMate on the mac. GUI design for Swing was done in NetBeans and could be loaded on the fly easily by Clojure.

Note the conspicuous absence of Vim, Emacs, Slime or any of the other fragile setups that people think they need.

Clojure has great facilities for modularization, and it's dead easy to use, but familiarity improves with practice in doing what actually happens instead of just pushing buttons in an IDE.
FratMusic.com searching for tech co-founder
FratMusic.com is searching for a tech co-founder. FratMusic is an online music forum targeting the college demographic. Before the site was shut down in May for legal reasons, we reached 100,000 visits a day. We're looking to re-launch by the beginning of September.

The site needs someone young and hungry to work their ass off for equity. Interested programers should contact mark@fratmusic.com.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/fratmusic.com#
Supposing black does take less energy to display, I wonder how often and how long users would need to stay idle to even break even after increased energy is used to load the script (even when it's not used) and fire to the animation when it is.
Because it's not a storefront to sell apps, it's just a catalog, and the developer of the webapp needs to take care of anything like that on their own. The submission/review for these is basically a cursory look to see if it's actually an iPhone webapp, categorized correctly, etc., not much more. How would Apple try to cash in on these when most of them are free or tied to a service that I assume a lot of developers created the webapp for in the first place, rather than have to fork over 30%/pay the $99 iOS Developer Program fee/deal with review hassles with Apple?
Probably not. Even if you (unrealistically) assume that there isn't a huge amount of overhead to designing and maintaining another Mac product, there's a huge cost involved in complicating their product line and confusing customers. Part of Apple's computer product strategy involves an extremely simple product line with few options.
Your ISP (AT&T) is paying them. Sorry, it sucks, but media cartel extortion is the new business model for sports.
I don't quite understand why this article doesn't recommend using <link rel="canonical" href="..."> as described at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y... (resp. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-...)

Such an easy solution to this problem.
You'd have to be pretty naive to think being legal would then suddenly mean you can easily make it. Burgers are legal. The vast majority consume them. Now open a burger joint and corner the market! Oh wait.. Health code regulations? Employee benefits? Payrolls? Tax? Inspections? Fire code? Have to be better and/or cheaper then the big chains? Who would have guessed running a successful business wasn't trivial!

People who were in the game before competed against anyone who couldn't run a small time dry cleaning shop. They were in it because it was illegal and those good at business was instead running legal businesses.
Don't get high on your own supply.
Let's make the web faster
if you're on a .Net platform, you may want to take a look at Dundas Data Visualization http://www.dundas.com. Just try to avoid the defaults :) We use these for data vis at http://allegiance.com.

Also, Theresa Neil posted a good list of 28 data vis tools here http://www.insideria.com/2009/12/28-rich-data-visualization-...
it was a clarification of the loot policy. since only backers get loot, its for backers only.
Well, I was speaking broadly...

But the point is that we have many examples of recommendation systems that do work reasonably well and working reasonably well is what I suspect would satisfy most users.

Further, a reader which could learn reasonably well from passive observation would give users the base do explicit tagging and rating.
Just to present an alternate viewpoint: I live in Palo Alto and actually like it! At least for me it's hard to think of a place where I am free to set my own schedule, choose my own office, leave whenever I want, enjoy gorgeous weather, and visit friends at Stanford in the same way that you'd think of a 19th-century company town.
I find myself excited over the preliminary results of my increasingly sophisticated simulations

This. The vast majority of the money being made in the market is being made by people with what you may consider a laughable lack of "sophistication".

Start simple. Complex modeling of stock market behavior only makes sense if you think the stock market has a complex underlying structure.
Robin Hanson: "Economics of Nanotech and AI" at the Foresight 2010 conference
Just try to keep in mind that when someone says "I built X in just Y hours" they tend to omit the "and have spent Z years developing the skill set required to do that."
Felons are prevented from owning bars, a felon could not get a liquor license.
I didn't warm to Python until v2.2. Took an article by Eric Raymond for me to take another look at it and it finally clicked. Great for trying out ideas, etc. But I still write all the heavy duty stuff in C. Its really cool to do the heavy lifting in C and expose it as a shared library and then do the coordination stuff in Python.
Creative Problem Solving with Gregg Fraley - IM #3
Do you believe that there are public policy questions whose answers depend on science AND are very important? If so, then it should matter a very great deal.

In other words, if you're the kind of person who believes that either climate change is no big deal or that there is nothing that humans can do about it, then it doesn't matter at all. Alternatively, if you think climate change is a big deal and that humans can do something about it, then public understanding of science matters because altering it might kill/save a few hundred million people. Do you think the lives of a few hundred million human beings matter?
Thanks. I've had to develop custom corpora for handling misspellings, netslang, SMS slang etc... even with this very early demo I have ideas which I haven't implemented. The next releases should do a considerably better job.
The only interesting part of the post is this:

"ps. Progressing along nicely, expect more updates soon, and maybe even screenshots :D"

I got an email version of the post about a week ago.
You can change the world
Fascinating article, I love compiler design.

I wonder if code cache locality (of the interpreters) ever becomes and issue or is that level of concern irrelevant because that's ages away from being the bottleneck. What other issues (besides maintainability) does this approach have.
Any Idiot Can Throw Shit into A Box and Call it Better
Looking at stereograms is seconds at a time. Movies, TV and video games are hours at a time.

There are reasons previous attempts to mass-market polarized stereo 3D -- a technology over 50 years old -- keep petering out after short periods of enthusiasm.

As evidenced from the SRI/Sega experience, this demonstrable lingering effect on stereo vision is a major factor.
http://www.jqplot.com/ is one that I've been using lately.
I certainly had very similar issues when starting out with Clojure (and am still running into them now), and I'd had previous development experience with Java and used Emacs before Clojure.

That being said, I do believe the "noob experience" is improving, and the community Clojure fosters is inviting and welcoming to newbies, as far as I've seen.

I've begun work on a tutorial to get people up and running with Clojure, but I will be recommending Emacs in it. As someone in the comments on the blog noted, if someone's goal with Clojure is to crank out a web app in 24 hours, they've come to the wrong place. Emacs enriches the experience, and I truly don't think it is as daunting as it is often made out to be. Gaining basic productivity in Emacs, even if not excellent productivity, takes little time, and the benefits of using Emacs seem large to me.

Regardless, the sentiment expressed here is important to consider. There should be a sanctioned IDE for Clojure, and it shouldn't just be Emacs and clojure-mode.el + Lein, at least not to start. Along with clojure.jar, I'd like to see Leibke's clj script packaged and promoted. That way, like with python, irb and newlisp, you can download and immediately get started with a functional REPL to see if you like the language before investing the time in setting up the ultimate IDE.

And yes, documentation. Please, documentation. It's in the style of LISP to have little to none documentation in code, as the code should explain itself. And it certainly should, but a little exlanation here and there can only help to enlighten those not as familiar with the language and save the time of those in a hurry.

But now is an exciting tine for getting into Clojure. Don't let the initial challenge of getting into it deter you!
Very impressive Mark - congrats!
Same here...That said, Firefox is still a real dog in OS X compared with Chrome and Safari.
Sign me up as a wetware guinea pig!
I bet a big factor in his iPad sales is the "gold rush" effect of being one of the first batch of iPad-only/iPad-optimized games. That's not to take away from whatever good qualities it might have. But I'm sure it is a factor.
Xbox has been profitable for some time now (over two years), not sure where you're getting your info from.
The suggested rewrite rule is even simpler than putting a <link> tag in every page.
Psychologists at Virginia Commonwealth University monitored 30 chronically anxious people during guided meditation. Seventeen percent indicated that their anxiety got worse.

17% of 30 = 5.1 people.
Why not just say "five out of thirty indicated ..."?
Lego for Grownups
Alchemy and transmutation of lead to gold is a pretty apt analogy for John Nelson's quest to turn his model of the market into gold.

a) The alchemical belief in transmutation was based on a thoroughly wrong understanding of the underlying processes. John's (and other's) lack of success indicates a faulty model.

b) Ironically, it transpired that, under true nuclear transmutation, it is far easier to turn gold into lead than the reverse reaction, which was the one the alchemists had ardently pursued. Nuclear experiments have successfully transmuted lead into gold, but the expense far exceeds any gain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_transmutation
> Real Bobs tend to reject `unfair' proposals, even when the game is not iterated. That's not rational (at least within the game).

It is rational when you add to the game the human consideration of post-game retaliation. The threat of revenge for injustice (whether by the loser, or an arbiter) creates the potential for "fairness and generosity." Real Bobs are made to stop playing.
Do you think his research will result in type I diabetes being cured in humans in our lifetimes?

Should it not be obvious that such a question exceed the ability of even the most sophisticated doctors and biologists today, not to mention anyone on HN. I'd agree that conspiracy and collusion is always part of human behavior but this doesn't prove that anyone knows the path that future efforts at cures will follow.
Not me... does it make me a non-engineer then?
Ask HN: Which Android Phone to Buy?
Is the Nexus One from Google the best choice? Or, should I consider another device from Verizon, etc. instead?

Ideally, I'd like to have a simple pay-go plan, as opposed to a fixed cost per month.
Worst comes to worst they can just merge with one of the already-existing distributed social network projects out there and rebrand it to Diaspora:

http://onesocialweb.org/
http://appleseedproject.org/
It's much-much easier to grow food in Antarctica, than on Mars.
("letters in this sentence".split(//) & "and this one".split(//)).sort.reverse.join

I'm just learning, but I think this performs it correctly with sets.
Oh, I realized that after I read the article. I just misinterpreted the title.