skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe you can help me out here, but how is she a geek?
When I mentioned that it may be possible for a web startup in beta to improve the speed of their code by a factor of 1024 over no particular timescale, I was downmodded by five points ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=187692 ).

I can only advise that you shouldn't quit while you're ahead. Now that you've eliminated the most obvious performance bottlenecks, you may find that less obvious bottlenecks have emerged. Removing these could give you an additional factor of 10 improvement.
Renaissance is the fund management company. It manages several funds, which have different returns because they use different strategies and have different benchmarks. Which fund do you mean? What strategy are you talking about?
Social Mediu U: Take a Class in Social Media
Live: Facebook Discusses New Profile Design
I have been sitting management accounting exams for fun. (Well, really to keep in study mode - half an hour a night every night is maintainable - unless you stop, then restarting is hard.)

I would highly recommend them to programmers. Because the maths is frankly trivial for anyone with an engineering or CS degree the textbooks are easy enough to skim, and once you have digested them they give you a solid theoretical basis to attack business problems.

Understanding cost and revenue behavior may not be as sexy as making people stand up in meetings, but it's a damn sight more useful. At the very least it can give you a hint about which people you should make stand up.
It was submitted as a standalone post. There are no comments on the new submission.
Something doesn't seem right about Doctorow's example of attacks on children. He writes, "But the fact is that attacks by strangers are so rare as to be practically nonexistent. If your child is assaulted, the perpetrator is almost certainly a relative (most likely a parent)."

I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't answer the real question. For most parents, the question is: given my child's particular environment, what is the greatest threat to him?

Doctorow is saying: given that your child was attacked (and no additional information), the attacker is more likely than not to be a relative. That seems backwards.
PHP Unit testign
Interested to know what tools people use/recommend for unit testing for PHP? What do people think about PHPUnit?
Work experience can be extremely valuable in starting up. I would even recommend going through the startup process as an employee if possible to learn some good and bad practices.

Personally my parents think I am crazy for attempting it. My father who ran his own business for 25+ years strongly encouraged me not to do the same. However, like him, I have the desire and he recognizes this.

Parents want the best for you, but don't necessarily know what is best for you.
Blockbuster reveals own next-gen box it will use to kill Netflix
Probably not. Remember Amdah's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmdal%27s_Law
Movies as a platform, can anyone say Movies 2.0
A better wording is that your chance of having the disease if given a positive result from the test is 1/10000 (0.1%).

That's a huge increase from a 0.0001% chance of having the disease, but it's still not flat out terrifying. Repeat testing can weed through the false positives at a speed proportional to its accuracy.
There is a high ration of signal/noise on Reddit and PBS alike. This may very well succeed but, it might just be preaching to the choir.

I was about to comment that I was happy that the information on Reddiit was going to reach a larger audience but, I wish PBS would reach a larger audience.
We're using the SBCL profiler on a regular basis to speed up the system whenever we find an area that feels a bit sluggish. We've made very large speed gains with only minor coding modifications.
Git Management
The majority of society demands to be entertained, not to entertain. Those that entertain are put on pedestals to be worshipped (either with praise or scorn).
The causation implied here is unlikely at best. More likely might be that until the last century no one had to deal with numbers large enough to need these kinds of statistics.
You're right, it was RIEF down for the year, but even Medallion suffered losses in August, here's his letter to investors explaining it: http://www.dealbreaker.com/2007/08/simons_warns_about_august...
allow me to summarize: giles bowkett is impolite on social sites such as this one, therefore they're all doomed. also, there are people on the internet that cause him trouble, like tim bray and cory doctorow.

whew, such a heady brew of straight-up TRVTH that guy is dishing out. i'm still reeling from the force of it.
Of Aviation Crashes and Software Bugs
Interesting that the very post in question is a pristine example of a flash of genius insight ("What's broken about the social news model and causes every social news site to turn into hogwash eventually") buried in the middle of a tedious rant.

To Giles: If you want to make the world a better place take a look at yourself and make a change! The value of this post could have been communicated in about 3 paragraphs, with no dubious pictures and ranting nonsense.

That said, a very interesting point.
Too bad for Ron Paul that this didn't happen sooner. He may have gotten 4 delegates rather than 3.
He's stating that the evidence is P(Was Relative | Child Attacked) is relatively high, especially compared to P(Was Total Stranger | Child Attacked). This means that it should, if you use Bayes' Theorem correctly in everyday life, shift your suspicion away from the random photographer.

Of course, since P(Child Attacked) is so very low it's still not a huge deal.

It's not really backwards. That sort of inversion is exactly part of Bayes' Theorem.
My parents support me as much as they can, despite limited knowledge and understanding.

While I'm sure they'd love to see my startup succeed, they are sensible people and are always highlighting the advantages of more stable, 9-5 type of employment. We definitely don't see eye to eye on many things in that regard, however they are always interested in what's going on, what we've got planned, and are always there to celebrate the little successes. When it comes down to it, that's all that matters.

That, and maybe some seed investment :]
I don't get how you're guaranteed to be rich in 10-15 years. If it's a 1/4 chance of being rich every x years, it's still just 1/4 chance over the span of 10-15 years, right?

However, I'm going to guess that you mean every time you try is going to influence the next time you try for the better (as evidenced by some paper about higher success rates for 2nd+ time entrepreneurs I remember on here), which makes sense. You learn from your mistakes, you make contacts, you have a better view of the market--so it shouldn't stay one in four every time you try.
Strong typing is one of the reasons that I LIKE Java. Especially on large projects it's nice knowing exactly what a variable is, and what data elements and methods are available.

I hope this doesn't lead to people using sloppy typing in Java applications.
Premature optimization may be the root of all evil, but failure to optimize isn't too hot either.

Glad to hear your results were so dramatic.
One thing many people seem to forget when discussing PHP is that if PHP vast library of built in functions doesn't do what you need, you don't have to live without, you can just write an extension, recompile, and you're in business. PHP allows you to write important logic in C, giving me yet another reason use it.
That's why it's super important that you can hack up a prototype very quickly. It may help to learn a RAD tool, or Lisp.
Have you read the post? You missed the most important 3 paragraphs in the middle about repeating the mistakes of slashdot, digg, reddit.

Tell me, what is news.YC doing to not repeat the same mistakes?
I'm aware of Amdahl's law. I also know of a case where adding an index to a production database gave a factor of 1000 improvement. If your design started as a proof-of-concept, you made a rash assumption, you had a tight deadline or you're just plain incompetent then there's almost no lower bound to initial system efficiency.
"If it's a 1/4 chance of being rich every x years, it's still just 1/4 chance over the span of 10-15 years, right?"

So, no matter how many times you roll a die, you've only got one in six chance of rolling a 1 in all of the rolls?

Somehow, I think your math is slightly off.
Your design seems perfectly good to me for what your site does. It has a library-like feel.

To get more attention, I think you should check out the FriendFeed API. Although it would mean more comments that aren't on your site, it would make it easier for people to share summaries.
PHPUnit is easy to install and implement. Writing unit tests is a simple matter of extending the test case class and throwing your logic in the function.

Would recommend.
Oh, dear. Now I feel obliged to say something, but all the original reasons against discussing the AI-Box experiment are still in force...

All right, this much of a hint:

There's no super-clever special trick to it. I just did it the hard way.

Something of an entrepreneurial lesson there, I guess.
I've been using websnapr.com for the web app I'm working on. It seems to be the best web-based solution around, but it does have some drawbacks, like thumbnails for new sites take some time after they've been requested before they're available. The "unavailable" thumbnail that they show in the mean time is a bit obtrusive too.

I think I'll be looking through the links in this thread to see if any of them are a better alternative. There's definitely room for a web service to do a better job at this, and it probably wouldn't be too hard with these utilities in the backend. It could even let you choose which one to render with...
I'm very impressed with your quantative approach. I'm also very curious about the type of modifications you're making. What proportion of changes are local changes which affect common cases, what proportion of changes are local changes which affect corner cases and what proportion of changes are architectural? Is it 70:20:10?
One thing that stood out for me is the lack of actual description of problem they were solving.

Location can be a solution to "too many online friends, I want to select a subset" problem, but that problem clearly was not attacked head-on (not sure if it even exists...).

Location could be a solution to "I have several offline friends but we're so busy we don't meet often, only when we bump into each other. Would be nice to bump into each other more often, eh?". Clearly this problem was not targeted either.

It seems they were trying to address problem of "how do I meet strangers on the street". That problem does not seem to exist, as most people do not seem to want to meet strangers on the street.

Any traction that they have had seems to be of "I want to belong to an exclusive club of cool people like me" kind of thing. It's real problem and while competition is strong market is very open due to its nature. Of course you really have to work on maintaining exclusivity and feeling of being "special", which it seems they neglected.

They should have figured out problem definition, that always helps.
Being a human (not a transhuman) it seems likely that Yudkowsky can only stumble across static arguments that convince gatekeepers to unlock the AI Box (rather than invent dynamic arguments on-the-fly so as to "take over the mind" of a gatekeeper as he argues a transhuman intelligence might do). These static arguments are finite (or, at least, the number of them stubbled over by human intelligences is finite), and are likely not very effective if a gatekeeper has pre-knowledge of them (forewarned is forearmed).

Keeping these arguments secret may be the only thing that allows Yudowsky to simulate a transhuman intelligence?
I think it was about as in-depth as you are likely to get published in a (UK) national newspaper. One small but well-written step in the fight against the innumerate sensationalists that dominate the press and no doubt contribute to the populist over-reactions from the UK government.
I would also like to add a big THANK YOU to Paul Bragiel for spelling out the lessons. Humanity advances the fastest by pooling knowledge and Paul has certainly contributed his fair share.
"Medallion's 3.9 percent return during August, though that fund too was whipsawed by volatility, bolstered Simons's reputation as the silver-bearded wizard of quantitative investing."

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&refer=ho...

So you may mean that they suffered from volatility in August. But making 4% per month is not bad, even if there are 10% swings along the way.
So far I haven't really used it for anything but minor stuff. But I have a very good impression, it took only a few minutes creating the slice, the management interface is great. No cons at the moment.
http://www.sl4.org/archive/0203/3149.html

http://sysopmind.com/sl4chat/sl4.log.txt

It's such a tease knowing that the information once existed. It was up there for 48 hours, but robots are blocked.

The reason to not disseminate the chat log is so that you can continue simulating the AI without giving away your tricks?
Great page layout and graphic design! Peeking at the CSS, I notice that the main div is called "paper" and that the offset lengths are measured in centimeters and millimeters. I find that intriguing and unusual. Was the layout created with a WYSIWYG editor? Or is it due to the designer's preferences?
Tiny robot replicates grasshopper's long leaps
You are very adorable. Just making an observation.
In any non-trivial project there comes a time when code becomes... complicated.

No matter how well designed the code and no matter how often the code is refactored, reality imposes on that neatly designed little world and makes the code sub-optimal.

This is when being able to understand code becomes important. To get inside the head of the author is an invaluable skill (even if the reader and the author are the same person separated in time). To understand why they did what they did (the answer is not always "they were morons"). To understand how to change the code and still guarantee the underlying assumptions.

Also, I would say that being able to read and understand code is even more important when your co-workers are equal to or above your skill level. To try to puzzle out why they did something can lead to an "aha!" type moment which are invaluable in learning new ways of solving problems.

So I would say that being able to read code is important. Maybe not "one of the finest tests" but an important test nonetheless.
Thats a good question. Our workflow is to look at the profiler results, and work on the functions that are taking the most time. Sometimes we'll find a function being called far too many times for the page being viewed, so we'll look into the program logic to solve that. Our code is highly integrated, so most pages are using functions or methods common to many others, so a fix (or a bug) effects a large part of the system. The example 100x triples improvement sped up the entire system as triples are used at the core of our security and relations. This is a long winded way of saying I'm not sure what the proportions would be, a guess would be 60:10:30
Oh no.

reddit has been slipping hard in quality, for me at least. Its front page will have you convinced that Iran is the best thing since sliced bread and everyone in power is out to kill you.
Giles, I know you're reading this. We refuse to take you seriously until we see pictures of Paul Graham in a sombrero.
This is neat. It's actually 100 short tips for entrepreneurs in PDF form: http://blogs.jobdig.com/wwds/files/2008/02/ebook.pdf

The tips might be common sense around these parts, but they're good as far as I can tell.
Create your own language on the DLR, step by step
Here's another one - from April this year:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a6eS...
I use Debian for servers all the time. Uptime, stability, support, etc all world-class. Well, there was that OpenSSL bit last week, but let's ignore that for now ..

The packaging system is great, but you really do need to understand it or you'll spend a lot of frustrated hours appending '--force --work-damn-you' to everything.

Debian major release cycles usually span several years. If you want to use the latest version of whizz-bang software you'll have to
- selectively include it from 'unstable', or
- build it from source and install it on the server,
- or (my choice) build it, package it in .deb format and put it on a private package repository and have the server install from there.

Debian infrastructure is about long-term planning. This means figuring a lot of things out, but it tends to pay off in the long run.
Fifteen Stupid Responses to Criticism
We only optimize when things start feeling a bit slow - never prematurely.
None. I've got things to do...
She says she is, because in any other community she's just a normal looking chick. Claiming geek gives you +3 on the 10 scale. See iJustine for reference.
This isn't true. You don't need a distributed sharded setup in order to scale. (You probably do if you are limiting yourself to MySQL) I built financial applications way back in the day that had a lot more reads and writes than twitter, and we just used ONE gigantic, super expensive database server.
My comment was aimed at your down-modded comment. You can make 10% performance improvements in dozens of modules throughout your system, but if they only account for, say, 5% of the total execution time, it won't make much difference.
I'm a big fan of Streem (http://streem.us), and I swear this has nothing to do with the fact that I made it.
Oh no! A fund that correlates with the S&P is down about 12% from peaking in May to early April! Meanwhile, the S&P is down, um, 13.8% from peaking in May to early April! So the fund is slightly outperforming its benchmark, even though it's dropped. I don't think anyone invested in the fund hoping to lose 12%, but this is within the range Simons said to expect. One thing you claimed was that we should expect stable, high returns, and the occasional massive crash. And yet the massive crash you predict has not materialized! Instead, we have a slight decline, mirroring a slightly larger decline in the index one fund follows -- as well as a record-breaking year, in which Medallion appears to have earned over 100% before fees, on over $5 billion in assets.

It's suspicious to me that you point to their low-risk institutional fund's losses as proof that their high-risk strategy is dangerous, even as their high-risk fund is posting record gains.
Does the World need another Scheme system?
It's presumptuous to say that voters effect any real change in government policy.
Is that you, Giles?
A baseball cap that reads your mind
I replied, and ended up writing more than I had anticipated, and put it in a blog post:

http://webjazz.blogspot.com/2008/05/segmentation-of-social-n...
Thanks for the great site, David.

I have a feature request. Can you please display a simple html table with title, author, link etc as columns for all the books squeezed? That will help find books.
Shark Week: Foolsville 2.0 | Tech Jaws
Social Search at LinkedIn Beats Google
We could fund the Department of Homeland Arithmetic with lottery revenues!
I'm trying to make a point about their overall strategy:

It is easy to have low returns with low volatility - just buy bonds.

It is easy to have hight returns with high volatility - just buy penny stocks or emergent markets.

Their Medallion fund was doing something that defied that rule for 20 years, it had high returns with low volatility. Up until August last year.
Mathematicians Reveal Secrets of the Ancient and Universal Art of Symmetry
Even if that is true, it can still be true that a good way to judge between two coders is to look at how fast they can understand a piece of test code (they look at the same one, of course). If true, it could be a faster test than having them both write an application, no?
How to watch Chelsea-Man. U on the Web, for free
He's right about delicious. After an hour browsing, I'm rather in awe of that site. It has a very good signal/noise ratio. Almost as high as dzone & much more readable.
Do you have anything online about your architecture? I think it'd be interesting to see how those 100k queries per second get served.

Hey thanks for OpenDNS by the way, I'm a long time user, and I love it.
Ask YC: How do the Karma points work?
How are some comment points negative?

What is the difference between new and newest?
Is Your Web Site Fast Enough for Google?
Yes, he was the AI in the experiment.
The four quadrants of web apps
Does anyone know what algorithm the karma point system follows?
What about the fourth and fifth AI box experiments? I know those failed, but do you feel they could have succeeded? Were you ever close?
Happy Birthday Web 2.0
When you get more karma you can vote comments down. That's how they go negative.

New (in the title bar) and newest (in the URL) are the same.
Best idea inside:

If you do the math, it's actually quite obvious that if your popularity contest for ideas inherently, by its structure, favors people who waste their own time, then your contest will produce winners which are actually losers. The most popular ideas will not be the best ideas, since the people who have the best ideas, and the ability to recognize them, also have better things to do and better places to be.

Regarding:

I want my blog banned from Hacker News. I'm not even kidding.

Suggestion: don't leave it up to News.YC to implement this. Set up a mod_rewrite, or even just a JS insert, which checks for a news.ycombinator.com referrer and bounces traffic to an error (or gross-out) page. Voila -- submissions will be rare, and those that are submitted won't be promoted.
Also, can you give us your thoughts on the current state of the path to the singularity?
This was a pretty interesting article. Overseas, they often imitate sites that worked well in the US. 2ch is the only site I know of that is imitated in the US.

2ch is pretty wild. There's a true story of a nerdy guy falling in love with a woman he rescued from a groper on the train. He proceeds to ask 2chers for help on what to wear, what to say on the dates, and what her actions mean. The 2chers end up staying up way past their bed time for juicy date updates until he finally gets the girl. Eventually, the story and thread was made into a book, and subsequently, a movie. It goes under the name "Densha-Otoko", which roughly translates to "Train Guy"

Half the weird stuff you see on youtube with a white cat comes from 2ch. There's that weird "hardest mario game" that you see on digg with a white cat...that came from 2ch.

It's rather impressive that he can smell the air for cultural itches to scratch. Often times, when you're mired in it yourself, it's harder to see the forest through the trees.
The most important thing: use one of the long-term distros. If you choose Ubuntu, go for the LTS even when it isn't the latest. If you're a RedHat fan, pass over Fedora for CentOS/RHEL. If you go with Debian, don't use testing.

My personal opinion is that if you're already familiar with RedHat/Fedora, CentOS will fit you better. Most of the time with these things it's familiarity that will trump all the superiority that fanboys flame about.
I think the bottom left quadrant should be rounded: if a website doesn't scale at all, there's no way it can have a lot of users. I wonder if there are other constraints like this one, and what shape the graph would then take...
Interesting point. You'd have a control, but a control that I place little value on.

In your example, I'd still have them both code something. That's almost always a half hour well spent.
I'm now curious as to why you switched from zeitgeist to molotovs. The yuppie hordes at Zeitgeist are extreme but it is so hard to move back indoors...