skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yup, I did read his Fooled by Randomness before I read this one. That one blew me away too. The Black Swan succeeded in in being even more impressive though, and I think it covered quite a bit of new ground.

The Black Swan is longer, and has a bit more technical coverage. I liked that, but I've heard from others that it gets in the way of the main point about how to deal with randomness.

Regardless, both books are insanely good. Worth the time and money for sure.
If you refer to http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/luajit.php my answer is: maybe. As far as I understand the JavaScript benchmarks there were made before the most recent speed improvements (JaegerMonkey, present in Firefox 4 beta). In my simple tests, the speed in some loops can reach the speed of C, with the times better than LuaJIT.

Still, LuaJIT is easier to obtain and run, as far as I know.
I believe he's referring to the end: If you could save the world, but to do so, you had to destroy New York City, could you? Should you? How much evil is acceptable in order to do good?
I'm really guilty of spreading myself too thin with projects. Recently I asked myself a different set of questions to evaluate what projects I wanted to work on, and it made deciding very easy:

1) Which ideas can be turned into a company?
2) Which have the most attractive success scenario?

I spent too much time focusing on any idea that could make money. Well, the problem is that making money really isn't that hard if you know how to ask for it. Every idea that came into my head was good enough to work on - if you ask yourself question number 1 a lot, you'll have the same problem.

Once I started focusing on question 2 everything became much more clear. You have to ask yourself a lot of questions to get to an answer; the questions (and answers) are far more personal than you can ask advice about. If you're going to give up a significant portion of your time to succeed, it's important that there's a big enough payoff for you at the other side. For some people, this is purely financial; some people want to make "popular" software that everyone uses. There are people who just like working on interesting problems, and people who really just want a day job where they can be "the boss".

If you decide what's most important to you, it should be much easier to decide what to work on. You'll end up with the added benefit of being much more motivated to work towards a goal that is desirable to you; not one that everyone else thinks is desirable.
"I make computers go fast."

(About to get my PhD, doing research in systems and high performance computing.)
You can't compare (or compare in an unfavorable way) the fundamentals of these companies with the fundamentals of hyped web companies, also many of those companies were profitable quickly and follow the IPO way. FourSquare will be here in ten years? Twitter? Zynga? M&A can make them durable but IMHO their fundamentals are more volatile: Google is not just a company who configured open source software and develop some scripts, some of their processes (adwords) can't be even copied with virtually infinite money (microsoft=>adcenter, yahoo=>overture, Apple=>iAds). We can argue that you can't copy/trash the network effect of facebook but we are in the prehistoric moments of the hypercompetitive web and their fundamentals are more volatile.
But javascript does not have something like numpy. You can easily get one to two orders of magnitude faster using numpy when applicable, and a MP3 decode certainly falls in that category.
I think that scum might be a little harsh. Google indexes and makes money (through adsense) on a lot worse things then content farms.

However, just like a Torrent site will rarely show up on the Google's first page for a TV show name, their algorithm needs to be adjusted to account for mills that value profit over content.
How do you send file attach attachments?
She's talking about the end of a particular wave, which is fine.

There will be new waves.
I think a wave is something that occupies a certain period in time.

If there isn't any energy left in the wave - it doesn't matter how fit or energetic a person is .. they're not going to be able to surf very far.
When I was in school, many classes were standardized on particular models such as the TI-83 and TI-85. On the first day of class, my teachers would always say "I teach using this model and if you don't have it, you are on your own". I didn't want to be on my own so I bought the recommended model.

In business, you can price based on "cost plus a markup" or you can price based on what the market will bear. In the case of TI, they price based on what the market will bear.
I don't think lispm was expressing a judgement on The Glass Bead Game, but rather pointing out the subtext of the book. The parallel with Ulysses is not applicable, IMHO; a day of a man's life is just the ostensible surface of the book, not its subtext.
... you just have to patiently wait for the next to come along.
That was an excellent suggestion. It is more lightweight than any other full-functional, graphic browser I have used so far.
Unless your server-error page has ads on it.

Hmm...
Aha, now your statement makes sense to me. I did not think of that possibility.
A long, long time ago I coded an MP3 implementation for a TI Fixed Point 16bit DSP@100MHz (family 5XXX IIRC).

I initially wrote it in floating point C (compiler translated float to fixed point) and it was damn slow.
I then rewrote everything to use fixed point arithmetic only and dropped down to about half a second of decoding for a second of data.
That wasn't still good enough because the DSP had to take care some other stuff like ide drives, dma, fat, dac, usb , display drivers etc, so I rewrote all critical parts in assembly taking advantage of the chip's build in dsp functionality and dropped to 100ms of decoding for 1s of data.

So it might be helpful to start from a pure python implementation then move your way down, you'll still learn a lot.
Something, Something, Something, Detroit
I'm a computer geek.

That's it.

I usually get a short, puzzelled stare, followed either by either a "what, exactly?" if they wanna talk about it or a "oh, change of subject..." if they don't. However they answer, go with the flow.

BTW, I'm currently a sysadmin, but I'm a coder at heart.
i can't for the life of me figure out why the 3x3 apartment building was divided into two bipartite graphs. can someone please explain? i thought each room is connected to any adjacent building.. since "Passing only through walls, ceilings, and ﬂoors" is an option??
Presumably the benchmarks would indicate immaturity by being slow; but it's not obvious what the benchmarks can be compared with. Are there other implementations of the same algorithm, with identical benchmarks?
Will fix that...
well you already outrank them, so maybe you are paying them to get the customers you already got.

how much are you spending per click there?
Flusspferd (http://flusspferd.org/) has GMP bindings, and there's no reason that node.js (for example) couldn't be hooked up to GMP as well.
I think you can upload your own extensions to Picloud.
I wanted it to be a seamless page, but the forum and wiki emit full-page XHTML/HTML - not something you can emit into a placeholder element.
"I'm an infrastucture engineer. I keep all the underlying stuff working so that people who build software and websites have a place to put it."
CAS on platforms which provide CAS for lock-free (x86/x64), LL/SC on platforms which provide LL/SC for lock-free (ARM).

AFAIK, platforms provide one or the other; not both. So you have to use what you're given.
That's a good suggestion; I can make locking versions of the same benchmarks. I'll add that to the list...
What I do: I write the software that lets other software developers get their job done; and in a circular way, I use the software I write to write the same software. If someone is technical, I can explain that I work on compilers.

But when I want to explain to non-techies what it actually entails: I say I sit in front of a text editor which contains precise instructions telling the computer what to do; and I edit it, slowly and experimentally, trying to get it right. It's almost like a poetry epic: low-level rhythm and rhyme, but high-level story.
This is assuming that performance is an issue, which I would guess is not the case for at least 90% of uses. For most cases I'd say ease of use and cross platform makes select "better" than epoll.
I make things go.
Having been, the big thing I feel I didn't do enough of was networking. I met a few folks, but really could have done much better at introducing myself to new people and maintaining the connection afterward. There are amazing people there, try to meet them all:)
Ask HN: How do Hackers kill time when bored on weekend?
I usually watch some tech-talk which is not too techie.
That's exactly the problem why our plugin (http://api.alii.tv) doesn't add the webcam output. I cannot figure out a good way to acknowledge user about the use of webcam and the potential security risk turns me down. Obviously, another problem is how to transmit the decompressed data in real-time to browser. I am interested to see their solution to the both problems.
Just an ineresting tidbit, wolfram|alpha originally tried to sell their iPhone app for $50 dollars with the rational that they offered a product that in many ways exceded the capibilities of a graphing calculator. Nobody bought it, because it was overpriced for an iPhone app. I know that I feel just as familiar using wolfram as I do using a TI.
It's a little tricky, since it would be hard to duplicate the feat of making this film on a $15,000 budget.

But I do think this film will be a landmark in the on-going story on the de-centralization of power in the film industry.
The replies to this comment seem to have missed one important point: You or I might not want to eat a Chicken McNugget, but millions do.

You and I might consider Demand Media-style content to be shit, but there's a market for it. We might want big, meaty content written with clever words and insightful conclusions, but the mass of the market wants little snackable boneless pieces that they don't have to work too hard to digest.

Demand Media understand this. They understand that the Internet is now predominantly used by people who read at an eighth-grade level, who don't know how to use browser tabs or ctrl-f, who will go straight for the back button if presented with big blocks of text. Demand Media seek to produce huge amounts of content that is just good enough to be the most relevant content for any given long-tail search term. They do that better than anyone.

Google aren't fools, they aren't being gamed, Demand Media are just creating content that is the most relevant content for very specific search terms. It's not of great quality, but it's the best that's available. If you know how to form a search query then you can find better content most of the time, but most people have neither the ability nor the inclination. Cheap, convenient, omnipresent. It's the stuff empires are made of.

Like 99.99% of products in the world, it's not bad, it's just not for you. If you are strongly opposed to what other people consume, you have three proper grown-up options. Either take it up with them, satisfy that demand better, or ignore it. Railing against the people who fulfil that demand is going to get you nowhere.
Birds of a Feather
As someone on the other end of that trade, living in AUD while earning USD has been incredibly difficult in the last two years, and it's not going to get any better anytime soon.

The irony is I passed on buying a flat in London because I was worried the AUD would get weaker and I wouldn't be able to afford the repayments.
Polya and Szego's "Problems and Theorems in Analysis I & II" are classics. If you can work through any part, you will have learned a lot.
The deal is that they are pretty much required and if you have a captive market then you can make your price whatever the poor folks will be able to pay for it.

Or would you like your child to be behind the rest of the class?

This sort of thing will happen whenever a piece of gear becomes 'mandated'.
The usual opening question in Ireland is "where are you from", and it's similarly awkward to answer for me (I'm not really from anywhere specific). If you're a foreigner in Ireland, the follow-up question is often "when are you going back?" - not intended in a xenophobic sense, but rather an assumption that one wouldn't want to leave one's home area for the rest of your life.

But I'm not sure there really are better ways to start a conversation that leads into talking about the people, rather than third-party topics. Probably a better answer to "what do you do", if you don't like the gambit, is to talk about your hobbies, or make something up that is only tangentially, allegorically or metaphorically about what you do.
Sometimes it might be wise not to let people know exactly what you do. As a warning, I was golfing with my father and group of people who have the same profession. I had been doing contract work with a Big Company as a report writer (yes, I know, but the money was really good). It so happens one of the reports was a customer facing document (receipt of sorts) and it was specified by people who dealt with other Big Companies and not regular customers. This caused said report to be pages long. The professionals in the golfing group all had dealings with Big Company and had received many pages worth of this report. My Dad mentioned, by way of explanation on what his oldest kid did, that I had contracted to Big Company and had written said report.

...errr...

I found out, for the next 13 holes, how much they disliked said report with detailed explanations. I was no longer contracting with Big Company, so no feedback was passed on. Dad now understands why I give a very short non-specific answer.
> You get an identifier by which to look up all the collected knowledge of humanity on the brown-throated thrush

Judging from Google, the collected knowledge of humanity on the brown-throated thrush consists only of this Feynman anecdote in different variations.
> What really annoys me, is when people respond with 'Oh right, I.T.' or 'I have a friend who does I.T. too, yeah he fixes computers at... '

You shouldn't let this get to you. These people are just trying to relate to you based on this new information.

To someone outside an industry, most people in it can appear to do the same thing. Just think: how many types of airplane mechanics/portrait artists/theoretical physicists can you identify? To people in these and many other industries, I'm sure there's an incredible variety of roles and job descriptions.
It's true that Numpy is much faster. I believe there's a lot of native code in Numpy and once we consider the libraries encoded in C, any language can be as fast as any other, as soon as we can offload enough to the libraries (for example, Perl has also some official C extension mechanisms: http://perldoc.perl.org/h2xs.html and even old Visual Basic was able to call DLL's written in C).

However, I'd really like if at least something that's now a part of Numpy (which I believe is now even more a language extension than a library) would become the part of the Python language.
Why not add a little box "find this song at:" and iTunes/Amazon/whatever affiliate links?
I've been considering an arrangement like this too, only I've heard a number of stories about people who kept taking "weekend" trips to renew their 90 day visas only to one day not be able to re-enter the country. I've overstayed an EU visa and no one seemed to care (I was traveling so much between EU countries that I honestly wasn't even thinking about it) but if you overstay somewhere like Singapore you can literally get caned. I'd look into countries where there are easier ways to get >90 day tourist visas, like Cambodia or Hong Kong.
1500 visits per day is not 'popular' by any stretch of the imagination, not to rain on your parade but that's still very small fry.

What you do have is validation that you have something going on there, now you need to analyze what that something is and if there is a way to get it to grow to a substantial multiple of what you have today.

So, what I would do with it is analyze the crap out of it to see if it has (autonomous) potential for further growth.

You also need to figure out why it dropped again.
Plus almost all of the users that do stick around go for the high-end financial referrals that Mint pitches them based on their data. Cost Per Action fees for rewards cards and mortgages are through the roof for complete signups of high-value people.

Their conversion rates are terrific even when you include the vast majority of people like us that sign up and never use it again. They were making quite a lot of money when they were acquired.
I make systems that help people stop ships from banging into each other. Essentially, I write computer stuff that lets people play "video games" with real life 80,000 tonne tankers, the idea being to help them go efficiently while keeping them out of places they shouldn't go, and keeping them apart.

Oh, and we help find the bad guys too.
That is one of my answers. The other is to grin broadly and say "Code monkey".

People get a bit of dissonance when they see me saying that, since I'm a bit old for using a keyboard full time. But programming is one of few things I've found that I love [Edit: and people will pay me doing], so I went back.
My biggest pet peeve, which perhaps is my own bias is that when someone says "programmer", I take it that they pretty much know how to use an if statement, loops, call functions, but that's it. You can hire people on Rentacoder and elance with that skillset for < US $10 an hour.

I guess "programmer" doesn't capture the bulk of the value of someone with a computer science background. But maybe there's my problem. Non-techies probably equate CS with just programming anyways.
I grew up around reservations in the northern plain states of the US. The opening question tends to be some variant of "Who are your relatives?". It can be quite uncomfortable if there is / was some dispute between relatives of theirs and yours.
Mostly agreed... but Dominion seems like it doesn't have much real human interaction. It's more like playing simultaneous games of solitaire with your buddies in a race to the victory conditions. I haven't used all the cards yet so I could be mistaken, but it seems the only real time you can affect other players directly is with the militia, which you can't target and just slows down everyone else. Tthat's not to say there isn't fun to be had, like in chaining together multiple Markets in a round.

You should also check out Bohnanza; similar ideas, fewer rules to parse, plus inter-player trading.
By the time the career question comes up I have already asked them about theirs, shared with them what I know about it, and "thought out loud" about what I think is most difficult/interesting/new about their industry, that they think I am a peer or an insider.

We all know something about every industry and every line of work, or at least have the interest to inquire about it (if not for anything else, because we're completely ignorant of it.)

Share what you know, show interest, and shut up.

Allow people to see you under their own favorite lights. If you can hold a conversation with a scientist just fine, no need to tell him you're an entrepreneur. And if a business man likes your management acumen and eye for the market, no need to call yourself a code-monkey. You're all of the above, but keep the conversation at their pace, ask questions from most general to more specific, and let them categorize you through the course of a mutually comforting conversation.

This is why you don't jump into an elevator pitch with everyone you meet, just because you got an idea and a GoDaddy domain.
Why are there alot of people not using the ASK HN or Tell HN: anymore?
Being a resident and being a tax resident are two completely different things. There are a few Asian countries (I believe Thailand) is one where you only pay tax on income if you're classified as a permanent resident. If you're on something like a 90 day business visa then Thai tax laws don't apply.

Contrast that with somewhere like the UK where you're deemed a tax resident only if you've been resident in the country for >= 178 days in the financial year (regardless of visa status). Combine the two scenarios, carefully managed, you can greatly reduce the amount of tax you pay.

It cuts both ways though. Somewhere like Australia which has a different tax year to the UK and it's possible to incur a tax liability in both the UK and Australia. You'd need to submit a return in both places, thankfully they have a tax treaty with each other to avoid paying double but you'll still need to submit returns to both.

But back to the OP, it's exactly this kind of approach wealthy individuals use to avoid paying taxes. Claim tax residence in a country that only wants your money if you're actually living there, live somewhere else that only wants your money if you're earning it in that country.
Whenever I mention I work on iPhone apps, the person I talk to always has an amazing idea for an app, and thinks I should write it for them.
Yeah, I think it's definitely different in the U.S. than Germany, regarding Facebook's hegemony. Hardly anybody uses anything else here.
This doesn't provide any evidence other than traffic TO Techradar from Digg. This title is the true exaggeration here.
and if they are non-techies, they by definition don't know how to tell a qualified vs unqualified techie anyways :/
Software Developer, because calling myself an Engineer doesn't make me one.
Depends who is asking. I have discovered that in many social situations, people don't really want an elaboration or know details. It's a "friendly" question and they want to try to relate. Perhaps with a followup like "my friend works on computers", "like apps on the iPhone?", or "oh, wow, I never got into all that tech stuff."

If they're actually interested and want to hear more, they'll follow up more detailed questions.

I'm pretty sure it's the same for anyone with specialised/deep skills.
I tend to think that AdWords augments search for generic inquiries and cannibalizes it for brand queries, and I've got data kicking around somewhere here for both of those being true for BCC. (I still bid on brand queries, because I still see positive ROI on them, just not nearly as positive as AdWords thinks. Long story, ask me some day when I'm not due at a conference in 20 minutes.)

I seem to have broken the Google AdWords interface and can't get exact data at the moment, but my CPC at content farms ranges from an average of 4 cents to an average of 8 cents. They send some of the highest quality traffic which is not direct from competitor's websites. (I wouldn't have predicted that but, hey, data knows more than I do.)
You've met one, now!
The dream for many speculators is to break the euro, at this moment as blue1 says is unthinkable in practical terms, and China is coming to the rescue, first with Greece and we can think that if needed then Spain. What i find funny (sad) is that the markets still believe in Moody's and their friends, after the disaster thet help to create with their ratings.
Another good source is online poker forums. The biggest is 2+2. Plenty of card players have moved abroad and play remotely.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/92/travel/
thanks so much for your welcome.
I have a question for you: what are the reasons that determined you to learn and develop for Android?
I'm asking because to me it's all about motivation. If I have very meaningful reasons for what I'm doing, then I enjoy doing that, and don't quit too soon.