skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Either you play optimally OR you (semi)bluff.

You can't have both. If you play optimally you lose. If you only bluff you lose. So you have to find a balance. And when you've found it, the other player will change his style so you're in the dark once again.

And the deception also affects your image (your perceived playing style). So the bets you make affect future hands, and the expected profit from future hands. That's what makes the game interesting.

What you describe is a game where you play against one of N players each hand, and you don't know which one. And every hand you get a different anonymous opponent. So basically you have no prior knowledge about your opponent, and your opponent doesn't know you. That would be a really boring game, and mostly number crunching.
I don't think it's a good buy personally.

Good product, but there are too many free options out there, and a lot of general turmoil in the virtualization space right now.
It's not that I haven't heard of it or macports, it's that I haven't really found a need until now.
They forgot robots. Microsoft is actually marketing a robotics suite! Its almost too cliche to even mention windows running robots going beserk etc....
Some people like paying $$$ to people who give them valuable goods and services. Just because the distribution cost is close to zero, it doesn't mean that the value of the product is close to zero.
They're trading at over sixty times their highest-ever earnings. I guess you have to wonder why, if virtualization is able to earn them such great returns, they don't have more competition.

My guess is that their product will get cheaper and more commoditized, and those 15% profit margins won't last. But I don't know much about the industry -- that's just what happens in tech, in general.
Seattle's version of this "ridiculous" idea: http://www.mudbay.us/

Mud Bay Granary isn't exactly a bakery, but it does nothing but sell expensive, organic, gourmet pet food. It's been in Seattle for years, and there are at least a half-dozen stores.
That's a good point. I went ahead and created a Google Group in the event that this becomes a regular thing (http://groups.google.com/group/nyyc). From here on out I suggest we use the Google forum to suggest locations, dates, etc.
Mine the long tail: Google keyword tool now has # of searches/month data
Hmm. That is a good point.
#3 Give me a listing of all the houses in my city sorted
by (value of house/taxes paid). That would go a long way
to bringing equity to the assessment system.

I think that Zillow.com already does something this, don't they? At least they show what houses in the area have been sold for, and what current listing are.
Too long...

Didn't read...

Not because it was...

too long...

really....

but because...

it didn't make...

any sense...

the information....

density....

was just too low...

I understand...

conversational writing style...

but do people....

even talk like this....

I think not...
It wouldn't collapse [all of] the financial industry. Any banks which may already be insolvent without FRB loans would have to declare bankruptcy. There are probably a couple solvent banks out there. Failure seems to be a fair and natural outcome for businesses that are poorly managed or choose unsustainable business models.

The FRB can remove the slosh by not rolling over loans to primaries when they come due, and by putting back the trash securities they took as collateral through the TAF and TSLF.
Wonder what the cache rate is that they could need billions of queries for such a simple site.
Thanks. Your question made me really think.
Why facts won't demolish the conspiracy theories
First weekend of August is great for me.
latimes showing some ycombinator love of late.
good write up, captures the unique side of this cool company. sounds like a fun place to work.
"Oil is skyrocketing because we are consuming more oil than producing. On a daily basis."

Oil has been fluctuating by as much as 10% per barrel in a single day. That's not due to changing global demand. Global demand for oil can't even be measured that precisely.

Right now, the oil futures market is overreacting to everything -- up to and including speculation that the market might overreact next week. The overall trend is correct, but there's no rational argument for the ~$50 gain per barrel we've seen since the beginning of the year.
I had a similar experience. My first copy of linux was the RedHat 7 distro that came with "Linux for Dummies", and it cost $20. At the time I didn't have a CD burner or a good connection, so it made sense.

It was also nice to have the book, even if it didn't make me much better than being a Dummy.
Massive Internet security flaw uncovered
I agree. "Thus far" is what I'm worried about. This is a valuable community and at some point will need defending from the hordes. There are lots of ways to do that, hence my question.
Just curious... Do people really buy linux off the shelf? Why? The packaging? Docs? Box?
"Scientists at the University of Cambridge have for the first time identified a key component to unravelling the mystery of room temperature superconductivity, according to a paper published in today's edition of the scientific journal Nature."

"We have successfully unearthed for the first time in a high temperature superconductor the location in the electronic structure where 'pockets' of doped hole carriers aggregate. Our experiments have thus made an important advance toward understanding how superconducting pairs form out of these hole pockets."

They seem to be at least a step closer. I can locate the Nature paper, if you wish for more details.
Heredoc syntax (am I the only one in the room who didn't know about this?)
no. not yet, at least. their P/E was astronomical before, and its still kinda high. will need to drop more before i consider a purchase, myself. if it dips below $20, i'd consider it.
Thanks for the condescension. I couldn't agree more on cost not equating value - I am an avid Ubuntu user and would gladly pay for its value as an operating system. The above was a joke - apparently not a good one, but a joke none the less. It was intended to be delivered at the expense of BestBuy, not Canonical - surely you are not presenting them as providing valuable service ;) But alas, a joke that requires an explanation was clearly not a well executed joke to begin with - I retract. Thanks for the education on value and economics. sheesh.
You have clearly never played poker.

What is it with people that think this kind of quip buys some sort of credibility? This is the second time today that someone has started a response with "Clearly, you have never...". I have played poker. I have also baked (reference to other thread).

Anyway, I don't buy what you're selling. It doesn't seem that it would be hard to make the computer be unpredictable, unless suddenly humans become good at figuring out the machinations of a pseudo-random number generator instinctively, and in real-time. Make the computer do irrational things at random intervals. The whole point is that a human player, not knowing what cards the computer has, will have little introspection into the computer's intended course of action. I suppose you could tell some things, depending on the rules of the game (i.e., if the computer traded 3 cards in a 5-card hand, you might assume he had a bad hand).

Essentially, it seems that you just said "it's easy to beat the computer if it plays stupid". That doesn't have anything to do with this. The computer can be both a perfect number cruncher and entirely unpredictable, and given enough dealt hands, I don't see how you could beat it.
Furthermore, this was apparently a cooperative movement between Canonical, ValueSoft and BestBuy to make a more accessible and user friendly Linux available to the masses.

http://blog.canonical.com/?p=18

Viva La Linux Revolution!
not really 'project' ideas, more I want data requests.
Free & Proprietary
That's a blast from the past. Pete's QB Site was a big website in the QBasic online scene.

But yeah...terrible article...

...
So they can drive up their valuation with an inflated number of "registered users".
What really stuck out to me was how pleasant it was to read a news story about oil that wasn't alarmist. I kept waiting for the "Burn the witches!" segment that never came.
What Microsoft wants from Yahoo
Global disease alert map
NYYC Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nyyc
Could work as a Facebook app, actually.
The one thing I noticed from the Flickr comments, 37signals comments, and the 2 threads here is that there's a lot of feedback from programmers to programmers.

Fine. Lots of good data. Maybe even some that will go into product improvement. It's a necessary but not sufficient step.

What we really need is feedback from paying customers, legitimate prospects, and monetizable eyeballs. We can critique each other's stuff all day long, but sooner or later, we need to get this in front of the users.

There's a pretty good tradition here at hn called, "What do you think of my app..." There's usually a lot of good feedback, but don't get fooled into thinking this is anything other than pre-alpha.

After reading all of this drama surrounding TripLog, now I'm curious what the real users think.

(My customers always have additional and sometimes very different feedback from "hackers". One of their biggest differences is regarding the mouse. Some of them never want to touch it during heavy data entry sessions. Talk about something drastically changing the UI...)
I tried these out for converting image-only PDFs, but the installation was getting ever more complex and unstable. I made a time-is-money decision and purchased Vividata - *nix based command line utility - which is a shame as I would've liked to have got these working. Almost all the other products were Windows based - urrgh!
If anyone has a different experience, I'd be pleased to hear from them...
Summary: "There's a highly exploitable design flaw in the domain name system. We're not telling anyone what it is for thirty days, though, so the open-source community can't fix it themselves within days and embarrass larger vendors. Patches will be sent out without context, so as to make it only slightly challenging to reverse-engineer them[1], and impossible to trust they're not actually creating worse vulnerabilities."

[1]: See: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/04/reverseenginee...
The st5rangest thing is that i actually have a /home/pavelludiq/dev/shit directory and i have all my unfinished stuff in there, actually, most of my code is in there. But the article still sucked. I have the most horrible handwriting, if i write my programs by hand it would take much longer and it would be a real pain to read, plus editing would be impossible, and copy\paste would not be present to aid me in time of need. And syntax highlighting would be missing, and debugging would be impossible. This guy is a real QBASIC hacker :D
Permission and Content. Evaluating Sharability through Quick-MI.
Print layout software is in common usage, meaning the yearbooks start digital.

Parse the index to intelligently parse the pages, and make a web-ready version.
Well, the original article did include Red Hat in the list of vendors. I don't expect that the details will remain secret for long.
Woo, something semi-usable.
Boo, 3 year contract terms. (seriously, this only happens in canada with the 3 years contract terms. I almost want to have some regulation to limit it to 6 months, but regulation is what got us in this mess in the first place)
I use dual 19" lcds. Even with the lcd farther back i still have to turn my head to see everything so I usually sit staring at one of them and keep what ever I'm not working on the other other one. Itunes, a web page, stats or something with a status bar.
http://jsonml.org/ is similar.

What you have done helps when server response is json/xml(which can be converted to json).

JSON is very nifty format and programmer friendly. Last year I had done some tooling to read JavaBeans using asm convert to JSON. We has wrapper over service classes to return response either as XML string or JSON.

check out this too http://blog.ketankhairnar.com/2007/06/json-utility-using-asm...
But I'm Buying For My Website Honey... | My Philly Network
Senate Passes Spying Bill And Grants Sweeping Immunity To Phone Companies
Senate Approves Telco Immunity for Illegal Wiretaps
While Red Hat is a Linux vendor, they already have some closed binaries floating around. Look at "binary blob" drivers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_blob
I use a tiling WM and a 24" monitor and I love the "minimalism" of it. It took quite a bit of getting used to, but not constantly seeing IM notifications and new email alerts has measurably improved my productivity.
The selling point: No more downloading; you can view everything in your browser.

Huh? What have I been doing up till now?
Lots of local governments already do this.

http://www.txcountydata.com/

This one in particular also makes historical valuations and tax bill records available.
Passpack releases Host-Proof Hosting Library
I find the motivation behind his contempt and scorn to be not that of someone who despises a murderer, but that of someone who is envious of someone's superior intellect.

Notice how he attempts to belittle Reiser, how he throws in the "genius" word . . .

I have been the focus of that sort of envy before, and it is written ALL over that nitwit's piece.

He's pathetic.
Changes to SearchMonkey's DataRSS format
Competition trumps regulation for keeping suppliers honest.
Sounds like mostly good ideas, with a couple that have already been done, I think:

3) # Give me a listing of all the houses in my city sorted by (value of house/taxes paid). That would go a long way to bringing equity to the assessment system.

txcountydata.com. Let me also add that I don't know that there's a lot of inequity in the system. In my town, the only inequity is that some properties haven't been assessed as recently as others, and that has everything to do with a lack of manpower and the amount of energy a property owner is willing to expend in his defense (i.e., you're not being treated unfairly if you don't even bother to fill out the protest form).

11) Sort car models by crash and repair data.

Consumer Reports has a limited form of this, doesn't it?
Since 11 > 7, it's on. I'll send out an email reminder on friday; write me at stucchio at google's mail service to be put on the list.
i love scribd, more for the comunity (groups, friends, comments, related docs, etc) than for the ipaper itself.

but i'm afraid that if the site become too popular they will be teased by copyright, and ruin the whole site (for my personal usage).
The remark wasn't meant to establish my credibility, I was just saying you make elementary mistakes. My hunch is you have no experience playing poker. This doesn't necessarily make you wrong, but it doesn't exactly work in your advantage.

Are you really saying that the computer doesn't need to use any psychology - and can become "world champion" just by playing a mathematically perfect game with some random bluffs thrown in?

You've got to be kidding me.

(Just for the record - I'm talking NL hold'em here. If you're talking about 5 card draw you have a point. As that game doesn't have the same opportunity for psychology)
I will dispute the sociopath observation. Even if you happen to be a trained mental health care professional, you have not sufficiently observed and analyzed the subject in question.

That really gets under my skin, people who play armchair psychologist/psychiatrist. Why? Because I have been victimized at work (back when I used to be an employee) by that very same type of ignorant joker.

"Oh, he has PERSONALITY problems."

RIGHT, I have PERSONALITY PROBLEMS, simply because I am not a lying, cheating, backstabbing, envious little slacker like the majority of the sheeple at the office.

Sigh.

Ok, I admit I have become emotional about this, but my original point still stands: non mental health care professionals have NO business voicing "diagnosis" about ANYONE'S mental health (or lack thereof)
Amazon has stated that simpledb does not run on dynamo though so this is all moot.
Epeus' epigone: How not to be viral
Tera-scale computing - a petaflop chip by 2020? Awesome.
This is a great example of how bad the press is at handling publicity attacks.

Any open source J2EE stack has at least a 128 bit session ID. Any .NET's is longer. PHP, Python, and Rails all have crypto-unguessable session IDs.

DNS has a 16 bit session ID.

Reliable exploits for this trivial problem have been available since the early '90s. So it's hard to see how we could have a massive new vulnerability in a protocol so fundamentally insecure.

Not only that, but the patch for this vulnerability simply randomizes source ports. DJBDNS has randomized source ports from the day it was released. Randomizing source ports adds ~14 more bits of randomness, when constraints are factored in. A 32 bit session ID still totally sucks, but it's more annoying to attack. But my point is: no vulnerability that is solved by randomizing source ports can be game-changing at this point. I could comment more about the novelty or importance of the attack, but it's inside baseball.

Even more importantly: secure web apps don't rely on the DNS for security. SSL/TLS was designed to assume that the DNS is insecure. It creates a parallel hierarchy that is secured by anchor keys distributed with Firefox, IE, and Safari.

If you are affected by this announcement in any way, "ur doin it rong".
Intel's first teraflop chip
Scribd is just plain annoying. You can't copy and paste, highlight (yes, I highlight my lines when I read). It's completely non-user friendly. I don't get what the hubub is. Also, I'm sure this would be interesting if I could read the damn thing without any completely un-needed browser plug-ins (IT'S TEXT!)
The research Schneier is pointing to suggests that it's possible to automatically generate exploits from patches.

It's an "open question", but given how much flexibility there is in patching vulnerabilities (effective patches don't need to be tightly correlated with the single broken code path used by an exploit), you can predict what the result is going to be on it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-dHl0c9S98
If speculation is pushing up the price, why are futures prices less than spot, and why is there no inventory buildup? And why are iron ore prices, for which there aren't futures, up so much?
"I don't know that there's a lot of inequity in the system."

CA has capped property increasesat a couple percent (3%?), much lower than price appreciation historically. Taxes are only reassessed when sold. So if you move into a house, your neighbor in an identical house next door might be paying half, a quarter, a tenth, or less of the property tax as you. People love the tax cap but it makes moving expensive (b/c of reassessment), encourages only large, expensive housing to be approved, which drives up prices, which exacerbates the tax imbalance, etc.

I'm sure a lot of people would be horrified to know how different the taxation on similar property is. Imagine if you had to pay 30% sales tax when you moved to a new town while old timers were paying 3%.
Ask HN: API Design?
I am interested in adding an official API to my site. Any links/tips/tricks/books? I'd rather take the time to make it close to right the first time, as opposing to break a bunch of things down the line. API Design is not my strong suit.

thanks
Wouldn't speculators "punish" themselves if their price expectations were unwarranted (= big losses for speculators)? What logic could lead to laws to curb speculation?
Web2py 1.38
web2py 1.38 is out. Write code once and it runs on iPhone, Google App Engine, works with MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MSSQL. Develop remotely or locally via a web interface or shell. http://www.web2py.com
I think lots of people run Antlr these days. http://www.antlr.org/
It's not dissimilar in Texas. I guess I just don't see the inequity here. I suppose one important difference is that there are some municipalities (like mine) that recognize the lost revenue and are trying to get caught up (i.e., assessments change in the absence of a transaction), but even without that, I just don't see it as inequitable.

encourages only large, expensive housing to be approved

Huh? Haven't you heard of D. R. Horton? Maybe the CA real estate market is different because it's freaking insane.

I'm sure a lot of people would be horrified to know how different the taxation on similar property is. Imagine if you had to pay 30% sales tax when you moved to a new town while old timers were paying 3%.

I'm equally sure that a lot of those horrified people would be far less horrified if they understood why things are the way they are (maybe not Californicators, though. If you live in CA, you're probably just horrified all the time).
What else did you expect? I'm not sure about you, but I have no faith in open source GUIs. "A camel is a horse designed by a committee" comes to mind.
That's a misleading headline; you can't buy one of these, it's a lab prototype.
Stallman's inability to see how damaging his rhetoric is to his cause is rapidly overshadowing any of his achievements.

I went to HOPE 2006 in NYC a few years ago, and ran into him while heading to a lecture about Asterix PBX use. As a huge admirer of GNU tools and the GNU/Linux operating system in particular, it was thrilling to finally get to meet one my heroes. For about a few seconds.

I shook his hand and somewhat shyly asked him to sign one of the few paper-based items I had in my bag, a copy of (surprise surprise!) PG's "ANSI Common Lisp". He refused outright, claiming it was not "free" in its licensing and printing.

I shit you not. The man is that much of an asshole.

I just goggled at him for a moment, and wandered away in a daze.

Don't get me wrong, I love his ideas. Information wants to be free. But to be so mindlessly pedantic about little things like what he is signing detracts from his cause.
Moleskine Tips, Tricks and Hacks
Here is a useful set of links:

http://neuroning.com/articles/2006/11/19/on-api-design-guide...

http://lcsd05.cs.tamu.edu/slides/keynote.pdf

It might be hard for us to try and help you out without knowing the project in detail, but follow the guidelines of that Google Keynote and you should be just fine.
Not true because a) within reason, using any of the body's systems makes them stronger. That's the point of exercising. And b) effective exercise isn't about burning calories directly, it's about raising your resting metabolic rate.
Being miserable. Rejoice at this new bright future of no more downloading.
Ask YC: Choosing a web framework
I have 3 use cases for a simple web app.
1)have people create accounts
2)login and change settings
3)as well as have people (without accounts) come and verify data.
Because of what I'm doing I'd like to integrate with an existing captcha system (a-la recaptcha).
Being lazy, I'd like to write the least amount of code, what webframework would you guys use?
Irony: Matt uses Wordpress, free software that owes its success to the proprietary software from Six Apart starting to really suck.
Fake Steve Jobs, R.I.P.*
Yeah, honestly -- who would vote this article up?

I wonder if we need something akin to meta-moderation, to account for people who vote up low-quality articles.