skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, if it's any comfort, your hunch is correct. I'm not very experienced.

My observation, perhaps incorrect, is that poker outcomes are almost entirely based on psychological manipulation, not on probabilities - because people can be psychologically manipulated. In this regard, poker is like Risk. There's an element of probability, but it only rarely tends to dominate outcomes (I am an experienced Risk player). It's possible to write Risk-playing software that is very difficult to beat except in the rarest of circumstances where luck dominates, because you can't convince the computer to invade Asia or fortify in Australia when it would really be against his interests. I see poker in the same way.

Perhaps I'm over-trivializing the difficulty of writing such a system for poker, but I suppose in essence, I am indeed arguing that you could create software that could just ignore the psychological aspects of the game, and instead play a total numbers game, and that over time it should be a winner. I guess I can concede that if you don't ignore the psychological aspects and try to use them in formulating strategy, that would be very difficult indeed; I just don't see the point.
Odd. What's not free about ACL? All the code is
available online with a notice saying you can use
it for whatever you want.

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/acl2.lisp
Spock...

I think...

that some people...

do...

talk like this.
The Design Funnel: A Manifesto for Meaningful Design
The iPhone packages are still crap, and they haven't changed at all. This is a BS ploy, plain and simple. Ugh... Back to the stone age for us...
I recently watched the documentary called "Revolution OS" and became disenchanted with the guy as a personality.

(The movie is available on the NetFlix WatchNow service...ironically only if you run windows+IE+MediaPlayer.)
Hrm-- it'd be interesting to time the two options.

With a text field you have a tap to edit, a tap to switch to the numerical keyboard (unless you can start there with the SDK), a tap for each # (say 3 on average), and a tap to save the record and send the keyboard away. That's 5-6 taps with a fair bit of distance between them on the screen, assuming that you don't have to drag the largely keyboard-obscured screen around to see other data ("I know I it's a few miles further than the post office... What did I enter in for that?").

OTOH, I just tried to simulate the odometer with the alarm clock setting controls on the iPhone (which is similar) and the flick-tap that it allows is pretty damn fast with zero major screen changes.

I find the iPhone keyboard to be a PITA and typos abound, even after practice. Editing a text fiend would bring up the keyboard, obscuring a LOT of info.

I'm not disagreeing, per se-- just saying that it's not so cut and dry that I wouldn't test the two side by side for speed/learning curve.
if you're looking for ease of use and speed, here, i'd suggest going with a framework on a language you already know well.

what languages would those be?
unfortunately yes. Here doc syntax is pretty common. Even C has it.
Your browser contains an entire copy of the Internet. Haven't you noticed the immense amount of RAM Firefox and IE take up nowadays?
I linked to it because I think trying to keep it under wraps but issuing binary patches is doomed from the start. I guess my sarcasm wasn't clear enough, so I changed it it "... only slightly challenging ...".

Mainly, I think the computer industry at large should know better by now. Delay the people who would fix things from getting the details they need and hoping the 'evil types' (their words) won't be able to figure it out in the mean time is a pretty bad strategy. (Fortunately, the "good guys" are often good at reverse-engineering things too.)

I don't know anything at all about the technical details here, but it sounds like the whole thing is being handled very badly.
thanks, great links. I guess something similar to the tumblr api, which I have been eyeing to model mine after, but with some differences.
The computer's strategy does not have to be deterministic - it can randomize. Moreover, even deterministic strategies aren't necessarily predictable. For example: bad hand - always bluff, moderate hand - always fold, good hand - always go ahead. This is actually a Nash equilibrium strategy for one of the simplified poker models. Within that model, no human player can repeatably win against this strategy, and yes, it's a provable mathematical fact that has nothing to do with psychology.
Did they really get 21 million users in May! That's crazy - it's competitive with Digg.

Compete shows them in the low millions though...
It's a PDF with images and graphs but I get your point. If you're on a Mac, PDFs are a non-issue and I prefer them over anything else because I can easily save them for printing & later viewing.

Enjoy: https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1750/federation-flickr.pdf
I really like the way the price goes up as more sell. I always wanted to try that on pro accounts for web services.
I signed up for a beta a few days ago but I haven't heard back - is that still open? I'd be happy to go ahead and buy the software if the beta is closed.
Once the game is reduced to calculating the odds at any given moment and betting when they're in your favor, even a simple machine should be able to beat a human as long as it makes reliable calculations.

You clearly don't have much of a grasp about what makes computer poker difficult. Read the U of A papers on poker AI:

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/papers/AIJ02.html

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/papers/ICML99.html

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/papers/davidson.msc.h...
You can easily modify KPAX (http://www.vimeo.com/1098656) to do what you need, and more. kpax is based on web2py (http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu) and you can download it from here (http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu/appliances/default/show/37).This (http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu/AlterEgo/default/show/99) shows how to add captcha. I will help you more if you sign up for the web2py google group.
Free software does not "need" an approach. It does not need anything from anyone, that's the point!
Sadly, I'll be gone that weekend.
Mom-and-Pop Multinationals
This is actually pretty HUGE... And it's not just about the long tail-- it's about doing SEO/SEM more effectively.

Made my day!
Was that available in 2006? If so, I guess he just meant the book, which is even more bizarre. So he won't sign any book not published by a "free as in speech" publishing house?

Curiouser and curiouser.
To me the great irony is that FSF software isn't really free either - it just has its own restrictions that it prefers to others'. To me, FSF is synonymous with "hypocrite", and seems to have sprung directly from Stallman's own peurile bitterness, and not from anything so noble as what they claim.

Even if you like the FSF stances (and I have no problem with that), I think it's hard to argue that their idea of "free" is really, truly free as Stallman likes to pontificate.

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

After years of stories about interactions just like the one you described, interviews, and countless mailing-list flame fests, this should be perfectly obvious to anyone.

Let anyone think I'm picking on Stallman because of personality differences, here's another: Theo de Raadt. He is most definitely an asshole - but at least he's consistent, focused, and not judgmental.
Hmm... I tried to look at some of the popular documents, but they come up empty (gray background only). Can anyone else confirm they see the same thing?
rails

RESTFUL authentication - http://railscasts.com/episodes/67
recaptcha - http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/recaptcha

but you might have to modify it a little bit to allow non-account holders to modify data, sort of unconventional?
Translation from Review-Speak to English of Selected iPhone Review Excerpts
Kaminsky and Ptacek comment on DNS Forgery flaw
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1466
Where's the irony? Matt thinks proprietary software has its place, and he likes free (as in beer) software.
The Oracle client libraries (in both traditional and "Instant" variants) for OS X on Intel weren't released until spring of '08. That was nearly a two-year wait relative to when many, if not most, developers using Apple hardware had moved over to the new hardware.

So yes, technically, there's nothing stopping you from writing an Oracle-based app on OS X today, but the story was quite different just a few months ago.

Also, while CoreData may have taken a lot of the nicer bits of WebObjects' ORM tier and re-packaged it for desktop apps using SQLite, the story for traditional client/server database applications isn't quite so compelling. RubyCocoa + ActiveRecord (or your preferred scripting language w/ORM and Cocoa bridge) actually seems like a much better option than bare Cocoa + Oracle C client libs.
I've seen large companies not do these either. What you've highlighted are great ideas, and I'm not sure they've been widely implemented (other than as bespoke services).

Traditional rankings of salespeople by turnover could be subject to short-termism, and these type of metrics might give a more balanced view.
Ask HN: Avg studio apartment rental in the bay area
Hi,
I am moving to the bay area and wondering the average cost of rental around the area? I can looking for sub urban area and can tolerate 1-1.5 hours of commute. Any decent area you would suggest? I have a dog, but I only need a studio.

I want to search online but have no idea which area is safe/good.

thanks for any helps.
I've heard it suggested though that the extra calories cause your cells to divide more frequently, which means you run out of telomeres faster. Not sure if that's really true or not though.
Interesting that he does not mention the biggest one of all, JFK. Perhaps he doesn't think that one is a conspiracy "theory".

This article only confirms my beliefs in conspiracy theories. He is obviously behind most of the ones he mentioned. A little fire has never in the world taken down a steel structure almost perfectly in a matter of minutes.

But why is this even here? What in the world does this have to do with hacking and starting businesses?

Delete!
Actually, this IS your father’s text editor
many, many years ago before i even knew what linux was, i saw redhat linux being sold at a computer store on the shelves with other software.

its box had screenshots on the back that made it look appealing, it came with a nice printed manual, and it was on a cdrom. this was back when everyone was still using dialup connections and the thought of downloading an entire operating system over it would have turned me off from trying it.

buying that was what enabled me to become interested in linux and unix in general. during my initial learning period, i consulted and made notes in that printed manual many times.
If you think it's so easy, Poker Academy has an API...
This is a fantastic essay. I appreciate Stallman's work, but I find myself much more aligned with the likes of the OSI or Apache Foundation than the FSF. It is refreshing to see Stallman's philosophy intelligently challenged.

One rather large supporting argument the author overlooked: Stallman/FSF have appeared to largely reverse their stance on open standards; his/their views on OOXML and C# are incomprehensible to me. We could argue the technical advantages of ODF vs. OOXML all day, but the total sum of the philosophical difference between the two is zero.
Well, I never got paid for programming, which basically means I'm not a programmer.
10 Success Tips from the Master "Michael Jordan"
Duplicate limit hold-em (same hands played at other table, with human and machine reversed)
Me too. Please post the next one though.
The Secret Behind Mike Arrington's Success: Om Malik
http://www.amazon.com/Roaring-Spring-Products-Notebook-Wireb...

I am a happier person after I got off Moleskine. Ideas flow better when you can rip out pages without guilt.

(kinda like the 'cheap branch' advantage of git)
No room for parody or farce? That's plainly false.
that bug was in our libc, not samba. samba just had some code to work around the problematic behavior.
Where is the awesome proprietary software that has smashed Wordpress to pieces which he referred to? His analysis about relative quality is off the mark. Looking at Photoshop and ignoring Emacs, gcc, gdb, git, Apache, and all the other great free software isn't fair.
OTOY Developing Server-Side 3D Rendering Technology
NewTeeVee.org, however, is owned by a guy in Missouri, Ross Hoffman, who sends all traffic to the site to TechCrunch.
Hoffman says he's been trying to reach Om for at least a year to sell him the domain, and says he'd part with it for $50

Yeah, right. Maybe $50 x 100.
"will work to reverse the widely held belief, informed by early troubles upon the operating system's launch, that Vista isn't compatible with many applications and devices."

Agreed -- when I read this line, I was wondering whether it would be through PR or action. It actually needs both, but without the action part, the PR won't do much good.
This piece mentions "No manual intervention" and backs that up with some reasons why Google supposedly doesn't have any manual intervention in the ordering of search results.

If that's true, then does that mean the eval.google.com "secret" back-end application supposedly used by teams of moderators to manipulate search results was a fabrication or just not under the principle of "manual intervention"? Or, do activities two years ago not count in the principles shared today?

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/29726.htm
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/01/1532216&tid=...
http://www.searchbistro.com/index.php?/archives/19-Google-Se...
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/is-eval-google-back-on-track.ht...

Marissa Meyer is also supposed (and a big stress on /supposed/) to have said that Google has 10,000 people checking search results for relevance:

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/06/26/GoogleScalabili...
Eisokant,

As someone who interviewed at top US universities (and ended up going to MIT), I would say that you approaching the problem the wrong way. If you want to get an interview/meetings with top universities, all you have to do is write them. Hell, write the professors. They are all willing to talk about their research and what they are doing.

Much more interesting to me would be a blog about what you found out after meeting luminaries at universities all over the world. Then you could write about how this has structured your world view and why XXXXXX university is the one to go.

That would get you a thumbs up. As it is now, it seems spammish and I would have no incentive to help you out.
"Ideas today are a commodity. Anyone can have an idea..."

This line scares me.

Yes anyone can have an idea. In fact everyone has ideas. The catch is that they range from disastrously false to powerfully true.

A place that:

1. Values ideas in the abstract (and not just their shiny tangible fruits), and

2. Is skilled in the art of investigating the truthfulness of a proposition (dialectic),

will arrive at truer and therefore more powerful beliefs, faster. If Cambridge offers more of that to people than elsewhere, then PG is right. Since the rebuttal doesn't seem to comprehend this, it serves for me as one more data point that PG is right.

Pay attention in case you missed it - PG taps out an article in Cambridge about how ideas are valued there more than anywhere else, and someone not in Cambridge writes a rebuttal that seems to hurriedly elbow right past the big idea, about ideas.

Now, as far as why the idea capital and the startup capital aren't (currently) one in the same. Well, have you ever noticed that not all ideas are about startups? And some very powerful ones at that. Like...

- ideas about the limits of human potential, technically and ethically.

- ideas about how to properly wield rationalism and empiricism

- ideas about what is good (to be sure, if your idea here isn't just an incremental advancement but a disruptive one, it can result in your imprisonment and execution rather than your IPO).

- maybe a few trillion others

So you can see why it will be hard for the capital of ideas to be the predominate home of any single occupation. Add to this, that powerful ideas tend to motivate people who manage to believe in them to the point of conviction. So if an idea motivates someone to execute their plan - their plan to reform education, their plan to work with the poor, their plan to save the whales for god sakes not just their plan for another effing startup, am i clear? - then they won't always be executing there in Cambridge. That doesn't mean that ideas are antithetical to execution.

But I would still buy this man a beer, because PG's article seemed true, but brutally so. And if such a thing had been said about my mother and she had heard it, it would be right to rise indignantly to say, "Scoundrel, take that back!" Of course the honest thing would be to later educate her on the truthfulness of those very same points, but in a more gentle and loving way.

So Charlie, I reject your reasoning but applaud your chivalry.
Don't forget the moleskine ipod hack:

http://www.moleskinerie.com/2007/10/moleskine-ipod-.html
Ask HN: What's wrong with all those dating sites?
What's your biggest peeve about the state of dating services on the web today and how could they become better?

Is there certain functionality that you think all dating sites must offer? i.e. location down to postal code or even year/month/day of birth.

Do you think the techniques sites use to reduce/remove the number of spam/predators/trolls go to far and actually detract from the user experience? i.e. captchas, super-long/detailed registration forms and surveys/compatibility tests, back-end automation to remove accounts according to preset criteria, etc.

There's gotta be a better way to build this mousetrap.
yeah its nice, its nice to see a little transparency from google.
I agree with you. In this case, for reasons I won't go into right here, I think the effort to "hide" this "new flaw" was doomed from the start. But in general, if you patch it, it's out there.

If this announcement counts as "Hackers News", it's marginal at best. "Protocols designed in the '70s found insecure --- film at 11!" But the discussion about whether you can reliable reverse patches to vulns? THAT's fun.
I thought hackers despise the mouse more than anyone else.
The overhead of calling functions and system calls
Several CRM software companies can easily compile this type of data into nice reports for managers. They usually offer their apps as one huge suite, or you can purchase an "inexpensive" core engine with separate customizable modules (customer, sales, billing, finance, reports, etc.).

I have seen executives balk at the cost of the entire suite, so they decide to purchase the engine and a few modules (customer, sales, and billing) with the intent of purchasing the customized report module "next quarter". Months later, after the funds have disappeared due to lackluster sales, a forest fire, CEO fraud, etc., the lower-level managers hate the software because they think it doesn't provide the functionality they need.
Statisticians please: What is the greatest form of poker?
The public thinks 'Texas hold'em' is the best. What do statisticians think?
You can check if the nameservers used by your current machine are still vulnerable/unpatched via a utility at Dan Kaminsky's site:

http://doxpara.com/
How about we make it the last sunday of the month? This will be easy to follow and people can plan accordingly.
Perhaps I am being overly cynical, but I suspect that bad articles get voted up by people who have posted snarky comments, in hopes that more people will read the article and agree with them on how bad it is.

Of course, this wouldn't explain the current score (more upvotes than posters), so perhaps some of the votes are from trolls, accidental clicks, people who only read titles, people who think the article is ironically amusing, or people who want to draw attention to bad content in hopes that mechanisms are put in place for its banning/removal.
Submitted to provide a context for the link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=240874
I am interested in hearing about this new "ninja out of the LCD screen" attack vector.

Are there any current safeguards against the ninja menace?
seems like an ass move not to forward to where the users would most likely want to go. guess its not as bad as parking it.
That so many vendors have collaborated to synchronize a patch release is interesting Hacker News. The odd quasi-disclosure -- here's how to test, here's a mostly-helpful patch, but full details will wait a month or until third parties figure it out -- is Hacker News.

Regular reminders of the general insecurity of DNS are also a public service, attached to megapatch firedrills or not.
On the linux side of things, Virtualbox is a much better product than VMWare except for some issues with giving control of USB devices to the VM. It loads faster, and has a coherence mode similar to VMWare Fusion on Mac.

The free solutions are getting much better and can compete with VMWare. Furthermore, I would say the money is not in desktop virtualization, but rather in server virtualization. For this, does VMWare even have a product?
What are you talking about? Almost every one of his essays has jokes.
You say that as if he should admit some wrong doing.

People paid him to manage their money, asking him to make as much as possible, knowing that he could win or lose, and he did and lost. Where did he "do wrong"?
You know I didn't make that up, right? There was a Ninja Virus in the early 90's.
> The market and the individuals who comprise it, rather than Richard Stallman, should decide, as they have in the past, which software people use.

Yes, although there's a footnote there: in winner take all markets, the externalities can drive people to feel 'forced' into choices. You can buy a car from whoever you want, pretty much - they're all interchangeable. But try living in the corporate world without .doc. It is finally starting to become feasible, but it's a tough, uphill battle.

That makes people frustrated.
You can always follow the Viral Video Method:

1. Short

2. Funny

3. Can be reproduced into different versions.

Perfect example: Star Wars Kid
http://youtube.com/watch?v=M2Ize9piRWw

Just make sure to display your site link in the credits.
Finally a good looking StatCounter Widget for OS X.
Fresh design for the StatCounter Widget. Add it to your dashboard if you use statcounter.
Or, let me help you out with this: yes. Even if you're running DJBDNS, your stub resolver (the one linked into your browser and other programs) is weak.

If this was a big deal, you'd have been owned a million times over by now, because this is something that the BIND team declined to fix in 1996.
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.

My guess is that the 'new' realization is that the attacks are (for example) 2^16 times easier to perform, or much easier to hide from usual countermeasures. It'll be interesting to see if the hype is justified as the details come out.
The MIT license and the BSD license are much truer to the idea of "free" than any FSF licenses.

The FSF licenses cause more proprietary code to come into existence (duplication at a great cost to society) when companies cannot integrate GPL products with their proprietary licensed software. So companies write their proprietary version of the component and no one can see the source, or the source of their subcomponents.
Well, all I can say is that I hope to release an app with this much free publicity one day. I'm sure it's going to help his bottom line.