skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Did you really write your whole server code in Erlang?

Yes. I started with Lisp but realized I didn't know how to scale it. Then I tried Erlang, thought it scales automatically and finally realized that it's still a lot of work and careful analysis of your architecture.

I wrote another version of my poker server in Lisp in the past few weeks and it's almost complete. I know how to scale it now but see no point in pursuing it. I wrote it as a way of relieving my frustration with Erlang, a way of moving forward, even by taking a step back.

> Your intelligence scares me a little bit.

Thanks! If was as smart as you think, I would have been rich by the age of 30 and I'm not.

> First off, can you elaborate on what these "social network" features are?

I don't know, actually, I haven't given it much thought. I did google for poker social network and found that existing sites are forums without any ability to play poker.

I see my site as a friendly place to play poker, one you can customize and tailor to your needs and wants.

> 1. Why will your poker program be unique?

Beats me. It's not unique at all. It didn't have a poker client for a couple of years, I'm just finishing up tournaments and there's only Texas Hold'em at the moment.

Once upon a time, a sportsbook and casino in the Caribbean commissioned poker software. I was running an offshore development shop from my apartment at the time (NYC and then Atlanta). I outsourced development to Russia. The sportsbook fired their top management because their software could not handle the load during football season.

The sportsbook then dropped custom developed software entirely and went with off-the-shelf solutions. That's how I ended up with buggy PC-based poker software written in Delphi. I'm still kicking myself not not forcing development in C++. Devs said it would cost much more (Delphi specialists them) and I capitulated.

I thought I could do better myself and wrote OpenPoker.

> 2. How will you achieve critical mass (what's your distribution channel/marketing)?

Word of mouth and slow growth.

> 3. How will you stop your competitors from stealing your idea and implementing them with their existing user base?

There aren't that many scalable poker servers to go around. Also, most of the competitors are huge real money poker servers. I looked at gPokr but I think I can do better.

> 1. There are plenty of people trying to solve the multiplayer problem (my company for example)

I'm available for consulting.

> and we would love to buy some sort of license to custom code written to handle generic server requests.

What are generic server requests? Are they binary? JSON? UDP? TCP?

> Then you can package your Poker software on top of that as a "demo". But if you go this route, you really need to redo your server in a more traditional language, Erlang is fun for show and tell, but not very practical for the masses.

What is a more traditional language? Python? Java? C? C++?

> I would recommend making a Ning for Poker Sites. There are so many poker sites out there right now that it doesn't make sense to try and compete with all of them.

Great idea, thanks! Hosted white-label poker.
Watched this one last year, which is the history of spoken English http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/CourseDescLong2.aspx?cid=2250

The current one is the evolution of language in general, but, of course, the audience is assumed to be English-speaking (he does use many other languages as examples however)
http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/CourseDescLong2.aspx?cid=1600

Enjoy!
Anywhere between a book a day and a book a month (with occasional extreme outliers in either direction), depending on work pressure, nuisance from small child, etc. The ready availability of reading matter on the internet -- interesting but mostly unimportant, coming in small digestible chunks, the reading equivalent of fast food -- has a pernicious effect on the amount of real reading I do.

Definitely worth it. Probably worth it even in purely financial terms since some of what I read is job-related, but the main reason is that I (1) enjoy reading and (2) have omniscience as a primary goal in life.

I usually have several books on the go at once. The two I had open most recently are Chris McManus's "Left hand, right hand" (a book about asymmetry, especially in human beings; recommended) and Peter Winkler's "Mathematical mind-benders" (a selection of mathematical puzzles ranging from tricky high-school level to harder-than-IMO; highly recommended to those who like such things).
He has been open with his support for Obama. But he's a numbers guy, I don't see where his math is biased. Likewise, he's a Cubs fan but his baseball research isn't slanted towards the Cubbies.

Your link just says because Nate Silver talks about Obama in his blog the site is a propaganda tool. People don't visit for the blog, they visit for the numbers and research. Personally I think it would be the other way around, if he were also a popular Obama blogger but did FiveThirtyEight anonymously that could be considered sinister (it still wouldn't be unless the model was proven wrong, but there would be a perception of deception).

I've seen him a couple times on HDNET and he's extremely clever. I'll be watching him tonight instead of the hacks they put up on the major networks.
reading "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley

just in time to get a kick out of the "brave new obamian world" video
Sort of like what happened to Feedburner, right?
I personally tend to look down on people who read only non-fiction (though obviously not as much as people who don't read at all). It suggests a lack of imagination. And I think perhaps that's the self-improvement aspect of fiction - it exercises the imagination.
Dean wasn't a web fad, he was leading all the polls until about two weeks before the first primary when he opened his mouth and started saying stupid shit.
Ruby on Rails Security Book now available [pdf]
When I was in Phoenix,AZ I used to spend 8 am to 5 pm reading books at Barnes and Noble every Saturday and Sunday.
My response/plug: http://geekstack.com/blog/indian-math-online-helps-you-study...
Here's the problem with learning through fiction: the only thing you can learn about through fiction is the mind of the author. When you read a Rand novel, you don't learn anything about how objectivism works, you only learn about Rand's imagination of how it works. Similarly, sentience may in fact be mutually inclusive or exclusive of understanding; just because you can describe a circumstance in which something is true doesn't mean it can ever be true.

This doesn't mean that fiction is useless for learning about the world. It just means that fiction does not contain the tools necessary to decide if something is true (or accurate, or possible). Fiction may spark an idea or make an argument, but you must go outside of fiction to see if those ideas have merit.
This might be a good fit for the guys at Plura: http://www.pluraprocessing.com/

Poker apps would be a perfect situation since it takes much more time than most games.
I read a lot. Everyday. I mostly enjoy fantasy books -- My girlfriend forced me to read "The Magician" and it's probably the best book I've ever had the pleasure of reading.
just have a handful of super-productive guys with a loose mandate and good motivation

I once joined a startup that fit this description. The team included the best programmers I knew in the city, and the CEO was (is) the best person at picking talent I've ever known. I believed, and still do believe, that people are the most important thing, so I wasn't too worried about whether the initial idea would work out. A good team would simply adapt, and this was going to be the best team I'd ever been on.

It didn't work out that way at all because the leader turned out to be... well, if I described how he was, you might not believe me. So let's just say I learned a lesson: the ability to find good people and the ability to lead them are two completely different things, and you can have one without the other. This team never had a chance to get off the ground.

This doesn't contradict what you're saying, but for me it's an important thing to add to the "put great people first" approach.
Can I recommend labeling the bots? I think you'll have trust issues if people think that there is some super-genius robot playing next to them. Poker players know that it's not that huge a deal, but I think amateur players may be turned off by that.

Either that, or have bot-friendly tables and human-only tables.
I clicked the "I voted" button just to make it go away. (I didn't vote, of course, cuz I'm not a US citizen. Erm, not that that's gonna stop some people...)
You might be surprised by what's in charge of your body
Read a few modern accounts of urban poverty, like "The Corner" and "Gang Leader for a day". Then compare it to accounts from the early 1900's such as "The Slums of Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia", "Land of the Dollar", and "How the other half lives." It will blow you away.

Yes, the technology today is far better and knowledge of science far greater. We have penicillin and vaccinations. Fwer babies die at all income levels. But the gang violence, drug addiction, and perpetual unemployment problems are all much, much worse. Nothing like our modern inner city slums existed 100 years ago. Technology gave us low infant mortality. Politics lost us our cities - http://detroityes.com/home.htm
What past bubbles can teach us about the one that just burst
Tips on A:B testing
My reading list is on my web site: http://www.jgc.org/writing.html
I heard some figure recently that in polling in previous years about 36% of students registered to vote said they are actually voting. This year it is around 88%, and that doesn't consider an increase in students registered.
Unless it's Fidel Castro. I work at a newspaper in South Florida. His (incomplete) obituary is very long and has not been written by an intern.
I try to read a novel a week. All fiction writers should strive for at least this much, and many times I feel like I should be reading more. I also try to read books about my career field and personal growth material. I used to have three books going at a time (one of each), but have reduced it to two. It's much more manageable that way.
TweetUp at OpenCoffee this Wednesday in Cambridge
Silver also said the Tampa Bay Rays would win 88 games, and people thought he was nuts. They won 97.
Not only that... Amazon no longer has to expend ANY packing material or effort (material + labor savings) when shipping these items. Slap a label on it and ship 'er out.
Vote early, vote often, right?
I think so, it teaches us to form complete views of the world in our head - which allows us to see the world as it is, and as it could be, much more comprehensively.
Wow, is this Reddit. I like how I am being downmodded for posting something that people disagree with.

I will keep my thoughts to myself in the future.
Mono actually has a plug-compatible Linq to SQL, AND it has its own DB drivers.

Even if you were so hopelessly dependent on Linq to SQL that you couldn't trivially port to Microsoft's newer persistence solution, you're still not up a creek.
Thats all fine and good -- but what if you dislike all of the choices? In other words, you are saying I should be forced by the government to spend time out of my day to go somewhere to complete a write-in vote for people who likely wont win? Alternatively, if you read reports -- some district ALWAYS go a certain direction (liberal/conservative/etc). So if you are a liberal in a district that has gone conservative for 80+ years... whats the point

I think this is counterproductive. If people don't want to have their voice heard, then they should not be forced. Those who are willing/able/eager to vote, shall, and those who arent, have no excuse to bitch about the results.

My point is not that the above are always sound arguments for an individual to not vote, but that we should never be forced to do anything by our government. If I want to sit at home and not be part of the system, well thats my fucking right. And that right is paramount, in my opinion, to any 'right' society claims that I should be involved in it. What can I say, I'm a libertarian.
I read about a book a week, more if I'm traveling.

Currently, I read while working out on the elliptical for an hour every weekday. This has me going through a lot of books (I have a Kindle, and many friends who are avid readers as well, so I get new books that way).

Favorite book, if I had to pick one: Guns, Germs & Steel or Omnivore's Dilemma.

Is it worth it? Yes and no. I think it definitely has expanded my knowledge and given me interesting perspective, but I've definitely had diminishing returns quickly (did I really need that fifth book on linguistics?)
[HN] Has the flag posts feature been removed?
I've noticed that I can no longer flag posts. Is everyone else encountering this too?
Here is a better analogy: You're in a crowd of people, all passing bricks, one at a time, in a general direction. If you fail to pass a brick, someone near you will get it anyway. However, as fewer people decide to pass bricks, the outcome of clearing all of the rubble will become less likely.
The Medici Meltdown
As a kid I probably read 20+ hours a week, half fiction half non-fiction. I even worked at a library when I was younger.

That dramatically slowed during late high school and university, probably only a few hours of reading a week (other than coursework).

I am back to reading 10+ hours a week, but all non-fiction. I have basically stopped reading fiction. I just have too many books I want to get through to have time for fiction these days.
I am told by someone with a high volume, consumer site that there are proxies in use that strip the query parameter from URLs that they guess are images. They are rare, but they caused him to put the serial number in the file name. (This was several years ago, I don't know if these proxies still exist.)
Nothing has changed. What happens, exactly?
I was going to vote for him.

But I just had a hard time evaluating it all.
Apple: Soon to Be a Mobile Gaming Force
do they have second hand book shops where you live? :)
Great feedback guys. Thanks.

I'm going to go the route of virtual machines, and give Multipe IE a shot so that I only need one Windows VM. After that, I think I'll start writing up some scripts (text, not code) to follow, step-by-step, to check various functionality.

Also, webrat (http://github.com/brynary/webrat) has received a lot of commendations on the rspec-users mailing list, so I'm definitely going to give that a whirl.
The Very Expensive Myth of Long Distance
A Million-user Comet Application with Mochiweb, Part 3
You keep doing it till your muscles are strong enough :)

Anyways you can do it for part of the day to build up strength. You can also do some 'front bridge' exercises. Don't push yourself just sit as long as you can, then go to a chair for an hour then jump back on.

Eventually you will be very comfortable.
Unfortunately, the economics of your proposed system do not work out. People are short-sighted. People are locally-political (ie 'Not In My BackYard'). Some things require economies of scale.

I'm with you, taxes are bad. In some ways, I agree with you that we should be able to earmark our dollars for things we 'prefer', but unfortunately that system will never work out.

I also agree that taxes are theft from the government. Unfortunately, the government has a need to steal from you. But its important to look at it like this. I've always maintained that TAX DAY should be 1 day before VOTING DAY. Anyone else notice how they are 6 months apart? This is by design. I believe in small, local government, which is a less extreme view than you are expounding above.

Unfortunately, some Federal/State taxes ARE necessary for a functioning society. We MUST have a military in some form. We MUST pay some government workers to regulate trade and commerce between states and other countries. We MUST have basic amenities that are built out at the cost of the populace as a whole, together, through taxes (Read: Water).

Everything else, however, is up for debate.

Remember -- as Winston Churchill once put: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried.."
I never understood how the internet crowd moved from Paul to Obama. The two could not be on more opposite ends of the spectrum from an economic theory perspective.
Don't forget about IETester: http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

Though there are a couple minor bugs, it works fantastically for testing IE6, 7, and 8 without jumping through hoops.

Combine IETester with Safari for Windows, Firefox 3 (and 2), Opera, and perhaps Chrome and you've got a full suite of browsers to test with just on Windows. For the most part, that will give an accurate view of how it will look on Mac and Linux, but it doesn't hurt to have a VM of both a Linux distro and (cough) OS X available to test properly with.
Is the black swan worth reading? The first couple pages were fairly interesting in b&n
What is the next killer app for Ruby?
I don't really trust anything but the real thing. So I build for FF3 and test on: PC IE6, IE7, Chrome and Safari; Mac: Safari, Opera, FF3 and FF2. Testing Safari on Mac and PC seems to be redundant, don't really care about Opera that much so only testing on Mac seems to be ok. Testing FF on both Mac and PC also seems redundant - but just because it works in FF3 does not mean it works in FF2. I'm not sure yet if testing Chrome and Safari is redundant - don't trust the Chrome JS engine yet - although it looks like I will soon.
This is sort-of correct. There are taxes on real-estate changes, corporate taxes, and import taxes.

Real estate and import taxes are the two that could be considered 'direct' taxes. Paying 7.5% or 10% of the value of your home at sale time is DEFINITELY a direct tax, its just highly delayed. This tax is based on the idea that most valuable property in the caymans is not owned by locals or is owned by very wealthy people. But everyone pays it...

Corporate taxes are indirect, but if you arent living off your own personal wealth, you are paying for those taxes through the products you buy from those companies or the lower wages you receive from those companies if you work there.

Aside from all of that -- it is foolish to assume that this would work in other countries that are not very small, exotic, and dependent (at least in some part) upon tourism/foreigners. In some sense, you could say that the taxes are paid by foreigners more than locals. Thats all fine and good for Caymans, but again, that would never work in the US, Europe, etc where populations are large compared to the number of visitors/foreigners.

Find me a country with a population of 50 Million that does anything like this, and I'll move there. :)
What real life bad habits has programming given you?
So... I spent the first 10 years of my life in India going through its education system and am currently a mathematics major at Caltech. From my experience, the Indian education system is heavily geared towards attaining high average output. The education system in the US is much more laissez-fair in this regard. It allows students to adjust to their needs and capabilities. Neither system is perfect. In the Indian system, the exceptionally smart students get shafted because they are bogged down by the rigid and usually rote curriculum. For the average person, arithmetic is sufficient but for an advanced major, giving them problems is crushing (I speak from personal experience). The complete lack of intellectual stimulus is very counterproductive. On the other hand, in the US system, a large portion of the students slack off and fail to use their opportunities. Going through the US education system has put me years ahead of where I would have been if I was still in India but along the way, I have seen many students miss out and just sit on the sidelines. [1]

This startup can be immensely helpful but please, don't see this as a begin and end all for mathematics education. If a student is capably of grasping the axiomatic principles of mathematics, such a learning path is infinitely preferable to the do-lots-of-problems method. [2]

[1] This is pretty much the exact same gripe that I have with programs like Kumon which give students lots and lots of problems without giving a solid mathematical foundation for why these problems behave as they do. For more information, Lockhart's Lament (http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html) is an excellent essay written by a mathematician on this topic.

[2] This is not to say that an axiomatic mathematics education is for everybody. For one thing, a student may not be interested or capable of such an education (just like how I am completely incapable of remembering anything). However, for students interested in mathematics, it is the way to go.
FCC to vote on "white spaces" spectrum today
Zend Framework Performance Tips
I have completed 2/3rd of the book and so far have found the content quite interesting. It does give a new perspective to think about.
Though not a big fan of NNT's smart-alec style of writing; but then again, it is his book. :)
...almost no problems...
Pownce Lessons Learned
oops, sorry, didn't see that, can't edit now.
With a non-trivial web site, the more browsers you test, the more cash you burn through, and (if you're not very careful) the more twisty the web site HTML and CSS code gets. But you already know that.

Verify compliance with W3C standards as a baseline, follow a proper subset of those standards whenever you can, and then point-test with large footprint (and buggy) browsers you might have to deal with. IE, for instance, can need special coding. FF, Opera, Safari and other such do not generally require any special-casing.

If you're compliant with web standards and the web page renders badly, then any problem reports are generally browser bugs. With that as a starting point for the ensuing discussions, you can then decide if you want to add support for the (buggy?) browser, or request that the accessor upgrade or migrate to a more standards-compliant browser.

Of course test harnesses can and do help here. But the closer you stay to the W3C and applicable standards, the more bug-resistant and future-proof your web site is, and the less browser-tail-chasing you will likely need to do. And the less point testing you can need to fund, particularly as you build confidence in the standards and the core browsers.

As for reading material, a subscription to communitymx.com is well worth the costs; that's one of the better HTML and CSS-oriented sites on the net.
Yes, part of the problem might be that mathematical achievement is not valued highly. But it cannot be the full explanation, since math is unpopular across the world, not just in the US. For example, I'm originally from Eastern Europe, one of the places where mathematical talent is supposedly valued highly, but I can tell you it absolutely isn't. I even went to a special math/programming-oriented high-school, and even there the cool kids were the ones that didn't seem to care about math at all, but instead had the looks/fashion/sports abilities.

Also, the comparison between American kids and Indian kids in the US is not quite fair, since these Indians are a highly biased sample of the true Indian population.

So the difference must be in something else, too. My personal guess is that the math in the US schools must be just too "easy". So, if kids everywhere on average learn about 60% of the math they are taught, they will be better in countries where the math taught is more advanced.
Kevin Rose of Digg: The Most Famous Man on the Internet