skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Randomness provides variance, which is essentially the range of opponent skill levels you can compete with. GoFish has high variance so anyone can play against anyone else (but is so random as to not be very fun) while chess has no variance so the better player almost always wins (also not fun, unless you match up well).

While unpopular with skill players, variance is handy in casual games like Catan because it broadens the range of people you can play with. Variance in the form of mana-screw in Magic does the same thing, with the bonus of allowing you to compete with a wider range of skill and money levels.
This seemed likely to many graph theorists. Glad someone proved it.
i think people are going a little overboard about this. it was a humorous essay, reflecting real events probably but told in an exaggerated style. (i do admit that the part about the dad and girlfriend pushed the humor into something a bit awkward.)

i thought his observations about paul's essays were pretty spot-on, and i'm surprised few people have mentioned this.
> But other then that you're right, and lets not forget the huge brain drain into America over the years.

This is true - and the brain drains are probably what made America great. Before and during WW2 some of smartest people in Europe (mostly Jewish) fled to America and they never went back. That is probably one of the reasons why the USA was off much better after WW2 than other countries.

This continued over the years. But it can easily reverse - if situations in the home countries become more favourable or if the USA decreases the number of Visas...
Which business model/mindset do you think may have contributed to the current world recession?
It's not, but it's all the information I have in this case. I don't know anything about her aside from her picture, included with the essay, and what's contained in the breakup letter.

Let's recap: he was with her for a year and thought he was going to marry her. She's very attractive, and they look happy together. I'd argue strongly that he'd need a very strong reason to break up with her, and the email doesn't provide one (although it does provide her with good reason to break with him).
Here is an unofficial online flash version of Settlers of Cataan. (Registration is required) http://games.asobrain.com/
Come on. Nothing beats a good 40-hour marathon of Axis & Allies.
Disturbingly, this website exhibits a lot of spam/MFA characteristics while being a legit EU project. Stock photos, long .eu domain with dashes, the overall feel of the site is just not very governmental.
Truly one of my favorite board games! That, Twilight Imperium, and A Game of Thrones!
> 1) Africa (don't underestimate it, it could grow much faster than any other country, iff it only could free itself from all those nasty colonialism consequences...)

Uhm... Firstly – Africa will never become a world power. Do you know how many problems Africa have? Most economies are shrinking. The countries whose economies grow are based on resources (e.g. oil) that foreign companies mine. There is not one sub-sahara African country with a good education system (the best is mediocre and rapidly declining education systems).

> y, iff it only could free itself from all those nasty colonialism consequences...)

You could blame the problems in the 70ies or 80ies on colonialism. But modern problems are created by Africans for Africans. I can cite numerous examples. Can you really blame Britain of Zimbabwe? Both Lesotho and Swaziland never had any major colonial influences – yet they are the most backward in Africa.
Tigris is a much deeper game.
No. By definition, marketers make that decision.
bendoct, I'm looking to create an informal group for game hackers/makers. Email me if you're interested. Ditto for anyone else interested.

peter [at] pchristensen [dot] com
Good points, good links. True, this is a time traveler's Starcraft/Warcraft/Command and Conquer, etc. On the Achron website they state:

"The company's innovation will create new sub-genres of games, starting with the game Achron." Achron is in the MTS sub-genre of RTS, to be pedantic:) However, the scope of differences in here make the term "sub-genre" seem unfair.

The new time related gameplay will demand a huge new strategic skill-set from the players. I don't think this will be true for Starcraft II. And you won't be able to learn this skill-set by playing any of the "old-school" RTS games.
Lessons learned from our hiring process
Product Management in a Startup
You learn these things when you are a junior X from someone who is a senior X who learned it the exact same way. I bet you can trace these little nuggets all the way back to some junior sysadmin who was looking over Ken Thompson's shoulder at Bell Labs in the early 70s. Other examples include lsof, vmstat, netstat -p, and doing anything useful in a Makefile.
Interesting. Pogue is a low pass filter on technology's rapidly shifting winds.
Alright stop with these infoworld links, that site is absolutely awful. Can we get them banned?
A New Corporate Transparency
How the Atari 2600 forged the home video game future
What you're suggesting sounds suspiciously like AIG and the whole "credit default swaps" mess. What about when the insurance company goes under and needs a bailout?
Patience, indeed. David Pogue has been working on his technical writing chops for a long time:

http://www.asktog.com/columns/017ManualWriting.html
> Yet the principal characteristics of the government’s response to the financial crisis have been delay, lack of transparency, and an unwillingness to upset the financial sector.

The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary.

Nationalization would not imply permanent state ownership. The IMF’s advice would be, essentially: scale up the standard Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation process. An FDIC intervention is basically a government-managed bankruptcy procedure for banks. It would allow the government to wipe out bank shareholders, replace failed management, clean up the balance sheets, and then sell the banks back to the private sector. The main advantage is immediate recognition of the problem so that it can be solved before it grows worse.

Finally someone said it, and better than I ever could have.
Thanks, I've long wondered about the specific name for the system. That article is a very interesting read, and the comparisons to Apartheid are apt.
Ajax developer's résumé spooks the old people
AFAIK some experimental versions of GHC can compile Haskell to GPUs, and you only lose a pretty small constant factor.
40 hours, and all that matters is whoever can hold the Caucasus for longer that 2-3 turns.
kill(pid, 0) is also a classic trick for detecting crappy rootkits; cycle through all ~65k possible pids, and see if the ESRCH results agree with "ps -axo pid". A patched ps, a patched KVM library, or even a patched procfs can still miss the code path used by the kill(2) syscall.
It's an interesting idea, but you have to be careful about these mathematical proofs of optimality.

First of all, it is very hard to rank the schools before seeing the offers, visiting the campuses, doing more thorough research (which you may not have as much time to do while preparing your applications).
Second of all, there are other factors involved. Where did your friends and boyfriend/girlfriend get in to? This is one big problem of the medical placement system, especially for those who are married by then.
Stanford could fill their entering class with kids who had perfect scores on their SATs and still have plenty with perfect scores left over.

Just nitpicking - this cannot be true [1]. Stanford enrollments per year are in the 2,000 range, while perfect SAT scores are just in the low hundreds. And not all students with perfect scores apply to Stanford.

------

[1] I know, you could construct some weird scenario where one year class would collect people from many years, but let's keep it realistic.
Other perspectives:

http://coderific.com/employers/7

http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Amazon-com-Reviews-E6036.ht...
I use CUDA for finance based Monte-Carlo simulations. Unless you are at a place with a huge cluster that you have access to, some problems cannot be solved without CUDA.
That "functional programming" someone was me.

And you missed my point entirely about mathematics, I think. "Fancy math" here is not calculus or fancy topology or graph theory. "Fancy math" here is that you need to build a new fancy math that works with your temporal engine. You can't just sit down and hack shit out, or you will die under the combinatorial explosion of temporal possibilities. You need to build yourself a system of primitives that are time-safe under the temporal transformations you wish to run, and make sure that as you add actions they are also time-safe.

Or you will be crushed by the complexity. Standard OO will not help. You don't need "a functional language", but you damn well need functional style. You'll end up reinventing it even if you didn't know about it advance, with rigid, explicit control over side effects.

If you set out to implement this, you will find the standard Action/Command pattern to be not very helpful. This game has a much richer timeline than the usual Command pattern is designed to handle.

"All you have to do is support multiple time-shifted simulations in parallel, and you are mostly there."

No, that will be inadequate. That doesn't get you to backing up to arbitrary points in the timeline, and since the simulations are not independent, you're going to have a hell of a time expressing all the dependencies in standard OO.

(Note that you could easily do functional-style OO. No problem. But it's not just standard imperative OO, such as might work with Starcraft. This takes more.)

If you don't believe me, try implementing it in a model system. I can only handwave so hard here before you need code to see my point, unfortunately, but I am extremely confident that if you approach this with the standard grab-bag of imperative techniques, you will fail, hard.
I don't envy the position that sites like Pandora and imeem are in. Getting a fair shake with the major labels is tough.

However, there is plenty of room to do interesting things without touching music tainted by the Big 4 labels. We are doing it with Mugasha in regards to electronic dance music and TheSixtyOne is doing it with indie music. The niche is your friend, the major labels are probably not.

Also, I think it's time to realize that basing your business model on advertising isn't working. These services are going to need to start getting creative with their business models and start making money on things people want and not things people hate (ads).
I still don't think that "doors for desks" is the right way to treat your employees, no matter how bargain-crazy your vision.
"[3] Learning to hack is a lot cheaper than business school, because you can do it mostly on your own. For the price of a Linux box, a copy of K&R, and a few hours of advice from your neighbor's fifteen year old son, you'll be well on your way."

-- http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
obviously...
I don't disagree that there is a difference in the behavior between you and the author.

This behavior is not different in quality, though, just in quantity. I think that when you call yourself a "fan" and spend your time "wondering about the intersection between PG's fans and Stephenson's fans", you are expressing the same kind of devotion shown by the author.

So yes, there is a gap between you and the author. But it is a relative one. And I happen to think it is funny to see people judging someone else's behavior even when they show the same behavior. It's no different than pill-happy moms worried about their kids using drugs, claiming there is a huge difference between prescription drugs and whatever-kids-take-these-days.
For the game replay system you describe, the only requirement is total determinism. That's not the same as what is being shown here, where the "separate simulators" are actually not independent.

Both you and stcredzero are significantly underestimating the complexity introduced by the chronoporters. Without those, you'd be right, but those introduce additional complexity that I would despair of getting right with imperative programming.

It always looks simple when you just look at a demo. It's much harder when you go to actually do it.
The key point is really this: if you call out to some C function, FoobarFunc(), you simply have no guarantees that it won't sit there in a while(1) { fiddlefaddle() } loop. Since Erlang "processes" are all part of the same OS process, that would kill the whole system dead. So you really need to offload things into their own contained little world, which in this case means a real, Unix process, or at the very least a thread.
It's nice. It reminds me of the "square root" hack for Gin Rummy, from the guy who came up with the card game Ambition.

Square-root hack is as follows: regular rounds are scored on the square root (rounding down) of the deadwood difference, capped at 5 points. Undercuts get a bonus of 3, plus the square root of the differential. Gin scores 4 plus the square root of the opponent's deadwood. So the ranges are:

Regular: 1-5
Undercut: 3-6
Gin: 5-13

The victory condition is to have win a round when you have at least 20 points, and you are in the lead.

Second-turn Gin is extremely rare, but first- or second-turn knock is not rare. With the regular system, a second-turn knock (pure luck) can be a 60+ round, and that's more than half the game. With this system, it's only 5 points.
Wonderful satire!
Investor Pitch: Excite, Engage & Exit with the Ask
New metasearch engines leaves Google, Yahoo crawling
•	Imperialism is a business policy, in it; it has produced small, bad, unsafe increase of market, and has jeopardized the entire wealth of the nation. It is irrational from the standpoint of the whole nation, and it is rational enough from the standpoint of certain classes in the nation. A state which kept good balance-sheet of expenditures and assets would soon discard imperialism.
US media doesn't seem to think UN anti-blasphemy vote is newsy enough
I disagree on both points.

Delegation is a good skill for a manager, but you don't go to a technical university to learn skills like this. You can pick it up in real life. (Also, it's most certainly unethical to delegate something and take complete credit -- and that's what the essay mills are supporting.)

On the second point, the subjects already are engaging, it's just that people pick the wrong topics. If you think data structures are boring, don't get a computer science degree. If blood makes you ill, don't become a surgeon. If you think the law is boring, don't become a lawyer. Pick something that you enjoy, not something that you think will be "in demand" after you graduate. Predicting the future is not easy. Pick something you like instead.
It's referring to the Bible's claim that the Jews were once slaves living in ancient Egypt.
How is your robot relationship?
I had no idea they were releasing a new PC version soon, that's great news. I'm hoping they introduce a tutorial mode. I've tried introducing friends to PlayCatan.com but having to explain all the rules in chat they lose interest right away.
MixTape.me presents a nice approach, offering music and data mashed up from a variety of sources, in a very clean UI.

http://mixtape.me
I am using these guidelines, starated today. I got a lot accomplished. Let's see how well it holds up. There's bad consistency and good consistency.
I agree. we have also polled our users in our startup Tonido. We have got useful feedbacks from core users than the guests.
I've played Catan with cards instead of dice- you have 36 cards, each with a number that can be attained by rolling two dice. How many times a number appears in the deck is its odds of being rolled. Statistically, you will roll 7 6/36 times, so there are 6 sevens in the deck. There is only one 2 and one 12 because their odds are 1/36. You shuffle the deck, and draw a card instead of rolling (once you go through the deck, you just reshuffle). This means that luck plays into when you will get a resource, but not if you will.
TheFunded Claims to be Shutting Down April 1
I posted your paper yesterday (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=534399), no one seemed to bother... I am guessing bbc is sexier or something.

I really enjoyed it
Are you serious? Do you ever drive or cross the street? Because things can get a lot worse than losing $200, with, I imagine, a higher probability.
I agree with all of your points here, as I don't really idolize anyone either, but I raised the question for the perspective of people who do idolize others or need these sorts of faith based crutches to get through the day. Religion and idolatry are prevalent in our species - more so than logic, sadly.
Actually there is a standard definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Metropolitan_Statistic...
Forging a Hot Link to the Farmer Who Grows the Food
No. (But it's read only)
Need a Pothole Filled in Your City? Call KFC
Damn...make sure you don't miss the breakup letter he sent to his ex-gf: http://www.gicleelife.com/email.php

My summary: You're kind of a pain in my ass and I can't waste time on your Emotions if I want to be a Success. Let's be friends, cya! ;D

I hate to judge people on their personal matters, but this was published and prominently linked, so it's fair game: that's some real cold stuff. I'm all for ambition and wanting to succeed, and it's true that I know nothing about the relationship (there may be plenty of other factors that change things), but to me it's still important to maintain some level of compassion and decency in your human interactions, especially outside of business - at least without context, the lack of tact and general bluntness seem to indicate a real sensitivity problem.

To me that's an entirely inappropriate way to end what you once considered a serious relationship, not to mention the inherent cruelty of an e-mail breakup, and the further salt-in-wound damage you inflict by posting the letter online...

Am I alone here?
The best line I've heard wrt giving Westerners a perspective to understanding China is this (paraphrasing):

Americans demand change when they feel something isn't right. They want to see change happen and want it immediately - or, at the least, every four years. It's a young country, barely 250 years old, and has reinvented itself many times over, in short durations, and has grown and evolved so much so quickly. Because Americans can change and remake itself so quickly, they also demand that of others. America is like the hare. China, on the other hand, is like the turtle. It's a 5,000 year old civilization, moving slowly and gradually, at its own pace, regardless of what others are doing. To the Chinese, the last 20 years has been probably the most progressive 20 years in China's history. To China, it is moving at lightening pace. Compared to China 10, 15, 20 years ago, it has come a long long way. And it will continue to progress, but at its own turtle's pace.
does anyone know if this is the result of the EDF lawsuit or something new?
IPhone OS 3.0 brings the speed for JavaScript
Frugality is probably relative to the industry you're in. Amazon is a retail company, where margins are low, and the overall health of the company can hinge a lot on managing all the seemingly small expenses that crop up in running a business.

If you're in a higher-margin business like software, maybe the Frugality trade-offs look different. Would Fog Creek be doing substantially better if it spent substantially less per developer? They might be doing a little better, but I doubt it would be enough to materially impact the business. And it may require that they put more of the company's resources into recruiting and hiring, to handle increased turnover.

I suspect that the author is heading to a startup as his next step, which may be why Frugality is standing out to him. If you're not cash-flow-positive yet in a business, then keeping your spend rate down by any means necessary can make the difference between success and failure.
> It's time for some wrath - nothing better than an institution that deals with 3rd world dictators to call out breaches of law.

The IMF doesn't "deal with" 3rd world dictators or "call out breaches of law".

> You could call it 'ethical awareness' that an outside perspective can contribute.

And you could call it a pony for all the good it would do.

"Outside" doesn't tell you anything about the value of a perspective.

> However, many bankers currently (and in the past) are in policy positions, and suddenly the lessons from corruption and aggregation of power in 3rd world countries apply.

If you're arguing that "IMF bankers will fix things", you're ignoring the fact that IMF bankers are what got us into this and we're currently using IMF bankers. (Guess where the current treasury secretary used to work.)

If you're arguing that the IMF is used to dealing with corrupt bankers, you're simply wrong.

And, if you're arguing that the US has problems because of corrupt bankers, you don't know anything useful about said problems.

> Well, I was hoping for a fresh outside perspective.

Hope is not a plan. Change is not necessary good. And an outside perspective isn't necessarily relevant. (Different can be good or bad.)

And, it's not "fresh".

> We here in the U.S. have been shafted for so long that we've got 'Stockholm Syndrome'.

One of the symptoms is grasping at anything, without regard for whether it actually helps or is even relevant.

So, to end on a positive note, it's likely that you've accurately explained why you're thrashing around uselessly.
> All advertising email is spam, "solicited" is just a weasel-word to sugar coat...

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Everyone is not entitled to their own facts (in this case, definition).

Even the hyper-vigilant about as far as you can be in that direction SpamHaus, disagrees with you and accepts the common definition that solicited email is, by definition, not spam.

You may consider all advertising email to be spam, just as you may consider all four legged mammals to be dogs. Doesn't make it so.
It reminded me of the secondary market in Japan for magazines that homeless people would pick out of the trash and resell.
We play with this but only on building victory points. Victory chits, largest army and longest road don't count towards the number of victory points. I don't know where this started but it has made for alot better games.
Jeff also professes outright that he has no idea what he's doing in a substantial portion of his daily blog posts. He's a proud idiot.

It's totally in-character for him to be unwilling to even try diving in himself.
I enjoyed the article. I also enjoyed looking through their blog (which is mentioned at the bottom of the article pages). It seems like a good place to get an easy to understand analysis of the banking crisis news.

http://baselinescenario.com/
A corollary may be, "Don't assume something is wrong because you don't understand it." This is a trap I fall into all of the time. Certain things tend to elicit it broadly, such as the Hoare rule for assignment:

{P[X/e]} X := e {P}
I always thought his secret weapon was his stirring musical numbers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vniMR6Ez9cE
Blog? Isn't that a little rude on their part? It's just happenstance that the "elevator statement" article is the current. If this like any other start-up blog in the future, later users who visit this page will be faced with marketing or development minutia. (It's why it didn't occur to me to even follow said link.)
CodingHorror and Open Source Economics