skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was the second or third thing we learned in a basic data structures course; not so much for the utility of the list but to become familiar with the application of XOR to pointer arithmetic.

That professor (his name was Jorge Orejel) was probably the best I've had. He was a hardass but really taught the fundamentals well. The 3 classes I took from him had something like 80% attrition because the lazy people gave up.

No I wasn't one of the lazy people :)
That's the point, it's hard to cheat "average karma per post"... you have to actually have posts that people like and upvote, instead of zillions of crappy posts.
Facebook tracks users even when they're logged out, and without telling them!
Funny Farm Game
Valuation just dropped 10B.
That is a novel way to attempt to do so (though I still think is far from absolutely successful). Most previous attempts dealt only with sample size.
Startup Events:

SF Beta Holiday Bash (10th)

Lunch 2.0 - Mozilla (4th)

Lunch 2.0 - Loopt (7th)
Confronting Failure and Winning
don't blindly fix bugs before writing new code
Reading people is what poker is all about, but tells (mannerisms) are overly emphasized to a large degree in the media. They really aren't much a of a factor once you move beyond total amateurs, though at the same time, a relatively large % of the players you run into at the WSOP main event are playing their first live tournament anymore.

Really, though, it's more about observing how your opponent plays (both long term and short) and putting him on a range of holdings.
Little to none, though I'll cover that in a later part.
They don't brute force only because processor power isn't sufficient to do so. Eventually they will cease to prune and will be unbeatable.

I'd never say chess is trivial, it's just far less complex than poker.
Also, interestingly enough, since poker is all about optimization, it would still be hard to play perfectly even if you had perfect knowledge of the state. Even sometimes knowing what someone had, it's hard to decide the perfect play.
>I suspect a lot of Ruby code you might want to run doesn't work with JRuby or IronRuby.

Not likely. Rails runs fine on jruby at least, and it does every dirty trick under the sun.
Interesting. So if you could setting on say linux, then you probably would be good to go.

If you want support on another OS platform, run linux in a virtual machine of some sort.
He he. Some time I'll tell you the story of why I would be a millionaire many times over by now if Neteller had not stopped accepting Americans. And why, after they did, I ended up driving home from Canada through a blizzard.

And why I own a whole bunch of cheap Dell PCs and registered copies of VMWare.
The labyrinth at Grave Cathedral is cool.

http://www.gracecathedral.org/

Definitely visit a beach: http://www.sfguide.com/sports/beaches.htm. This is a lovely time of year to watch the waves.

If you have time take a win tour of Alexander Valley. You'll fall in love.
5 Things that will Kill your Startup [in 2008]
Cory Doctorow's short story on VCs and Startups
i understand the desired and potentially correct conclusion, but what can you really conclude with a sample size of 5 people?
China quick to find Olympic fakes but not pirated software
You know, like, "I was playing 30-60 at the Bellagio, and I got cleaned out..." Something along those lines.
Here's an honest question. Why isn't more research being done into solving Poker compared to the amount put into Go or Chess?

> It seems to me that it is an interesting question that combines elements of computation, AI, and psychology.

> One can see instant practical results by playing your bot for real money.

> Poker is a fun game. :)

Any answers would be appreciated, especially as I'm thinking about doing a PhD and am currently exploring open problem domains.
Venture capitalists, and their fake profile pages on Facebook
Spam Trap Claims 10x-100x Accuracy Gain
http://www.toronado.com for the best beer selection ever
Nice article. Found it refreshing and forwarding looking, without trying to be too futuristic.
Karma per submission was calculated once:
http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html. (Scroll down to August 6th's entry.)
Ask YC: favorite books
with the exception of programming/technical books, what are your faves?

Mine: lotr,ugly americans,the new new thing....
if you 'game' the system by submitting a bunch of news or insightful posts, I think we all benefit
I skipped compilers in undergrad, did any of you guys use what you learned in compilers in other topics?

( have no desire to make a compiler, but wondering if this is a topic I should pick up )
Joel Spolsky's talk at Yale, part 2
Better yet. Park the car and _walk_ down University Avenue.
My predictions:

buffer overflows will no longer exist because anything user input facing will be written in 'safe' languages

sql injection/cross site scripting will be no more as frameworks continue to prevent them out of the box

somebody will create a user friendly sandboxing system rendering trojans and spywhere obsolete
Windows will be dead?
Take the free shuttle from Palo Alto to Stanford though! Stanford owns a decadent amount of land between the too, it was a much longer walk than I expected.
Against the Odds (James Dyson)
It seems to me that the 'emerging monopolies' wouldn't kill your startup, but be a good thing, as getting bought seems to be a worthwhile goal.
I was just in Palo Alto for a couple days. I stayed in Dinah's Garden Hotel in a "Deluxe" room with patio facing a pond. (El Camino Real). Quite nice for the price I paid.

Ate some breakfasts at Peninsula Fountain & Grill (Emerson/Hamilton). Classic American diner.

Drinking at "Old Pro" (great mini burgers) and other bars in the area which are more difficult to remember. (University/Ramona). Pretty good.
Rails Plugin - Acts as taggable on steroids
Podcasts from ThoughtWorks - DSL Part 1 of 2
Avoid the Cable Cars. Unless you like standing in line for 3 hours to have someone's crotch in your face while the "conductor" yells at people not to lean out.
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Not a big fan of the Joel on Software but this is an amazing article... ...I used to be one of those "house programmers" too!
The Economic Naturalist
I recommend Robert H. Frank's book "The Economic Naturalist" for insight into everyday economics (extracts at http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/22/why-do-reti... and http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/more-from-t...). As those URLs suggest, it is of the Freakonomics genre, though IMHO better than the original Freaknomics by being broader and more fundamental. Ch 3 ("Why equally talented workers often earn different salaries...") resonates with PG's articles about inequality/productivity, though unfortunately I can't find extracts from that chapter online.
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Richard Feynman)

What do you care what other people think? (Richard Feynman)
The Bible

Autobiography of Ben Franklin

Mastering the Winds of Change (solid self-improvement book)
Watership Down. It is surprisingly epic and immersing for a book about rabbits traveling through the English countryside.
Snow Crash (Neil Stephenson)

The Bible (Various chaps)
You reminded me of a great little book published a long time ago which is still very relevant: "The Ugly American"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_American). A recent really good read was Le Carre's "The Mission Song"
What a delightful piece. I browsed a little more on the website and ran across the following gem:

When an engineer knocks at your door with a mathematical question, you should not try to get rid of him or her as quickly as possible. You are likely to make a mistake I myself made for many years: to believe that the engineer wants you to solve his or her problem. This is the kind of oversimplification for which we mathematicians are notorious. Believe me, the engineer does not want you to solve his or her problem. Once, I did so by mistake (actually, I had read the solution in the library two hours earlier, quite by accident), and he got quite furious, as if I were taking away his livelihood. What the engineer wants is to be treated with respect and consideration, like the human being he or she is, and most of all to be listened to in rapt attention. If you do this, he or she will be likely to hit upon a clever new idea as he or she explains the problem to you, and you will get some of the credit.

I think it applies equally to software projects.
Cool idea for removing the luck, but I think it has no bearing on the computer's strategy, only on the analysis of the results by the human observers.
Do you have any hard data on CPC vs CPM market share?
The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)

I, Claudius (Robert Graves)
This is very narrow minded. Perhaps the CPC ads on average are targeted towards the demographics they discovered.

I have successfully used Google Ads outside the USA. The target audience was high income, but they did click on ads as long as they were relevant (or close to relevant).
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect -- Read it free online! http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html
A Preview of HTML 5
Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia
The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence
by Josh Waitzkin (the movie Searching for Bobby Fisher was about him): talks about the higher stages of mastery.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Art-Learning-Journey-Pursuit-Excellenc...
whoa how did this get in??
The Marin headlands is nice to see. Sausalito has a cool bar called the "No Name" that has live Dixie Jazz most days.
Muir Woods is a nice walk. Pt. Reyes area is purty.
Maybe drive from SF to Monterey on the Pacific Coast Highway and see 17 Mile Drive in Pebble Beach.
No Contest / Punished by Rewards (Alfie Kohn)

The Underground History of American Education (John Taylor Gatto)
I don't quite get the faith Lush seems to inspire in some of its users. It's terribly documented, has antiquated semantics (no closures), and isn't even type safe (you can segfault if you pass an object of the wrong type). I might consider using Lush when performance was absolutely critical, but otherwise I don't think it holds a candle to Matlab for prototyping.
A For-Profit, Political Advertising company
http://www.ronpaulblimp.com/Transparency.php is how much all the staff members are getting paid. I just thought this company's very new business model was interesting. I'm not trying to exploit a flaw in the naive implementation of social news or anything.
The animated film is a classic :-)
LOTR

Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)

Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)

Devil in the White City (Erik Larson)
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (bit of a beast, but well worth it).
Is preparing to scale up front a real problem?
Company story:  Blue Origin and planning for scale.
Many.

In short:

All books written by Witold Gombrowicz (Diary if have to pick one),

All books written by Slavoj Zizek (Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates if have to pick one)

Recently read and significant:

The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper,

Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders, Jack Schwager
Not sure it's so hard... with a leaderboard there's much more incentive to start working with others to vote up your submissions, use multiple accounts, etc.
Open Source Hardware Gift Guide
"Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn

This philosophy of science masterpiece illustrates how a community evolves its mental model or paradigm - from a long-accepted world view, to a crisis caused by evidence that contradicts the prevailing model, and then at last to an acceptance of a new paradigm.

http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/Kuhn.html
Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Material which kicks off with the Golden Compass is a great read.

Sherlock Holmes stories are fun.

The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick is also a good read.

Pierre
Godel, Escher, Bach (An Eternal Golden Braid) by Douglas Hofstadter. Also, The Mind's I (more philosophical) edited by the same guy.
Indian Startup Coverage
that hotel is also very close to the Exploratorium, which is as good as interactive science museums get and the Palace of the Fine Arts, which is worth seeing if you're in the area.
LiveJournal sold to Russian company for $30 million
Where does Paul Graham eat breakfast these days?
- use of weapons (ian m banks)

- surely you are joking mr feynman (rpf)

- origin of order (stuart kauffman)

- slaughter house five (kurt vonnegut)

- goedel escher bach (douglas hofstadter)

- theta-magical memas errr metamagical themas (dogulas hofsta)
got to love Hitchhikers, I also enjoyed Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by adams too.
I've been following webyantra and pluggd.in for a while, and they both are well written blogs.
Don't use the dollar?

I'm not sure what he's getting at. Use a payment service and quote in whatever currency the use prefers. It's not like you have to do your own currency exchange or anything -- all that stuff can easily be handled.

Also the "there won't be a Web 3.0. Web 3.0 is a Web 2.0 meme" seems a little flip. The 2.0/3.0/4.0/etc meme is from software versioning, not Web 2.0. So I imagine whatever comes along big on the web next people will naturally call Web 3.0 -- for the same reason the next big wr will probably be called WWIII. That's just the way numbers work. Of course, "Web 3.0" may never catch on, but that's a different story.
thats a really good overview. Naming divs has to be a winner, I am not sure if the names they were using in the article were defined by w3c or it gives you the ability to name your own.

shame each browser will render it differently...
Would you care to elaborate? Which books are good? What kind of practice? I'm sure many here are interested.

Thanks.
Countdown To Le Web: Two More Free Tickets
I had similar issues. But I find that the simplest way to get around them is to use VMWare or Parallels, depending on what your emacs is running on. Run Lisp inside the OS of your choice and connect to it using Slime.

If you don't use Slime+Emacs+Tramp, I don't think it's worth getting into CL at all. Slime absolutely rocks my world. I have 8 SBCL instances running on multiple machines (virtual and dedicated) on my network and the internet, and I don't have problems doing any lisp development.

My advice would be to pick the OS/Lisp implementation based on what you think you might need.
I have actually programmed game AI and I can say none of your arguments is convincing. It is a very bold claim you are making, with very little to support it.
As the saying goes where there's muck there's brass. I believe there is money to be made in niche markets where there is a need for software that solves boring problems effectively. The way I see things are going we're too tied up building the next "poke your friend in Facebook" app that we tend to forget that there are real problems being experienced by people/businesses that are begging for a solution. Not a knock against face book developers but it would be nice to use that kind of brain power to solve "mundane" problems.

Wait first wasn't there a PG essay about this already? Shame on you!
Getting Advertisers for your website - Will this work?
Chess lacks chance compared to blackjack too. Does it means chess is simpler than blackjack?
Computers can brute force poker too. The way computers and humans play chess is also very different, although there is superficial similarity in that they both enumerate future moves.
Chess has been researched much, much more than Go.

In research, you are looking for problems that can be solved in isolation, not ones that combine many diverse topics.

Perhaps poker is not researched more because gambling is tainted negatively by the society.
Unhappy? Self-Critical? Maybe You're Just a Perfectionist
Oh, no. I should never have read that, now I've got the damn Art Garfunkel theme song stuck in my head (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_Eyes_%28Art_Garfunkel_so...).

Curse be upon you :-)
The End Of Fuel? Shai Agassi Launches Alternative Transportation Venture!
- Godel Esher Bach

- The Development of Mathematics, by E. T. Bell

not that i understand mathematics that well, but this book gave me many ideas of how an abstract/complex thing like mathematics can evolve through history, i found that exciting

- when i was a teenager i liked a couple of books by Martin Gardner
Is acquisition a valid exit strategy?
I'm working on a business plan for an internet startup, and I'm not exactly certain of my exit strategy. I figure if I do the old...

1. Make website
2. Get lots of users
3. ???
4. Profit!

...investors might not appreciate it.

Is targeting acquisition looked down upon, or is it considered a valid exit strategy? Honestly, I'm at a loss how else would you exit the business other than selling it once it's profitable.
Please show me how..I'll be eternally grateful
It's the Sun, Stupid
Are your lights on - Jerry Weinberg
The blind watchmaker - Richard Dawkins
I'm analytical to a fault, but Neil Gaiman's novels genuinely make me believe in magic at some level. I love that.
And yet, I spent 5 years working for a company using Peregrine ServiceCenter, the most god-awful piece of junk software I've ever seen, for trouble-tickets. I actually once measured how much time was lost in a day because of its suck. It wasn't insignificant, and it didn't even begin to cover the emotional effects on productivity. I hated it with a passion, to the point where it would be personal revenge for me to drive Peregrine out of business (at least out of the trouble-ticket software business).
..and all the other goodies that was located at the Boston Computer Museum. Someone decided to plow it over when they were just so happening to put an interstate underground. Oh well. The commute to the airport is wicked fast now.
2. The game was limit holdem, which is easier for a computer to solve than no-limit.
For anyone looking for more ideas, there's a related thread here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=56618
There is quite a bit of research being done about poker in the last few years. In fact poker related research has got best paper awards at a couple of the major AI conferences in recent years.

Check out http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/. They're probably the leaders in this field.
It's widely accepted in AI circles that Poker is a much more difficult to solve than chess. The main reason is that chess is a game of perfect information whereas Poker is a game of imperfect or partial information. It's much more difficult to find an optimal (or even a consistently successful) strategy in Poker.
My other favorite bit is how the old dying dinosaurs fight the on-coming revolution.
Chess doesn't even need processing power in theory, only a very large database with state lookup in the big book of chess.

There is a nice proof in game theory that any turn based game with 2 players, limited number of board positions, and finite max length is subject to the creation of the perfect game book - basically a simple table of board positions and the ultimate correct decision for every board position. using it you are guaranteed to win/draw optimally (depends on first mover advantage) against any player.

You just can't create a "big book of poker" it doesn't meet the requirements.

PS: Go is also subject to this treatment despite being several orders of magnitude more complex than chess, it is still a finite 2 player turn based game.
The Bible,

Wild at Heart,

How to Win Friends and Influence People,

Songs for Martha <-- I have an autographed copy,

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,

Rainbow Six (and most other Clancy books)
iPhone Delivers: Bigger Browsing Share Than Windows Mobile
I'm an in-house programmer (left grad school because I thought I'd get some money). The job is painful. The layers of bureaucracy are suffocating. It probably doesn't help that I'm actually working for contractor that produces in-house software for the federal government.

Oh well, at least its expected that an employee will move around a bit.
Try some Haskell today!
Don't 'target acquisition' what you should be targeting is making a profitable product. Make your customers happy, make money, then figure out the 'exit strategy'. When I worked for Accel I would have been very uncomfortable with an entrepreneur that presented an exit strategy. Yes, acquisition may be the end result, but don't make it your end goal.
I'm taking compilers right now. The highlights:

Loads of practice writing code to solve problems with a significant degree of complexity where accuracy is critical and each step builds on the last. It's easily the most coding-intensive course I have ever taken.

Writing a compiler is the best way to learn the dusty corners of a language, and you typically have to learn at least two languages; the source and the target.

You learn how to read and apply BNF Grammars, not just understand what they are (as in a Theory of Comp course). You learn how they're used to specify things like operator precedence. You also will probably get a lot of practice analyzing or manipulating the resulting abstract syntax tree. If you are slow at recursion now, you won't be after trying to build a compiler (or else it will take you forever).

You make practical use of a variety of classical data structures and algorithms. You walk around your parse tree, you do graph coloring to optimize register usage.

Really though, it's not a topic you can just browse over and get much out of. The real value is actually buckling down and trying to build a compiler.
Given my current employment situation, I'll just say that his remarks in this part of the talk are painfully correct.
In-house programming doesn't need to be as bad as Joel's experience. Yes, you are in what is called a "cost center" that doesn't get the same management priority as a "revenue center." But the more closely your work is aligned with a revenue center, the better treatment you'll get.

In a software company, you're in a revenue center. The problem is that you may have to sign a draconian intellectual property agreement, jeopardizing side projects. This is less likely as an in-house programmer.
I have been forced to use terrible software before so I can empathize.

This is why $DEITY invented Trac.
The $1,000 DNA Test - 23andMe interview
> Eventually they will cease to prune and will be unbeatable.

No, they won't. The universe isn't big enough for a computer that would play brute force in a reasonable amount of time.
re: Web 2.0 being out of style, perhaps some of the trendy things like gradients, etc. may have fallen out of fashion, but, IMO, simple interfaces will never fall out of fashion.

For the last ten years, I've programmed user interfaces for folks with high school educations to run complex chemical plants and refineries, and I've seen that an easy-to-understand interface has at least as much importance as the algorithms that underly the interface.
1984

The Silmarillion

The Hero With A Thousand Faces

Dune

Walden (about half the chapters anyway)
I'm working on a similar business plan right now, and am having the same difficulty. Our software solves a problem and I believe we can get a lot of users, but despite adding in ad revenue and a vague "enterprise edition," the numbers just don't add up into something attractive.

Is it best to be honest about this, or beef up the numbers?
All of William Gibson and all of Neal Stephenson (especially Cryptonomicon and Baroque cycle series)
A List Apart: Designing For Flow
This is a brilliant recruiting speech.
I think Wasabi is very misunderstood. Creating a meta language that "compiles" down to PHP or ASP makes a lot of sense. Don't we need every advantage we can get? If doing that speeds up his development cycle and helps him support both Linux and Windows customers, I wouldn't call that a mess.

It's unorthodox maybe, but not a mess.
and the spec he put together which outlines copilot is a pretty good read:

Spec:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/RandomStuff/copilot_spec.pdf

Article:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/AardvarkSpec.html