skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Honestly his idea of how professionals play profitably in poker is pretty awful. To say that a pro's bets are merely probing for information to let him know when he is beat is a gross oversimplification. "Betting for information" is actually a common leak (a sub-optimality) in beginners' and even solid players' play.

Most bets (there are some exceptions, but they are very few) have one of two purposes:

1) To make a hand with good equity (the chance of winning if no one ever folded) fold, especially a hand that is currently beating your own.

2) To get value from a hand with worse equity that will call.

The best situations are where your bet is doing both. For example, if we raised preflop with 8-7 and are greeted with an A J 8 flop with 2 clubs, we can bet and get hands like 10-10 and 9-9 to fold, while hands like a flush draw or straight draw will call. We can bet sometimes on the turn against certain players and get all but an A to fold.

Contrast this with a situation where we have K-K on an A 8 2 flop with no draws. A LOT of bad players bet small here so that if someone raises (or even calls), they can assume they have the A and fold. This is a huge mistake. We're only folding out hands we beat, getting called by hands that beat us, and possibly giving a smart opponent a chance to bluff us off the best hand. It is much better to check and let an opponent with a hand like QJ hit a worse pair (or give someone with TT a chance to think he might have the best hand when the turn is a 9) so that we can make money from a couple bets. Furthermore we give aggressive opponents a chance to bluff at us.

When we bet for information, our bet has no value, therefore we make no money from it. When we instead bet for value (or to fold a better hand) we do make money (in the long run) from our bet.

This post got longer than intended, but seeing your comment get a few upvotes, I wanted to make sure that people didn't think his insights were actually good. The most insightful thing he said was:

Professional players are so much better
than amateurs that they can make a living
in many cases, becoming very very rich by
exploiting the difference between their
level of skill and the level of the people
they play with.

Don't let yourself (meaning the reader, not necessarily the poster I'm replying to) be one of those amateurs too often ;). Beyond that, especially considering that he says, "I can't play poker..." I would definitely not take his poker insights very seriously. The parallels with entrepreneurship, however, are pretty interesting.
Ask HN: Winter Mini-Internships?
As a college student, I have a month off coming up and was thinking that it would be a good experience to find a startup to work for a few weeks. For reference, I have a programming background (freelance web development), but am more interested in doing a marketing project. I am wondering if this would be something that would be worthwhile to both me and the company or if the short timeframe just makes it too much of hassle?

Anyone out there have experience doing this?

Any other thoughts/suggestions?
On first read I thought this guy was just turning 30 :/
Anyone know if YC is doing traditional companies? i.e. advertising and real-estate.

Don't need the money but could really use the "blessing". They have some of the most enviable media contacts in the industry right now.
Internet Use Doesn’t Lead to Isolation
TechStars Graduate Everlater Secures Funding
Wheels, this is brilliant and it mostly matches what we learnt from other startups during StartupSchool and the Y-Combinator reception last month. Thanks for putting this in a post.
I'm in pretty much the same situation as you, having done startups before with cofounders and encountered lots of problems related to that. Now I'm a single founder.

The problem (at least for me) is that you have to find someone that's smart, gets things done and have the determination required to do a startup. It seems that there are a lot of dreamers that like the idea of doing a startup, but when the rubber meets the road almost all people bail. Not that I blame them, most people have commitments that requires them to hold steady incomes, spend time with family, etc.

Finding a good co-founder is almost as hard as doing a startup. There are lots of people that will say yes when you ask them, but very very few that will actually get something meaningful done to move things forward in a serious way.
Right, and incredibly high speeds is definitely accurate. I can't remember the amount of instructions/second our mainframe can handle, but I remember it being in the multiple hundreds of thousands.
Microsoft vs. Google: When it comes to the cloud, it's war
A self-service application generator that non-programmers can use to build custom web apps (order processing, inventory, accounting) for small business.
JBoss's "tattletale" program does just that for a few years already.

Maybe it doesn't draw pretty drawings, but otherwise it's oldnews.
Some people still refuse to invest in DB2 though, and so you're stuck with VSAM/Flatfiles for your data. It's a horrible time sink.
It's a proof-of-concept. Don't get hung up on the parsing details, I expect I'm going to have to rewrite it at least twice.
BTW, time to put up a nice looking 404 page or fix whatever's wrong:

http://www.directededge.com/dsfdsfds
I find that my customers are very good at telling me what I should do...

For the product, absolutely.

I was referring to how to build the business, not the product. Sorry for the confusion.
unreal the original has a linux port I think, but this udk is for unreal 3, which I don't think does.
Quicken Online to Shut Down Next Year, Users Moved to Mint - Mint - Lifehacker
Allow me to rephrase - "I get what they (CRFs) do" then, at a high-level.

Thanks for the video lecture links, I'll definitely look into those.
I think Office has cut off the oxygen supply to this whole market--no one even dares to step up to the plate, if they're interested in the "big win".
Lucene got company: galago
Tech titans meet in secret to plug SSL hole
I think he was. Ruthless in competition, shipping product on time with bugs, commanding loyalty -all laudable when you are a tiny company. Even breaking the law is relative - what Bill does became illegal only when Microsoft became a giant. Its not monopolistic practice unless you dominate the market.
In my experience, the reasons are mostly just because it's been the standard for so long at said shop.

Most people using mainframes don't make money off of their IT department, their programmers are expensive and don't produce profits. Investing in a large change from "what works and has a fixed cost" to something new and possibly troublesome or more expensive (initial cost) just isn't a priority for them.

Not to mention the retraining you'd have to do. A lot of these programmers are either old and unwilling to learn, or just uninterested in rocking the boat. So is it worth it to have to fire people or get subpar code, or just stick with what's working that keeps you generating a profit and keeps your current programmers job security?
...when you are able to talk someone else into being committed to it, it acts as a kind of validation of the idea.

I've heard this argument before, but I don't buy it. All it really proves is that group think is alive and well.

Two classic counter-examples:

1. I can come up with the most ridiculous idea in the world and still find someone who I could convince of anything.

2. I can come up with the best idea in the world and still not be able to convince anyone to join me, but be able to convince many people to buy it.
It seems that Cappucino will provide the same quality of experience as Flash, while avoiding the serious downsides of the latter (mostly proprietary technology lock-in, but also just general misbehavior compared to platform apps, as Francisco points out so well.).
So why did you miss the plane? Was it your fault or the airlines?

If it was your fault, what do you expect to happen? If you travel by TGV in France and miss your train, your place is also gone and you have to buy a new ticket.
I really like the fact that the engine is free for many non-commercial purposes.

I think the indie game scene in particular, which often releases their titles for free, can benefit tremendously from having these tools available.
Dry vacuum pumps fail regularly (<500 hours). Not exactly peace of mind, that. I'll take a battery backed electric gyro or AHRS any day.
It took me a while to realize what this was about. They could have made that "Learn More" button more prominent. That said, I'm intrigued about what this will mean for SourceForge and friends.
You, my friend, are a scientist, and not an artist.
My apologies...had a little too much coffee this morning. ;)
Here is the discovery: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=923333
The Internet has the potential to magnify socialization opportunities beyond anything in history.
And to help internet socialization along, consider my product at www.sococo.com
Its for group collaboration when the group is distributed geographically. Provides social cues needed for rapid, frictionless communication - you can see who's talking with whom, whether the staff meeting has started, who's gone home.
Hi folks, this is Jay Pipes, the author of the slide decks in question...someone notified me via email that these slides were up online.

I had no idea those slides were even up online! People tend to take the slides from my website (http://jpipes.com) and post them on various websites without my knowledge, which is perfectly fine. :)

Those slides are also quite old (2+ years now). I've done many presentations since then and have a number of alternate slide decks which you may find useful. Here are the links to download PDFs from my website.

http://jpipes.com/presentations/kill-mysql-performance.pdf

http://jpipes.com/presentations/target-practice/target-pract...

http://jpipes.com/presentations/target-practice/target-pract...

http://jpipes.com/presentations/joinfu/joinfu_part_one.pdf

http://jpipes.com/presentations/joinfu/joinfu_part_two.pdf

http://jpipes.com/presentations/dqm/legend_drunken_query_mas...

You can also download a chapter of my book (Pro MySQL) on SQL Scenarios:

http://jpipes.com/presentations/sqlscenarios.pdf

Cheers!

jay
Thousands? Haha.

Yeah, that was pretty hilarious. I was trying to reach a milestone at the end of September and I put in over 5500 hands on 9/30 alone in about 11 hours of play.

The only correction I have to your post is: They're almost as good as the TV pros, but younger. Most of the cash game Internet pros (and many of the tournament Internet pros) are much better than the TV pros (other than a select few like Ivey and Antonious, who also play online anyways) because the Internet pros have played so many hands and tirelessly gone over areas where they are losing money to improve. When you're playing 400-500 hands/hr, a small improvement in your game can mean a difference of over $25/hr for mid-high stakes players. Many of these players aren't "TV pros" simply because they make a better hourly rate playing online where they can put in 8x the hands in the same time span, or because they don't (yet?) have the bankroll to risk losing $100K+ on a single hand.

I'm sure you (gizmo) know all this, but I thought some of these points would be useful information for the HN reader who is less knowledgeable about the poker world.

Here's one more tangent point you might find interesting about deep stacks (http://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/issue56/Savage-Deep-Stack...). Here a well-known tournament director points out that deep stacked tournaments typically hinder the pro. Of course this doesn't apply to cash games (which you were obviously referring to), but because of tournaments' increasing blind levels and the need to end after a period of time, deeper stacks at the beginning actually mean a more-pronounced lottery period later on.
He had similar things to say about iPhone.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2007/04/ballmer-says-i...

"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance," said Ballmer. "It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get."

The charts here have iPhone handily out-pacing all Windows Mobile units:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/11/03/canalys_q3_200...
The network affect of a bug tracker is that having a larger user-base means:

(a) more people have run into the same problems as you, and have either posted their own solutions or pressured the company into fixing them
(b) more people may have built extensions on the product
(c) more people may have written helpful tutorials on the product
(d) more people will know what you're talking about when you speak in the product's language.

I think there needs to be more 'marketing' around the idea of simple software that's easy to use and doesn't screw up. Not enough people really appreciate these things in the quest for more features.
Vivid, emotionally potent. Color breaks the barrier between what's history and what's current.
Just to add a little to your excellent advice:

#1 could be an intangible improvement over existing offerings, such as better customer service, better (or no) contract terms and/or pricing, etc.

Something that's been talked about here before is offering localized versions of popular services, such as the dating sites tailored to the local culture of Japan (or was it China?) due to the large difference in the way that dating work over there as apposed to western countries. This could make #2 much easier to accomplish, if your offering is a better match for a specific subset of possible customers, but I guess that's the definition of finding a niche market, huh?
How to make money selling iPhone games
Writing tests adds time up front but almost wipes out the debugging stage for me (which used to make up > 50% of the time).

The number of crazy edge cases that have been picked up by my tests that would have just "got through" before scares me when looking at code without tests.

Of course, I acknowledge it's not for everyone and it's not for every project. If you have a very strong up-front design and speccing process coupled with a final integration testing process, I'd argue unit testing might not be necessary at all. As a lone developer with a lot to keep in his head, though, unit testing has been very useful.
How fast would one of those monsters be compared to, say, a modern day Mac Pro?
And when your capital city has a unique geography that makes it both difficult to attack and guaranteed to be a center of commerce.

I love all the giant old stone walls in Istanbul, the place is filthy with them. The people are totally used to it too - it's trippy to see schools and homes built around centuries-old ramparts.
it doesn't sound like this is a Flash vulnerability per se, but rather a misconfiguration of Flash on Facebook's and MySpace's websites right?
Ask HN:  Technical founder startup share
I've been presented with an opportunity to help an aspiring entrepreneur take his idea from the idea stage to (a) demo and then (b) foundation code-base and initial launch system. For (a) the cash strapped founder is offering an effectively insignificant sum that I may as well wave, and a somewhat more realistic sum (pending his successful demo-based vc funding search) for the initial code base + a 3% share.

Given my NDA obligations I'm not at liberty to delve deeply into the idea, but its possible to say that it is a non-trivial (but not rocket science) cross between a social system and a ubiquitous domain X, and that technology will necessarily play a key role in the operation and success of the enterprise. The system will require a sophisticated backend and it is clear that market price for contract development of the system is substantially higher than what is on offer. In sum, while there are other aspects to the business such as 3rd party affiliations and data acquisition costs, technology costs will be a significant chunk of this venture's operational costs. (Marketing, should a non-viral path be chosen, is the only other immediate potential cost. Company can be virtually operated.)

The original founder is entirely non-tech. He seems intelligent but I'm not 100% sure if he is really up to the game of an internet startup (he apparently has been shopping a cost structure where 10% of his costs were for software ...), and that most likely his potential competitors (n.b. nobody seems to be doing what he is proposing!) will be techies. In any event, in the course of the our ongoing conversations I have been giving him critical feedback outside of the mere technical aspects of his proposal, so I certainly think I would be making contributions beyond providing software.

Currently I am in a situation where I can minimize my expenses and go in Ramen mode for a few months and I think the idea is compelling enough. So I am considering a counter proposal to join forces as the tech co-founder and bootstrap this venture, and seek outside investment at a subsequent stage where we have a functioning system and a founder team that covers the bases for the required expertise in running this business.

So. There is a founder with a compelling and fairly unique idea. He does not have funding as of yet. He has worked out the process to some degree but I've been also giving him feedback on that front as well, but lets just say he has the idea snd processed worked out for the sake of the argument. If a tech founder were to join, what should he reasonably look for in terms of percentages?

(Thanks in advance for your feedback and advice.)
Ministry of Justice told to ‘get its act together’ on prison data
This is a great breakdown of your journey. Thanks for giving us the info.
If you were trying to hit the easter egg you have to put it in the query string, not just as a sub-url.
Yeah, I noticed that, but there's definitely an ugly page there that I thought you might want to fix.
They did this before with OSDN, wonder if they'll have any more success this time around.
Interesting.

Now, imagine you were earth. You want to support life. In fact, you want life to flourish. What do you do?

You've tried "small", but bacterias are too small to flourish.

You've tried "water", but fish and crawfish just isn't enugh, is it?

You've tried "plants", but trees and flowers just grow, they don't expand, evolve.

You've tried "big", but an even bigger rock killed them all. And ouch it did hurt too!

Now, what do you try?

How about "smart"?

Yes, that's it!

Smart grows.

Smart expands. Smart can even _protect_ you from those pesky big rocks flying around out there. No more hurt, no more pain.

And smart evolves. Boy does smart evolve! No longer do you have to rely on that long and tedious process "smart" chooses to call "evolution". No, smart can _accelerate_ evolution.

Yes, smart can also be destructive, but it's a learning phase, needed in order for smart to evolve to a level where they can protect you from those big, ugly rocks (ouch ouch ouch!).

Even better: they can put your precious life on other planets.

Think about that: accelerated evolution and spreading to other planets. Now _that's_ flourishing!

Yes, humans truly are the best invention of earth ever. You should be proud of yourself.
That actually goes for investors in general, from what I can tell. Biggest mistake we made with the first investor that invited us in was assuming that he knew what we did. (One of his associates apparently had said that he should talk to us; he'd never looked at our website.)

In the case of YC interviews, that paragraph that says what your company does is buried in the thousands of pages of text that are going across their eyes during the screening process. Don't expect them to remember it verbatim. ;-)
Is open source selling out?
Agile has its place in the development cycle. Specifications are still necessary, long-term goals drive the structure of agile groups. But the big message is, smart motivated programmers in small compatible groups work lightening-fast. Cheaper than "extreme programming" which assume the lowest common denominator which assures a predictable bland product in about 3X the time and 10X the cost.
Another friend had to use an external GPS antenna to get it to lock appropriately, so I'm not surprised that you had to put it by the window. I would say this is common in multi-tenant buildings, especially concrete ones.
Obviously wise advice, although without demographic information on the "clickers", besides the vertical market information provided http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArtic... -- there is no way to target those who click.

Now, if we get the demo info about who is clicking (age, sex, income, marital status, job description) it would be a treasure trove to those who create the ads. More importantly, it would be a treasure trove to those of us without Fortune 500 budgets for advertising.

But I digress...

In other news, "The Stupids" is on Comedy Central right now starring Tom Arnold. It shows a one star review on Dish Network, but then again Dish Network's critique also doesn't rate The Goonies with the billion stars it deserves... hmm wonder if it's worth a watch on my break.
Google Dashboard: This is a brief of how much Google knows about you
Bill Gates used to always say that the biggest competitors to Microsoft products were the previous versions. Which, in addition to giving him a way to not talk about the competition, had the added benefit of being mostly true.

I wonder if Ballmer is familiar with the way Gates handled this kind of thing. Maybe someone should introduce them.
Cool! Its been argued before that the average view of a group of experts is almost always better than any individual view.
Now, how do we know which contributors are experts?
Correct. That is exactly the reason. The revenue protection is a happy coincidence.
And IntelliJ has integrated the dependency matrix for… quite a long time.
Any plans to add a gui? The command-line interface is probably limiting the potential market you could reach.
Ah I hadn't thought of that, which is kinda stupid considering I have a site that gets thousands of adsense clicks with >75% of them coming right out of a google search.

I haven't used adwords much. Can you target content networks to very specific domains or pages within domains?
It's a little early to tell for sure, but it might well be A Great Thing for JS+HTML/CSS to become the assembly language of the web. If Javascript engines get faster, and CPU speeds keep slowly inching up (looks like Moore's Law has temporarily been repealed ;-), and things like Web Workers become commonplace, ...
Apple doesn't owe you anything
Several hundred Kilohertz? :-)

It IS incredible - but modern Computers are even more incredible.
It wasn't silly at all. What he was saying was that the set of all single founders has a higher bozos/nonbozos ratio than the set of all cofounders. That doesn't mean that the absolute number of non-bozo single founders isn't high, but that requiring a cofounder might be a useful heuristic.

Additionally, it may have something to do with having the ability work with others. If you're investing in a potential company, you want the company to grow, so presumably it's not going to be a one man show forever. In this case you want to make sure that your founder can work with at least one other person.

I personally think I fall into both the bozo and the "not being able to work with others" category. If I get to the point of having a prototype, then I've unbozofied myself, and perhaps could attract a cofounder. And if the cofounder works out, then maybe I have a shot at actually working with people and consequently running a company.