skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think it's confidence that makes you naive. I think that too much confidence may keep you from giving up when you should. You believe that no matter how many problems you're facing, you'll find a way to make it work. Inability to take criticism smacks more of arrogance than confidence in my mind, but maybe it's all semantics.

That being said, I agree with the parent. Humility is as important a trait as any, not matter your walk of life.
You really can't say too many good things about John Tromp's remarkable paper.
There's one for the iPhone http://code.google.com/p/metasyntactic/wiki/NowPlaying

(From a Microsoft C# compiler/parser guy, no less).
This is a great article and where I got the inspiration for the term Acting Sober: http://blog.figuringshitout.com/oct-28th-day-16-acting-sober...
Well I didn't really understand that article, but I know how to fix capitalism. Though you're going have to pay me to find out.
Island in the Sea of Time was published in 1998, and spawned a sub-genre. Speaking of Stirling, his series The Domination is in the same class as Ender's Game and Dune, at least, for world-building, and the first one was published in 1988, per wikipedia.

Accelerando has more scope than most of those you mention.

Other books in that class would include Snow Crash, A Fire Upon the Deep and the sequel A Deepness in the Sky... Hm. It's true that most of those I can think of right now are from the early part of the last 20 years (or the first one of the series is). Maybe that's because that was the end of the SF era, as you suggest, or maybe it's for some other reason (I've been an adult a little less than 20 years, which may bias me; it may be that lots of books of the past ten years will be considered important, but they require distance; something else?).
I think these could stand up to that list:

The Diamond Age (1995)
Cryptonomicon (1999)
No argument there (ðere?), SQL is an unfortunate language.
Player. Losers would be spectators, clueless pawns.
Checked some the blog posts, and they are good.
Are the blog moved to some other place. There is no activity from feb09.
and justMagicallyWork(), the call that papers over leaky abstractions, off-by-one errors, misunderstandings, logical errors in your thinking and just does whatever it is you were trying to do.

>>> data = urlopen('example.org/lovelydata/2009/')
YetAnotherException: [...]

It needs some kind of web form cookie login non-standard authentication. Aaargh I can't spend any more time on this sub-project it was only supposed to take two minutes!

>>> import bigGuns
Warning, Universe enters a fragile state. Tread carefully.
>>> data = justMagicallyWork(urlopen('example.org/lovelydata/2009/'))
Success. Cost: 12 Karma.
>>> del bigGuns
normality restored

Phew!
I'm not a greybeard. I can probably run faster than you too. I can learn as fast as anyone and can probably freestyle martial arts better than most younger. I can code.
In a maximally efficient market, no one can make more money than the absolute minimum required to make participating worth their time, because otherwise someone else will come in and undercut them.

While that's true, it's also the case that the "absolute minimum" rises as people in a society get wealthier, and markets are the fastest method known for generating wealthy societies. The minimum amount for which most people are willing to work is absurdly high by the standards of all but our own very recent past.
https://www.google.com/adplanner/#siteSearch?identifier=twit...

Twitter is 59% female? Seriously?
Any and all data from the Federal Government. There cannot possibly be enough structured data coming from there.
The big problem is getting people with credentials to write the books. School systems have to worry about that sort of stuff, and usually these people want a good chunk of $$$ to participate in the long process of creating a textbook.
Or "rewriting the whole thing in Rails, using agile development practices, of course."
I remember that chapter from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman quite well. One of my favorite passages is the following, which is the source of the title of the chapter:

We came to a certain book, part of a set of three supplementary books published by
the same company, and they asked me what I thought about it.

I said, "The book depository didn't send me that book, but the other two were nice."

Someone tried repeating the question: "What do you think about that book?"

"I said they didn't send me that one, so I don't have any judgment on it."

The man from the book depository was there, and he said, "Excuse me; I can explain
that. I didn't send it to you because that book hadn't been completed yet.
There's a rule that you have to have every entry in by a certain time, and the
publisher was a few days late with it. So it was sent to us with just the covers,
and it's blank in between. The company sent a note excusing themselves and
hoping they could have their set of three books considered, even though the third
one would be late."

It turned out that the blank book had a rating by some of the other members! They
couldn't believe it was blank, because [the book] had a rating. In fact, the
rating for the missing book was a little bit higher than for the two others. The
fact that there was nothing in the book had nothing to do with the rating.
I submitted this article because there are lots of issues pointed out that I feel very strongly in favor of. (For example, the patent system being, sum total, a net harm). The only problem with it that I have is that it feels kind of half baked. There are so many ideas expressed that it almost seems like it should've been explained in an entire book rather than a blog post.

The reason I submitted it is because I thought and hoped it would generate some very interesting discussion here.
I included the second part of the thought experiment specifically to prevent creating that impression. Guess it didn't work.
Pandora - Music Genome Project. I've been working on a media player, AuraMP, for a number of years and I've really wanted to plug into sites like Pandora.
A concurrent REST api, written in scheme. That support a parallel/multicore environment. Which in turn compiles to C.
ثبت نام متقاضیان فاقد مسکن در شهرکهای تعاونی مسکن مهر
Charles Stross was interviewed for the article... when people make headlines that end in a question mark it baits this kind of response, but come on, we can do better.
That's a couple of years out of date. These days it would be more like "server-side doesn't matter, we use jquery on the front end to build a rich front end without proprietary products." Though, since I've actually said that myself, I'm not willing to admit that's a trick yet.
Charlie Stross is quoted in the orignal article. I think a decent standard for a top-level comment here is that you should have read the article. In the sub-levels, it can make sense not to.
It's next to impossible to hustle someone in poker regardless. You can only misrepresent your skill for a very short period of time before the losses become too great to overcome. In most cases you'll never be able to setup a huge bet to recover those losses. (Especially with capped buy-ins of 100-200bb). Furthermore, since there is still the unknown factor like in the the old 5c-draw scenarios -- you have a 4 of kind him a straight flush etc. you can bet everything and still lose regardless to how skilled you are.

Additionally, luck still plays a huge role in the short term no matter how skillful you are. You can't bluff/draw every hand and win over the long term. I can't lose to you for thousands of hands and then suddenly flip a switch and make it up in one hand. This is where/why the pool/golf/prop etc hustles work.

Poker is really about the long term unless you go on a short streak (such as perhaps Isil did) and get out. Otherwise the skill factor will eventually kick in; Even if it takes 1million+ hands before you can even start talking about the "long term" there is no real way to hustle anyone over that amount of hands. Poker wisdom is: "The long term is REALLY REALLY long."
In a maximally efficient market, no one can make more money than the absolute minimum required to make participating worth their time

No. In a maximally efficient market, no one can make more money than the absolute minimum required to make participating worth someone else's time. If I can make widgets twice as fast as everyone else, I can make lots of money.
Congratulations, you win. In fact this has already happened as was the subject of a 60 Minutes piece over a year ago:

http://news.cnet.com/60-minutes-report-how-online-gamblers-u...

I particularly enjoyed this quote:

"This Grey Cat person was new. And at first, he seemed like a live one. He seemed terrible," Witteles remembers. "He seemed to play crazy. It seemed like he was giving his money away. Except the only thing was, he wasn't losing. He was playing in a style that was sure to lose, but he was killing the game day after day."

Sound familiar anyone?
Skype CEO Outlines Platform Ambitions, Hiring Plans
I don't believe that profit margins represent market efficiencies. In a perfect market, profit margins represent value perceived.

If your product will save me 10$ but costs you 2$ to produce, charging 5$ is beneficial to both of us.

The problem we have now is that the current large companies believe that they're entitled to receiving the same profits they've had in the past without innovating or even adapting to the future.

If your value proposition is only worth 2$ to me in the future, why should the government come in and tax all companies in my industry because I don't think you're worth paying anymore?

I suppose that's a simplistic view but then again I've always abhorred working at large companies because of the huge number of people I'd see around me contributing very little. I think small companies will very often beat big ones on both quality AND cost because of the lack of bureaucratic overhead. The overhead though is exactly how the incumbents protect themselves from the newer entrants, entrapping government to create barriers to protect themselves.
I know it's not quite the same thing, but I have a t-shirt (from an Irish pub) that has the great W.B. Yeats quote:

"The problem with some people is that when they aren't drunk, they're sober."
Damn, thought it was San Francisco fandom. And yet it seems applicable.
To those I'd add:

The Orphanage series (starting in 2004) and
The Old Man's War series (starting in 2005)
It sucks that comments aren't enabled on that post. You can see the responses from the community (including Brett Slatkin one of the authors) on the Google Group for PuSH:

http://groups.google.com/group/pubsubhubbub/browse_thread/th...
Yeah I think Card is at best a mediocre writer. And I thought that before I knew he was an ultra-right-wing nutjob.

The problem with sci-fi and fantasy is that because they're so niche, and because so many people are predisposed to liking them based on subject area alone, the average successful writer makes even Dan Brown look like Charles Dickens. That makes Card look good by comparison because he isn't a bad writer (certainly far better than Brown) and most in the genre are.
Meta's an ex-Microsoftie -- he's currently at Google.
I have to agree that On Writing was surprisingly good. I've read a few Stephen King novels and have mixed feelings about him, but that was probably the most helpful writing advice I've yet come across.
there's also an R package with the book's material: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ElemStatLearn/index.h...
It's very naive. There's no telling what breaking up any company that achieves 5% to 10% market share would do to capitalism, but it probably wouldn't be good. Would you bother trying to build the next Google if you knew it was just going to be split into 15 pieces if you succeeded? I would not.

It also says nothing two of the biggest problems our brand of capitalism faces, which are perverse incentives and lack of transparency, both of which were leading causes of the recent meltdown and our current health care woes.
My take-away is that even a great company with great culture to foster creativity can have serious problem when it grows to a big organization.

It seems creativity happens mostly in little start-ups.
And good luck fighting network effects. How many Facebooks and LinkedIns do we need? While we could use different social tools, what value is there in more Facebook look-alikes resulting from a breakup? The value of these social tools derives from their network effects.
a real-world grep. this might be solved in my lifetime, since books, notes, etc are all moving to digital. sometimes i just wish i could grep for x and it would find x in all my books, notebooks, etc.
Waiting for Scott Aaronson, http://scottaaronson.com/blog/ , to give his verdict.
> but it relies on the GemStone/S VM, which is NOT open source.

...making it about as interesting as pre-GPL'd Java. No thanks.
Is this surprising to anyone? You cannot simultaneously have the price of a good be zero at the margin and yet pay producers non-zero renumeration at the margin.

There is no Internet Economic Fairy that makes it possible to increase consumption of music by a factor of dozens while simultaneously decreasing monthly expenditures on music (relative to CD sales) AND leaving all participants in the system better off.
I recently really enjoyed the Revelation Space series by Alistair Reynolds.

Also, Greg Bear's books about The Way (Legacy, Eon, etc) make a great series.
I find it amusing that none of the google properties have any statistics.
a toned down, smooth voice of a person of the opposite sex is generally considered "most pleasant"

IT is dominated by men, so a girl is a practical choice if you want to be successful.

That's actually not true. When you switch on the tube you will notice that most commercials (except those that are supposed to have women identify themselves with) are dominated by male voices. Being forced to use a female voice in an ad is usually considered a weakness because male voices are more effective in binding your attention and suggesting "trust".

Regardless I don't think all of this plays much of a role in a tech screencast. I agree that I want to understand the damn thing, so get a pleasant speaker (of any gender) and don't make me suffer. From there my decision for or against a product will be influenced by so many details, I doubt "pleasant voice" affects it much.
Yes, you can write the application with the SDK, but _proper_ testing requires a _real_ phone.
The question is what did those listeners do? Did they go buy her album? Did they go buy a concert ticket?
It is worth noting that just one cup of tea causes me to produce more urine than all the cars in the world.

(Just thought I would point out how "useful" comparisons like this are. Less useful than an entire Library of Congress...)
The problem is not the "soft delete", but rather peoples' inability to write computer programs, then.
I somewhat enjoyed Greg Bear's Blood Music book, but not enough to buy another from him. I'll definitely give him another change and check out the ones you recommend though, thanks.
Except that this one, um, is.

They mention explicitly that tanker fuel has half the allowable maximum of sulpur on average, but it's still a travesty and can be cut down substantially if proper measures are applied.

It's unfortunate that environmental policy is dictated in terms of sensationalism rather than actual impact. Rational policy outlook should have certainly looked at shipping as one of the first causes of airborne pollution.
the thing that killed my wristwatch was my tibook and now my macbook pro. The titanium g4 would give me small electric shocks where I had scratched it with the wristwatch so I had to stop using it.
The 5% to 10% is an example aimed at most markets. I would not apply it to Google. I would apply that to pub chains, food and beverages, most manufacturing, retailers, etc.

It does cover at least some perverse incentives with regard to corporate governance.

It is also a summary of a lot of issues. There are links to articles with more details.
How is Flixel compared to Push Button Engine and Always 3D? http://pushbuttonengine.com/
http://away3d.com/ (used in the Facebook game Cafe World)

I'm looking forward to use such a framework/engine in my upcoming multi-player Flash game. I'd be grateful if anyone here can offer me some advice/links about this.

(My impression is that Push Button Engine is more mature and probably better supported because there is a company behind it. Is that really the case?)
A list of Object-oriented Flash Game Framework:

http://www.idevgames.com/news/object-oriented-flash-game-fra...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)
The Perfect Interview Test
"... Mapmakers will often use “copyright traps,” bits of information in their maps that are purposefully wrong ..."

Very true. I once had to re-do a map for this exact reason though I'm not sure the "purposeful" fit was to get the major intersection on the page or to catch people out.

"... In Australia, the butchers have a secret language called “rechtub klat” ..."

keew txen tuo siht yrt ot gniog.
1. does anyone know the ratio of pollution from all-the-consumer-planes-in-the-world to all-the-cars-in-the-world? (i feel like military planes and tanks should be excluded, or rather included in a separate ratio for comparison.)

2. how does this pollution compare to oil spills (eg, Exxon's Valdez)?
Sociopaths do not assume responsibility for anything they do. They absolve themselves of the consequences because one of the definitions of a sociopath is that he has no regard or compassion for other beings.

To a sociopath there is no other justice other than whichever favors him the most. The blogger in question has evidently read little to no literature on the subject.

It is interesting to note that over a fourth of all convicts display sociopathic characteristics, among them a complete lack of remorse for their actions.
If people listen to twenty tracks a day, this rate amounts to $1 per person per year.

That seems lowish.
Rational policy outlook should have certainly looked at shipping as one of the first causes of airborne pollution.

Rational policy outlook should have started by looking at the adverse effects of airborne pollution. What are the adverse effects of releasing SO2 into the atmosphere over the middle of the ocean?

What and where matter just as much as how much.
what about http://www.last.fm/api?
u can see islamic, health, and lots of beautiful powerpoints
I love the idea of the language mixed with visual affordances. I am though torn between whether its too much clutter or does it make the code easier to read and drill down.
Try this:

http://parselets.com/parselets/yc/14?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.y...
For the specific example of Facebook, it'd quite feasible to have a lot of different services that shared data as needed. It's not the name of the front end that people want, it's the social interaction.
Now isn't the nicest time to be going after shipping companies, with the way their profits have collapsed over the last year. The recession has been pretty hard for airlines, but the drop in shipping prices is shocking by comparison: more than a 10x drop.

http://investmenttools.com/futures/bdi_baltic_dry_index.htm
Copyright does not prevent you from independently building a set of data that someone else has already built, it merely protects against copying their set verbatim.
Richest Members of US Congress
yes, but how much would have been paid for the right to broadcast 100 times on a radio station with 10,000 listeners?

it's easy to see artists don't get the same returns from radio as CD sales. spotify and the like are a new medium again - but with more similarities to radio than CDs imho.
I think you mean "gniog ot yrt siht tuo txen keew" :)
Yeah, but I prefer real solutions, regardless of how ugly they are, rather than wishful thinking for so-called "elegant" solutions.
If one cup of tea made you produce as much urine as half of all the people on earth, then yes, we should grab you by the collar and confiscate your ungodly cup of tea.
Correct, they do have an open api but it just doesn't always seem to have the ability or content that Pandora has. I would like best to use as many of the major providers as possible.
Why?

If you can't come up with a hard-and-fast rule, then the interpretation/selective-enforcement is just going to open the door to patronage and corruption.
Heh, I started measuring my fingers after reading this. It's kind of mind boggling how symmetrical your left and right hand are.
The ratio is only referring to sulfur. I'm fairly sure the high octane required for jet fuel would prohibit most sulfur emissions. Additionally, the weight sensitivity would be an added incentive to reduce any unused components, such as sulfur.
From the article it appears that in "rechtub klat" the letters in a word are reversed, but the words have the same order in the sentence. So it would be:

"gniog ot yrt siht tuo txen keew"
If the widgets were the same.
King's one of the great 80s writers. He's not at his peak anymore, but when he started he was one of the best.

Ender's Game can be read as a genocide apologist novel. I don't totally buy that, but it does espouse a universe in which smart people are allowed to kill their enemies gruesomely and not be punished. It's also almost sociopathic in the way it revolves around Ender. He's the center of the entire universe.

Card's politics don't shine out as much in it, which is why it's only slowly decayed with many, many rereads, but it's there. He's very xenophobic — he excuses disliking foreigners with the excuse of "Other people think I'm xenophobic but secretly they're all very evil", but it's straightfaced enough that you don't notice it until you've read his later bigoted stuff and come back to it. It does avoid his religion and his sexism, though, which is good; later parts of the series aren't spared.

Not to say the series isn't a great young adult read: Speaker For The Dead introduced me to maturer themes in SF/F in the first place, and the Bean parallel novels are delightful fun military strategy reads. But they're very flawed, sometimes irreparably so.
How Venture Capital Lost Its Way
An Introduction to Lindenmayer Systems
YC Interview Decompression Unparty at the Hacker Dojo/Sun@7pm
Hey fellow XY and XX Ycombo interviewees...

Lets decompress at the Hacker Dojo on Sunday night! Say 7ish (till whenever). BYOB... (& maybe a little food, if you can.)

Lets get together and congratulate or commiserate each other on our respective YC fates... maybe talk about pitches, (without the rapid fire induced super-stress...) Give some feedback... Compare notes...

Maybe some of the unchosen teams can do some DNA re-combining of their own and get reborn as newly evolved startups hybrids. Maybe we can just do some commiserating about how our pitches failed to be understood! (We're just too advanced for them to comprehend...;)

Maybe we can just drink... talk tech, and compare battle scars of hacker venturing.

Definitely, if you haven't, you should drop by the Hacker Dojo and check out our hippyish Hacker commune, ala - shared hack-space! It's a great place to get cool things done.

Try to send me a heads up if you think you'll come, or want to collectively change the hour - so we can plan which space here to commandere.

(You old-school YC alumni, or YC'r yourselves, lingering in the area are welcome too! Also - if you can, pass the word on to other teams, as no one but the YCrs themselves have the master list of applicants here this weekend.)

-mark
(mark@kiputers.com)
Android is splintering, just not how you think it is...
But the difference is that users have control over the music on Spotify. Even with the free version you can listen to a song when you want, as many times as you want. So as long as they're a Spotify member, a user essentially owns the content on there.

With radio it's more of a teaser. You might hear a song you like but you'll have to purchase it if you want to listen to it on repeat.