skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A twinge arrogant, a twinge lucky, but I feel like this kid gets it. I mean, it's an easy statement to make considering his success, but nonetheless, I like his style.
What happened to people who can write successful products but not yet been open sourced?

This happened to John Carmack, Jamie Zawinski. They are probably too busy in making stuffs work then writing answers on Stack Overflow or committing code to GitHub.
This is the same post as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971477
Email is now in my profile. Thanks!
Some might see your analogy as backwards, especially if they view individual freedom as having natural bounds which are easily identifiable to mentally stable humans. I have a feeling that's why you were voted down (not by me, sorry). An example of this line of reasoning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_Justice
Three False Constraints (or: why social gaming is taking off)
If this were the only way that scalpers operated, then I would agree that they'd be a social good. Instead, there are a number of scalpers who wait in line, knowing full well that they're not going to the game/show and they'll sell the tickets to someone who wasn't fast enough to get in line. This sort of thing happened in Dubai, where some folks would buy shares in some real estate venture, and then flip it to someone further back in line.
Hotmail, MSN, Messenger - Malaysia
SF - 12/7
http://realtimebooze.eventbrite.com/

NY - 12/10
http://realtimeboozenyc.eventbrite.com/
A fifteen minutes introduction to Redis data types
You're right that the value of a trade is minuscule. But, a trade's value only amounts to only a handful of cents.

The top high-frequency traders though multiply that minuscule effect by millions (amounting to a much higher-value add as a whole to society), which IMHO justifies their high earnings.
Ask HN: How to make money as a CS student?
Hey guys,
I'm three semesters away from graduating, and while I to learn and work on my own projects in my spare time, I have been looking for a way to make money while doing something relevant to coding. The first option I thought of was an internship with a local (NYC) startup, but almost all of these are unpaid.
What do you guys think is a good way to make some cash in my offtime and hopefully learn from it?
I thought I'd seen it, but couldn't find it in a quick search. And the extra slash on the end of the url stopped it from triggering the dupe detector. Seems like a simple fix to match up urls with or without a trailing slash.
aside: Tim Bray on corporate sponsorship of languages: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/10/01/C-dot-next...
Not only is it true that the first slope doesn't have to be less than one, it could plausibly be greater than one.

Suppose the course material is really cumulative, so that some students "get it" and take off, while other students fall by the wayside. Then scoring well on the first test predicts scoring well on the second midterm, while scoring poorly on the first predicts scoring really badly on the second. Then the slope of your least-squares-fit line could easily be greater than 1.

In other words, the mean could stay the same, due to above-average students (on the first test) getting better, and below-average students getting worse. There's no reason to suppose that below-average students will magically get better.
My personal rule is I’m not touching anything I got from the acquisition. I’m just going to continue to live off of my income.

Wonder what his plans are. Investing? Funding his next startup? Philanthropy?
The look of a winner
"I ran some cross-market analyses of stocks in 2006 when I was working at a financial software startup. I found that basically everything was overvalued: there were no values to be had in the stock market at that time."

I guess you weren't looking at special situations/event driven investments were you? Because I know plenty of people who did well during that year taking advantage of inefficiencies like spinoffs, merger arb, and cap-structure arb, and so on... these are typically the types of investments that Buffett refers to when he said that if he was managing 7 figures he could do 50% a year.
This is one of those things that I never thought the internet would bring you: Real time slicing of a brain. Crazy. It's amazing to think of where we will be in another 10-30 years.
Moonlight will never reach feature parity and is unable to run most of the common Silverlight apps. The chance of Silverlight working on OS X in a few years is about the same as IE working on OS X, or Office for Mac having full support for macros (if it's not clear, MS dropped support for both).

What about mobile devices? Stuff running on ARM?

More of our computing time is being moved away from PCs. If this doesn't work with a browser of with an open set of technologies, it is bound to stagnate and lead to lock-in.
Thanks for the feedback truebosko. I agree it's not ideal and I'm playing around with various ways to solve it. I think a combination of community rating and moderation will be the long term solution.
The problem with this argument is that the citizens who want to keep a small town small were there first. They created and/or maintain the urban environment that makes the location appealing for the would-be condo builder. As such they have the right to make whatever rules they want within certain limits -- think of it as a "private" club that has a specific membership requirement (you must live within the prescribed boundaries to join.) If I join your club I should expect to abide by the rules set by the members according to the process that existed when I joined, just because I think the walls of the clubhouse should be painted blue doesn't mean that I can decide on a whim paint a small part of the wall. If the condo-builder wants to create a building as tall as he wants then he should find some piece of land that does not have restrictions attached to it, build his condo, and see if the people come...

Zoning restrictions are a part of the market. If it were not for the restrictions the land would have a different value. Part of what makes a piece of property valuable are the side-effects of these very restrictions.
You know, you have a good point.

In high school, I was pretty shocked when my mom sat down with me and my buddies to play Tetris. And she actually whooped on us.

What was going on became very clear to me when her only complaint was that the controls weren't on a keyboard; she could only have gotten that good by wasting her time playing the game at some old job or school.

It is also funny to note that she had no conception of the competitive aspect of the multilayer modernization of Tetris, even though she was flailing bricks at us the entire time.
And what do the other data sources say about temperature in comparison to the tree data?
Forget DTV; FCC now planning "all-IP" phone transition
Http://www.emeh.wen.ru/
Ha. I wonder what the best MITM attack would be. Is rickrolling still in vouge? or should they be sent to a G.W.B./Sarah Palin fanclub page(assuming that most students on campus are liberal this would be an insult)?
In addition - this design firm put out a ad the day before my project started looking for a new designer. If this person was so good, why didn't they just fill that job?
True, but as much as we HATE those guys who line up for the first Xbox360 / Wii / Playstaion 3 trying for the ebay flip, they are technically not doing evil. The ebay flippers allow MSFT / Nintendo / PS3 to charge $1000 on launch day so that demand == supply, but the game companies won't do it for social / PR reasons.
scalper can buy all the tickets to a popular game and sell them all at 10x the price

How is this a problem, especially one requiring regulation? Nothing has changed from your original formulation, except apparently that he's now making 'too much money.'
Microsoft promises 'open' Bing strategy
I have talked to some kids in college classes that just don't have the intellectual curiosity that most hackers have. They will simply not go out of their way to learn something new for the sake of learning something new. I started learning Erlang not because I want to find a job programming Erlang but because I would like to expand the way my mind thinks about programming. If all you have is a hammer....
Creating a Flash platform game with Flixel - Adding a player
Ask HN: As an employer, what do you wish applicants did more often?
I have been job hunting for the better part of six months. Although it is disappointing that the market is overwhelmingly biased towards web developers and I've yet to receive a single offer, what has irked me most is the apparent lowered standard of courtesy and care displayed by some employers, with larger companies more likely to be offenders. (Going into an interview without really studying a candidate's resume, being disappointed that a new graduate doesn't have more professional experience, taking much too long between correspondence, not notifying of rejection after interview, etc...)

Yes, employers more often than not have much more on their plate than applicants, but having passed through enough of the screening process to have a face-to-face interview for a position starting ASAP, I can't help but feel offended when the other party do not have the courtesy to say "Sorry; good luck."

But, enough of that: I would like to get the other point of view.

As an employer, what are some of the things you wish applicants did more of to make the whole process smoother and generally more pleasant for everybody involved?
Well...

I think the point would be to direct them at their school's library page or, at the very least, wikipedia.

(Not that I ever did this).
Knowledge work productivity
I remember hearing about this, and the problem was wear on the moving parts. The engine does not last long enough.
This site was clearly developed for large companies having problems hiring because of their size. The lack of an even remotely useable demo made me snicker at the minimum $500/week price point.
Super duper - let's dump a ton more paper into the mail system that people can end up either recycling or, more likely, throwing into landfill.

I'm not even an environmentalist (though an avid recycler for economic reasons) but I'm surprised the big G would come up with something as wasteful as this.
As a soon to be graduate, how do I go about getting my foot in the door of a high frequency trading shop?
Tips for Beating the App Store Blackbox
Indeed. Negatives are much easier to throw around than positives, and much less useful. I'll try to answer your question as well as I can. (given it's 7 am and I am barely awake)

When presenting a method or a program to students, I try to start from as scratch as reasonable. I recently prepared an experiment for a student of ours, and essentially wrote the program in front of him, running it at intermediate stages so he could see it evolve. He felt comfortable changing the functionality afterwards, so I expect the information transfer worked. I've done the same before with small student groups, creating something minimal, but perfectly understood.

For negotiation situations, I prefer doing them in person or at the very least over the phone, but preferably so that I have all the data in front of me. At that point, I want the other person's attention focused on me, not on the projection screen.

When showing a thing, like a program or a concept, I like to show the thing rather than showing something that shows the thing. I'd explain it and demonstrate it rather than showing slides about it. I might show photos of it being used in situations I can't directly reproduce.

In all of these situations, slideware would not have noticeably improved things. And it's always a timesink, for me at least.
thanks, totally emailed you, looking forward to getting in touch
I was reading the comments of the Techcrunch article and someone mentioned Grooveshark: tried it out today and within in seconds I was listening to all my favorite songs without signing up. Of course within minutes I signed up because I wanted to save my playlist. UI was extremely clean, fast, and intuitive and worked excellently in my outdated Firefox browser on linux.

Just now I went to mog.com... "discover music through people and people through music"... and "where music listens to you"... and "Better Than Rhapsody, Pandora and iTunes... Combined.". Lame first impression.

I click "Try it free"... but I have to enter my email, screenname, password twice, TOC checkbox, and a captcha. screw it! Then I'll have to pay later?

Of course, will Grooveshark the Audiogalaxy (but better) of 2009 survive as it is today?

And as far as long-tail catalog depth... I'll need some more man-hours to see how deep it goes, I'm assuming Mog will be deeper and have better discovery features. I mean you have to pay money for it, it has to be better in some way I guess.
World flags averaged by population
I have been experimenting with various iPhone marketing strategies. In the past few months, I worked with some very talented iPhone game devs and learned some more interesting marketing / promotion tricks they employed. I thought I'd summarized the ones I found most effective and share with you all.

Hopefully this would help some of iPhone game devs in marketing your next game this holiday season. I'd love to hear what you guys think as well. If you have any additional thoughts / tips you'd like to share please let me know!
I hate job hunting.
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Slay,

Just don't post any advertising from your site. I think that worked fine for Craiglook.

Futhermore, Yahoo pipes seem to be working fine with craigslist. Are you sure it's not your site being blocked ?
Off topic. I like to imagine that when we start to colonize mars, our two robots will be recovered and put on display in reverence. Someplace where everyone can see them, much like the statues of important human figures.

I've been following these guys for so long, so this is really awesome/sad.
Hi Yang,

I would recommend putting some personal pics of you and your friend’s mountain biking on your webpage. It will make you come across a little different than the other candidates.

Also, the page looks very 1998-notepad-hand-coded html. Not the best calling card for a computer geek dude. Go get some Dreamweaver time somewhere and make a nice layout. Focus on an eye pleasing font and page color. If you are not layout talented look into using one of the templates out there on the web. Make it nice and professional then add some fun interesting looking personal pics and head your resume with your webpage address. It might help your job prospects.

http://yangman.ca/
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Because then the very wealthy scalper has a monopoly, and the monopoly power allows for profit-maximizing pricing, which causes dead-weight loss.

It's better the scalper sell 50% of the tickets at 10x (and let 50% rot) than all of the tickets at 2x (and have nothing rot).

The scalper will let some tickets rot to preserve the 10x pricing because this is a repeated game. If people know that he'd rather let tickets rot than lower prices at the last moment, they'll have no choice but to buy at 10x or miss the game.
Shoot me a message on skype or gchat and I'll give you some ideas. breck_yunits on skype or breck7 on gmail
Mini Jpeg Decoder
I've been reading Jaynes again this week, and he's just very, very convincing. And so I'm trying to read everything you wrote through these Bayesian glasses, but sadly, I'm not successful. Jaynes is rather critical of Fisher's hypothesis testing, on the ground that you can't accept or reject an hypothesis on its own; you need an alternative to compare it to, and that alternative needs to make definite predictions. I don't see what the alternative to your null hypothesis is (the negation of the null hypothesis does not make definite predictions)
I hate this passionately. Google is my home page, and now every time I open a new browser window, I see a distracting animation.
How about we get the telcos to provide the decent bandwidth they promised first... http://www.newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm
three rovers, don't forget Sojourner.
Debugging Ruby
Right, however don't forget there is a continuum of software types. The great majority of the code I write is customization of previous software for a new client. If you write enough business software, you will find out there are about 5-10 main components that they all have, and each new project differs only in how they're assembled, and the per-client business rules used to orchestrate them.

For example, it took me months to implement a decent RBAC system in CLOS; prototyping it literally took hours, just reading the wikipedia page. However, I had to refine that after every client, not just customizing it for the client, but iterating over it to make future customization unnecessary.

Billing, accounting, collaboration, knowledge management, human resources, lead management, CRM, inventory, etc. Do web-based implementations of those for a year and you will end up with the core necessary to ship any business software product in a very short time, assembling from your own repo. Augment that with web APIs (which I happily pay for) and you're there.

Another thing that I have become expert at is using other people's software. I am a hopeless cliki addict, mainly because I rarely code to scratch an itch; I have been writing Lisp code for years now, and for the last year, that's what I did full time :-) I have come to know huge libraries so intimately, including their quirks, that I can patch together something fairly quickly and get it out of the door.
Developing for the iPhone is like launching a rocket. Provided your calculations are correct (i.e. you don't do anything to get rejected), you're really trying to get escape velocity, so that your app pops onto the top lists. If you miss that, you'll have a much more difficult time.
How to optimize Windows XP and VISTA system?
When computers become slower and slower, what can we do to improve their performance? This article will tell us 9 methods to optimize system and speed up computer.
I'm in a similar situation as the author, looking for my first full-time job (I'm graduating this spring). So, I guess my opinion doesn't count for much.

But I still think it's sad that someone's personal home page must be directed by the current perception of what's the "cool" thing to do (for that matter, using Dreamweaver is more what the "cool" thing was in the late 90s). A plain HTML page says "open-source hacker". But it only says that to other hackers, so this will only help you if the person doing the hiring is technical. A "generic HR person" might prefer a "generic stock template".
You could use the firefox one: http://www.google.com/firefox
Actually, it comes from the people (brokers) who were making a killing on (by today's standards) enormous spreads between buy and sell. The end buyer is likely ahead.
Clearance Scrubs
Learn c++, real-time programming, finance math, move to chicago.
Ask HN: Visas
Hi guys,

My first post here. Not the best one to start out with I guess, but it's something that's on my mind. I'm 15 years old, and I'm launching my startup in the coming few months. Thinking about my future, I'd love to move to the states.

Is there anything I can do to greater my changes of getting a visa or greencard now? Anything particular to startups?

Cheers,
Lachy
While there is a lot of horseshit being fed into the twitter system, I do know that it's being used as an alternative communication mechanism (maybe just because it's a fad?) and quite sucessfully in some areas - wasn't it doing at least some good in Iran?

I don't have a beef against stock trading in general, just the uber hyped money generating system that it fuels and the fact that it seems to make the rich richer and drain the brain market who in my opinion should be doing something more productive - making stuff that could be helping people even if it's in often unremarkable or in a horseshit fashion like Twitter can.
http://www.itl.nist.gov/div897/sqg/dads/
American Express have entered two teams in the Sussex Business Squash League
What Makes Silicon Valley Special? Eternal Optimism of the Innovative Mind
I believe liquidity is a good thing, but can there be too much liquidity?

These computer algorithms seem to be really good at making things very liquid, is there any inherent danger in that? I seem to remember reading an article that the automated nature of the high-volume trading machines posed a danger in and of itself.
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How much finance math do you need ahead of time? Is it enough being a great developer who is willing and able to learn the financial side quickly?
I worked 8 months on a small-business management package in MFC/C++ using the "RAD" Visual Studio 6. That was the last piece of major code that I have written in something other than Lisp. Immediately after that, I wrote a similar package in CL with a web-based interface, using the free allegro serve; this one took me about a month, though it was functional after the first week.

I know what you're thinking; the previous project gave you the hindsight necessary to implement the second so quickly. Well, not really. The stuff I did in Lisp where things that have been on my requirements for the first project but was never able to implement without huge investments in time. MFC is the most brittle, most fickle and fidgety POS of all time; it generates the boilerplate for you and it expects to you to use its skeletons just the way they are. It took me months to experiment with the various data access APIs, ADO, DAO, and ODBC, moving from one to the next as problems arose, and each change of backend requiring a complete code overhaul.

Now I write database code in native idiomatic code; I can change the backend with a feature. I would sometimes forget to #+postgres on deployed code and find everything working but not see any change in the postgres logs, just to realize I have :sqlite3 pushed into my features ;-)
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Common ground and cultural prominence [pdf]
egads that's horrendous.
The site is pretty sweet. I like how it simplifies the usage terms and lists out what is important.

I know it's an image site and that probably means the pages are pretty heavy, but the pages do seem a little slow. I wonder if I would get annoyed by the sluggishness after long-term use. Any speed increases would probably be worth the effort.
Why do well-known ideas, practices, and people maintain their cultural prominence in the presence of equally-good or better alternatives? [...]
It could also be a man's name. teshekkur adamyrat ;-)
The ebay flippers allow MSFT / Nintendo / PS3 to charge $1000 on launch day so that demand == supply

The only winner here is the scalper though. The customer Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony are put in a lose/lose position.

The scalpers have the highest profit margin while the real fans who buy the extra games have $500+ less to support the companies that are bringing real value to the market.
A similar theft happened in Brazil in 1990. It wasn't done by a crazy dictator. In fact it was right after the first democratic presidential election in decades.

All investments, CDs, savings accounts in excess of around U$1000 were "frozen".

It didn't affect the masses, who didn't have bank accounts anyway. But the middle-class was screwed.