rw

For comparison, I recently released Plainsight, a textual steganography tool: http://github.com/rw/plainsight.

(Video link in the project desc.)

Another one is Clothes Horse. They're trying to solve this problem using machine learning: http://www.clotheshor.se/

How likely is it that these sites serve up clean binaries to Google's spider?

This.

QW is the Starcraft of first-person shooters. It's so much fun to duel (or 2on2 or 4on4) that pro players for other games still enjoy coming back to qw, where many of them started. I would say it's a beautiful game.

It also has a ton of fanatical players/mappers/coders hacking on weekends, making their own custom additions to the game.

What, specifically, would you like to see changed?

It is evolving: Coffeescript, node, npm, and V8 are four examples. It can feel good to code in JS, just like it can in Python or Ruby (or Scheme :-) ).

But, there is going to be pressure on those that make the judgments. What happens when someone figures out how to game the doctor rating system? I'm just very risk averse when it comes to surgery (and I want my doctors to be vetted by experts in their field, as well as my social circle).

(I worked with Ev for a year, before he did YC.) The whole Mailgun operation is top notch. If you want to do cool things with email, definitely check out MG.

I strongly recommend both of these:

  * The Practice Of Programming (co-authored by the 'K' in C's K&R)
  * Code Complete 2

What does yahoo do? Google does search. Microsoft does consumer and enterprise software. Apple does hardware & consumer software... but Yahoo? Do they 'do' news? Not really. Finance? Kinda. Distributed computing? Yes, but they don't make money from that. BOSS? DDG isn't enough.

I'm stumped. How does Yahoo make money, besides slapping ads on content (as a 2nd-place implementation of AdSense)?

tarsnap

Exceptional link, could stand on its own. Thanks!

Many companies manage their small clusters mostly by hand, even if they know there should be a better way. You just showed me one better way--thanks!

A task list should enhance your productivity by offloading bookkeeping. That's it. If you need people to yell at you (as the OP says) to determine priority, you are probably working in a painful and interrupt-driven way.

Here's my method (for writing software):

  1) Blank sheet of paper (8am).
  2) Figure out one thing to do, and write it down on just one line.
  3) Finish that thing.
  4) Check that item off, and write down the next task *before you put down your pen*.
  5) Goto 3.

This is how I stay focused without trying to forecast too far into the future.

Source or object code? The article doesn't specify.

If he could learn to care less (for comparison, he should not try to read all of Twitter), then Facebook would not present such a problem.

No. randomwalker's point is that every branch must be proved to be a win.

>> "it would require devoting more computing resources than the planet has for a pretty significant amount of time"

This is also incorrect. As mentioned in other comments, the branching factor of chess implies that it is not brute force solvable using the entire universe as a computer--let alone just Earth.

Even more than that, there's the whole hustle element to good hacking. That hustler + hacker combination is how you get amazing things done. (Shall we call them... the haxlers?)

Irony: it is articles like this that keep me coming back to HN.

I recommend against studying CS in college unless you think the school has a really stellar program. Since the OP is self-taught already, he can keep his software development hobby+job, while officially studying math or econ in school. That will give him a broader POV. YMMV of course :-)

In Scheme (vs. Common Lisp) sequence operations are typically defined in terms of cdr, which operates on [singly-linked] lists.

Definitely check out his other essays too!

How does Digg differentiate itself from Reddit?

Apostrophe injection attacks are very bad in Scheme.

P.S. Terry Tao posted a comment on the OP. Worth a read.

The "AI API" is the dream application. Just imagine: you get to implement (and even discover) cutting-edge prediction algorithms, make them scale, and expose them via your protocol-of-choice. No frontends to write, no Joe Luser to support, just beautiful math and hardcore infrastructure engineering.

There are reasons this hasn't been done before. I don't think it's a viable startup idea. Think about the capital you would need to even get something like this off the ground. Doing the AI API 'right' would require a supercomputer, if you take it far enough.

A guy can dream though. Maybe doing high-frequency trading would get you most of the way there.

IMHO, go for the niche: elsewhere in this thread Directed Edge was mentioned, and they are a good example of a business tackling a well-defined problem with exciting tools and techniques.

For more on that, you might enjoy Charlie Stross' "Accelerando": he discusses lots of awesome singularity topics, including so-called Economics 2.0. He posts on HN as cstross.

With Vimium, press f-S-E and you're there. Not as good as one keystroke, but better than using the mouse!

"Everyone generalizes from one example. At least, I do."

Are you in school? Get an independent study going with a professor on a topic she likes and you wouldn't mind learning. Emphasize that you want to get your training wheels for autodidactic math education.

e.g. until the United States implements the Kyoto Protocol :-)