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The Obama legislation that forces your parents medical insurance to cover you until you're 26 goes into effect next year. I'm planning a year off from college to work on projects that I can't realistically attempt while in school because I need to focus too much on classes. You could consider doing that too.

This looks awesome, thanks. How to design abstractions was what I had in mind when posing the question.

(since I had to look it up what a SVM was)

"Support vector machines (SVMs) are a set of related supervised learning methods... The standard SVM takes a set of input data, and predicts, for each given input, which of two possible classes the input is a member of... Intuitively, an SVM model is a representation of the examples as points in space, mapped so that the examples of the separate categories are divided by a clear gap that is as wide as possible. New examples are then mapped into that same space and predicted to belong to a category based on which side of the gap they fall on." [wikipedia]

No matter what you need to be able to produce something valuable, if only to be a good potential partner for a tech person. The most straightforward valuable thing to produce is code.

Without that you may find good contractors but probably not someone that will stick around. Tech-enabled startup people tend to have scorn for people with ideas but little else.

Sure you can extract _some_ value but is the tradeoff always worth it?

Look at Windows Phone 7.

A dual question: what hardware do you use?

Wacom tablets are expensive but drawing with a mouse sucks.

Check out The Unapologetic Mathematician "blath":

http://unapologetic.wordpress.com/

Flagged. Dumb article.

The Inform 7 one is cool. It's almost not recognizable as a program.

Imagine: programming by dictation.

Correlation, causation, blah blah blah.

Oh, and of course the average would have to be weighted by thread karma.

  average = total user karma / sum of thread karma over all threads commented in

My last reverse engineering project consisted mostly of hours sitting at Chipotle with hex printouts and a highlighter. That was a file format though, not a protocol.

Also maybe put the authors in the link text to avoid having to click through? Titles really don't help distinguish between these books.

John Baez rocks. In general. All of his stuff is great and his writing style will cheer you up when you feel like you need to go back to freshman calculus.

I read some of his pieces on Lie algebras and A-D-E classifications. Very helpful.

There was a gigantic list on Geocities compiled by Alexandre Stefanov of free math books. Maybe you can find it.

Otherwise a lot of this stuff is torrentable. Also check international editions.

I didn't go through the whole list but I'd make sure to not miss out on the Feynman Lectures. Once you learn the material it's not really worth it to go back. They're nice because he gives you the story behind the equations.

Further down the road Laundau & Lifshitz is apparently the Bible.

Maybe rguzman can post his reading list...

Math helps. I'm finding myself saying that more and more lately.

Man all the hype about Lisp just suddenly made sense to me. Why do we need all this other stuff? Loved the simple exposition and backronyms, contrary to some other opinions here.

Has this concept been tested? As a potential customer I don't have any reason to believe that this organizational structure works.

The video is downright inspirational though, great job on that.

So where are the RGB coordinates on there?

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Tell+me+a+joke.

I think you have it the wrong way. Every plane I've ever flown on (>100) starts numbering at the front, and you can see the wings are clearly swept downward.

12A looks like the obvious choice. No seat in front of you (I had that once and it was better than flying first).

I wonder if the full-body scanners would have caught this.

This might be a naive question, but is there any empirical evidence showing that blogging/tweeting actually helps your startup? Is this supposed to be for self-motivation or getting attention?

1) Concept rocks; if you're in Chicago I'll sign up right now.

2) No more than $10, and only if it's remarkably good (healthy) food. Chipotle is $7, relatively nutritious, and enough to keep me going for most of the day. The only downside is the walk and lack of variety.

Where can I pledge money for the cause? I'd up the bounty myself if I could.

Hah wait that's not actually what you said, which still doesn't sound reasonable.

Also a better formula might be something closer to

  karma per vote = thread karma / total comment karma in thread

Typeclasses in Haskell.

Something like

  karma per vote = #comments / #votes

Okay, actually that sounds reasonable.