tvorryn

There is fairly strong evidence that NLP is not effective: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming#Sc...

If not now, eventually they must be or must have been "doing startups" because all businesses begin as startups. It's in the name, a startup is a company that is just getting started. Some eventually grow up into the titans of industry that we all know.

The parent is wondering why don't we see more entrepreneurs founding companies that look like they could become the next titans of industry. It seems to me that their companies either don't exist, or are currently invisible because they haven't begun gobbling up market share.

Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2 are the ones I know of.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_2#Free-to-play

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dota_2#Free-to-play

Most US authors pay only a few cents per delivery. [1] Books with lots of images can become expensive but it seems like the images are likely unnecessarily big for an ebook, and that is why his costs are so disproportionately large.

1 - http://www.thepassivevoice.com/06/2012/amazons-markup-of-dig...

If you want a semi-realistic startup reality tv show to watch right now, try TechStars on Bloomberg Tv: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/75400336/ or Start-Up Junkies: http://www.hulu.com/start-up-junkies

That's my plan actually. It should be a lot easier to get going than C or an LLVM backend as others are suggesting.

I think you mean contracts or defensive coding. If someone calls my code wrong they will have to think to test that particular case themselves, which is hard. Unless I've written contracts; then when it blows up they'll know what they did wrong.

Huh. You're right. That seems pretty recent, or I didn't notice the switch-over. Thank goodness.

I was a little disappointed that when he talked about Jekyll blogs, he didn't mention Octopress. The default theme looks pretty good, it has a decent set of plugins and the code display looks great. It was actually pretty easy to set up too.

http://octopress.org/ My blog using the default theme: http://www.trevoroakes.com

Yeah. In this competition collaboration was discouraged. That does keep politics/alliance building skills out of the equation at the cost of worse overall final products.

You didn't do too badly this time yourself. 11th place. Looking at what he did, do you see what you could do to improve your bot further?

I actually used this idea from the forums and your post to get 683rd place even though I started on it with 36 hours to go before the deadline. http://aichallenge.org/profile.php?user=972 So thanks.

How'd you do?

Haha. It didn't say that before, because he hadn't officially won yet. It's actually been propagated from Tron: http://a1k0n.net/2010/03/04/google-ai-postmortem.html

Overall Winner's Code and description of how it works: http://xathis.com/posts/ai-challenge-2011-ants.html

27th place's code and description of how it works: http://forums.aichallenge.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=2169&...

and profile: http://aichallenge.org/profile.php?user=3845

16th place's description of how their code works: http://www.decompilinglife.com/

and profile: http://aichallenge.org/profile.php?user=4728

11th place's code: https://github.com/a1k0n/ants/tree/master/bot

and profile so you can watch how it works in action: http://aichallenge.org/profile.php?user=432

Here are some histograms from before the finals of how different languages and countries did compared to each other: http://imgur.com/a/Li1b4

This essay seems quite relevant: http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/hackers.htm

It compares self-taught and college taught programmers to street fighters and martial artists.

I think you mean:

; println(myList)

i.e. reorder those and add a semicolon or put it on the next line

and I agree with pivo that "Jim" :: "Bob" :: Nil should be List("Jim", "Bob"). I'm not sure if these are the same as _Y_'s Fantom code, but both of these print out "List(Jim, Bob)" in Scala.

Cons is short for construct and comes from Lisp which has weird names for things; things like car and cdr.

It means construct a new list.

A cons A (or A :: B) means create a new list with A before B, where B can be a list item or a list itself and A is a list item.

The :: operator is right associative so "Jim" :: "Bob" :: Nil actually works like ("Jim" :: ("Bob" :: Nil) ) (Actually all operators that end in : are right associative in Scala.)

For more see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cons

I spent quite a few hours a while ago trying to organize languages into different language groups in order to pick which languages to learn next. If you're interested in that see the blog post that came out of that: http://hacklash.posterous.com/how-to-choose-your-next-progra... .

Just be warned that I'm coming at it from the outside with most of these languages, to make your final decision try and find someone experienced in multiple languages from the paradigm and ask them which to learn the paradigm with.