skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the article :
"The sequencing of the pictures on these trials was randomly determined by a randomizing algorithm … and their left/right target positions were determined by an Araneus Alea I hardware-based random number generator."

At the very least they were using Araneus Alea wich is a hardware random number generator, so the numbers were not predictable. It's possible that the "randomizing algorithm" did something dumb and made the sequence not random, but I doubt it. I'm downloading the replication package to see if it has the source code. If it doesn't, that's a pretty big red flag for me.

I think that it's more likely thet the sudy was done so many times that it eventually gave significant results than it is that the sequence was not random. Or maybe prescience is real to some degree, or the study is a statistical glitch.

EDIT: the replication package doesn't have the source code for the progrma that randomizes the sequence.
What about making the address bar red when there is a bad site, similar to how the address bar is green for ssl sites?
Is there a specific conference you are going to?
I know I'm not Paul Graham, but since we're on the subject...

I'm very excited and am actually going for two weeks in May/June for a class to Delhi, Mumbai, and maybe Jaipur/Agra on the way for a day or so. Any recommendations besides the obvious things everyone does/sees?
Life Before Death: Pictures and Interviews with Terminally Ill
Mac's market share isn't the reason why Macs don't have viruses
Put it up now. Text on the Internet (and links to it) starts the clock against Google not hating your bones. Keep your mailing list "warm" with a monthly email about e.g. the problem space. Cross post the email to the site.
The article also mentions Tornado, so they're probably not using Django. (It's totally possible - just unlikely.)
the app engine applications gallery is now gone, too. coincidence???

http://appgallery.appspot.com/results?topapps=true
Thanks, I would like to get into Y-Combinator more for the Network than anything.
In order to be accepted by a "critical mass", your website should be dead-simple to use. It should also be dead-simple to understand what value your product adds to the user's life and how it accomplishes that goal. The site has potential, but could definitely use a design/user-interface rework. Here are ideas I gathered after a quick glance at your site:

- White is boring and dated. If you're afraid of color, try some neutral tones or add minimal color to specific areas (think facebook header, or HN header).

- In 1 sentences below the headline "Share interests..!", explain how exactly your site does what it says it will do. If you think you can't explain it in 1 sentence, start with two paragraphs. Then edit it down to one. Then down to one sentence. http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2647-the-class-id-like-to-tea...

- Instead of presenting the tags in a grid, categorize them. This might seem difficult, but I'm sure you could do it. It is simply unpleasant to browse through a grid of words.

- Mention how quickly the user can begin chatting, and make it prominent. Is registration required? If not, advertise this.
Candid interviews with the terminally ill.
Very poignant, example quote.

"Death is a test of one’s maturity. Everyone has got to get through it on their own. I want very much to die. I want to become part of that vast extraordinary light. But dying is hard work. Death is in control of the process, I cannot influence its course. All I can do is wait. I was given my life, I had to live it, and now I am giving it back"
Ask PG: Would you consider a "Make My Votes Visible" option?
I was wondering if you'd consider adding an opt-in setting that would make users' votes visible to others, both for comments and for submissions. I'm interested in it for a few reasons:

1) I'd like to see what people I respect are voting for, in the hopes of finding things I otherwise would have missed.

2) I'd like to someday make a recommendations system that would work for HN, and starting now to create a corpus of permission-cleared votes would help if I ever get to it.

3) I think it might have a positive effect on social dynamics. While there is in theory greater potential for retaliatory downvotes, I hope that instead people would act more considerately if they felt that others could review their behaviour. I don't see any way to test this other than by trying it out.

I think this option would best be a simple checkbox on each user's settings page: "Make my votes visible to others". The votes would then be visible from a link on that page for others to view. Ideally, it would also be possible to view these from an item-centric viewpoint, accessible from the 'link' page.

If the idea were to catch on, I'd eventually like to see an 'Open' list, parallel to 'Classic', whereby one could view the entire site as it would appear if ordered only by users with their votes set to be visible.

Thanks!
Brings back a mostly forgotten incident from several years ago. I'm a tall white guy living as an expat in Seoul, speak Korean on the job, am pretty deep into the local community and sort of forget from time to time that I look different.

Riding the subway one day during rush hour I couldn't help but notice the guy next to me, a total stranger, was pressing hard against my privates with his hand through his own coat pocket. Thinking it might just be an accident and immersed in my reading I turned away 90 degrees. Sure enough five minutes later they guy had changed position was once again attempting to stroke me, quite hard. Mind officially blown, I moved to the other end of the car, mused on the creepiness of the situation, then promptly forgot about it.

Uncomfortable? Mildly disgusting? Yes. But not "sexual assault."
You should really define "server developer", otherwise you'll end-up with offers ranging from "bash scripting" through "rails backend developers" to "C developers".
thank you google! wow, this is amazing.
I think it's pure ego that drives someone to spend $160M to win the governorship. It's a luxury, not an investment.
I don't know that I'd agree that it wouldn't survive outside of research. In recent years, there's been a huge push for pure-managed operating systems, where everything runs in one address space and depends on the compiler to ensure security and reliability. While no such systems are in practice (to my knowledge), the potential is incredible. We'll see how it pans out in the next few years.

(Full disclosure: I started such an OS, Renraku, so I have a bit of a vested interest in the success of such ideas)
The Specific Help From Sample Dissertation
The usefulness of dissertation samples is often questioned by students. The right sample dissertation will provide students with the knowledge required to produce the best dissertation. Knowing the ways in which samples help will be helpful to students.
Good ideas - I appreciate the input. Another thought - do I request emails for beta testers specifically? Or do I request emails from the average joe, go about beta testing via another route, then inform average joe on the launch after beta testing is complete?
Here you go:

http://contracts.corporate.findlaw.com/finance/loan/4422.htm...

http://contracts.corporate.findlaw.com/LCsearch.html?entry=c...

Do not try to "wing this" yourself, have an attorney do it.
But then the page would load slowly... and be dependent on the performance of the remote server.

Let's say if he decides to query a bunch of servers to check out uncommon tlds, then his site would have to wait for the slowest link.
Which is one of the reasons I stick to computers and avoid the black market.
If you are coming to bangalore, lets meet :)
Whitman's very candidacy was an insult to those of us who have gone out of our way on many occasions to discharge our civic duty of voting. I'm sorry, Meg, you don't just wake up one morning, having never participated in the political process, and say "hey, you know what, I'm so great, I should be governor". It was an exercise in ego from the get-go, and thank the gods that the voters saw through it.

BTW I'm no Jerry Brown fan either. The candidate I would actually have liked to vote for was Tom Campbell. Had Whitman not blown him out of the primary, maybe I could have.
Ok, I'm ten years older, I'll give some advice.

You're 17, you're just starting to get good at stuff, so don't sweat it so much. I think the best thing to do is take on an interesting, challenging project that has some potential to become a product, but will definitely push you to learn.

Hell, copy someone else's idea. As you work on it, you'll probably figure out something they aren't doing, or find a product that rests between the competition. For now, becoming a great hacker is more important than having a winning idea, because if you do it in the reverse order, you may not be able to implement said idea...
Here are a few pointers:

1. Find a way to help everyone. Tell them, "hey, give me your e-mail address and I'll e-mail you x" or "Hey, e-mail me and I'll send that website/book/pdf I was talking about." Don't even talk about your projects. When you send the e-mail put something about it in the signature. They'll check it out. Follow up 3 weeks later.

2.Why do you want to talk to the famous guy? Is it because if he just tweets or blogs or knows about your app you're going to be big? You won't be big because he knows about it, but you'll probably be big if 20 up and coming people know about it. Hit them up, and you actually stand a chance.

3.Think about your personal brand (I struggle with this!) before you get there. Are you the newbie with something to prove, the expert, the rags to riches b2b story. All your stories, interactions have to match this personal brand. It should be an extension of your online presence (HN comments, blog, twitter, etc)
I wish Yzupnick had left that part out, because the rest is true. Money falls out of a few simple assumptions, which just spewing them out in a simple HN comment (i.e. "please don't hammer me too much on the mathematical details") is something like: 1. For any given thing, different people have varying personal valuations of that thing. 2. As people have more of a thing, they value gaining yet more of that thing less per unit. 3. People can engage in the trade of goods.

From there it's a short step to bartering things for things I value highly with things I have too much of (or can make too much of) and therefore value less than my trading partner does, and from there only a slightly longer step before an economy develops in which there is a measure of fundamental market value, because the actors in the market conduct arbitrage until there are no more arbitrage opportunities, which mathematically implies the existence of a sort of standardized value measure.

I call money the most real abstract concept in the world. You can't actually have any of this "value", you can only have dollars or Euros or 1000 pounds of cabbage or something else real, but it underlies and informs every economic thing you do. You just barely can't touch it, it's just as real as it can be without quite being real. And money will exist until at least one of those three things is no longer true. (And even post-scarcity there will still be the little matter of time, and the trades thereof.)

(If this interested you, I really recommend at least the first few chapters of http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_ToC... .)
Remove every comment in your last example and see if you can still read it.

I believe you will find it easier to read.
Checking out svn production probably isn't ideal, but lots of people do it. I think the default capistrano+svn set up actually does a checkout behind the scenece. It's usually much faster than an export and it means that if you have to tweak a file on production (yikes!) you can check that change back in.

Also, deploying via export is trickier than it sounds. You can't just cd to /var/www/whatever and run "svn export" or else you'll end up with files deleted from the repository still existing on production.
Cooks, who are on their feet a lot, often wear clogs or crocks for shoes and/or stand on thick, squishy rubber mats.
Having been at Y! when broadcast was bought and having seen behind the curtain, I think you are seriously overestimating what was purchased...
Thanks a lot, I appreciate it!
I know HN usually gets silly on the weekends, but this is generally good advice.
Use curly braces, even for single-line control blocks.
Ask HN: High stress hacks?
I just picked my locked out neighbor's door lock. We tried brute force methods (pulling the pins, trying to cut a different door's chain lock), but eventually the elegant method paid off. What are some times when you've used your technical or trivial knowledge to get out of an otherwise hopeless situation?
More than you ever wanted to know about PacMan. The Pacman Dossier
I think he knows that. I think he's just avoiding actually making his argument because nobody can counter his points if we don't know what they are.

Also, to White_N_Nerdy, before you go 'look at how much it's worth, they MUST want that and are therefore involved'- consider that the USA GDP is 15 trillion dollars. There's no way our government could control the entire drug trade, which means a fraction of 500 billion is the best they could do, and what's a chunk of 500 billion to the US gov't? Besides, is a chunk of 500 billion actually worth the risk of the ENTIRE WORLD discovering our government is the most evil and corrupt organization ever to walk the earth? (not that they are, but they would be if they were orchestrating the entire drug trade)
I also like code like this. Sometimes a closing curly brace will pass for a blank line.

And ya, scrolling is the enemy.
Hi Scott, didn't see this comment before I posted mine (take a look at it if you have the time). Thank you for writing Zeta-C and proving the concept of reasonable C->Lisp compilation, and for making the code public domain.
Wonderful book recommendation, I am half way through, knowing nothing about web-design. Reading this book puts a huge smile on my face, it is funny and an easy read!
It's not that you are over thinking them. You are just giving up too early. Let's say there are two girls. You go on a first date with one and you see all the potential. By the time you're on your 67th date, there are a lot of flaws you've discovered. That's how projects work.

Each hour you spend thinking about it or working on it is like another date. The more dates you go on the uglier she gets, but also the richer the experience. Pick a project and just stick with it. The reason why your other ideas look so much better is because you haven't ever gone on a date with them yet.
I am currently writing Learn You Some Erlang. I have never read one of the 'For Dummies' book, have no idea what tone they employ or what kind of readers they assume they have.

I can say, however, that there already exist a few books on Erlang, quite serious, that actually cost money. I wanted to offer a free resource to learn Erlang, given my frustration at the lack such things when I began learning the language myself. I found a problem, and am currently trying my best to solve it.

If you feel like learning the language but my book's style and/or tone annoys you, you might prefer buying one of the books. There's also an online tutorial on erlang.org and an interactive one on tryerlang.org.
True by _why is special. Very special.
You mean a local maximum for clojure or programming in general? Because ORMs that use the Data Mapping pattern (like SQLAlchemy or Hibernate) are better in some cases where ActiveRecord is a bit simplistic.
yeah, that would be awesome.
I use the 80-col guideline to know when I'm doing something wacky, but I break it often. Not by too much though.

Except in the case of CSS, in which I MUCH prefer 1-selector-per-line over 1-rule-per-line. My CSS lines often go above 160 chars.
One thing to add: I learned at Startup School that if you really want to talk to FAMOUS GUY at a conference, do it before he speaks.

At Startup School, every presenter was swamped with people after his talk, even the ones who really weren't that famous. But all of the presenters, even Ron Conway, had few enough people trying to talk to them before the spoke that they were quite approachable.

It also shows them that you knew who they were before the conference, which probably gives them a slightly better impression of you.
it was my understanding that even a dynamically linked C program needed to be GPL compatible to use it (thus the reason for the LGPL). Am I wrong in your opinion?

IMO, yes. If you compile a C program which dynamically links to Readline, and then distribute it, you're not distributing any part of Readline itself. The GPL does not apply because you do not need permission from anybody to distribute your own code.

In theory, GPL'd libraries are fine for proprietary applications to depend on (via dynamic linking). However, many vendors like to statically link their binaries so they don't have to worry about shared library incompatibility. This is where the LGPL comes in. A vendor could (for example) statically link GTK+ into their application, so they don't get complaints about somebody who tries to run it from a system without GTK+ installed. If they linked against Readline, they'd have to rely on the local system libraries.

Of course, it's possible to dynamically link a proprietary application against a GPL'd shared library, and then distribute them both. But now the GPL does apply, because GPL'd code is being distributed, and it's quite possible a judge could decide you're trying to play games to avoid the license.

Also, the recent WordPress theme issue probably mucks this up even more from an understanding point of view.

WordPress is a source of misinformation regarding the GPL (see below)

Some said even if the themes hadn't used GPL code but simply called existing routines, they needed to be GPL. Where do come down on that?

IMO, this is incorrect. The argument is that the WordPress API can be copyrighted, which (in the US at least) not a position held by the courts. If it were, any project which imitated an existing API (Wine of Win32, GnuTLS of OpenSSL, editline of Readline) would be illegal.

GPL misinformation originates from two sources, broadly:

* Those that want to distort the GPL's purpose, to transform it from a shield into shackles -- WordPress and MySQL are two examples. They release GPL'd code in the hopes of creating a "community" to mine for cheap bug fixes, but intentionally spread GPL fear so paying customers are less likely to download the Free version.

* Those who are opposed to Free software in general, who do not like the idea of users having full control over their property. Usually large companies -- prime examples are Microsoft (especially a few years ago) and Apple today. A few individual trolls/cranks exist here also, but they're mercifully rare.
If you're implying a drug expert must have been a druggie, consider: has a dolphin expert ever been a dolphin?
Bogus Grass-Roots Politics on Twitter
Its only misleading to the degree of 4 orders of magnitude

That's okay, right?
We were really surprised by how fast and scalable MongoDB was.
Ask HN: Building a Lead Generation Page?
What is the easiest way for me to create a single Lead Generation Website so that I can convert more sales for my business?

I have very limited knowledge with HTML and PHP

I am thinking of a website like http://www.onlinecollege.org/ but for Life Insurance. Any thoughts?
Facebook | Mazii Jay Zarif
A bit. I admire his principles of using free software only no mater what.
Sure, but how many of the people who fell for the current scam would have noticed that the address bar was it's normal color?
Thank you for pointing to that statement from the article. I'm still pondering what scope that statement leaves for imbalance in the number of pictures of one kind or another during the trails with each experimental subject.
Wow. These are all awesome ideas.
If your are going to Mumbai, don't miss the street food. Especially the vada pavs. And you must absolutely take a ride in the local trains! Save the touristy stuff for later.
...because there are no other database vendors out there. There's definitely no such thing as Postgres, SQL Server, or DB2.
Unfortunately there are plenty of alternatives for relational-ignorant developers to abuse. I wouldn't break out the champagne just yet.
Alas, porting Zeta-C to Common Lisp is not nearly as easy as one might expect. The problem is that a lot of C code makes assumptions about how the compiler is laying stuff out in memory -- for example, code might write a word through an int pointer, then read it back as bytes through a byte pointer. To support this kind of thing, Zeta-C used displaced arrays with different element types onto the same memory locations, which the Symbolics hardware supported but which can't be done in Common Lisp. (It didn't even quite work on the CADR and Lambda, as they were 32-bit machines; it requires that the tag bits be in addition to the low-order 32 bits of a word, as they were on the 36- and 40- bit Symbolics hardware, rather than borrowed from them.)

I suppose, though, that if there's only one chunk of C code you care about compiling this way, there is a chance you could get lucky, in that the code might not do anything that wouldn't work in CL.
I'll add to your advice about circles, which I generally agree with (although I usually introduce myself immediately once there's a break in conversation, even if I don't have anything to add).

I would amend your advice to say you don't necessarily need to have something to 'add'. Most people actually are less interested in what you have to say than what they have to say. Most people actually want you to ask them to questions they can answer intelligently. The other reason to ask more questions is you'll actually learn more, rather than walking around talking about stuff you already know, which won't do much more than inflate your own ego.

So, don't feel like you need to say something that's always equally as smart as everyone around you, posing simple questions is totally fine within reason, just watch for cues for boredom.

Leaving conversations and circles is important as well, often you don't want , or can't spend an entire hour talking to a single person or group of people (though sometimes you do!). Especially if you're organizing an event, you really should probably be having more shorter conversations so you can meet more attendees. I usually excuse myself with 'Excuse me, I have to say hi to someone', which is a great phrase because 1.) It's sincere 2.) It's pretty unoffensive.

Of course it's more polite to leave a circle than to leave an individual, you don't generally want to leave someone alone and with no one to talk to, it's rude unless you know they're a social butterfly and really don't care. If possible you should instead integrate your party of two into another conversation. I generally do this by saying 'Oh, by the way, have you met bob?' or 'hey, let's check out what they're talking about'.

Speaking of events (shameless plug), the Los Angeles Hacker News meetup is next @ coloft next saturday!
http://www.meetup.com/Los-Angeles-Hacker-News/calendar/15138...
Hypertextuality: how a programmer reads TS Eliot's 'The Waste Land'
H-index for Hacker News
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index

the variation for Hacker News:

A HNer has index h:

if h of [his/her] posts have at least h upvotes,
and the rest posts have at most h upvotes each.
That's an interesting idea. As an immediate response, I think if I made my votes visible, then my upvotes would outnumber my downvotes even more than (I believe) they do now. If that reaction is general, and if participants buy in to making their votes visible in the first place, that could substantially increase the ratio of upvotes to downvotes. In turn, most users would be happier, as most seem to be more dismayed by themselves getting downvotes than by somebody else getting upvotes.

Your reason number 1 for doing this is also why I would hope that some regular participants here would disclose their votes.