skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Scratch my earlier comment. As found in the article:

"
The scientific literature has provided clear evidence that the ORE [other race effect] and the popular belief that OR faces all look alike are not accounted for by the paucity of anthropometric variations in OR [other race] faces, but by a genuine lack of expertise. Although this theoretical explanation has been supported by numerous behavioral (for a review, see ref. 2), computational (e.g., refs. 3–5) and neuroimaging (6–15) studies on the ORE...
"

so yes, it is because we are used to seeing faces from our own race. And no, the researchers are not implying this is a genetic phenomenon.
dict.TryGetValue is an odd example here -- idiomatic F# for a map lookup would be:

let value = defaultArg (Map.tryFind "foo" dict) "default"

or

match Map.tryFind "foo" dict with
| Some v -> v
| None -> "default"
Thanks for the feedback, that is a very good point! Next time I end up going down this path I'll keep this issue in mind. What I was getting at there, however, is really "any axis that causes your laws or ideals to different from that of the filter agent".
View From Your Window: Guessing World Locations One Window at a Time, a Game
Yes, I quit after a few questions (of which I had ~50% correct). I found it mentally taxing.
Hacker News isn't a potentially valuable Internet resource waiting to be mined for interesting new applications. That's Twitter. Hacker News is an actual community.

I don't know or care why the API got blocked, but I've been as happy with as many HN add-on apps as I have been incredibly irritated by them (paging: guy who scraped all HN job postings and made his own job site with them). From what I can tell, it's not actually part of this site's philosophy to be a building block for other people's software ideas.
My feelings exactly.
Got 29 points - in the ones that I got incorrect, it was usually the alternate that I had narrowed it down to that was the right one.
There's a very strange Brazilian auction site called "Pior Lance" ("worst bid", found at http://www.piorlance.com.br/ ).

The name is misleading, it actually works this way:

1) You buy "bids", the right to do a single bid
2) Every auction has a timer that ends the auction when reaches zero
3) Every bid placed on an item increases it's price by 1 cent and resets the timer

Products get auctioned for values below 20 bucks, which may seem like a great deal, but every cent costed one buck from the bidder.

Pure genius.
I got just about average (26) but I would be interested to see if HN has an inordinate amount of people coming in around the low 20's.
Simple explanation: we don't know how to distinguish between faces "out of the box", we have to be trained to do it. Most of our training happens within our own race, so we become very good at distinguishing faces.

When presented with completely different type of faces, we have to work hard to tell two faces apart, we can't just distinguish them on first sight.

It's like knowing to tell the alphabet from your own language vs some other language you're encountering for the first time.
We have plans to expand the available widgets and to let you make your own.
You can actually do better than this - it's possible to build a switchable pulse, sawtooth and sine'ish wave oscillator from a single op-amp. During my childhood my father was heavily into electronics and electronic music, and one of his interests was designing and buildning his own analog synthesizers. One of his more compact feats for one of his many synthesizers was four three-wave oscillators built on a single TL074 (quad op-amp).
Need help PM'ing a startup IT project
Someone suggested I post here. I hope this is the right forum for this if not, my sincere apologies.

I am being asked to help manage a software development project of a friend of mine's startup company after 2 years of not working and am looking for some insight from the hive since im feeling realllly rusty and down on myself and i want to show him i can do it. more inside....

I need advice concerning managing a 3-layer software development project (will be in .Net)

This is for a service based business lets say company x (providing supplies to clients at wholesale who then sell those at retail. They want to create a backoffice management platform for the company and its clients to use as well as a base for which clients to be able to create websites which take advantage of the complex database structure and its stored procedures. The structure is as follows:

Layer 1: web pages (aspx) hired and produced by the client
Layer 2: components (com) produced and paid for by company
Layer 3: database (sql) produced and paid for by company and containing stored procedures and relationships for the front end to use.

They want to create it in such a way that keeps the application source confidential by controlling component development themselves.

This is the only information I have been given so far about the project. My first assumption is that the com layer should basically be a web services layer which if they want that confidentiality and strict control was how we used to do it at my old job.

I also need to help define some good policies which would help assure quality control between the layers especially at layer 1.

For example:
1) the application must leave a log in main operations
2) the application will use stored procedures programmed in the database; will use a specific user/profile.

Can anyone give me any suggestions to create a reasonable list for our quality control or caveats and best practices?

Thanks so much in advance
I don't have any experience with developing lightboxes but couldn't the 'X' button just use javascript to go back in the history (instead of directly hiding the image). Or is that how most lightboxes work but because this one cannot use javascript it is not possible to do so?
I'm amazed the message their eyes sent was so clear and nuanced.
US Military Harvesting Rainwater in Hawaii Now
34/36 I did not find it stressful. I think that was because of the instant feedback, though if I had been getting questions wrong, that would have made things much worse than just finding out at the end.
Even when those buttons DO work they aren't instantaneous. You presume a world where pedestrians have almost no patience. A more likely scenario is that people start pushing the button more and more trying to get it to work before they "give up in disgust".
Ask HN: How do I start learning iPhone app dev?
Can you guys recommend any specific tutorials. I know I can google it and get a shit ton of resources but I need a more practical approach.
Roll your own PubSub with DNode in node.js
Prediction: The average HNer will score significantly higher than the general average.

I hypothesise that the social issues geeks experience are predominantly caused by hypersensitivity to the emotions of others, rather than insensitivity; In keeping with the Dunning-Kruger hypothesis we tend to underestimate our ability to empathise, thereby causing us to overanalyse social situations, leading to anxiety and paralysis.
I’m going to have to plead some confusion or ignorance I here. I’m well aware that nutrition has become a political hot potato for the last few decades, but I’m trying figure out why you felt the need to bring it up in your response. What do you mean by “not food groups as a proper noun?"
I also got a 26. Apparently I'm not as good at reading people as I thought...
" 'In most elevators installed since the early 1990s, the 'close door' button has no effect. Otis Elevator engineers confirmed the fact to the Wall Street Journal in 2003. "

Interesting. In a previous career I worked at a hotel and had, as part of my job, a "fireman's service" key. Very handy thing.

Elevator banks in NYC offices and hotels have a key slot that, when activated, pulls all the elevators to the lobby. You're supposed to only do this in an emergency, such as a fire.

While the elevators are set to fireman's service, the same key (well, a duplicate, if yours is the one that was used to pull the elevators) is used inside an elevator to control it.

While on fireman's service the doors will not open unless you press the "open" button. If you take the car to a fire floor you really don't want the doors opening on their own.

You have to press and hold the "open" button until they are fully open; also handy in case you start to open the doors and start inhaling smoke.

Likewise, once open, the doors don't close unless you press and hold the "close" button.

I'm pretty sure that once you closed the doors the car automatically returned to the lobby.

Bottom line is, not every control you see on some equipment or machine is meant for everyone to use.
Indefinite storage of solar power via MIT
I'd like to think the kid is pretty smart. Facebook has really only been "on the scene" for a few years now, growing in popularity enormously over a 24-36 mo. glaze.

I say it's too soon to judge anything. Give him more time to actually prove himself as a high quality (or poor-quality) leader.
I love the idea, it will make corporate world much better places to work for most of corporates out there, it also encourages ideas of each individual, and cultivates creativity. However, i think its insane to use a software/ IT product to take the power off those politicians, and create democracy within the corporate world. My best wishes to you, kabuks.
What's your basis for that line of thinking? He's only consuming 1800 calories spaced evenly throughout the day, so I'd imagine that he'd in no way be coming close to taxing his body's ability to process glucose or produce/respond to insulin.
I found it a bit irritating because some of the pictures were incredibly grainy, but not stressful per se.

(scored a 32, for the record)
There are so many problems in the world right now — big problems, small problems, even problems that people don't know they have. Why would you waste time on a problem that you admit in your very first paragraph does not exist?
24 hours later: Why RockMelt is my default browser
Why does a pregnant woman gain weight? Because she consumes more calories than she burns. Why does someone with hypothyroidism gain weight? They consume more calories than they burn. Why does someone on prednisone or antipsychotics gain weight? They consume more calories than they burn. Why does someone on an 11-day meth bender lose weight? They burn more calories than they consume.

All true, but it's not the most enlightening way to look at it. The more interesting question is why they eat so much/little.

In my experience, and the experience of lots of others, eating food like Little Debbie's makes you want to pig out, whereas it's practically impossible to pig out on steak or chicken.

I'm not surprised that you could lose weight on an 1800 calorie junkfood diet, but I think it would be hard to stick with it, even by the standards of diets, which are pretty much all hard to stick with. The fact that a doctor, a profession loaded with people who are a few standard deviations above the norm in terms of ability to delay gratification and self-discipline - a med school professor, no less (same but more so) - has the discipline to do this for 10 weeks, is not surprising, and probably not relevant for the average person who's struggling to lose weight.
Solve any Hard Problems Today?
What Does that “Business Guy” at Your Startup Do, Anyway?
For the first half of the test, I was kicking myself over the number I got wrong, but my final score placed me as above average.

Actually, after I started mousing over the images to see full-size, and spending several seconds studying each face, I was almost always correct.

Yay for me.
Nice story,

The sailing against the wind is not an intuitive, mostly because there is no simple mathematical formula for the underlying physics. However one can do some convincing models.
I have some matlab code which can, probably in the simplest way, demonstrate theoretically the principle. In short, if it is possible do sail down the wind faster the the wind than by having rotating sail (blades) DDWFTTW is possible. See: http://goo.gl/TtEfM
I think it's interesting that Dave Winer decided to do this as a blog post instead of a HN discussion.

Instead of having a conversation with the HN community he decided to have a conversation with his readers.
Quickly: you don't know what you're talking about George Colony

"The great CEOs in technology navigate their companies through product change, brutal competitive threats, shifts in architecture, and highly fickle customers". -You

FB started out as MySpace for .EDU emails. News Feed, Platform, Connect, Photos, etc built around Zucks idea of 'Social' has revolutionized the way we interact and build our products online.

Little do you know, everything Mark has done is playing right into his hands, especially with the 'Like' button. Facebook AdSense for publishers is just around the corner and will disrupt a major portion of Google's business. His master plan has yet to even be completed. Social has only just started.
Same here (34/36)... I was kinda surprised because I felt some of them were really wild guesses and it usually turned out I guessed correctly...
The Top Twelve Greatest Video Games of All Time
31 here.
"What's a tab?"

"And have you seen my medication?"
There are countless of "business guys" out there seeking technical co-founders for their project. While this article discusses more about what your role is as part of an already-established team, it can still give you a glimpse of what you should know about in terms of how you can provide value down the road (separate from the initial product development).
Realistically: The ability to show or hide objects on a page. This would make creating things like tooltips, lightboxes, dialogues etc. a lot easier.

Ideally: I would like components to match their actual behaviour more closely, e.g. a tab container would actually contain views in the respective tabs that would be shown or hidden depending on the tab selected. I know this is no easy feat - I have yet to find a wireframing tool that lets you infuse interactivity as easily as one would like to, and I have been through a lot of them.
CL

(setf value (gethash "foo" dict "default"))
This issue has gone all the way to congress a couple times, but no real fix has ever come of it.

Fortunately the market has already solved it for us. With Itunes and Hulu and DVD season box sets, we've gone all the past a la carte per channel and straight to a la carte per show and per episode.
>Apparently that's because Hacker News has blocked his API.

Does anyone know if this is actually the case? http://api.ihackernews.com gives me a 404, but I'm posting this from ihackernews's browser interface, which obviously is getting updates.
Are you against http://searchyc.com?

Are you against Gabriel Weinberg's Ask YC archive (http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive)? Would you like it less if he built it automatically instead of manually (cf. http://metaoptimize.com/projects/autotag/hackernews/)?

I agree that the job posting site was really tacky, but that guy entered all the data manually anyhow.

I think in sum total that most add-ons are pointless. A few are useless. And only a very small fraction are bad, and should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
Spot on. 30 out of 36.
If you opt to add a repository that is full of malware, that is no different from downloading a piece of software from an unreputable website. I don't really see the issue here, especially since most users will not every find a need to use this.
You misunderstood what I was saying. Start with the firehose. I don't want it to make money, I want it so I can link this flow in with other flows that I'm following without having to visit all the sites. Not trying to make a business, just scratching my own itch having no idea where it leads.
Google Search app for Windows Phone 7 - in the Marketplace now
That's not what I "decided" at all.

I do my writing on my blog. That's the way I work.

Happy to participate in a discussion here.
33, which surprised me as I'm extremely introverted. I got the sense that the expressions fell into different categories based on where the tension around the eyes was, and the matching word had been randomly chosen from the category. The "1000 yard stare" category, the "happy" category, and so on. By the end I was enjoying this new match-the-category puzzle.
Seriously? I mean, I'm doing my job using the, let's call them, open-source languages: javascript, php, bit of python, java and perl, but, still, I would say that C# is better than most of them, both in terms of the lanuage syntax, features and such, as well as in terms of the quality of libraries. That it's sort of Microsoft-platforms-only keeps me away, but I have to give a credit where it's due: C# is a great piece of technology.
i think a lot of his problem is one of perception. i also think his youth works against him sometimes. personally, i'm not a huge fan. sometimes it seems like he's trying to squeeze the facebook social graph for as much as he can.

but then, like the majority of people, i only see a small subset of his personality. he is in a very competitive industry and it's the young, type-a/ultra-competitive/greedy capitalist/smart guy trying to wear the [big] shoes of a modern visionary that is often in the spotlight.

it's hard to imagine how i might act were i the youngest billionaire in america and the creator/founder/leader of what many consider to be one of the biggest tech. revolutions in recent years. i would probably try to act as admirably as possible, given the various constraints. but even then it's hard to control public perception. mr. gates for example, who i think is a pretty admirable and visionary guy, was vilified for the longest time.

edit: clarification.
You can also use defaultdict[0], or define the __missing__() method[1] yourself on a dictionary you receive from someone else's code. In either of these cases the "not found" value will be whatever you decide it should be.

[0]: http://docs.python.org/library/collections.html#collections....
[1]: http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#dict
Generational GC will be very useful for Perl 6 and other languages running on Parrot, especially if we can add reliable escape analysis. The ability to perform the equivalent of stack allocation in C offers many performance benefits.
You appear to be disagreeing with the article while saying the same thing? I don't understand. Did you read past the first sentence?
Indeed. I only got a 31, but with the exception of one set of eyes that I completely misread each one I got wrong I was waffling between two answers and the one I didn't pick was the actual correct answer.
I took down the site after YC blocked my IP address. I believe it was blocked as a result of increased usage from the explosion in traffic, resulting in some really heavy usage of the API. My guess is that YC's software did this automatically to prevent abuse.

In addition, many folks weren't happy with me distributing the HN database. So there really wasn't a reason to keep it up.

I'm going to rework the API such that it will work within the boundary of an acceptable scrapping rate. I'm not putting the database back up.
A great video website like TED, surprised so few people have heard of it
Is it only me who finds it difficult to label expressions just in eyes, when it feels like an image of the overall face would be much clearer?
This article resonates very strongly with me. My job involves writing Java. Having really gotten into Python and Clojure over the past few years, as well as dabbling with Haskell, it really frustrates me when I have to write certain things in Java that I know could be done more elegantly/safer/quicker in a more expressive language. Like the author, I often find that I am not satisfied with Java code that I write. There is always a temptation to try to use functional techniques in Java. Experience has taught me, like the author, that this usually makes the code hard to read.

Does anyone have any advice for a Python/Clojure nut who has to write Java from time to time?
An Org-mode clone for Vim
One could certainly make the argument that Zuckerberg is suffering from a form of business myopia. He's leveraging the main competitive advantage he has, which is the social graph. Perhaps he should think more broadly and take advantage of Facebook's financial resources and intellectual capital. Companies such as Apple and Microsoft thought beyond their narrow set of competencies to become full fledged technology companies. It will be interesting to see if Facebook will move in the same direction.

In all fairness to Zuckerberg, one could also make this argument about Google. While both Google and Facebook dominate their areas because of powerful network effects, nothing lasts forever. Imagine what the Union Pacific Railroad company could have been if they stopped thinking of themselves as a railroad company, and started thinking like a transportation company. It's tempting to stick to riding the one horse you have, but rarely has this worked out long-term in the tech industry.
27. Not really stressful.

I chose overly negative options in a couple cases and thought it might be showing a self-esteem pattern but subsequently I noticed that I misjudged the assertive ones (I think selecting a "interested"-type option instead). I dunno what, if anything, that indicates.
There are ways of fixing the warnings so you can use -Werr. For signed/unsigned, just change the type of one side of the comparison, or cast to whichever type is most correct for the comparison while manually making sure that you won't have any range issues. For your limited range example, you could probably use the preprocessor:

ssize_t i;
#if SSIZE_MAX != INT_MAX
assert(i <= INT_MAX);
#endif /* SSIZE_MAX != INT_MAX */
f(i);
There's another company, Skyfire, that's been pushing a similar solution for the past few years. I've never met anyone who actually uses it.
Nice job indeed (with the video), but looks totally fake to me. Like they did the electric arc in After Effects.

One thing's for sure, there's no way they're getting that into the App Store... Apple doesn't like it when you repurpose the buttons!
23 here, i'm off to watch jeopardy at 5 o'clock! and then it's judge Wapner...
I think I did "better" with the small images, the large ones leading to overanalysis perhaps?
I think that's rather the point of the test.
We have a greater vision in terms of equity, in that when you work you also gain equity. Unfortunately we are still working through the legal details of making that work. But it is articulated in our white paper (http://bettermeans.org/front/?page_id=306).

We will be sure to share that with all of you once we get there, because that will be the next innovation of our model that could also really shake things up, especially for tech teams and other startups looking for a way to create more fair partnership
Hasbro unveils device that promises 3-D on iPod
Sounds like you hang out with the wrong kind of communists? I think anarcho-syndicalism is gaining ground.
35 out of 36. I've often thought I was hypersensitive about things/people, and I'm always concerned with what other people are feeling, even more than my (female) partner :)
Ask HN: Have the database of HN posts/discussions for personal use?
Could the full database of HN posts/discussions be available for download for personal use?
Loads of people leave and come back, too. I knew several.
Although you'd probably want to replace those square brackets with parens to make it a generator, if you're dealing with a largish file.
33/36. Found it stressful.

I felt like I was picking the desired answer, not reading an actual emotion. An artifact of the test maybe. The expressions read artificial to me--like pictures of actors or models. Not sure what that says.
Same... and I was only way off on one of them. Not stressful, although I was getting impatient cause I should be working instead :p