skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
if you look at a lot of the popular students, you'll find they are often of certain MBTI types (ESFP/ESTP). there's also a particular type (ENFJ) that is insanely charismatic (Oprah Winfrey is an example,) and they are also very popular in different ways

i know that it's pretty much impossible for me to pull that sort of charisma from myself in any quantity, while to them it comes naturally, likely often just through impulse

in other words, no. you probably won't become more popular by trying. wearing the right clothes, and doing all sorts of things that the popular kids do will only make you look like a poser. the popular kids don't do those things to be popular, that's just what you see on the surface. and if you can't see beyond the surface, then you probably don't get it
because smart scientific people are skeptics. It is tougher to resolve one's skepticism with religious beliefs than it is resolve with atheism. Interestingly, I have known several atheist who were almost "religious" in their atheism.
This picture is cool: http://www.physics.berkeley.edu/research/zettl/projects/nano...

In 2002, the latest in radio tech was pretty typical looking. Small, but understandable. This new nanotube-based technology looks revolutionary.

If you think back to when the transistor was invented, I bet it was similar... and think what the transistor did to our society. (Transistor -> internet. Nanotechnology -> ??)
In Asia, M$ has a real strong support because people think that Linux and other free OSes are for geeks only. And they won't when everyone here thinks that M$ is the `standard' and won't mind locking themselves in it.
4. You can't expect people to explain their position again and again on forums like these.

If this thread is any indication, then actually, you can expect people to explain their position again and again. The tough thing is getting them to stop.

/me is guilty as charged...
Wow...my points were missed completely. Everybody knows the BC is real, but Amex does not advertise it. Info is leaked, they create buzz, and they allow people to gossip about it--its far more clever marketing to neither confirm or deny its existence as Amex did in the 90s--esp when it was by invite only and many people werent sure if it was real.

And I didnt suggest that casinos don't make money off the high rollers. But they definitely make a greater and more stable cashflow from masses of low rollers than handfuls of high rollers. A smaller scale example would be the high end dept store in your city, like a Saks or a Neimans--their avg purchase is probably in the high 3/low 4 figures while at the same time at least once or a few times a day a high roller spends 10k+ on clothing. Probably with their Black Card. XD
Getting the demographic and targeting right is hard as most of them don't know who their consumers are or are too vague?
Popularity isn't necessary for happiness. That being said I'm happy I survived high school.
What does weapons research have to do with my comment?

I would rather see my tax money go to things like Alzheimer's/cancer research and public health measures.

I'm not against people researching stuff like the eclipse in the Odyssey for fun, but it shouldn't be publicly funded, especially when the premise of the paper makes so little sense.
Recommended Flaw: 31% of Digg Homepage submitted by 10 Users
Mmmm... this should be juicy hacker fun for a few days!
of course i was right on spot.
so why the downmod?
Isn't this roughly the same as my "spluh" comment? :)

In a religious culture, it's hard to find anyone more religious than an atheist. The reason for that, I think, is that you have to make a choice to be an atheist when it's not the default.
"I try to be free of superstition of all kinds."

Really? What's "spirituality" then?
Well, this is good news then. Yay!
As the creator of Linux, Linus was given stock in many Linux-oriented companies by the company founders. He has done fairly well, as he should.
I keep using the 'snapshots' internal options to 'block' for 'all sites' -- but the preference never sticks.

Next up: using AdBlock or NoScript to block JS from *.snap.com domains, which should do the trick.
Great points, actually. I was running it in Virtual PC recently and marveled at how incredibly few resources it used. I was surprised by how much software I could get to run on it as well.
Too bad we can't run 'explain plan' on them :)
Days? I think we're already into negative minutes...
To what do you ascribe the success of Yahweh?
On the scale of bitching about digg (which I'm known to do :-)) this one doesn't rank. Given the various power laws out there, I'd say that it's actually pretty diverse.

The people at the top, for whatever reason, work very hard to get there.
Nothing new: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
Say2GO Offers Asynchronous Voice Chat For Windows Users
It seems like twitter is taking fail to new levels every day.
these queries are not optimised at all. first of all, every page gives of MySQL warnings...and second, there are alot of SELECT count(*)...instead of SELECT count(1). This may not seem like it would increase speed alot but given the number of users and the amount of times that query is executed, it will speed up twitter by a bit.
There are a few other things that i have noticed...they should really clean up their sql
Collecting salary just like anybody else.

Is Transmeta a startup that have an exit strategy where everybody will get rich?
It looks like the number on News.YC is about 26%.

> (let bys (map [_ 'by] (beststories nil 1000))
(/ (apply + (map cadr
(firstn 10
(sort (compare > cadr)
(dedup (map [list _ (count _ bys)]
bys))))))
1000))

.258

This is the fraction of the 1000 top-scoring stories in the past month or so (http://news.ycombinator.com/best) submitted by the top 10 submitters. Who incidentally are:

nickb 77
edw519 34
markbao 26
bdfh42 20
nreece 19
ajbatac 18
wumi 17
prakash 16
smanek 16
ilamont 15
I was happy to see Alpha Labs - we're about 1.5 hours north of Pittsburgh, and plan on applying for the next cycle.
I wonder how many minutes to techcrunching...
Yeesh. This does not seem safe.

At least maybe (big maybe) some good will come of this?
This isn't all that surprising to me.

I would guess that there a few groups of users, with approximate proportions:

Lurkers: 70%
Diggers: 20%
Submitters: 10%
Regular Submitters: <1%

.. is there anyone from Digg here that can confirm this? :)
Explain Plan? Isn't that oracle? I ask because there is an "EXPLN" link that gives you what I think you're asking for.
Anyone here in the 'Burgh and interested in machine learning and/or anything related to natural language/comp ling? I'm a research programmer at CMU, taking classes in the above areas with my tuition benefit to get back up to speed (I had previously been out of this field for several years).

I'm interested in talking to and/or meeting anyone with similar interests and an entrepreneurial bent (or any hackers doing something entrepreneurial in Pittsburgh at all, for that matter).
Wouldn't a working service be more interesting than this thing? Or are they expecting us to fix their code?
They really weren't kidding when they said that they'd mistakenly built it as a CMS instead of as a messaging platform.
yup, nothing new. That might even be a good percentage :) http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html
Best of luck with that! Drop me a line if I can help in any way.
It would be cool if there were a primer like this for all research disciplines.
Maybe I should just come up with an acronym for drop me a line. We should sit down and chat sometime. The address is in the profile.
Boy this demystifies the social animal that is twitter. The test database is very small.
Seems like this was a mistake by twitter: http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/staging_twitter_co...

Some profile pages are being linked to the staging server.
Saw that after I posted that, thanks.
For some reason, that code sample makes me want to investigate lisp.
It's not hard to write portable C++ code that doesn't cast pointers, and it's really not that hard to write C++ that doesn't "touch" memory cells. Being able to access the Java class library and 3rd party APIs from C++ could be very useful.
The search page looks particularly sloppy. Searching 'john' yields 27 queries, including a number that look redundant

Grabbing the users

SELECT * FROM `users` WHERE (users.id in (<list of user ids>))

followed by queries for each user id in that list

SELECT * FROM `users` WHERE (`users`.`id` = <user id>)

Maybe there's a reason for doing that, but if there is, I can't think of it
I looked at the division problem and guessed 472, and got it right. I think guessing accurately is important. You almost never have time to work things out. The 4 was obvious, and the 2 was probable--they wouldn't likely require a remainder from people. And so that left the 7 to guess.

I mean, given a set of problems requiring such division, most could be acceptably answered by nearly-correct answers. This isn't true in finance, but for most other things it is.
The idea of a static mindset is itself limiting. One needs to have a mindsheaf, which could be a time-varying sheaf of mindsets. This would be a contravariant functor F from the real line, with its usual topology, to the category of sets. The value F(U) for an open set U of the real line would be one of the mindsets of the mindsheaf. Of course, other topological spaces are possible, and the functor could have values in other categories. I mention only one possibility to illustrate the primitive inadequacy of the notion of a static mindset.
Yeah. I think Apple's Cocoa framework is a good example. Instead of inheritance you use delegates to modify class behaviour. Subclassing is 100% possible but not very often required because of the delegate pattern.
So depression is the sensation of my brain atrophying. Actually, that explains a lot.

First thing I did after reading this? I went for a short, but hard run.
Actual article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/business/06unbox.html
Pathetic. More details here.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=homers-odyssey-may-docum...

They interpret a poetic statement about the sun as referring to an eclipse, and then yet another statement about the god Hermes as referring to a particular position of Mercury.

I hate it when people try to reduce literature to some kind of secret code for other events, and just by coincidence, they happen to be the sort of events we can observe or calculate today.
Okay it's down now. They put up the whale page on staging and probably just disabled the plugin.
Is anyone else ever disturbed by the attempts to "make X fun!" by inclusion of cartoon characters and other inanity? I think it's a distraction; the kids just pay attention to the cartoon.

I know that some teachers would disagree, but in my experience, most teachers at the primary level don't really love math. Not the way I do, anyway. At the very best, you get people who liked doing rote problems, and those sorts of people just suck. The rest struggle through the lessons as much as their charges do, and they'd be lost without the teacher's guide.

In my opinion, the way to make math fun is to make the exercise of the skill itself more fun. Make it part of a game. For bonus points, make the game complex enough that multiple strategies can work, estimation or direct calculation or induction. And I'd like some recognition of the fact that some people are insanely good at this and others will always struggle, so create teams where different skills are useful (calculation, problem solving, record keeping, data gathering) but everyone learns the basic lessons.

Sooner or later you're going to be alone with the pencil and paper and Mr. 4 and Ms. 5 are not going to be there to help.
It would be best to package your PHP additions as an extension if you could, but I imagine you'd have done that already if it would work.

PHP on Ubuntu comes with the Suhosin patch installed, so there is at least one third-party PHP patch that has some significant distribution.
Same, except a six mile bike ride.

Depression as my brain cells dying scares me (motivates me) a lot more than depression as a chemical imbalance..
I don't think that's true ...

I believe that the original source of that quote was Rousseau, referring to an unnamed princess, some 20 years before Marie Antoinette was even born.

There is some speculation that he may have been referring to Maria Theresa of Spain, but even that is doubtful.
Hey Paul,

I speak to JD all the time (he wrote the article) and we've been looking at these numbers again every couple of hours for the last couple days, and the 31% that he wrote about (it hovers around the 30% mark) is fairly consistent when looking at the last 500 frontpaged stories.

One thing he didn't write about was that at the time if you expanded it out to top 28 users, that number was around 51% of Digg's frontpage stories.

Around 5am this morning (for me, about 5 hours ago), we ran the numbers again and at that particular time, one user was accounting for 53 of the last 500 frontpaged stories on his own.

Not going to say the data is conclusive or anything, because I frankly just dont know, but when you consider Digg says they have something like 23 million uniques a month and well over 1 million registered users, 50% of their frontpage traffic being dictated by less than 30 users is a little strange.
Thanks - would love to talk to you about the experience - shoot me your contact info: ak @ my-yc-username dot com
Related reading: "The murky demimonde of Amazon's top reviewers"

"Amazon's rankings establish a formal, public competition for power or its online equivalent, recognition...

To the extent that competitive energies drive Top Reviewers and their nemeses to generate content, and to spend time on and publicize Amazon.com, the chief beneficiary of misuse of Amazon.com's ranking system is Amazon itself."

http://www.slate.com/id/2182002/pagenum/all
It doesn't seem strange to me. The top submitters aren't dictating the stories. They're just submitting them first. And it doesn't seem at all unlikely that a few dedicated users could be the first to find a large fraction of the stories that ultimately became popular.
1. Your post is clumsily worded. Your argument seems to be 'oddness is mistaken for stupidity'. But you never really state that explicitly, so I'm not sure.

2. If we're 'experts' about spotting people who are too stupid, then why do we mistake oddness for stupidity?

3. Your grammar is also poor - e.g., 'to stupid to mate with'.
The title pretty much covers it. Twitter is more like an IM network or email list service than like a typical database-backed webapp; a relational database is just the wrong platform for large-scale messaging.
I give up. How do I enable the analyzer?
"What if God-belief was an emergent property resulting from other beneficial traits, but not itself beneficial at all?" -- nice adbuction. Like to see more hypotheses.

In regards to Buddhism, I'm happy with where I am right now. But it does seem that Buddhism would be a good "fit" for me. I've always been a Great Pumpkin man -- hate to leave it without good cause.

"Science is our unit-test framework" -- more like our design review. Living would be the unit-test. Society might be more like a system test. (E-gads, an extended metaphor! Would be fun to chase that one down :) )

As far as Judaism and the various sequels (I won't use the Y word as it offends those of faith), beats me why they are so popular. Intuitively I would think it's because they offer more to the species than they take away in the competitive market of creative narratives to existence -- sort of the same reason start-ups do well because they offer a unique and worthwhile value proposition to their users. But that's just idle speculation. I always had a weak spot for Hegel's historicism and dielectric as a way to understand the role of person, religion, and society. But these ideas went _way_ off the rails later with Marx and others, as you know. Popper had a field day with them, yet I feel there's value to be had here. Seems like a lot of great thinkers get a glimmer of an insight, then spend the rest of their careers taking it too dang far.

Great discussion. Thanks!
They're not always submitting them first either though. Users like MakiMaki and MrBabyMan (Maki and Andy are both great guys btw) often resubmit other users stories to get them frontpaged.

Not saying thats a bad thing either, because I believe that good content should have the best possible chance of getting noticed - it's just the Recommendation Engine has widened the gap recently between the top users and the large majority of the site.
Prius to go (partially) solar
I think you missed it. It seems to have disappeared.
My favorite quote: “People who believe in the power of talent tend not to fulfill their potential because they’re so concerned with looking smart and not making mistakes. But people who believe that talent can be developed are the ones who really push, stretch, confront their own mistakes and learn from them.”

However, I have one question/concern: Can the "innate ability and talent" truly be fostered in large corporations where companies have the ability to "push, stretch and confront" their employees' intellect?

I hope so and wish friends still in school read this article as well as PG's "Hiring is Obsolete".
I dont know the specific numbers - but I guess if you looked at a site like socialblade.com you could probably guesstimate the submitters/regular submitters number.
A preschool teacher typically makes 18-25K a year across the country; I would guess 30-35K is as high as it gets in even the most expensive parts of California (experienced or not).
Did anyone get a screenshot before they disabled it?
"Is anyone else ever disturbed by the attempts to "make X fun!" by inclusion of cartoon characters and other inanity?"

Yes, Mr Lockhart is -

"A similar problem occurs when teachers or textbooks succumb to cutesyness. This is where, in an attempt to combat so-called 'math anxiety' (one of the panoply of diseases which are actually caused by school), math is made to seem 'friendly'. To help your students memorize formulas for the area and circumference of a circle, for example, you might invent this whole story about 'Mr. C', who drives around 'Mrs. A' and tells her how nice his 'two piesare' (C = 2πr) and how her 'pies are square' (A = πr2) or some such nonsense.

But what about the real story? The one about mankind’s struggle with the problem of measuring curves; about Eudoxus and Archimedes and the method of exhaustion; about the transcendence of pi?

Which is more interesting? measuring the rough dimensions of a circular piece of graph paper, using a formula that someone handed you without explanation (and made you memorize and practice over and over) or hearing the story of one of the most beautiful, fascinating problems, and one ofthe most brilliant and powerful ideas in human history? We’re killing people’s interest in circles for god’s sake!"

- http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

(which I originally found linked on HN or reddit, and enjoyed reading ... but then what? Where is a near layperson to find mathematical writing that walks the line between Mr C and his two pies, and the impenetrable mathworld.wolfram.com, neatly skipping the textbooks written to look comprehensive to school purchasers, rather than to be useful? ( http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/lost-purposes.html ))
count(*) is optimized by mysql

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/04/10/count-vs-coun...
Metcalfe's Plateau - "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded"
You could probably get this from the digg api, lurkers coming from various traffic figures out there. I'd guess the proportion of lurkers is actually a little higher than that.
Javascript code that displays a drop down of Coutry and State:
http://javascript.internet.com/forms/country-state-drop-down...

I know you wanted cities, but maybe this could do
Hmm. Ok, I believe the number could be partially due to brokenness. Digg made a big design mistake initially in copying Slashdot too literally, and having stories that make the frontpage start at the top and get pushed down. That causes all sorts of problems. Having stories bubble up from the bottom is much more robust. But even if they did that I bet the percentage of frontpage stories from the top 10 users would surprise most people.

Edit: Steve Huffman just reported the number for Reddit, and it's a lot lower than Digg's: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=238290
Biofuels Have Bumped Up Food Prices 75%
Three VC Questions You Should Not Answer
Sample VC Intent Letter
And sadly it's not even close to large-scale yet. They only have a few hundred thousand users.
Toyota to add solar panels to Prius hybrid
Why roundtrip to the db for the same user info again? I have seen this type of behavior in data access "frameworks"... the optimization would be to reduce the roundtrip to the db...
The Facebooker Who Friended Obama
"The people at the top, for whatever reason, work very hard to get there."

And what do they get in return?
iRobot files robotic lawnmower patent
Microsoft's Hyper-V Finally Shows Up to Virtualization Party
DIE HERETIC SCUM!
> "a Web site entirely in Flash still presents a poor user experience."

Duh. How many of those are being built in 2008?
Google, Zen Master of the Market
I dimed this out and had it disabled. Twitter doesn't need people poking through its' SQL. Imagine what we'd find if we were poking through yours...
Interesting site: http://godisimaginary.com/
I think this is yet another argument against JavaSchools. The article mentions roles, which are a very powerful way to compose class fragments into classes; usually much more cleanly and reusably than inheritance. Unfortunately, Java doesn't have Roles (or Traits; same thing), so you just can't teach it. Instead, you have to teach hackish workarounds that don't even work. The choice of "a real language" to teach computer science means that you can't actually teach computer science. Instead you teach Java.

It's a shame that students have to begin their programming careers by working around bad tools.

Anyway, I think everyone with a degree in computer science should at least be able to write programs in Smalltalk, C, Lisp, and a dynamic language (Perl/Python/Ruby). Let them learn .NET and Java in trade school. They are of dubious educational value.
You could use MONDIAL.
http://www.dbis.informatik.uni-goettingen.de/Mondial/

The database is pretty extensive, but you should only need to query it once to get what you need.
WHY do some people reach their creative potential in business while other equally talented peers don’t?

...

In this case, nurture wins out over nature just about every time.

Yep, "nurture" tends to win when we're already dealing with "equally talented peers". Three decades of painstaking research to prove a roundabout tautology.
Resources for learning load balancing and building scaleable web apps?
Hello. I'm a skill and competent programmer but haven't really delved into the realms of server administration beyond a single server. I'm working a project that requires me to scale an app across multiple servers as traffic increases and want to know some resources for learning the ins and outs. Books, online resources, etc. Load balancing, database clustering federating or whatever the terms are, software architecture and how to go about administrating the servers, etc.

I want it to be similar in nature to google's app engine in that once the app is built it scales automatically and I don't need to modify the code after the fact as things get bigger.
Boiling Down Books, Algorithmically