skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do similar. To search for things, I tag all my entries, so it looks like like this:

@todo @linux @work

- Don't forget to process the client's log files today!

The file has grown huge, but I can still find what I need quickly.

BONUS: You can use quicksilver to add text to files, so from idea to entry, it only takes a second or two. No app booting, web page surfing, etc.
Python + Hadoop = Dumbo
Interesting, but somewhat unsatisfactory, I feel. What if the description really did describe everyone quite well? For example "you are a human" would describe everybody quite well. So the experiment seems incomplete.
Yahoo is beginning to treat the whole Internet like an operating system...in the sense that there are Windows UI guidelines, Mac OS UI guidelines, Gnome UI guidelines, etc. If everybody were to standardize on the important stuff, usability of the web in general would go way up. Much the same way going from DOS to Windows (or Mac OS) made it possible for a very large number of applications to share common conventions, making them all easier to use.

I don't know how strong the business case for this is for Yahoo's bottom line, but it does seem like it's cheaper to define the standards rather than play catch-up on converting two or three years down the road when everyone settles on a set of conventions. It's also good to be a thought leader among developers and designers...frankly, I feel more warm-fuzzies for Yahoo these days than Google, primarily because Yahoo has done so much for improving web design and making UI development on the web really nice and predictable. They've begun to turn it from a black art into an engineering discipline (vision and taste still matter, but a lot of the usability problems have been formalized into a coherent system rather than a pile of guesses).
Congratulations. You are not the target of that kind of fear-mongering. IMHO, the majority of the people intelligent enough to be on HN aren't either. Books like 1984 and 'State of Fear' are intended for consumption by The Proles (to use the term from 1984 itself). They're intended to raise awareness for what's going on to those that willing trade liberty for a (false) sense of security. I think our bearing the presence of these books is well worth others waking up and smelling the coffee for the first time.
I read somewhere that prototypical tech company should be making at least $300,000 per employee that they have. I wonder how Microsoft stacks up to this psuedo-stat.
Types Considered Harmful
Right, I guess it's always been pretty obvious to most of us that the media uses fear for ratings. But there were some interesting examples in State of Fear that were new to me.
Come experience the tech AND SF social scene at the LS party saturday: http://laughingsquid.com/laughing-squid-2008/

Next week there's a SF Newtech "Belly up" meeting (a good place to meet tech folks in a friendly atmosphere): http://newtech.meetup.com/15/calendar/7924275/
It's not just identifying with some vague general points of the description. For some people reading an INTP profile for the first time is blow-your-mind-and-shit-your-existential-pants amazing.

INTPs would be first in line to understand and point out the kind of cognitive bias that make people believe in horoscopes and astrology (and possibly the other 15 MBTI categories).
That sounds like cleverness or original thinking. We're talking about an ad agency here.
Better yet, ban the idiots up-voting such stories; because they clearly don't belong on HN.
Having spent some time in Tokyo, I must say that the most striking thing for me was that at any moment of the day, the streets are flooded with people going too and fro. It was amazing.
-m
This is why I act like a man
Do women in science and technology have to act like men to succeed?
Here's another take: Social News = popularity contest for ideas from idle people.

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/05/collective-intelligence-...
Probably not exactly hacker news, but interesting that this isn't just some urban legend.
I disagree. Here's a typical conversation on #catalyst (Catalyst is a Perl web framework that I develop):

<newbie> How can I make the start of a request die if a precondition isn't met?
<@developer> Step back. Explain what you are trying to achieve.
<newbie> Well, I want the user to be redirected to the login page if a session cookie hasn't been created.
<@developer> Don't do that manually. Use the Session and ACL plugins.

What happened here is that newbie was half way into his half-baked solution, and couldn't figure out how to get it to work. The developer knew that they were solving the wrong problem, and pushed them in the right direction. (It does come down to reputation in cases like this, I admit. If it's someone we've never heard of, they're probably just trying to write an app and they don't need to understand the internals. If I asked the same question, someone would probably immediately give me the answer. Or flame me for asking a dumb question ;)

Anyway, I don't think Lisp will throw off imperative programmers; Lisp can be as imperative as you want it to be. Compare:

(do ((i 1 (1+ i))) ((> i 10)) (format t "~d" i))

To:

for(int i = 1; i <= 10; i++){
fprintf(STDOUT, "%d", i);
}

Edit: I replaced the loop macro with do, because it looks more like C. (ugly though ;)

Pretty much exactly the same.

As for other functional languages, you are probably right. I'm sure people ask #haskell "how do I do a for loop" and are told about recursion. I think that's the same as the use-the-right-libraries example above.
INTP last time I checked.
The Prototype-Production Knob - "Lispers, I'm waiting for you to chime in right about now..."
I really like/appreciate/admire the Yahoo! Developer Network for what they're putting out. I don't have much use for most of Yahoo!'s other services (Flickr excluded); but most everything to come out of their Developer Network is pretty damn nifty. The YUI JS libraries are pretty brilliant (esp. the WYSIWYG editor) and this "design stencil" is just inspired - it's the kind of initiative webapps in general need to make them even more viable alternatives to desktop applications. (As a desktop developer myself, I say that with a huge twinge of sadness; but it's true nevertheless).

If Yahoo! were to be gobbled-up, Flickr and the Yahoo! Developer Network would be the only things I'd pray aren't canceled.
Google AdSense for FeedBurner Feeds is Here
It's probably too late for you in this case, but in the future, it's probably a good idea never to read patents. (not legal advice) That's the policy I keep -- I don't follow links with 'patent' in the URL, because it's much worse for you if you knowingly infringe.

For that matter, I don't even read paper publications out of places like Microsoft Research because of patent-related issues. Take a look at this, warning about an IBM publication: http://on-ruby.blogspot.com/2008/02/ip-police-line-do-not-cr...
"It just seems like you could take any 4 either/or categories and have a test that's equally valid."

The categories used by the Big Five were actually created using empirical research.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Con...
Lispbox is great, but when coming from a different environment I found it extremely useful to customize emacs a little (nothing fancy, F2 for save, ctrl-C copy) and unfortunately you can't do that in lispbox.

To the GP, it takes a lot of time and effort, but what you learn stays with you. Can't remember how many times I installed everything afresh, and on how many machines, but now it's really easy and, though it could be confirmation bias, rather elegant. I'm pretty sure I could teach somebody up to my level in 3-4 weeks, including lisp itself.

That said, I'm still not done installing - today i tried http://dirtyhack.org/vetler/docs/cl-webapp-intro/part-1/
and got a "make-pset is an undefined function" for no apparent reason. <Sigh> I guess it's another Elephant reinstall in the next break. But it does get easier :) This autumn I hope I can move to actual programming.
At least three different psychologists have told me that the instinctive response is supposed to be the right one. I think it has something to do with how these tests were developed.

Keep in mind that personality tests like these are primarily intended to map out traits of a person's personality in preparation for some kind of psychotherapy. Maybe not so much for Myers-Briggs, I wouldn't know. But the scientific intent of these tests, if you could call it that, is simply to give your therapist an idea of when to start when trying to figure out some deeper issue. (Why you are miserable, unable to work, excessively anxious in specific situations etc.) For that purpose, personality tests are perfectly suitable.
Started to read, things kept popping up over the article as my mouse cursor crossed the window. Gave up and left. I wonder if those "services" that deface articles provide a report of how many people leave the page within 5 seconds of the first pop up.
Get Your Sharky Groove On | Tech Jaws
I lost 2 years worth of ideas and notes when my PC crashed. Since then, I do it all using todoist. Pretty nice - just add a Project and add each idea as a todo item.
I would say yes, but it really depends on the industry and situation.

We entered the powersports vertical because we saw that the best of breed ecommerce sites really were not cutting it. We planned to differentiate ourselves on technology, infrastructure (due to our technology) and user experience. We are about a year in and are exceeding. We came in with really no experience in this market or industry. See my past comments to see what startup I am referring to.

We did however, spend a lot of time researching our market as we went a long, so their certainly has been a learning curve. However it was not the most difficult obstacle we have faced.

Quick iterations on our product / agileness in our software and listening to customer feedback has been key.

Feel free to drop me a line if you have any specific questions.
What does "progressive" mean in this context?
haha... I have the opposite problem of being a good designer but a crappy programmer.
Schools eyeing virtual campuses
In-flight surveillance could foil terrorists in the sky
I think the benefit is less in helping you understand your own personality, and more in helping you understand how others' personalities differ from your own.
NitobiBug: A browser-based JavaScript object logger and inspection tool
INTJ. type loudly, speak boldly on occassion ;)
I think you're too hard on people. Not every conversation has to be some deep and meaningful meeting of minds. There's lots to be said for a night of crude jokes and chasing women. I'd argue that it's a lot more human experience than deep conversation. It really sounds like you need to relax.

Meeting people on the internet is no substitute for honest-to-goodness human interaction. Also, it's a good idea to have lots of friends that you have nothing in common with. The perspective you get is invaluable.
Thanks for the comment, but I do not think that's an absolute requirement. I have reviewed the trends on investing alot recently.
Arguing between 3 or 4 clicks doesn't change anything. There are a lot of problems with beginners and lisp, but they're far from how to get to the first implementation. As a newbee myself, googling for lisp environments was damn easy and instructive: i knew within 20 minutes that I should use linux, and if i really wanted windows (as I did at first) there was only one choice. When I finally had access to a decent linux it took me maybe another 20 to confirm that sbcl is the one I wanted. All that gave me lots of background information on the side.

Now the first brush with asdf on the other hand was a nightmare. I still don't understand why I have to become an expert in pgp (definitely not just a beginner) just to use asdf-install.

I think the main problem for beginners is the effort it takes to install a reasonable environment. I tried two versions for a web application server: ucw and weblocks. Weblocks meant installing more then 10 different packages and source code is pretty much standard documentation - but it's ok because it's understandable and officially beta anyways. UCW is the standard - after a year and a half I still couldn't produce an installation running on a port different then 8080 (I use 8080 for tomcat for all my machines).

All this effort is way disproportionate to the effects. Installing emacs and slime is may not be a breeze, but once you discover that googling "emacs configuration" brings up a bonanza it's worth it. (Also that .emacs in windows is _emacs... that's half a day I'll never have back). But so much effort just to get a server running... if you want to help beginners write a better ucw tutorial, don't just rearrange the links on the frontpage of lisp sites.

(btw, I hit ctrl-C before hitting reply, I just knew there was an "expired link" comming. And so it did.
SBCL, mzScheme, and Clisp. I got SBCL and Clisp to work.

I'm having trouble explaining why I had such a hard time, but I think that's because I was a noob at the outset, but I'm not such a noob any more. Sure, now I can install Lisp on a friends computer in a day, tops. For good hackers, installing lisp is trivial. Of course, there are lots of things that good hackers can do in a tiny fraction of the time it takes anyone else. But from a noob's perspective, everything is very different. There might be a place that works, but there are many that don't, and those dead ends are really going to set you back.

Maybe I can't see things through a noob's eyes any more, but for whatever reasons, installing lisp took me two months, working full time.
So let me get this straight: WinFS never happened, and MS engineers drooled over spotlight, therefore multitouch won't kill Google.

Like walking through NYC, and telling the guy picking cans out of the garbage that he'll never get the Mona Lisa into the Met that way.
Cool Google Brazil recruiting video
She wasn't even hot. :(
Relax people, it's just a cute story. It's not really asking whether Gates is "smarter" than Zuckerberg (if that question is even well-formed).
C++? Linus Torvalds wouldn't agree:

"C++ is a horrible language. It’s made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it’s much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do nothing but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C."
Lessons of the fall
I confess that I had a struggle to get the Oracle bindings for CLISP working on Linux (3 days full-time work, and I am very experienced with build issues on that platform), and I still haven't been able to do it on Solaris. Getting Oracle bindings for Tcl or Python was trivial, literally minutes of effort, including the download. So yeah, LISP does have a long way to go. I can use it on (some of the) kit I control, but forget deploying LISP apps anywhere else in the organization, there's no way I want to be responsible for building and maintaining it on the plethora of platforms and versions we have.
It means the writer thinks the ad agency is hip or cool or at least fashionable.
Why I Do Not Like CPM Advertising On Blogs
Already works, try it :)
Memo to Microsoft: You Can't Bribe People To Ditch Google
I have a strong feeling upmod/downmod is broken as a mechanism for guageing the "interesting-ness" of web posts. It seems that everyone agrees that the community "ought to" upmod valuable things and downmod useless things independantly of whether each person agrees or disagrees with the basic premise, however what I observe is that the more emotionally invested someone is in an issue, the further they stray from the utopian ideal.
I have a notepad that I keep in my wallet. Every time I get an idea it goes in the notepad. It works great!
It's quite a long URL, so not really "tiny".

The idea itself has been tried several times before. CompuServe (or was that AOL?) was one of the first to have keyword-based navigation. A few years ago, I met an entrepreneur in London, UK, who was building a company through which you create a unique number for yourself, and that gets associated with all your contact details - sort of like a phone number but to all your contact details (a bit like a LinkedIn public profile I guess). There are other variations.

Personally, I find this way of navigation weird and I don't like it. Also, the domain name your service uses (oneryng.com) doesn't really brand the service in a useful way (but I do love the domain name!).

Also, what's your unique selling proposition? I can't see one!

Apologies if I seem a bit blunt. Please correct me if I misunderstood something.
I seethat you have invites to evernote and yet it's not on your list of apps you use - why not?
Local ad network started by Harvard,Yale undergrads set to expand
I'm soon starting my trek through every problem in the algebra text that Harvard's PhD prelim recommends for study:

Abstract Algebra by Dummit and Foote
http://www.amazon.com/Abstract-Algebra-David-S-Dummit/dp/047...

I've started the first section of the first chapter, but that was only in a few hours of spare time. I'll be posting solutions by chapter soon and post my stories/insights on Hacker News. Here's section 1.1 (except the last problem, 36):

http://therobert.org/alg/1.1.pdf

Comments are appreciated. Better now than when I start the real journey. :)
Very interesting! This reminds me of http://creativeclass.com/whos_your_city/ which I came across recently.

I live in Denver, and I've been increasingly aware that it doesn't feel like a very ambitious place, at least in the ways that I care about.

I'm considering Boulder... could somebody with a lot of time spent there speak to what messages Boulder sends? And how well it (really truly) lines up with the ambitions of tech entrepreneurship, intelligence, and living well?
Yeah, he should have added "Part-2: Downloading Libraries". They actually exist, and can rival comprehensive library of Python, but it takes quite a lot of energy to discover. I remember asking here on HN "what is CL standard library? where is it documented?" and people actually pointed to a magic place that I forgot to bookmark and now I'm lost again. :-)

Ubuntu does a decent job of packaging some popular CL libs in their apt repos.
The most important trick is just to name a price in the first place. Especially in software, if you're good at what you do and the position is a good fit, you are almost guaranteed to be able to get what you ask for, as long as it's not ridiculous. At worst, you'll get a counter-offer. If someone drops you outright it's because they really don't want you and the salary just forces them into a decision. (Or, rarely, it's because they truly can't afford you: you don't want that job, becuase it won't be there for long anyway.)

Employers actually hate it when people come in with squishy responses like "Oh, I'm not looking for salary specifically..." because it just makes more work for them. It's much easier if they can say "this person costs this much, do we pay it or not?". Coming up with a "fair" salary is much harder.
I really think that the 1% prevalence number thrown around for INTPs in the general population has to be an underestimate.

I'm wondering how they came up with that number. Where did they get their test sample? Surely if you go around asking people to take personality tests at random, their likelihood of saying "yes" vs "no, sod off" is going to be a lot stronger for some personality types than others.
if you want more history, i'll work on a few more posts like this one. it's not so easy for me to do because it seems sort of self centered. the reason i did this one is a guy getting out of b-school asked me to.

i would love to see a way to pump all this discussion on hacker news into disqus so that it gets onto my blog. there's a good discussion going on there that you all would be added value to
I wouldn't use it just because the keyphrase is mutable. It is bad enough that TinyURL obscures the destination, but with the possibility for the destination changing without even the submitters knowledge makes the service completely untrustworthy.

Maybe I'm missing something...
Good directory structure + version control + a list keeping program that I wrote. The list keeping program just keeps lists along with entries in said lists. Lists and entries can then be retrieved based on regular expression sequences, timestamps etc... The actual data is kept on a remote postgres server so I can access it from anywhere.
well i sort of did. we turned $150mm into $750mm from 1996 to 2000. vc's generally get paid 20% of their profits so take 20% of $600mm and then split that with Jerry and a few others and that's where the money came from.

i've made more since, but that was the initial payday.

up until then, we were eating ramen the week the mortgage was due.
Hmmm, sounds like a growth industry
FeedBurner Rolls Out AdSense on RSS Feeds
"Black Swan".

What's up with the [dead] "fredwilson" comments, BTW?
hmmm why are you posting the solutions online? Apparently, this book happens to be a popular textbook in many schools http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Abstract+Algebra+by...
The idea is easy to understand to anyone that knows that tinyurl is. Otherwise, they might be confused. I think a screenshot of the address bar showing a long url and your short "keyphrase" one would help explain your site to your users. I also don't particularly like the design (e.g. the font, black background, blue links...) I'd suggest a simple white page, something like the google homepage.
lispbox(common lisp) and drscheme(scheme ldo) are two good packages/environments but it isnt obvious how to find them.

the value of a "click to download-click to install-write short piece of code and see result" -cycle hat can be done immediately is very high.

feedback is obv very important for learning and LISP doesnt provide much of that in the beginning.

with python you can create games and simple but useful programs right away.

when arc is finished im all for helping to create a good IDE and libraries to it and document it well and create a very easy path for beginners to gte started.

then maybe lisp can get popular.

i think it will stay a small language though.
I assume you meant to reply to me. Thanks, I'll set the robots file appropriately.

And I'm posting it for the same reason that guy posted his poker bot earlier. If you're determined enough, you can always cheat and that won't change whether there is a program or solutions manual online, but hackers and autodidacts can enjoy the intellectual sharing.
Hecl too:

hecl> proc x {} {return y}
hecl> proc y {} {return z}
hecl> proc z {} {puts "hello world"}
hecl> [[x]]
hello world
You're missing the point. Myers-Brigg types are most useful for understanding other people, not for understanding yourself. Before I read about the other Myers-Brigg types, I just didn't understand why certain other people made decisions as they did, e.g., a member of a group insisting on a worse outcome for everyone to punish someone who'd offended them. I mean, it just wasn't logical!

You see, I was trying to understand/predict others' behaviour by projecting my own personality onto them. Much better is to understand/predict someone's behaviour based on how someone of their Myers-Brigg type would behave.

If understanding how others are different is what Myers-Brigg types are for, then the division into 16 types makes sense. It represents a trade-off between having too few types (and not having predictive power) and having too many (and having to learn too much information of less relevance).