skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The best I could do was an "authoritarian index", using the
(GDP / Population) / Gold Medals and Total Medals. If you rank them by that, you see some pretty nasty countries near the top, and nice countries near the bottom.

Zimbabwe, North Korea and China round out the top three... Ethiopia is ok but does lack freedom of the press, etc.

Then look at the bottom of the list: all free market, liberal democracies. Finland, Belgium,etc, Bahrain, arguably the most democratic country in the Gulf, Slovenia, etc, on the way up.

There are statistical blips of course. Jamaica is near the top because they are just that aweseome. Also, I just made this up so it's probably completely wrong.

To put forth the very rough and completely unscientific theory:
A more authoritarian country is willing to put in more effort, per dollar of GDP and amount of population, to get gold medals. They've got more to prove.
Beautiful essay.
I don't see what the benefit is to being a rabid spectator

It gives you something to talk about besides the weather. That's a huge part of the draw. If it weren't for sports, what would you do as you sat around drinking in a bar with your friends?

Also: Athletic people are fun to look at. And sports offer a nice balance between the predictable results of hours of practice and careful strategic planning (everyone loves it when a plan comes together) and the drama that arises from random factors (as Yogi Berra supposedly said, "it isn't over until it's over").
INTP?

If so, one of the reasons he might have a hard time absorbing details given to him verbally: for a visual thinker, there's a point where spoken verbage (without the aide of note-taking) becomes overwhelming. It's why most of us loathe the telephone.
Obama's Secret Weapon: Geeks. Lots of Them
Great... now if you only could do that from HN in addition to Disqus ;~)
What? He wrote iPod Touch? What's the problem?
I don't disagree but diagnosing this particular problem didn't require knowing any C, just the perl profiler and another perl build.
does matlab count?
I agree. But regardless of whether it is Apple or the music labels that are pushing it, it could explain the weird-ass closed format of the app-store.
Richard Feynman’s Modest Science (and fake teaching)
Why didn't he put that on stackoverflow?
Bzr 1.6: Stacked Branches, improved weave merge, updated protocol
My project, or Lisp Flavored Erlang?

Regardless, the answer (I believe) is, not at this time. But soon enough...
You challenge them.
PHP static analysis
This is a great idea to encourage more thoughtful discussion through blogs. Those disqus guys are smart.
What a dumb move. I thought this was supposed to be the candidate who got technology.
I've always liked this essay on leadership by the guy who founded Visa:

http://futurepositive.synearth.net/stories/storyReader$173

It had a big influence on me when I first read it in high school.
Well not 'free' exactly.

Minimum wage is the regulation that's causing all the trouble here.

Without minimum wage, Many of Farmer Smith's problems would have gone away. He could just pay the lowest rate at which he could still get enough workers to pick his fields. He still might have to adjust the rate by field, bit once that's done he wouldn't have to worry about motivating workers.
No, much less sophisticated.
It's bad. Too personal, I don't want to talk to "Real People", I want to be anonymous.
Founders at Work, actually. None of the how-to books are good, so the best source of information is stories, and FaW has the best stories.
What’s Hot on GitHub
Wind Turbines Causing Dark Nights for Bats
BedPost.com (Tools for measurement)
For an article whose author sets himself up as a sarcastic judge and jury of basically the whole web community, this provides very little insight or information.
I have many of these traits. I offer the following strong suggestion to others in this boat: treat these traits as character flaws and attempt to mitigate them.

About 2 years into grad school is where they started to really hurt me. I can't absorb many details verbally, and this never hurt me in classes. When doing research, however, many ideas concerning the details existed only in my mind or my adviser's mind. Mundane details also became extremely important, and finishing projects is crucial.

General suggestion: be active about organization.

Some specific suggestions:

Use source control for ALL projects, and follow "best practices." It's a matter of personal discipline as much as a way to go back in time.

Track your projects/tasks/subtasks: I like http://www.rememberthemilk.com , but a small notebook would probably be sufficient. Pick a task you are doing right now, focus on that 100%, cross it off when finished. Pick the next task, do that 100%.

For all projects, specify an end point, or at least a point at which one stops to reevaluate.

The good news: if I could improve myself in this regard, anyone can.
I could lambast this article so much, but Im on an iPhone and my last cigarette just ran out.
Just to clarify, Jonathan Nelson ( http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=iamelgringo ) organizes the Hackers & Founders Meetup. I facilitate the http://www.bootstrapperbreakfast.com/ events
Not once does he even mention looking at the query plan. SQL server will tell you exeactly what it's doing to run a query, and from that you can tell what's blocking.

My guess is the update is trying to update an index the select wants to use. Updates that span two pages can give rise to deadlocks like this, where the select has a read lock on one page, and the update has an x-lock on the other.

None of this is magical.
Google dinners are still free for now
Since I always feel like I am the exact person described by these stories, I am hereby chalking it up to bias and relegating them to absolutely minimal relevance.

But yes, I think I'm like this person. Of course.
Team sports or (para)military training.
I've found it helpful to make the connection in my mind that writing == working; if I'm not taking notes I will absolutely push many interesting things out of my mind and have to relearn them later. Forcing myself to jot down notes of things makes it much better.
On Google App Engine: "Finally," they said, "somebody has figured out how to make Python scale."

Made my day :)

I hope posts about "language X will not scale" would stop. Its really pointless.
FriendFeed Blog: Preview the new FriendFeed design
Seriously, how long before HN comments can integrate with Disqus?
I really like your site too. I would like to see a slider so I can navigate the show and like the poster above, I'm not sure about the name.
I have these traits as well - 'INTP from a mile away'.. Organization has really helped me over the years, and I would agree with comments above about social activity being stifling creatively (which basically means we live in our own little world).

Tip for organization: Do not try to organize yourself - pay a consultant to set up a system for you. Every time I tried to get organized by myself it turned into another project. 2 consultants and $3k later, I had all my papers in a filing system, and a matching file system on my HD. I was able to stick with it and improve over time until it was something that kept me fairly organized for the last 3 years.

Bookkeepers and accountants that have been a lifesaver to keep books in order as well.
I think that's an Irish writing style and not particular to Joyce. I know I've seen Roddy Doyle books use it, at least. Could have been copying Joyce's style, mind you, but I doubt it.
Objective-C here, too. It's kinda cool because I get to re-learn C at the same time.
Fighting for the Right to Clone
Polling for opinions on the subject just tells you what people perceive, not what really is.
along with emacs lisp.
I am on HN because I am an active hacker and startup junkie. I might have similar feelings about the Olympics and professional sports if I participated in those activities AND could draw useful data to help my personal endeavors.

Being that an in depth knowledge of football and related player stats gives me no benefit or edge in my pursuits, I choose not to dedicate time that could be better spent actively doing or learning on spectating.
It's hosted at Media Temple, so it looks like it's a VPS.
He turned down the offer of a US scholarship to train in Jamaica.
How to learn from your mistakes
Painful lessons from IT outsourcing gone bad
See my other comment above, I think there is a difference because I can apply what I see and learn here directly to my daily activities and interests.
Please do, if you get the time.
heh. mouse pointer was on hand and I thought you said: "I have the upper nand over the spammers" ;-)
I suppose that was when I got interested in starting a business. I realized software is one area where you don't need much capital. So I decided to fall in love with software ;)

To be honest, I hugely enjoyed it, though it was a kind of marriage of convenience at first.
TED is hiring a new video editor
I guess this can be useful for people at Manhattan.
Disqus lets you profit from comments on other blogs
Like the author says, even if you don't read the whole book, the last chapter is something you should take the time to read. It was really a great part of the book.
Use the Native Architecture
Peter Drucker's Entrepreneurship and Innovation. His memoir Adventures of a Bystander also has a lot of wisdom about business, besides lots of great stories (don't miss "The Man who Invented Kissinger", if you're a fan of history).
PHP
I'm an embedded systems programmer not a web guy, although I have done some simple CGI stuff.
Under my belt: C, C++, C#, a number of assemblers, Python, Lisp, Prolog, Java, BASIC
Not a book, but I recommend getting a subscription to Inc. Magazine. At the very least, check out Norm Brodsky's column every week at the bookstore.
Usually when sitting around drinking with my friends we end up talking about things like startup cultures, robotics, home automation, guiter-effects-pedal hacking, economies/investments, business operations, business ideas, religions, etc.

FWIW, my friends cover a fairly wide variety of demographics, they are not all geeks or startup people, but they all have the ability to discuss things they are actively involved in in one way or another.
This is PHP? Sold!
Google finds no privacy on private roads
When is open source just throwing it all away?
FriendFeed Beta Testing New Design, Adds Grouped Friends And Photos
Right. And thats my problem. "I'm still learning about some of them after 6 months".

Its tiring to have to type git --help, or man git-blah or whatever. Is it cool because I realize I have INFINITE POWER WAHAHA? Yah. But I have to look it up too :(
OpenClip, she is dead
Caterina Fake joins the Creative Commons board
Out of curiosity, which prog. language did you start with?
Available at http://beta.friendfeed.com/
So, it's just a colorized, otherwise identical rip off of what PHP already gives you as part of their official documentation? http://www.php.net/manual/en/types.comparisons.php

Blogspam is the bane of the internet...
Yes I agree. To make the list statistically valid you should probably only look at those countries with more than say 15 or 20 medals. I wonder who comes out on top then? :)
The most important programming language
Ask HN: CSS Framework?
Is anyone using a CSS framework, if so which one?
Rabbiter - Open Federated Pubsub Server
How about interchangeable frames? Can upsell to existing customers with decent margin leftover.

And who are these common guys of which you speak?
It also lacks the bolding and heavy cell borders and gutters that turn the PHP manual's table into a wall of gray noise. It's a solid improvement.
This is a kickass product. Wish I had thought of it.
I'll show up around 9ish. I'm surprised it's not at Ritual though.
FREE SEO Software Called Traffic Travis 3.0 Ready For Download
Have you heard of Traffic Travis 3.0? If you haven’t keep reading. To date over 4,328 people have downloaded and started using it to gain an edge over their competition in the search engines.
Muxtape open source clone OpenTape
SQL server now has row versioning like Oracle, so that writes won't block reads, and you don't have to read dirty data (you just read data how it was before the write started). I think this is not turned on by default because it has a performance hit.
Also I can't remember if it's new to 2005 or 2008 versions and can't be bothered to look it up.
Many people find that physical endevour is an inherent part of being human. Watching the best people compete in sports provides an important perspective on the human condition. When the world comes together to do this it can be a celebration on this aspect of humanity.
i've made use of blueprint and grid.

the concept is useful but don't use them as a crutch for learning CSS
I second that; please do, and post the blog post in HN!
I'll admit that I know nothing about PHP, but please tell me it is a mistake in the design table that they have "foo" == 0. Otherwise, we have this rather disturbing* non-transitivity of (==):

true == "foo" == 0 == false

I also generally dislike the idea of having certain values being treated as "false", e.g. 0 is false but 2.2e-16 is true... or "a" and "1" are true but "0" is false. It just seems to be clumsy, and not very robust. It reminds me of the "and-or trick" in Python, which busts if you aren't familiar with the fact that values such as 0/0.0 are false.

* Actually, on review, it's obvious that some non-transitivity is desirable by design, in the sense that 1 and 2 are both "true" but we don't want 1 == 2, even though 1 == true and 2== true. However, I still maintain that the chain I have above represents bad design.
This was a fun essay. However it also contains one of the really annoying aspects of aaronsw's writings, when he calls DanC's "socially conservative politics" one of DanC's flaws.
I've played video games heavily since I was 5, but didn't start to program till college.
The people commenting on that post are scary. They're making out like these traits are uncommon or indicative of personality or mental problems, whereas they are extremely common and usually not detrimental at all.
It's new to 2005, and though it's not turned on by default, it damn well should be as it is in Oracle and Postgres. Multi version concurrency control (i.e. writers not blocking readers) is old hat in the db field. Prior to 05, you just liberally sprinkled (nolock) on your selects and accepted that you may get a dirty read but that it was better than the db falling over with over aggressive locking.
PHPList is a good, free mailing software - its usually included in fantastico

http://www.phplist.com/

i've heard of people modifying it to use postgre, but i believe it only comes with support for mysql out of the box
I am using blueprint css in my latest website ( http://overtrainer.com ) mainly just because I am too lazy to learn css correctly ;)
Ask YC: How do I message another user?
Why no private messaging? I always seem to have to play internet sleuth, just so send a simple private 'email me lets talk privately about ...'
Ask HN: Who here is using IronRuby? 
What are your thoughts/experience with it? How different is it from the "real thing" ? :) Does it support migrations?
Secret blog published in robots.txt file
Could you describe how records are broken in Erlang?
My Florida Vacation Rentals
Master Resell Rights Site
Lees Marketing Tools
It's really, really difficult to come up with a relevant, concise dot-com domain name that's not already taken.
Bring up an interesting point.

With Amazon, you can see a reviewers other reviews. A good thing to do might be to identify those who have purchased the product, even if you don't exclude those that haven't.
I use boilerplate, a stripped down blueprint css:

http://code.google.com/p/css-boilerplate/

I'm not a semantics-nazi by any means, but I've used grids at different times and... meh, I'd usually rather just throw a few float:left's together and keep it clean.
If a user doesn't post an email addy in his/her profile then it might mean he/she doesn't want to be contacted.

That said, it would be nice to have a note on the profile page indicating that addresses in the email field are not displayed publicly.
The fact is, if you look at it in this abstract way then your feelings are valid. But during concrete web development, the functionality of PHP's comparison operators make a lot of sense and make the code simpler and easier to understand.
Open source doesn't magically solve the copyright issues that are hurting Muxtape. Creative commons is the "open source" solution to that problem
This wording...

> The PHP Documentation Group has now added the Appendix K. PHP type comparison tables to the official PHP manual.

...seems to make the claim that the linked article came before the PHP manual's version. I'm too lazy to verify (e.g. by checking archive.org or something) though.
I have a weakness for submitting wild-ass guesses, so my guess is that after a user account has X number of submissions killed, they autokill after N number of flaggings. I would also guess that as X increases, N decreases.
If you found this article interesting, I heartily recommend the author's book 'Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do' [1]. Most of this article is pretty much an excerpt of one chapter, but the book goes in a lot of directions.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/03072...
polish != Polish:

polish = "make shiny"

Polish = something related to Poland

I think you need a different name.
Yeah, I'm a bit the same. I was really enthusiastic about it at first. But after following a bit of the discussion on the mailing lists and IRC, I'm a little put off with a few things.

A lot of the discussion seems to be focussed on excluding people, this just strikes me as elitist.

The idea is good. I really love the idea that people are required to show something. I often fall into the trap being interested in stuff, but not actually creating new stuff. Forcing people to create stuff is a really good way to keep the focus on the creativity side of things.
this is awesome, but can I get it like a combination of jottit and google docs? So I would have, like, niels.nowdothis.com, and I could get a private URL to send to other people which would allow them to add to my list.
oh, and man, this should be the redirect page for leechblock!
I think they're trying for more of a "fight the power" kind of solution. If everybody and their brother is running OpenTape, shutting down web-based mixtapes becomes prohibitively difficult.
Operating quantum memory at room temperature
This is a great example of why it's important to actually determine the root cause of a performance problem before making any decisions about how to fix it. Performance problems are very often something stupid and not at all what you would expect.
A friend of mine, homeless in the area, deeply appreciates this.
Said "iPhone Touch" before. Glad to see he fixed it.
Haskell or maybe Erlang.
I thought he was specifically speaking of extreme positions such as that of intelligent design.
I used to be like that, and I still am in many ways. The real reason?

He does not give a shit about the minutiae of life. He just doesn't care in an intrinsic level. He does not get satisfaction out of it. And that is a good thing in the long run, because those kind of tasks, as important as they may seem to some, really get you nowhere in life. Let the bureaucrats be bureaucrats and create things like java.
Amen. I've seen way too many code-bases hacked to death by insistence on things being "fast" without at all understanding what or where the slowdowns might be. Monte-Carlo optimization, I suppose. ;-)
Our schools teach us things like the founding fathers were heroic revolutionaries casting off the shackles of monarchy for the benefit of mankind because The U.S. government has to justify its own existence as being somehow intrinsically, morally, or mystically correct. No one wants to think that the government is just a bunch of guys who own the land between canada and mexico, and got it by inciting mob violence and forming armed militias.
(see the Nobel Prize winning Ideological Origins of the American Revolution)
But you can pick any major historical event and look at the basic message that kids are sent: the civil war was about freeing the slaves, WW2 was about saving the jews, vietnam was about stopping communism, Iraq was about deposing a mad dictator with WMD's. Step back from any of these and look at the various motivations of all the players involved and you get a very complex picture that doesn't reduce easily to an ideological byline (America: spreading freedom!). But every country teaches children that it is awesome, otherwise those children might grow up not believing in the legitimacy of the people in power.

In short, the actual function of school is to tell children that the current balance of power is the correct one, and comes up with all manner of reasons why this is so regardless of what the power structure actually is.
in PHP "foo" == 0 due to how php handles type juggling - the string is converted to an integer before the comparison, with strings that don't contain numbers converted to 0. so "foo" == 0 and "0" == 0 but "1" != 0.
Why is this? I'm not sure I understand where the gain is.

I guess that, for me, the cost of a few keystrokes involved in writing "if x == 0 then ..." vs. "if x then ..." never seemed to be worth the hassle of remembering false values. I've always found it preferable to make the comparison being made explicit.

I also generally dislike the practice of using reserved values to signify empty data, e.g. 0 for missing numerical data. I prefer to use ML-style option types, e.g. None vs. Some 0, and in a dynamically typed language, I'd just use the nil/().
This makes more sense, but I still find it odd and disagreeable. I tend to prefer that my programs fail loudly, so I'd write string -> int conversion to raise an exception on seemingly non-numerical input like "foo", "ba6r.5", "pwn3d", etc. Then again, admittedly I know very little about web development. Is it not practical to do this?
Joyce invented the style. It has since been used by many other authors. Now that I think about it, it was a kind of refactoring or re-encoding: making a shorter symbol for a sequence that's frequently repeated.
What exactly do you mean by "The human brain prefers the dumbed down language."? Am I different from my brain? Because sometimes I enjoy books that aren't dumbed-down.
I agree, two good books on techniques for helping you manage issues related to ADD are

Driven To Distraction by Edward M. Hallowell http://www.amazon.com/Driven-Distraction-Recognizing-Attenti...

Healing ADD by Dr. Daniel Amen
http://www.amazon.com/Healing-ADD-Breakthrough-Program-Allow...
Adrenaline Is a Key Ingredient to Success
Yes, that's what I was thinking. I see this as a distributed-computing solution to RIAA legal threats, "The Pirate Bay gambit", if you will.
This is how I interpreted it as well
I was actually thinking just about K-12 education. I got a lot of rewarding stuff out of college. I think most kids would turn out just fine if they were given much less structured enjoyable activities while growing up.
On the web, all the data comes in as strings including numbers. So the comparisons work well the numbers in strings. The rest of the weirdness comes from PHP copying C and Perl semantics.
Feynman was a fascinating character. Anyone interested in learning more about him should pick up Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
It may be instructive to see what the torrent community has done with the Hydra project.

After all, the Muxtape "code" was only one part that made it shine. It was the content that made the service so enjoyable.

If content could be backed up and retrieved across the Opentape network, that would be cool.
Stop: Analytics Time