skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not doing a startup, but I have had to defend my separation of work and life rather strongly in my circles.

Here's my take on it: we're all dying. You get a very limited amount of time to spend in the best amusement park ever. Once it's gone your done. So try and have some fun along the way.

When I'm not working I'm thinking about programming. Or I'm climbing a mountain. Camping. Running. Spending time with my wife. Painting. Playing my guitar. Climbing trees. Occasionally I'm out at the bar with friends.

I prefer to be alone most of the time. It's where I get my energy from. Ultimately you just have to discover what works for you.
Live everyday like Steve Jobs would
Just from getting some friends to do this it seems to me the median score overall and the median score for each age are a bit inflated. Just my thoughts, but I think people aren't being 100% truthful. Although I may just have a poor vocabulary http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36208
Some of these don't look like real words (e.g. splarge, which is definitely something that you could make up). I assume they're real, though.

Anyway, my score: http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36192
My result[1] isn't too bad but there's still quite a few words I can learn especially at the end. I did cheat a little since I learned a few of the more curious looking ones when this showed up on /b/ 2 nights ago.

[1] http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36123
It's certainly a survey, but I don't know if it's in disguise...
No, the contractor just didn't want to pay them by the market-determined rate.

If he were offering the right money, welders would come out of the woodwork. They would leave other jobs or relocate.
Methinks these survey takers doth be liars
I think that's really really nice of him but it's not economically relevant. If anything it proves the rule.
I think this is more because of Ratan Tata's philanthropic nature. He is the best of the current breed of industrialists in the country though it is still sad that the richest Indians (Mittal might be an exception) inherited their V.C money (and got a lot of it actually).
Ah, yes. The ol' stop-mucking-with-my-layout line.
Pretty interesting, but I do hope they do not try to extract any meaningful statistics based on this. I guarantee you 95% of the people are cheating.
Perhaps the most interesting part of how they're doing it is that they have an algorithm that doesn't rely on the results of other test takers, except for the eventual statistics.

Also worth seeing: http://testyourvocab.com/hard.php
Amazon has done two environmentally positive things that I can think of off the top of my head.

1. Pushing for frustration-free packaging. Less waste if the packaging isn't designed to attract eyeballs and deter shoplifters in a retail environment.

2. When scheduling grocery deliveries with Amazon Fresh, you can see when they will already have a truck in your neighborhood. My groceries essentially carpool on their way to my house.
To add to what you are saying, the problem with the Nano was that it was addressed at a market where the average buyer will look at all options available. A car is not a "life necessity" and that alone puts the prospective buyer in a different class. This means that the Nano competes with the other offerings on the market rather than being a separate market unto itself. The Tatas envisaged a separate market developing around the product, which didn't happen, and hence the low sale numbers. What they might want to do is try and "create" the segment they want. How they do it is entirely up to their marketing team, although being a marketeer I might be able to think some ideas up as well.

The Nano stigma you talk about was the average car buyer looking at it and thinking, "That is a terrible car." Wrong audience. But I can understand why they did it though. As a car manufacturer trying out new things, their marketing did tend to see it as a "car market" problem -- hammer, meet nail.

Housing on the other hand is a "life necessity." If the houses Tata is promising are able to deliver on quality, security, repairabilty, and temperature issues, you might have a winner. It will also have to withstand the endless jugaads people are going to subject it to in cramped urban spaces.

On the other hand despite Tata's tall claims, it's difficult to see their marketing team do much about it. I don't see Tata Swach ubiquitously in shops here, nor do they respond to inquiries about their solar cells (I tried). Beyond the brochures and the websites, it's difficult to get Tata to respond to you. This makes most of these announcements pointless.

As an Indian, all I feel is further dejection and the hopelessness of dealing with a bunch of lotus eaters with press releases trying to solve problems of an audience they do not understand.
The population is self selecting; I wouldn't trust their percentiles.
That video is oddly mesmerizing. The second one is better though :) It has bouldery excellence, Queen, bees, and you get to watch him push a frickin' tree over. Though in the 3rd, he discovers "the world of BULK LEGO on eBay".

I think he is going slowly crazy. Or more comfortable with the camera. Though are those all that different, really? Great entertainment, either way :)
You might try Henning Nelms Thinking with a Pencil, it is a great source for learning practical sketching and drawing.
Any use this yet and can share experience?

edit: no irc channel found for veracity-scm, does it exist anyone? also, I found the piping method they used to get their PGP key was causing issues with sudo, just wasn't accepting my pass with two sudo statements like that for some reason. It worked when I separated them.
Obvious point : The only people interested in finding out their scores will be the kind of people who think their vocab is something worth competing on. There's no way this is a fair sample across all English-speakers.
anyone know of something like this for other languages, eg german?
With any luck perhaps some day I'll be in the driver's seat. For now I'm just taking advantage of whenever I see an opportunity to pick up some knowledge. :)
The numbers appear to be based on people who previously completed the test. It's a pretty easy test to cheat on...
Oh, they're very much real, (mind you, I don't know what a a splarge is) except that they don't turn up in daily conversation.
Not just self selecting, but the scores are basically self-reported. It didn't actually test anything.
I think its rather cute that people take the moral high ground when it comes to the law. However such ought-to-be approaches to the law are irrelevant. Its the legal system not the justice system. He did his homework and he is within his rights to take advantage of all laws which apply. Americans don't get all up in arms when major corporations use loop wholes in the law to get over on us (when was the last time General Electric paid taxes? The 70's?).

Furthermore, the articles author pointed out that original owner was foreclosed on and promptly went mia and company which owned the mortgage went under. Its that either of those 2 parties or even a third party will assert their rights over the property, but until that occurs he is the legal owner as he legally filed as such. His neighbors can moan about it all they please, but they have no standing in the case whatsoever. Example: Someone defrauded Southwest Airlines: me having nothing to do with the case cannot bring fraud charges against whoever did; I have no standing in the case. I could have been standing right next to the guy that did it, as he did it, but I still have no standing in the case.

Thirdly, who's misfortune is he taking advantage of? The homeowners? No, they didn't pay their bills and left, the title went to the mortgage company. The Mortgage company? No, they went under. Whoever working there had long since lost their jobs and most likely found new employment before this guy applied to legally own the property. You want to make this guy out to be a bad guy because he doesn't use things the way "normal" people do and he got ahead for it. You are boring and lack any relevant imagination.
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And it was optional...
eh.. you mean they were hired to go back to the corporate workforce... that's not an acquisition.
I bought a new pair of wireless headphones a few months ago. I'd always heard that wireless audio was a really dumb idea because of the sound quality, but I really wanted to get rid of that cable.

After some research, I discovered that there's a particular Bluetooth audio codec called apt-X, which has essentially wired sound quality (and certainly way better than the awful default Bluetooth audio). No cables, no dongles (my mac supports apt-X out of the box).

This represents a genuine (patented) innovation - none of the other wireless audio solutions are as good. I can't help but wonder if the people behind it would have bothered if they couldn't patent the codec.

I don't know if that makes the patent system worth it for software. I suspect it doesn't. But I know at least one example where it led to innovation that may not have happened otherwise.
Our family lives in San Antonio, TX where we are obviously dependent on air conditioning during at least 9 months of the year, but we typically keep our temps at about 76-78 degrees. I cannot even imagine keep our place at 72 degrees since the kiddos would complain it is cold and I would receive a $700 electric bill. Yes, electricity is very expensive in Texas.

However, we have a second home in Montana where we spend our summer away from the heat and humidity of South Texas. It has no air conditioning and, some summer days get well into the upper 90's here. It is amazing the techniques we'll employ to keep the place cool during the hot days, and they always keep the place in the 70's. We close certain blinds, open the upper windows and lower windows at night. When it cools off we will allow the cool air to pool in our downstairs areas and then close it off and "save" it. We will alternate between upstairs and downstairs sleeping based on the weather.

Being from New Orleans, I treasure cool air, and being in Montana right now I realize how cool it is. No pun intended :)
I only scored 24k which seems low based on the statistics at the end. I also only selected words that I absolutely knew the definition of, even though some I think I knew based on the root.

Memorizing trivia words is just something that has never interested me. Instead I keep a thesaurus and dictionary handy at all times :)
Benchmarking a simple crawler
Bloomberg short documentary about Larry Page & Sergey Brin
They ought to include some fake but plausible words to correct for cheaters. (Perhaps they do?)
I got 25,600 but that was below the median of 27,123. I didn't select words I recognized but couldn't define and I double checked some definitions. I think I have a decent vocabulary. It's like I'm competing with the High IQ Society book club.

You need a test where the definition is part of the test. Otherwise anyone can just check boxes.
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Am in the process of planning a redesign of a site, looking forward to working with this.
22,700 http://testyourvocab.com/?r=38336

What difference does it make? The site doesn't say what it means in everyday life. I'm guessing if you exclude high achieving SAT vocab nerds, it finds the difference between people who care about the meaning of each word and people who will guess through context because they have no patience for a dictionary. Or people who don't read fancy texts, like the Scarlett Letter for example, after failing to read that I stopped reading books.
LOL
A) It not being the the ,market holds the greatest benefit for everybody that matters, as everyone else's home prices rise as a result of one less home being sold.
B) There is a $500,000 home at the end of my block. A mortgage company (which is still in business) owns it. Still they don't maintain it. The pool is decaying into a bacteria ridden cess pool and everyone living here takes turns calling the mortgage company just to get them to mow what are usually 4' high grass out front. I imagine that this situation is prevalent elsewhere as well. I would love it if one of the neighbors could obtain the house for free and keep it up.

Speaking of, good job assuming that this guy "owning" it is somehow not keeping it up. Stereotypes will get you far. I can't way to read what you say when it turns out this guy is not only poor, but black or muslim so you can think even less of him.
Skeleton first got my attention a few weeks ago when I noticed Paul Irish had forked it to his Github account.

https://github.com/paulirish/Skeleton
37,700 http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36826 without cheating and not counting ones that I only thought I could puzzle out.

Maybe working on that English Minor is panning out...
"I prefer buying hand blenders from Amazon, instead of from Braun, because when it comes to the online shopping experience, price, delivery and customer service, Braun will not come near Amazon's quality in a hundred years."

That is exactly what I was trying to get at, only your explanation actually successfully conveys the idea. Thanks.
weren't you recently searching for exploitable webgl driver bugs?
I'm almost 26 and I scored 26,500.

Not sure I buy the results though. I would think that the rate of increase would start to decrease quite significantly after high school/college but it appears to stay pretty much linear throughout the data.
I wouldn't say the ONLY people. This could be the next 'IQ test' where it seems the near opposite, the lesser intelligent ones are who are obsessed with them.

Going by magazines, common forwards and so on it seems the average man loves a good self-quiz.
39,000 I use more of the words on page 2 that I should, I'm probably unbearably obnoxious to be around...
I got 37,300. They claim this is not quite 95th percentile, which I am a tad skeptical accurately represents my vocabulary-size percentile relative to the general population. Perhaps this survey is being forwarded around unusually literate people at the top end, or more than 5% of responders are cheating. Where are the fake words to catch cheaters? I Googled a lot of what I didn't recognize, and everything I checked was real.
Same here. I absolutely love Dave Brubeck (no homo). He really got me into jazz, and my first ever jazz piano performance was take five.
First DIY electronics "show-and-tell" over Google+ hangout
Their statistic is probably inflated due to linguistic subreddit, where this test originated:

http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/edlnv/reddit_i_...
Illiterates are vastly underrepresented.
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Ya, the pics on the side are just random pictures I took. I will definitely re-design the blog to show the author's pic.
lots of people here are saying they scored lower than what they expected, and that maybe other people cheated. that could be it, but it could also be that hacker news folks tend to be overconfident. this would match the stereotype of this group being mainly male nerd entreprenuers, which could score worse on things like this but perceive themselves to score much higher (a feeling not a fact backed by studies that i can remember). who knows; just voicing this thought since no one has mentioned it yet.
Lol, I guessed at that too, I thought classism but racism was a possible too.

Though, now that he is one of those black people it is safe to say that the neighbors are right and people like that should not be allowed to vote irregardless of laws written in the mid 1800's. I hope everyone makes it out Sunday night to the neighbor hood klan meeting so we can all praise white jesus, drink beer, and talk crap about all those seedy black people.
It doesn't get upvoted and be featured on the top page of Hacker News if people are not finding it useful. Hacker News is not a website to be defined by you on what is interesting and what is relevant. You are just one of thousands of people visiting this site and it will stay like that - if you find that non-interesting, it is irrelevant.
The word was actually "sparge," a word that any home-brewers have likely come across.
I became a persona non grata socially. Folks would invite my previous company but not me. Simple as that.
Think I have the lowest score here. 16,400 words. English is not my native language but I speak English daily and I wouldn't say my English is bad. Pretty disappointed with the score and also surprised the median is way way higher than I expected.

Edit: And, also to add, I followed 2 criteria for whether I know the word or not.

1. What's the absolute definition?

2. And can I find the equivalent or meaning of it in my native language? (which is Tamil, an Indian language, if anyone cares.)
37,200
I am a non-native speaker
I live in Tucson, Arizona, and I own a few houses built before A/C became common. I have one house (a rental) made of mud adobe, which is essentially mudbricks made into 14" thick walls. It was built in 1919 and has the interesting feature that it takes a few days to change temperature. There is always a week here that it changes from a nice spring to a hot summer and the house takes a long time to make the transition. It also stays cool pretty effectively with only a small window A/C unit. My current residence is a 50 yr old double brick wall house that doesn't do as well, but better than you might think for a house with zero insulation in the walls. Average bill in the summer was $300 before I put solar in this year (3300 ft house).

I definitely agree with the article - this city would look a lot different without A/C. But the mud adobe and high ceilings work surprisingly well. The heat isn't as bad as you might think either - as one of my wife's colleagues remarked "It is a city that you can eat at least one meal a day outside" which means breakfast or dinner in the summer and lunch in the winter.
Even so, I think this is more of a Polyglot than a self extracting PNG.
looks like it was designed as a firewall bypass
How i co-founded my first startup
how i co-founded my first startup
But to remove some of the bias, we'd need approximately equal numbers of above and below average people to be going to the trouble of answering the quiz.

And in the back of my mind, I thought that the bulk of quiz magazines were sold to women, no? (Though I'm probably being too pedantic...)
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I've heard that air conditioning had an effect on culture, too. Before A/C, you'd sit out on your porch to cool off and as a consequence get to know your neighbors. After A/C, you'd retreat indoors and live a socially isolated life.
I got just under the median on this test, but I scored around the 99th percentile in the SAT verbal, and I feel it's reasonable to say the two test approximately the same things. It seems unlikely that I've slipped so far in just two years :)

I never really considered Hacker News to be full of overconfident people. If anything, to me being part of HN is a humbling experience. It reminds me that there are so many people out there that are smarter or more experienced than me, and I've seen other people say similar things.
I looked up every word I did not know in the OED (sparge being one of those), and they are in fact real.
The note field on the application being limited to 140 characters is a nice touch.
22,000

Clearly my American public school education has served me well. >_<
Damn, that yellow background is killing my sight! I had to disable line 104 in /screen.css
I was honest and was shocked by my result being in the bottom third! I have an IQ > 125! I think I need to read more.
+1

I found the case studies very educational. I'm looking forward to more of them!

Can you post links to new ones on HN as they become available?

Thanks for sharing!
I'm not sure if vocabulary size matters once you reach around 25,000 words. The words I didn't know were in part because I've never had any need to know them; if I had run into any of them while reading anything written in the past 80 years, I'd be angry at the author for showing off.

When I was young, I thought that if I wanted to be a writer I should have a huge vocabulary... but now, when choosing words/synonyms I dismiss most options because they're much too obscure.
Just as a test, ticking all the boxes scores 45,000 words. Which seems to indicate that they haven't seeded the quiz with fake words to weed out cheaters : Pity, since there was an opportunity to unbias it in at least one dimension. (I also tried deselecting just 1 of a few of the really tough words : Each one caused the score to lower).
They could also test you on some of the less-recognized words you selected to help identify cheating.
I love the thought put into this, and I have done years of thinking on similar topics... but let me ask you a point-blank question: do you seriously- seriously - believe for one instant that clarity on majority desire would be any less malleable than it is currently? Do you think that those that are promised free <blank> or tightened regulation/penalty/restriction on whatever their religious or cultural morals dictate would not do as they do now: vote for what benefits them, and ignore the repercussions?

The answer of how to balance a budget is as simple for a government as it is for you and me: don't spend more than you have. So what does your network vote to cut? How can that be peacefully decided? What will those that claim "disenfranchisement" do?

Please understand, I am heartened to see this topic here, and I, like you, want to work toward a better system of government. I just see human nature working against any centralized power system, as those least deserving of the power always work hardest to yield it.

Good conversation. Good group involved. I am glad to see your group thinking on this incredibly important issue.

P
I only checked words that I can use in a sentence: left one blank on the first set, a handful blank on the second set.

42,500 (http://testyourvocab.com/?r=37216)

Apparently the OED has 7 times more words I don't know. That's offal...
I got 17,200. I'm 22 with a Bachelor's degree and I was pretty surprised with how low I scored. Anyone in a similar category?
Ask HN: Socioeconomic implications of automation?
For my senior thesis, I'm doing a project on the implications of pervasive automation of almost all production. My current thinking on the matter is that we're going to see a continuation of rising unemployment in the US and a further divide between a very small number of rich (that own/invent the automated means of production) and the masses of poor unemployed. It's already happening today (Redbox/Netflix? Amazon? Kiva?). My guess is that we'll see upwards of 30-40% unemployment in the US in the next 30 years. This clearly isn't a sustainable or desirable (for most) outcome and it seems as though we need a fundamental socioeconomic restructuring in order to avoid total collapse. Martin Ford's "Lights in the Tunnel" addresses this issue, but there seems to be hardly any other discussion of this topic. Is the technology just a long way off? Do most economists just think that the economy will always have a use for all human labor? What do you guys think?
I've lived in the two heat extremes in Texas. Dry Dallas and humid Houston. A/C is definitely important but I've always found myself needing to use it less in Dallas. I can open the window in the evening and let the breeze blow into my room and close it before I leave to class in the morning. In Houston A/C is necessary even into the night as the heat in water vapor lingers around.
Has there ever been a case where defining yourself as a negative of something resulted in a success?
"You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." -- Dorothy Parker