skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My problem isn't with students that are completely into casual sex. In fact, that's what I was imagining: people who are completely open and honest about what they want.

Instead, I find that most college students are either in denial or they let themselves get carried too far. The people here are always in it to get back at a boyfriend or they're too drunk to realize just what they're doing. That's what I can't stand.

I think that people who worry about livings and books are often just as bad, to be fair. I switched out of an English major because I realized that the people I knew going for English were often really out-of-sync with the real world and were really unpleasant people. I moved to a major that had a few people who were really with it, and formed a group there.

I've never seen American Beauty. Would you recommend it?
I initially thought this was supposed to be a rap, and read it as such -- it worked well. I then read the text at the bottom.

That creates a scary thought: can Dr. Seuss books be rapped verbatim?

(This is making a rapped version of "I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees" going through my head.)
I really do wish my knees weren't a beta version though.
go to the doctor and ask for a full blood test.
Best of luck with finding a hobby! Tell me if you post it on Reddit: I'd like to see the answers.

I'm still a virgin, because - somehow - I still believe in abstinence until marriage. No clue how long that will last. And I find it really sad that people tend to become cynical about lust and sex and romance. Thanks to that, the best relationship I had started with the girl being with another (pretty awful) guy: we got really interested in each other at least in part because it was so clandestine at first, so larger-than-life.

And I don't know if it's because of youth or not, but I loathe people who are very into romance and very against any sort of physical contact. I think that's like the exact reverse of casual sex and it's just as bad. There needs to be a balance.

Cheers.
Thanks for your reply!

ad 1) see your point

ad 2) true. in our case: we want to accept at least visa and mastercard. programming skills are definitely present (and very good), so this should not be an issue.

I wonder which provider you chose for your project?
An old principle here perhaps: evolution does not mean making an organism more complex or "better" necessarily, only "more adapted", so sometimes more complex organisms can become less complex organisms, such as cave fish losing their ability to see. Similarly, perhaps with memes. Better adapted memes mean just that, better adapted, even if they are completely insane from one way of looking at things. So if the meme of say plastic wishbones mentioned in this article is adapted for some crazy reason, it will find a niche. This is the dark side of evolution. Sometimes organisms lose features and complexity for the sake of adaptation, and perhaps there is a memetic corollary here to, sometimes in the free market the most adapated memes are some of the most insane or revolting, from an aesthetic standpoint. Which just proves the "selfish gene/meme" paradigm - if they can get copied, they will, and they don't care about whatever pain or suffering or cultural decline that may occur as a result.
Hi Davidw,

Thanks for your interest and questions.

For now, Nitrogen is primarily aiming to bring Erlang up to par with other languages for creating dynamic, Ajax-ified Web 2.0 applications.

"What does it really do that takes advantage of Erlang?"

The big advantage is that, with Nitrogen, you can develop your entire Web 2.0 application in Erlang. Before Nitrogen, most people did the front end in Rails and the back end in Erlang, and used a bridge, such as Apache Thrift, to get them talking.

Once your web app is in Erlang, you can:

* Run on Mochiweb or Yaws, both extremely performant http servers.

* Distribute your web server across multiple nodes without worrying about sticky sessions.

* Reap all of the other Erlang goodness, such as hot code swapping, built in application monitoring and restarting, an extremely stable environment, etc. (All of the stuff that made Amazon use Erlang for SimpleDB and Facebook use Erlang for Facebook Chat.)

"What about the DB layer?"

Mnesia, Erlang's built in database, actually does the job quite well. Languages tend to add a DB layer to ease the pain of jumping into and out of SQL, and we're so used to this that we expect to have to do the same in any language. But in this case, Mnesia thinks in Erlang syntax, so there is really no need to wrap it in anything. Plus, Mnesia works really well for documents with changing schemas, which is very Web 2.0.

If you'd rather avoid Mnesia and use SQL, then ErlyDB is your best option.

Happy to answer any more questions.

Best,

Rusty - Creator of Nitrogen Web Framework

p.s. - Saw this post through a backtype.com alert (hooray BackType!)
Miller, K. F., Smith, C. M., Zhu, J. & Zhang, H. Preschool origins of cross-national differences in mathematical competence: The role of number-naming systems. Psychological Science, 6, 56-60.
I was wondering whether or not to flag this, but decided against it on the off chance that people hadn't heard of it.

I find ReCAPTCHAs very easy to fill out, myself. I've never had one wrong yet. If it's doing good at stopping bots, then it's absolutely a prime solution.
Yep! It can even win against other start-ups that way.

Inertia is a terrible thing for a business.

(As an aside: this is a really excellent article, and I'm not used to that from Seth Godin. That was a very pleasant surprise.)
Mini Nuclear Reactors to Power Remote Areas
Ask HN: Do you tell other people about HN?
I've been very hesitant to tell any of my friends about HN. I've seen the kind of content that gets generated when the community population explodes, and I'd really hate to see that happen here. It's not that I don't trust my friend's content, I don't trust their friend's content.

I know the HN has generally rebuffed off-topic material, but at the same time it still shows up. Should the broken window theory or a video of a meteor really be on the front page today? Its not that I don't enjoy that content, but allowing some of it is a slippery slope and before you know it we could be seeing posts that stipulate that Karl Rove eats deep fried baby flesh.

So HN, what do you think?
You're not reading the hypothesis correctly:

Asian children, by contrast, don't face nearly that same sense of bafflement... maybe that makes them a little more likely to enjoy math, and maybe because they enjoy math a little more they try a little harder and take more math classes and are more willing to do their homework, and on and on, in a kind of virtuous circle.

The argument is not that the clarity of the Chinese-language numbers is, in itself, that big of an advantage once kids grow beyond four, five, or seven years of age. The argument is that kids who are comfortable with math at age four are more likely to remain happy with math throughout the rest of their schooling, whereas loss of confidence at an early age results in loss of future confidence.

Obviously, while you can test the difference in math skills among seven-year-olds, this stronger hypothesis is hard to test rigorously, because you can't easily control for all the other cultural differences. But it's a very interesting idea, nonetheless. One of the most amusing things about this hypothesis is that it mirrors the difference between the English and Chinese written languages: Chinese writing is badly designed compared to alphabetic systems, to the point where there are serious effects on the literacy rate. See Moser at http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html and DeFrancis' The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, linked from http://www.pinyin.info/readings/chinese_language.html
Sorry, it meant to say 10 years, not twenty. It's a Nokia 6210 and it has served me well for many years.

My bad..
I'm glad you took the trouble to argue with yourself, because now I can ROTFL at your third paragraph with you instead of at you. ;)

Believe me, advertisers are human and they will forget every bit as quickly as everyone else does.
well reddit haa a daily/weekly top 10 growers list on top of all time
http://www.reddit.com/stats/
The article was about the research Dr Keizer has just published in Science. How is that research not original or peer reviewed ?
Of course, if I were compelled to remember every single event of my life in perfect detail I'd probably get really interested in myself, too. My own past would be everywhere. I'd never really be able to escape it. It would probably be hard to focus on much else.

So, as the title suggests, there's a feedback loop here.

I really feel for this woman -- this is a terrible condition. Perhaps the fact that she isn't completely crippled by PTSD is a tribute to her skill at self-analysis. It may be that she has had to become a conscious expert on herself just to be able to talk herself through the fear.
am I the only one who would have questioned if it was the end ?
123

Eins zwei drei

Hundert drei und zvanzig

Logical? (hope I didn't make a mistake there...)
As far as telling other people goes, I find that HN comes up most often when I tell my friends about the interesting stories I find here. The reaction from non-technical people is usually something to the effect of: "Where the hell do you find this stuff??" The reaction from technical people is usually something like: "Yeah, I already read that on HN." With regards to the first group, it seems that they always find the stories interesting, but never show any signs that they'll make HN one of their news sources, and I'm fine with that.

For me, things such as the meteor video or an article about the Broken Windows Theory are fine, and I don't foresee any "Karl Rove eats deep fried baby flesh" articles soon, but I'd like to keep it that way. The community at HN is the root of the reason I keep coming back.
I've got a hint of your problem, particularly when it comes to remembering the dates of events. I remember people pretty well, and I remember things that happened, but I have a real trouble with timing and sequence, even for things that only happened six months ago. The advent of email archives and iCal has been quite useful!

even if I can recall a traumatic event that happened I never actually feel the emotions associated with it.

As the article suggests, this is an understandable correlation. Emotionally-colored events are easier to remember. If you don't tend to have emotional color to your memories, that might make them less likely to stick around.

Honestly, I'm kind of happy to be leaning toward the forgetful side. Losing your memory can occasionally be traumatic, but compared to being constantly tortured by memories that won't go away...
Cool, thanks for replying. Mnesia is not part of Erlang that I've ever looked at in depth, so it remains something of an unknown. I really wish someone would publish some information and statistics about how it handles ever larger data sets. Something like Postgres or Mysql is more of a 'known quantity' in terms of what it can handle, how to improve it, and so on. Mnesia, we know, does distributed really well, but I know less about how its performance/scaling characteristics for other aspects.

Anyway, looks like a cool effort, so good luck, and keep writing about it!
A better option would be giving/removing non constant karma point (not always 1).

So something like +- 1/(1 + karma/2500).
First Jukebox Appeared On This Day | TechJaws
I find that hard to believe. There are plenty of self-absorbed people who don't have exceptional memory. If anything, it's the other way around: she's self-interested because she has perfect episodal memory.
Have you seen footage from an eye tracking session? A user can't explain or point his mouse to where he is looking. The eyes move quickly and somewhat unconsciously.
I'm also cautious about writing about HN on various communities I visit simply because I fear it would attract the wrong crowds, e.g. spammers, trolls and your average eternal septemberists.

Right now HN is a great community for startups, Internet businesses, developers, designers, and entrepreneurs. The signal to noise ratio is very high and discussions are relevant, mostly civil and very interesting. Heck, I can't name another site with so much relevant content for Internet businesses.

Furthermore, I think it's perfectly fine that HN remains a relatively small and focus community, not every site must be like Digg or Slashdot in size.

Regards,
WarTheatre
I tell people about it but most people aren't interested. I think they're happy to let me be their geek news filter, or perhaps they're just humoring me. Either way I think the aesthetics of the site go a long way to keep out wrong people.
I'd say the big winners are people who've spent the last two months going short. It's like buying during a boom, everything goes up - only question is how much.

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ASKF
Looks right. IIRC (studied German in college), numbers are read similarly to English, with the exception that the tens place is read last. Transliterated, you would get something like "three thousand, four hundred, seven and ninety" for 3,497.
YouTube Live's Big Debut: Pretty Small
I think this article (if you read page 2) points to the obvious solution - government says to the big 3, declare bankruptcy, then we'll give you (or help you get) credit to avoid liquidation.
Yes, I tell smart people. If their friends' friends submit stuff that's offtopic, the editors just kill it. Though in fact I think our strongest defense against idiots is to look boring to them.

Incidentally, the broken windows story isn't offtopic. News.YC isn't just about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking.
Automated user interface testing on the iPhone
Poll: How do you feel about making HN invite only?
Seems like the site is growing by leaps and bounds...and slowly losing the quality we've all grown to rely on.

In fact it seems like almost every day now, there is a new thread with people worrying that the quality of submissions has gone down.

The problem is that, getting frontpaged, is so damn easy. For example there is now a front page thread with 2 points. So once HN hits that threshold of crappy users, you'll see the quality take a sharp dive overnight.

So why not make HN invite only to keep the quality of posts up? If you want to read? Nothing will change. Want to post? Then you better get an invite from a friend or wait a few months for the registration to open.
I'd like that. I'd like the exclusivity and want to keep up the quality of the front page.
Bad idea, we can police our fellow users ourselves, by voting down crappy submissions early on.
This is only a problem if there are very strong mechanisms in place that encourage/force people to actively compete for karma so that they don't risk losing their status. For instance, if high karma people are given more exposure or special benefits (early access to content; free stuff, etc.), you can bet this will lead to an increase in active karma manipulation. People will simply act accordingly to get better karma, which might not always be preferably depending on the type of community you run.

Karma is very important to people online and fooling around with it can cause hurt feelings. After all, Karma is often the only explicit reward that community members receive and is a way of being recognized for being a productive, helpful, nice and ultimately good member.

Regards,
WarTheatr
I wish they would get rid of that notice about cookies. Every other site uses cookies and no one else seems to need a notice about it.
Good luck with that. It is technologically possible, but everyone who works with planes is scared shitless of the possibility that something can go wrong. It's bureaucracy at its worst. Nothing will happen with the existing system, the best we can hope for is that a new and better system will replace modern (obsolete) air travel.

Many major airports are clogged, however..it's more than just a problem of traffic control and coordination. There is a limit where you are operating so tightly that if anyting goes wrong, there will be a major accident. I think the direction we are going in is one of smaller aircraft and more decentralized terminals. With the level of stupidity in airline travel (et. al.) and the growing resentment among passengers, it is doubtful that the system can successfully develop into something even more centralized.

This whole industry is a prime target for disruptive change. The major problem is the same as for startups working in the financial industry: there is just too much regulation. (TipJoy, PayPal etc.) In addition, the capital requirements are pretty steep.
Yeah, I think my phone just wasn't liking my hand/head when I was trying to test it.
What he said. If there was some benefit to having more karma than "the other guy", then maybe.

That said, I'd still be in favor of one, only because "news" is temporal so "old" karma shouldn't be worth as much as recent. But, I'm shooting from the hip here and there are probably unintended side-effects I'm probably not seeing.
Recession Proof Java Programmers
You're Asking The Wrong Question
The company had actually already chosen Samport, a provider mainly (only?) active on the Scandinavian market. However, Samport fulfills all requirements that I previously described.

Actually, if there are any Scandinavian developers/entrepreneurs reading this - give Samport a chance. In addition to the previously described advantages, they are also cheap and -- besides the hosted solution where customers are redirected to their servers -- allow you to seamlessly integrate Samport with your own e-commerce.

Regards,
WarTheatre
I think a good idea would be to treat karma the same way that tennis rankings are counted: Only the past 52 weeks are counted. So if you gain 1000 karma in a year, then don't participate, your karma will be 0.

That will encourage continual good behavior.
Seems like the site is growing by leaps and bounds...and slowly losing the quality we've all grown to rely on.

People have been saying that for most of News.YC's life. Certainly for longer than you've been a user. And your proposed solution is also one that's been discussed since before you joined. So ironically this submission appears to be an instance of the type it seeks to prevent.

Incidentally, your second option is impossible. There's no downvote on submissions. The way to push a story down is to upvote other stories. Or if it's really lame to flag it for deletion.
Given that I have fairly high karma, it's hard for me to claim that I'm unbiased...

... but this is a bad idea. For one thing, decaying karma is devalued karma. Why should people work so hard to gain something that is crumbling into dust all around us?

But the bigger problem is that absolute value of karma is not that important. The important social signal is in the first derivative. If you make a post that people like, your karma goes up. If your flaming instinct gets out of control, your karma stays constant or goes down. If karma is constantly going down anyway it will confuse the issue. Either you're going to have to do some complicated mental arithmetic to figure out whether or not you suck ("let's see, I don't think I've looked at my karma total since Tuesday, so my karma should have fallen by 10 by now, but OMG I think it's fallen by 14, so I must suck!")... or, more likely, everyone on the site will subconsciously interpret the ever-falling number as a sign that they suck 100% of the time, so everyone will feel like crap at all times.
"I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members."
I mean: newspapers survived TV.
After the Crash: How Software Models Doomed the Markets
Likewise, as well as my eyes.
None of my friends would like it. As unscientific as the Meyers-Briggs test is, I really do think this site appeals mostly to a small subset of XNTPs. And there aren't that many of those around.
So, make hitting the front page harder?
Interesting that you mention one place where things got worse and another where they got better -- any chance that the reddits could reverse the trend?
Have a look at the comments on the broken window theory post, a lot of them are about the applicability of the theory to online social sites, something which is very on-topic on HN. Just because an article isn't inherently startupish, it doesn't mean that it's not relevent to HN.
Global warming predictions are overestimated, suggests study on black carbon
I think rankings in other sports might be more fun if they worked more like HN rankings. Baseball fans do a lot of that. It's kind of what baseball statistics are all about: The player in front of you is not just competing with himself, and the other players on the field, and the other players in the league. In a sense, he's competing with Lou Gehrig.

Of course, the reason to avoid putting dead players in the rankings is that the people who prefer watching competitions between living players -- i.e. the majority of fans -- don't want the dead ones cluttering up their leaderboard. But this is the web, not TV, so the solution is simple: Multiple leaderboards. Create a version of the HN leaderboard that only counts the past 52 weeks. Put it up at some URL or other. Then people can decide to use the alternative leaderboard if they want.

Heck, if we want, we can allow every reader to create his or her own leaderboard algorithm. Then we can have big chair-throwing debates about which leaderboard best represents the True State of Play on HN. That is exactly how the world of baseball statistics works. ;)
Typealyzer - Find Your Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
> Why should people work so hard to gain something that is crumbling into dust all around us?

Like money which will decay with inflation, or perhaps the regard of people who will be dust in a few decades?

> If karma is constantly going down anyway it will confuse the issue

If that's a problem, the site can provide the 1st derivative (ignoring decay). A bit like music charts ("at number 10, up 5, it's...").

Some sites (perlmonks) already give you an xp (karma) delta whenever you reload the page. A last 24-hours delta would be more useful (again ignoring decay).

Then again, I don't see what the utility of decaying karma is personally. It smacks of "what have you done for me lately". I think it's OK to respect people for past glories.
What would be the difference to any other News site then?
Ask HN: Is relying on scribd's API a big mistake?
I have a web application I'm working on that essentially shares documents within a small niche community. Scribd has done alot of the hard work as far as managing documents go, their iPaper allows me not to worry about storing documents, making them easily readable, etc.. Most of the heavy lifting is done by them.

HOWEVER, I am now building a web service that depends on scribd.com for full functionality. If scribd goes down, I go down. If the documents on scribd no longer become available, my service fails. I've already discussed the implications of copyright for my service with the scribd guys and that's not a concern of mine.

I've been told that scribd has enough momentum to not have to worry about it, but adding that extra coupling still makes me wary. It will save me LOTS of time and effort though and my release date will be MUCH earlier and alot more flashy and stable. I've decided to go forward with scribd.

Am I making a mistake here? I'd like to hear what you guys have to say.
A speed bump ultimately doesn't stop drunk drivers...
most schools in urban india and a large number of the rest are 'english-medium'.. which means i learnt math in math class (in english) and learnt to count in hindi in hindi class.. but never had to solve a math problem in hindi

i am currently learning japanese and can agree about the numbers being syllablically small.. but this language has it own complexities - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counters
which require a speaker to think a lot as well
Git the fsck out