skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a weird theory, but it is somewhat coherent. INTJ is very close to INTP, just not really for that reason. ENTP is the classic entrepreneur. INTP/INTJ is the classic hacker; there was a poll on here and nearly 60% of the people 662 people who voted were INTP/INTJ, whereas they're each around 2-3% in the ordinary population. 10% of the rest were ENTP. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204240)

Basically, the Myers-Briggs type determines your preferences for particular cognitive functions. The four letter indicator is like an extreme Huffman coding of those preferences:

Your information-gathering, perceiving function (that is, input.) This can be either i(N)tuitive or (S)ensing. Roughly, a sensing person trusts their senses, directly what they see and hear from the world. And an intuitive person trusts, or looks for knowledge, in their subconscious and conscious cognitive models.

Your decision-making, judging function (that is, output.) This can be either (T)hinking or (F)eeling. Roughly, the thinking person is at ease when they can make a decision supported by a logical process, and the feeling person prefers to make the decision according to their gut.

(E)xtroverted and (I)ntroverted describes the social attitudes of each of the 'functions,' in other words, whether you, when information-gathering, or decision making, prefer to focus on behavior, action, people and things or the internal world of ideas and reflection. There is only one letter for this, even though each function is supposed to have its own attitude. This is because Isabel Myers believed that there was always a balance; if you are introverted in information-gathering, you're extroverted in
decision making.

Finally, the last letter, (P)erciving or (J)udging, specifies which side of yourself; perception (information-gathering) or judgment (decision-making), you tend to show to the world. Perceiving types prefer to "keep decisions open." Judging types prefer to "have matters settled." The YCombinator practice of deciding quickly, while it may be a definite plus for both sides, is a judging characteristic, for example.
Please do not attempt to justify obnoxious and off-topic comments. The hypothetical positive effect of influencing other submitters who may or may not even be reading the story you post them to does not outweigh the very real negative effect of degrading discussion.

Might I suggest as an alternative that if you wish to whine/encourage others to submit better articles, you can simply "Leave url blank to submit a question for discussion." In that way, you can create a more suitable venue for airing your grievances, rather than shitting up every other thread with either complaints about the that article or in this case, complaints about a whole class of other articles.

That the highest-voted comment on this article is completely off-topic isn't and indicator of efficacy at encouraging better submissions as much as it is an indicator that the quality of the discussion is dreadful. And that, frankly, is a more dire concern for the vitality of a site than whether any given reader (even one with vague claims to seniority) has to ignore a few submissions that others have chosen not to ignore.
One thing I've thought about in the past is should an upvote/downvote result in a percentage gain/loss instead of absolute.

The thing is, if you've only got 3 karma, and someone downvotes you, that's a big deal. But if you've got 3000 karma and someone downvotes you, it's not. Maybe a vote should result in a 1% gain/loss.

On the other hand, it probably doesn't matter that much :)
Magic Quadrant for Social Software
In Appalachia there are coal fires that have been burning for thirty or forty years, and they are allowed to keep burning because the coal is worth less than what it would cost to pipe in enough water to put out the fires.
Doesn't work. Look at digg.

What about graduated voting? You need a higher level of karma to vote on stories when the reach a certain number of votes.
Well maybe kindle, but neither iphone or kindle are disposable.
Ok you got me ! :)
Isn't every forum that has a few admins basically an oligarchy? Same with mods in IRC.
I can recall an article I read a few months ago, where a couple of researchers took data from an instant messaging service and found that there was, on average, a ~6.6 degree separation between parties.

Just found it. Here you go: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7539329.stm
Agreed. Karma might not be the best system for encouraging good behavior... But does anyone have any other ideas?

It's also slightly more difficult because what constitutes good behavior isn't always black and white and isn't even always agreed upon.
"Today's Sunday magazine has a cover story on Jennifer Aniston. Of course!"

I think that comment is a little disingenuous. The Times obviously used Aniston to draw people in, but the content of this week's Sunday Magazine is focused on the same exact issues that Godin is referring to in his post, in this case in relation to motion pictures:

"This year, we’ve stretched the issue to reflect a new reality: when you watch moving pictures these days, a theater is the last place you are likely to be. Cable, YouTube, DVDs, DVR, news briefs in the elevator and cartoons on your cellphone — through a variety of media, we now consume fragmented narratives on multiple screens."

The Times is full of smart people, and they obviously aren't oblivious the changes print media is going through that is similar to what movie/television/video based media is going through. They've already taken small steps in the right direction with introducing editor blogs + comments, etc. More needs to be done, but the trick is finding the happy medium between providing an engaging envrionment while at the same time keeping quality of the publication at a high enough level. That certainly isn't as easy as Godin makes is sound.
What are the odds that the idea came from reading comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=372305
That's not what Singulatarians believe.
There's a lot of people who think it's all a media scam. Go to freerepublic.com or listen to Rush if you dare.
This is no singulatiry. CPU speeds have hit a wall, the exponential growth of CPU speed is dead.

The only thing left is massively parallel, but we can do that now, no need to wait, and we still don't have a singularity.
50+ Everyday Products That Use ARM Microcontroller
Nothing in this question makes any sense. Missiles? Rockets? What?
ARM is by now as God - it is in everything: in our mobile phones, in our GPS, PDA or in our laptops. Let's see a list with 50 products that use ARM Linux technology.
I wrote a websnapr equivalent one time. I needed thumbnails of every website on the internet and favicons wouldn't do.

So my script:

1. connected to a database and found a list of sites it needed images of

2. checked the image table to make sure there was a recent (< 1 day) snapshot

3. if there was not, it would start X, take a screenshot

4. use photologue to compress it on-the-fly

5. save the picture

it was less than 200 lines, but it worked really well. that's still my pride and joy.
Actually the idea came from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=362459
Lol, good idea. Although I could see M$ or Yahoo! looking to make some sort of a deal like that.
My two complaints about contemporary bagels:

1) They're not baked long enough. The ultimate bagel is soft on the inside with a firm crisp on the outside - sort of like a French baguette but doughier inside. The only way to correct it is to freeze any bagel you buy (unless you're in NYC), then stick it in the toaster oven prior to eating for ten minutes. That will crisp the outside while keeping the innards soft and lovable.

2) They're too big. The early 20th c. bagels were about half the size - about the size of a hockey puck. The full bagel today is a meal by itself. Then when you add the schmear and lox you're into dinner territory. But eating half a bagel isn't an option...

If you're a bagel connoisseur, this article is also good:

Was Life Better When Bagels Were Smaller?
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07E1D7103EF...
Google CEO Schmidt lays out U.S. energy ideas
If you believe in miracles then, yes, you're too optimistic.

If we can magically create software that can create software that is more intelligent than humans, then the singularity is nigh.

The solution to global warming will most likely be a series of clever "hacks" such as electric cars, recycling, carban taxes, turning off the lights when you leave a room, etc. Most of all changing politicians to increase the speed of change.

There doesn't seem to be a giant off switch that can wipe out global warming.
Although LaTeX typesets beautiful documents, using it is frankly a pain as it takes far longer to typeset a document in LaTeX than in Word or OOo Writer. You arguably have more flexibility in LaTeX, but its nature to typeset using its own sort of syntax makes documents take significantly longer to write.

And I don't think Times New Roman is a particularly bad font. Although it is overused everywhere and may cause eyesores due to this fact, the font itself is serious and a standard in many areas and thus is my second favourite font (after Helvetica.)
This reminds me of the story set in ~1900, when the gray-beard physicist tells his student not to study physics because all the big questions have been answered, and physics as a science will end in a few years.
Moore's law is most interesting in terms of cost these days, not clock speed. The cost per cycle is still dropping.
Select public data sets are hosted on AWS for free as an Amazon EBS snapshot

Given that you'll need to pay for the EC2 volume and EC2 instance you'll have to create in order to access the data, I wouldn't exactly call it free. It is nice for those who would have otherwise had to pay the transfer cost for uploading those datasets.
Amazon Web Services Public Datasets
Baker news? ;)
According to this logic, shouldn't kids from Kansas or Iowa do way better in math?

I'm Chinese myself, and I think there might be a simpler reason. Our schools public schools are way tougher. I'm talking 7 am to 5 pm, non stop learning hard. We're talking about doing trig in the sixth grade and calculus in middle school.

Those are the kinds of schools our parents went to and those are the kinds of schools they send their kids to. Instead of soccer practice or baseball games we take more math classes.

Also explains why we tend to suck at sports.

From my experience the difference in ability stems more from culture than from genetics.
Interesting. Perhaps that's perl's main problem. Ruby (or python) snatched up that generation of hackers since they could make more of a splash. Someone commented on reddit a few weeks back "perl used to have a really cool culture"

OK - I can now see a benefit of favouring recent contributors. It helps stop ossificiation.
It's simply a question of the rate of diminishing returns when using a program such as LaTeX to typeset. I must say that I prefer Word largely for school-related documents; however, I have been known to write up a report-or-two in LaTeX as well. The final output is superior to what Word can produce, though there are few circumstances wherein it is truly worth the extra time and effort to typeset in such a program.
Agreed, LaTeX is a huge pain for anyone not familiar with programming and the sort of syntactic manipulation needed.

I have noticed that Apple's Pages, while idiosyncratic in its own bizarre ways, does fulfill a number of the author's complaints regarding other word processors, particularly when it comes to ligatures and old-style figures (the numerals with ascenders and descenders).
Which also reminds me of a comment I just read about the singularity coming within 20 years. It just shows us how limited and distorted our vision of the future of science truly is.
I am bored of all these posts that talk about HN. I am not on HN to talk about HN itself dammit.
Visit one of the channels.
As others mentioned, cvs is not just for developers, it's also for doc writers, lawyers, UI testers and designers. All that goes into a product must be versioned.

But fine, let's say it's for developers only. Did you notice that the article is written by a developer? Clearly GIT is too difficult for some of its core aduience - developers.

Blaming the user is not the way to build something people want.
What value to add to the process?

Why wouldn't I just post up the job on Amazon?
This reminds me of a story my introductory psychology professor told in an early lecture:

A few years earlier, teaching that class, he handed out a "personality test" questionnaire and collected the responses. The next class, he handed each person an envelope with their name on it containing their results. They were told not to reveal their results to anyone. He then asked the class for a show of hands of who thought their results accurately described them. Most of the class put their hand up.

Then he started reading from a page in front of him, and then they realized they were set up: he had given the same results to everyone, yet they all thought it described them.
And now, a few 4th Century Greek jokes
legal discrimination based on gender is a VERY hard thing to justify rationally

No, it's actually very easy to justify rationally: for example, sending young men to war lets you replenish the population faster than if you'd sent everyone equally. Nature discriminates on gender, making it useful for us to do the same. It's only hard to justify if you subscribe to a certain system of irrational axioms, one of which says discrimination is generally bad.

You conceptualize marriage as a universally available contract to "legalize" romantic love, unfortunately tainted with gender discrimination by backwards people. I have nothing against this idea, but invent a new word for it, it's not marriage. ("Civil union" would be fine.) I can imagine elephants inventing marriage, but I can't imagine them accepting gay marriage on the same terms as straight. This is the elephant in the room: your concept ignores the both the purpose and the practical workings of marriage all through human history, long before anyone thought of contracts, romance or discrimination.

For example, I have explained how tax breaks for married couples benefit society: they give the provider an extra incentive to get and stay married, thus encouraging good offspring. I have similarly cynical explanations for other aspects of the institution of marriage which are IMO utterly unexplainable from the human rights perspective. Let's focus on the tax breaks. Isaac, by what mechanism do they benefit society in your opinion?

(Necessary disclaimer: this is not an ad against gay marriage. But if your opinion on gay marriage is based on ideology instead of analysis, you're wrong, even if the opinion itself is right. It's like having an incorrect proof of a true theorem.)
Lets assume you've never posted a job to Mechanical Turk before. Here is what you need to do:

1. Create an Amazon Web Services account

2. Figure out how much you want to spend (and don't forget to calculate Amazon's share)

3. Prepay the exact amount or more

4. Create a Human Intelligence Task template

5. Publish the Human Intelligence Task

6. Login to Amazon's portal regularly and navigate several pages to find your results. Have fun clicking refresh.

7. Review the results and promptly pay your workers (or they may ignore future requests)

How much is your time worth? Feedback Army spends the majority of the fee towards paying the mechanical turk workers. The Feedback Army software saves you from many of these steps and conveniently transforms the results into an RSS feed.
Too Many Technologies; Not Enough Brains
So a Microsoft engineer is drafted to the army. On the shooting range he can't hit the target at all. When sergeant notifies him of zero hits, the engineer puts his finger into the rifle's barrell and pulls the trigger. His finger is ripped off. After evaluating the finger engineer turns to the sergeant and says:

- On my side everything is fine - bullets are flying out. The problem is with the targets.
The major win is that a DVCS decouples the "commit as save work-in-progress" from the "commit a carefully polished jewel of a changeset which will live for eternity in the revision history".

i.e. you can commit locally frequently, and push refined changesets upstream. The best of both worlds.

Other top benefits include sideways pushing (work on desktop A & B, push work-in-progress between them without polluting the central repo).

Yes, you can get a lot of the DVCS benefits from giving people personal, scratch brances in a central CVS, but for various social and technical reasons that seems to rarely happen.
"Basically, the Myers-Briggs type determines your preferences for particular cognitive functions."

This is backwards; your Myers-Briggs type is determined by your preferences, and is ultimately little more than a form of horoscope targeted at those who realize that birth month has no significant correlation with personality.
College Football Star Wins Rhodes Scholarship
The IDE Jazz Scheme will be released Thursday
Ohio State Study: Marijuana may facilitate neurogenesis
I have never used Mechanical Turk before and I see that you are adding some value.

If you improve the look of your own site you might have something here.

Another idea might be to offer larger scale tests with graphical reporting on the results, basically using the low cost/test advantage that Turks offer.
Thanks. This is a pretty new project for me (< 2 weeks old) following the release early, release often mentality. I've seen enough interest to validate the idea and so I'm reaching out to a few designers I know to get a proper face lift. I'll also dump a few dollars into making some design firms aware of the service and see where that takes me.
No, you're totally a water sign. I can tell from your username.

You're probably in flux due to the dawning of Aquarius.
Yes, some, but not most. I switched from Subversion to Git myself a couple months ago and it took a week or two, but I learned "the git way" of doing things. Yes, I would need to look up the command to remove a remote branch, but I haven't done it in weeks and didn't commit it to memory the first time so that's understandable.

Building something people want doesn't really need to be a goal of open-source software. Most software is built in the first place to solve a need of the person or people building it. Since they're not getting paid, what do they care if everybody wants to use it? A large majority of people seem to like Git. There will always be those who do not and I'm sure everybody has something they dislike about it. The difference is, Git is not commercial software, so making it more usable need not be an overwhelming goal -- although, you could fork it and make it your goal.
Trovix is also looking for a few good engineers, in particular a search hacker. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=355208
Is there a way to control styles from hotkey in apple pages?
I meant determine as in "to find out or come to a decision about by investigation, reasoning, or calculation." I didn't say that it was necessarily 100% accurate.

But the MBTI is not a horoscope. The INTP/INTJ slant here is way statistically significant. Obviously there's something there.
I don't think we actually want to have chair-throwing debates over who the karma leaders are...while the leaderboard is a slight concession in the general direction of caring about karma, this site has always been set-up to stress the content of a comment over the nature of the author precisely because the accumulation of karma should be mostly irrelevant. Every comment that is posted about karma or some other meta-aspect of the community (including this one) is another comment that isn't actually content itself, and we should be trying to minimize such things when it is possible to do so.
Now, while I submitted this article because I feel it is important to disseminate this information, I do have a few qualms with it.

For one: "The research suggests that the development of a legal drug that contains certain properties similar to those in marijuana might help prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease."

There already is a drug that contains properties similar to marijuana -- it's marijuana. While it may not be legal at the present time, I believe that it is important to, instead of attempting to find a synthetic alternative (which would be far easier to mass produce/sell/market/monopolize) attempt to reconcile the discrepancies within the pro/anti-cannabis legislature to better suit the needs of our current condition.

That said, I was even more disappointed with the article's implication that marijuana is "immoral."

I feel as if these students are forced to adjust to the conditions of their academic system, rather than challenge what they might believe to be fallacious. As a scientific objectivist, this struck me at my core.
Try sitting down for two hours to study the most common LaTeX typesetting commands and to learn how to write your own macros. Text documents should then be marginally slower in LaTeX than Word, and anything with equations far faster.
That's more like a jumbled dictatorship. A few people each have unlimited power.

I'd see an oligarchy as more of a site like Reddit or News.YC, but rather than every person having a vote, a set group of people are able to. Like if only the leaderboard could perform certain tasks.

The problem to circumvent then would be if the leaderboard became overtly political, but I think that a) that isn't going to happen on a site like this, and b) it should be easy to make the system balanced if we have Dictator Paul Graham around to make sure that the people in such a system don't turn into absolute jackasses.
> From my experience the difference in ability stems more from culture than from genetics.

This is actually his point: the chapter from which this excerpt is taken is from the second half of the book, which is all about how our behavior (and thus our performance) is profoundly influenced by our cultural heritage. There's a great chapter, for instance, on how cultural differences regarding deference to authority resulted in Korean Air's high crash rate in the 90's.

There's no mention of the rice paddies in this excerpt, but Gladwell argues that rice paddy cultivation was considerably more complex and required considerably more labor than typical farming practices in the West, a long history of which resulted in a culture of persistence. (Which might explain just why Asian public schools are way tougher.)
I'm not sure you can solve the problem if you can't trust the teachers. In Rob Gifford's "China Road", there is a story of a chinese girl who had her identity stolen by a corrupt teacher. She was told she failed a school entrance exam when in truth she passed - the teacher helped another student from a wealthier family use her identity to get admitted to a school.
Or weigh your upvote power with your karma.
Apparently we as a group are ENFJ! That's the current result for news.ycombinator.com.
Free Dr Pepper Site Down (see the PHP)
I've often wondered about this issue in regards to tax code. Does a massive, labyrinthine system encourage legislators to add still more layers of complexity?
Do we really need another social news site?

1) The market is saturated with well funded companies doing the same thing

2) Theres nothing significantly wrong with Digg/reddit

3) You need a large audience for it to be useful

4) The crucial early adopters that you would need have a thousand other social sites trying to get their attention

Not having seen your site that's all I can say.
Thanks, Paul. That helps.

When you ban trolls, do you ban the IP address, limit the account or delete the account all together?

Re: flagging. Does that just mark a link or comment for review by an editor, or is there an automated banning process there, too?
Indeed, I often find myself reading the comments before the article here.

It's probably a bad habit though, I suppose I should form my own opinion about the article first.