skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The other surprising thing about trolls is that they tend to come from very high-achieving and wealthy families."

Is it really that much surprising? Trolling would fit well with the stereotype of "spoiled rich kids". No offense meant.
I prefer real attention and praise to a number.
I can understand the Firefox extension as being something laudable, sure. But an HTTP API? That seems kind of random, given that the URL shorteners work with 30x HTTP responses. I mean, you just need to request the short URL and read out the Location header of the 30x response. It seems... convoluted to go via an additional server.
This is so hilarious that it feels wrong to nitpick it. But in the interests of science, this survey technique:

A scan of Twitter reveals a lot more people talking about actually using Match.com than Plentyoffish...

... is like a freshman-class exercise in Spot The Sample Bias. Twitter users are hardly a representative sample of the online population, let alone the population at large.
Add a contact page or detail (other than twitter). How would people contact you if they want to?

P.S: I was looking to contact you for a collaboration (like possible exchange of data). I didn't find any details on your profile too.
Mental illness is a "hacker's topic" because it requires mental "hacking" in order to flourish in spite of it, and I'd imagine there's a large number of successful "mind-hackers" on this forum.
This might be the most criminally simplistic, naive thing I've read on HN this month. Get started, suck it up, and know thyself. Wow. Thanks. I never thought about doing something instead of not doing something. That's profound!
Interesting analysis, though it became a hit outrageous at the end. With the degree of fakeness he is proposing, how is it possible that the degradation of content quality went unnoticed? And A.viary?

I'm not one to hate on awesome and successful startupa, we should also consider this. POF doesn't have the members it says. POF had growth, decent size. Publicise startup story and millions in income, millions in members. Press written, and your numbers jump.

Just like the situation with a video on YouTube. It wasn't the video that made it have high view counts. It was the video being publicised as having a huge view counts because of an exploit - and people went on the page, and the view count increased.
I love coding. I just get distracted sometimes. For example, I've had a ridiculously productive morning. It's already 11:15 and I've squashed a killer bug. But, it'd probably have been twice as productive if I weren't reading/writing on the Internets on the side.
Build a Basic Stamp supercomputer
There must be a better book for a beginner.
yes, well, coding and novel writing have opposite goals.

i'll show you. i optimized a classic for you.

lord of the rings: evil guy makes magic ring, loses it, good guys get it and he dies when they eventually destroy it.
I really question whether a fancy machine helps with productivity. Some things are obvious, like plenty of screen real estate so you can switch contexts just by flicking your eyes. But most of the tools are just gratuitous power hogs. Rational Rose, Eclipse, etc. Let's be brutally honest, modern IDEs don't do much that Energize wasn't doing perfectly well well over a decade ago, or that Emacs was doing a decade before that. I could do my job on an old SparcStation 5, and I bet everyone else could too.
Its construction is already in-progress. :-)
I still have that in my downloads folder. Hopefully we see a shift that brings the focus back to game play and away from vertex crunching/pixel pushing. If i wanted realism I'd go outside. I'm sure that's heresy in the halls of nVidia.
A) The search appears to be jQuery driven and just does a text search of the records that already appear on the page. This won't scale

B) I can't do a useful search: "Ruby developers with an hourly rate under $150 with over 2 years of experience"

C) You need standardization of the rate format to make it useful/searchable. Dollar per hour or something similar.

D) The technologies list is weird and kind of useless. I'm an expert in "friendster"? You either need a really comprehensive list of programming languages, technologies, APIs/Frameworks, etc... or you need an auto-suggesting free-input field basically like tags.

E) As other people have mentioned you can register with an e-mail of "a" and no password. Basic input validation is usually a given...

I'm not trying to knock your effort, but basically you're shoving all your DB records on a page, and using a jQuery plugin to search them. This might be a nice way to demo how jQuery works, but there's not much there, and you'll have usability and scaling issues very very soon.

You're also missing basic stuff like input validation, informative information, useful search, etc...

If you're just learning some web site design and development, then this is a great first site. However, it's not really a startup/web-app worth reviewing here at HN (imho). There's no business model, the functionality that exists is sparse and not really polished, there's nothing here that couldn't be replicated in an hour or two by someone else. The "find a coder" space is already served by a large number of sites that have a much more mature feature set and large existing user base. What is the new thing you're doing to compete?
Windows Senior Vice President Steve Sinofsky...

What do you expect from a guys with a title four words long? snicker
Taking the fun out of Rickrolling since 2008.
You knowingly drove around for two days without brakes? The level of risk you put everyone else on the road and children crossing the street/etc... is amazing. You should be in jail.
No offense meant.

None taken. It's true.
Any idea on specific numbers?
I'm mildly depressive. Mental issues are very common among smarter people. Meaning: you're quite normal. :-)

* see a psychiatrist and possibly get on a drug. Can be very helpful.

* see a therapist

* start a regular exercise program and stick with it. Huge benefit there.

* limit carb intake, especially simple carbs.
Qooxdoo 0.8.1 and Playground
I know nothing about hypergraphia, but I question the assumption that your desire to write could be "channeled" into coding. I don't think it's necessarily true that two superficially similar activities are really scratching the same psychological itch.

When I had a blog, I'd inevitably find myself posting inappropriate personal confessions on it... hence the reason I do not have a blog. I've ruined relationships with brutally honest emails.

This makes me suspect that your itch is not writing per se but self-revelation. Have you tried taking up painting or sculpture or some other art form as a hobby, so that you can express your feelings in a way that gives you more plausible deniability, so to speak?

Or learn a conlang and make your inappropriate personal confessions in a language that only ten or twenty other people in the world can read fluently. :-/
You see, this stupid question is designed to be rightly answered by someone who has carefully crafted an answer that turn some apparent weakness into a perceived strength.

Wrong. That's precisely the kind of answer it's meant to weed out. The question is supposed to show your ability for reflection on your faults (because everybody has them), and let you explain how you are going about working on them.

If you take it seriously, you can get quite deep and philosophical with that question, demonstrating your ability to express yourself, and discussing the relative merits of someone looking to fill the position.

Granted, the phrasing is very cliche, so it might be better to ask something along the lines "in the near future, how would you like to have improved yourself?".
I rarely if ever agree with the WSJ, but here's an example of where I think they've mostly got everything right. Ayn Rand was naive but did have a point: innovation happens when you leave the innovators the hell alone and let them invent. Washington is indeed fooling with that formula.
No. A slow machine is just aggravating. If I have to wait very long for a compile, the IDE, anything, there's a good chance I am going to get distracted and do something else. I'll typically have tons of things open at once, already slowing things down a bit; having old hardware is just too much on top.

It is important to check for performance on slow machines, but that can be done on a virtual machine.
How did you get into meditation? What kind of meditation do you practice?
I always respond to this one by saying "my greatest weakness is that I don't know my greatest weakness".
A real full-size keyboard with tactile feedback.
You can emulate a slow connection using something like YSlow. http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Intentionally slowing down development time just doesn't seem like the correct approach to me.
> Yahoo/Microsoft

I'm not sure I agree with you, but anyway, that deal fell through because of regulation. But observing that one aspect of regulation works, is hardly an argument that deregulation is bad.

> "cost of going public"

Other comments in this thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406433) suggests that going public means slightly more than digitizing documents. No SAAS, no IM, no iTunes, more lawyers, more accountants. But, arguing "regulation is not hurting that much" is hardly an argument that deregulation is hurting more.
This is true, and that's encouraging.

In the meantime, I may just grab it for win32, see if it plays OK under Wine, and if not use it on a VMware image of XP.
I am speculating; Inevitably posting confessions and trolling seem to involve a need for attention perhaps? This may be a result of your earnest interest in fitting into your peer group at an earlier age?
photoshop?
Laptops seem to be the weak point of a lot of things, and it makes sense: nonstandard hardware, heavy use (movement), batteries, suspend...

In the end, it's all dependent on your hardware. Some laptops work well with linux, some do not. Some have buggy ACPI, some do not. Forex: my laptop works great with suspend and hibernate. My wireless card has OSS drivers. Not all laptops do.
A Haven for User Data
I agree with your vision of mental illness as a "hacker's topic" if you think of hackers as a high ratio community. I don’t agree to the fact that it requires "Hacking" to deal with this very serious issue. Hacking is just a way to alleviate effect of it on the daily basis.

Again your calling a debate on a subject most people don’t even understand on a public forum, I don’t think this is productive to people with real issues. I have been there I know what I’ am talking about.
Insanity in the context of this quote is not mental disease.
There's also longurl.org - doing the same sort of thing.
Exactly. Iff you understand tech, it it obvious what to do in those cases. If you don't it is much like magic. You don't have a sensible baseline of how things should behave. So you make assumptions, and are occasionally wrong.
Windows job is to occupy about 128MB of RAM sitting in an invisible VMWare window, assisting Linux and OSX users at launching Microsoft Word to prepare that stupid TPS report every Friday.
If your browser doesn't prompt you for username and password, you can supply them in the address bar:

http://username:password@website.com/

So, in this case:

http://theinfo.org:1729kennedy@infochimp.info/ics/data/arch/...
Great overview of two ideas that wouldn't have gone anywhere unless the founders got started somewhere. Good motiviation!
Friedman Would Be Roiled as Chicago Disciples Rue Repudiation
Or, when using communication mediums where length isn't an issue, you could courteously give your readers a decent url:

http://decenturl.com/

e.g., http://news.ycombinator.decenturl.com/long-urls-please

And a tidbit for the sadistic: http://hugeurl.com/
Quite possibly a mild case of AS. I was socially awkward as a kid, most of my friends in high school were IM/online friends, and I didn't have a serious girlfriend until after college. I'm "class of 23" although that could have been earlier if I were an unscrupulous person.

I had a social growth spurt recently (girlfriend dumped me, health problems went away, much better job, developed the will to learn social skills previously neglected) which has been wonderful, but also a huge spiritual challenge for reasons that are too personal to get into.
Bingo! That is why for the past few years every laptop I have bought has OS X on it. The hardware works, in particular sleep suspend. Close the lid and it goes to sleep, open the lid and it wakes up in moments, not thirty seconds. On the desktop I run Linux, but for a laptop it is all OS X. Everything I do is c/c++, unix, or web related so working in OS X doesn't matter.
Frodo survived.

It was Gollum that died. I'm not sure anyone considers him a "good guy".
what are you talking about? Japanese cars have the most intuitive user interface on the market. Its the U.S. cars that you have no idea where everything is.
I totally agree - and in fact I think this is one of the best interview questions. In my experience, the people who identify and actively work on their weaknesses are the most likely to succeed.

That said, I might rephrase the question to be something like "What new things would you like to learn, and how are you going about learning them?"
No, the patent system is there to make innovations available to everyone.
Only after the patent expired.
Wait is this an actual analysis or a joke? I'm not familiar with the blog.
I've been using Twitter as part of my blog and have started replacing the href of links with the expanded link. So if you go to my blog or follow me on twitter the links look the same but if you hover on a link the status bar shows the end link.

I do this on the server side, with Python code I mentioned http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406608 but it is possible to do it client side as well with something like http://remysharp.com/tinyurlapi
> Laptops seem to be Windows' week point with regards to drivers

I disagree. I had the exact same experience with a 2002 IBM ThinkStation. Intel Chipset - as standard as anything comes. Ubuntu worked out of the box, Windows had nothing. It booted in 640x480 (IIRC, maybe it was 800x600) for crying out loud.
i am ever so pleased that you enjoyed my mundane utterance.

and check out that downvoting! apparently this place is rife with crazies. butthurt ones...
A Swedish Commercial featuring the Tesla Roadster
Socialise with like-minded people - I play darts a lot with friends, its a mildly obsessive game, but also a social one.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407608
Project Gutenberg Releases Mobile eBooks
likely a bit diff from the core web app focus on HN, but we are a startup online retail site, launched in late September, smack dab in the midst of the big meltdown and fared pretty well in the 4th quarter. December provides a natural lift for retail, so Jan numbers will be very interesting but overall we did much better then projected and seem to be gaining decent traction in our niche: www.hoodiepeople.com
Perhaps it would be wise of Apple to introduce versions into the App Store. I think using private APIs should be fine, but maybe after an update the developer should have to go in and select that it works with the new version.

This is what Mozilla does for plugins and it works pretty well.
Scott Adams Blog: Warren Buffett and You
Mp3Coast Music Search Engine For Direct Download
Oracle speaks about the state of the economy.
Good point - what I've done is allow you to piggyback more than one lookup onto a single request. so the plugin will batch them in groups of 4. does that make sense?
the "he" is in reference to the singular evil guy, maker of the ring, who dies. the "they" reference the plural good guys, who do not.

clearly, i forgot to add comments
PHP REST SQL: A HTTP REST interface to MySQL
Who was Ponzi -- what the heck was his scheme?
Cousin?
off the main topic but I'd love to stock some gamer hoodies on our retail site, ping me if you'd like to partner or have any leads (hasan {at} hoodiepeople.com)
Didn't Grim Fandango use lua?

EDIT: link: http://www.grimfandango.net/?page=articles&pagenumber=2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangling_modifier
Yep - looks very similar to what I've done, I hadn't seen it until a few days ago. We could do with even more similar services - to balance out the hundreds of url shrinking services.
What are peoples thoughts over having a http restful interface to the database instead of a traditional ORM?

I'm considering this approach in a future project, returning data as json/serialized php
Oh don't even get me started on my Amazon "to-read" list. My "saved for later" shopping cart list is many pages long. If I buy half the books saved in the shopping cart, Amazon will have a bumper quarter.
Oracle's biggest risk is that its customers simply cease to exist. How much was Bear Stearn's site licence worth? Or Lehman's?
Has Stagnating Innovation Led To This Economic Crisis?
This guy is 4 times smarter than you. You should definitely check out his resume and his work. And perhaps if you're lucky, have a conversation with him to actually know how smart he is.
By "hacking", I mean using medication, therapy, cognitive-behavioral approaches, meditation, etc. to deal with the mind's inefficiencies. I don't mean the narrower sense, which is coding.

People post neuro articles to this site all the time. I'm not going to get into the debate over what mind is, but the brain is essentially a computer.
This is completely nuts.
I have had a pretty serious depression that lasted for around two years, and am still trying to get out of it. I've noticed that depression, and probably other mental states, is something you don't see in other people unless you have had similar experiences yourself. Now I can see that friends of mine have gone through a depression by the cues they have left, but I would never have noticed this before - if you haven't been there yourself you won't see it.

I'm pretty sure that mental problems of one sort or another are much more common than you would expect, but it's one of those things that it is still a taboo, so you never know how widespread it is. So you should know that you aren't alone at all. Almost everyone has to go through one or more major crises in their life.

As to how to move on I think you're on the right track - accept your mental state and whatever baggage you have and start working with it. Once you accept that you are what you are and that this is OK you are halfway there. Next make sure you have friends or family you can talk to. They'll tell you that they love you no matter what, and that if you were different you wouldn't be you.

Accepting who you are is much harder for you than it is for the people around you. Judging by your post it looks like you're well on the way to acceptance of yourself. I'm sure you'll be OK.

I'm posting this under a single serving account made for this purpose because I'm a regular cotributor here and don't need to have my personal life and problems all out in the open, but if you want to contact me let me know in the comments and I'll reply by mail.
Agreed, I've actually had more trouble with Ubuntu quirks on my System76 laptop than I did on my old Vaio.
Lengthening Out URLs
As with any good conspiracy theory, there are chunks of truth in there. There are many people doing this type of activity on smaller scale.
I toss books out on their ear* if I don't get to them in 2 months or so. And it's the book's fault, not mine.

Prioritize. If the stack was smaller and less intimidating perhaps you'd read more of it than you are reading now.

* - They go to the library whether I purchased or borrowed them: http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/6f0fz/comments/c03nzlo
You're right, my mistake. I get the games using the two languages confused -- both are common choices for game scripting. The same logic applies, though.

(Heh... looks like Lua's also used to drive World of Warcraft. Civilization 4 uses Python, as does Battlefield 2.)
Well, on the server you're still starting N requests based on my batch request. I guess combined with caching that can make sense, yes. Even so, I'd probably want to implement my own [1] when setting up my own web app for reliability/trust reasons, and because of same-origin restrictions on client-side scripting. (XHR does support not following redirects, but it's kind of pointless with same-origin policy)

[1] I did exactly that for http://tweetoftheyear.com/ in clojure:

(defn lookup-redirect [url]
(try
(let
[response (http-client/url-do url "HEAD" {:follow-redirect false})]
(when (#{301 302 303 307} (:return-code response))
(first (get (:header response) "Location"))))
(catch java.lang.Throwable t nil)))
You've already won more than half the battle. You seem to have made a very studied and pragmatic analysis of yourself and you've shared that with your peers. That is a lot more than most people will ever do and it's certainly a big part of learning to control the the personal quirks which bother you. But you seem to have done that already to a large degree and that's commendable. It's almost the new year and I'm starting to think of my own goals for 2009 - your post makes me start to think of some things of my own which I'd like to change. Thank you for writing this post.
Comments about things that are universally bad are universally bad, and should be avoided like the plague.

I've got some good business books around here. Most of the ones that are wretched are self-help books with a little business language sprinkled on top to cover the flavor.
I thought so, and I do cache everything nicely in memcache and db.

Also it's hard or maybe even impossible? to reliably fetch arbitrary short url using javascript - exposing it as a simple json api makes this easy.
great idea. Installed :)
Hobo - the web application builder for Rails
It's also worth looking at the DBSlayer rest-ish interface to MySQL. It was written by and is being used by NYTimes engineers: http://code.nytimes.com/projects/dbslayer
I'm curious about the carb limitation - what is wrong with sugars?
Can you just say, "I have plenty of weaknesses, and I'll be happy to tell you about some, but I don't believe I have any that will prevent me from doing this job."
http://www.json.org/json_parse.js

// This is a function that can parse a JSON text, producing a JavaScript

// data structure. It is a simple, recursive descent parser. It does not use

// eval or regular expressions, so it can be used as a model for implementing

// a JSON parser in other languages.
nice - I've been meaning to learn a bit of clojure. I hear your point on wanting to set up your own - and as you've shown it is easy to do.
Yeah, it's only possible on the same hostname as the page you're on, which limits the usefulness and makes the server-side lookup necessary. The JSON solution will only work via a foreign host with a <script> tag as far as I know, which again is something of a trust issue.
I identify my weaknessess and actively work on them, but I would never answer this question honestly, because I can't assume that the questioner is someone as enlightened as you.
Rebuilding SvN in 18 minutes
nice idea and thanks for including an API.

sort of related, I wrote a Greasemonkey script to automatically create bit.ly urls as you type a Twitter Tweet. Does it on the fly. Uses the bit.ly API. Check it out at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/39042
Heal depressed acne scars natural
Not ment as a comment on the product, just enjoyed watching this timelapse view of the site being reconstructed.
Ruby on Rails Documentation (formatted for the iPhone)