skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
MBTI is more complicated than that. Those four preferences interact to form a fuller picture of the personality type. Regardless of whether you choose to view it as informative, it certainly has more depth than a Facebook quiz. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator#Typ...

Personality is indeed a complicated thing, and MBTI respects that. It's understood that only the person in question can decide what their type is, since so much about it is below the surface of what another person can observe. It's only a tool for analyzing and understanding certain parts of your own personality that most people share, that can vary widely, and that tend to face one of two directions.

Knowing my type (INTP) has been pretty valuable to me. It's given me a clearer understanding of the preferential basis for some of my attitudes and behaviors, and it helped me accept my introversion as a natural part of who I am. Looking at the previous HN poll (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204240), there's a strong presence here of types that are uncommon in the general population. At the very least, that correlation is pretty interesting.
Thanks for the feedback. Accurate assessment. This is definitely still too early to use for most people. We're not really trying to push the beta, we're just looking for dedicated users to help give us great feedback.
I would expect scientists to lean more toward a system based on a notion of natural rights, rather tha on legal technicalities, but I admit a tendency to project.

That's curious, I would expect completely the opposite. Are "natural rights" empirically observed? How would you attempt to test or falsify a natural right? Does the concept of a natural right provide any predictive power? How would the existence or non-existence of a natural right change the observed nature of the universe?

The whole concept of "natural rights" sounds suspiciously like moral realism, which is about as anti-scientific as you can get.
While I've heard many people dismiss such personality tests, I found that the description of my role variant (INTJ, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(Role_Variant)) described me extraordinarily well. I'd be interested to hear whether other people think the same thing about their respective personality type descriptions.
I find that people persistently overestimate the worth of "traffic". "Traffic" has no value.

Intent has value. To what extent does clicking on the Google logo demonstrate intent for a commercial transaction? I'm guessing "close to zero". Yay, your bar code site got 100,000 viewers who are not in the market for bar code solutions. That and $3 will pay for my morning cup of coffee.

(To the extent there is any value, it is leveraging the momentary and fickle attention of the Internet mayflies to get links, which will have SEO value long after the few seconds of fascination have passed.)
I thought I had seen it all until I used Sybase for the first time the other day. It complained about a syntax error near INTEGER in "CREATE TABLE foo (id INTEGER)". Turns out that INTEGER is not a type it understands.

...!
Syntax file for the Go programming language (vim)
London Silver Jewelry
Reading the description of my type for the first time after eye-rolling my way through a test was a bizarre experience. Its accuracy made me suspect that there was something to it.
Managed C++ isn't really designed to bulletproof C++; it's designed to make it possible to field C++ code without allowing attackers to upload their own programs into your program's memory.

Kicking Managed C++ for not being C# is a bit of a cheap shot.
That depends on your definition of "high-value"

Hypothetically, an individual may consider a video to be high-value. Yet, if the video is pirated and if most people see the video without paying anything to the video-maker, the video-maker may stop making these videos.

Now, from a monetary perspective, your comment may make sense. Because of piracy, the video-maker did not make a lot of money from the video. However, I would still consider the hypothetical video to be high-value.
"Have you ever wondered why there are so many kinds of mustard but only one kind of ketchup?" It's just not TRUE.
I don't think you're misunderstanding anything at all

My opinion of what constitutes "middle of nowhere" may differ from the average San Franciscan's, but I've had the opposite estimation of costs that jedberg did. That is, EC2 was 20% more expensive than operating ones own hardware in a South Bay datacenter for a year.

This would have been about a year ago, but, IIRC, including operating costs, one would break even at around 10 months of unreserved EC2. Pricing has certainly changed in the meantime, so 30% in the other direction is well within the realm of possibility.

Back then, it cost about $3 per year per watt. Now it's pushing $4. The trick is, in the case of ones own hardware, one usually pays for the available capacity, not just what one uses. On a 500W server, that's $2k annually.

That's the flexibility that AWS offers: one doesn't pay for the operating capacity, only the use. It would seem, however, that one pays for the hardware up front either way.

The great increase in flexibility of operating ones own hardware is not suffering from only ordering off an abbreviated menu. Germane to the OP's question, I have never found any virtual or dedicated server offerings come close (say, a factor of 10) to the I/O performance of something custom configured/assembled (even from inexpensive, commodity blocks). Whether this constitutes a problem is subject to interpretation

In general, I remain skeptical that there exists in The Cloud cheap-enough commodity servers suited to even a majority of applications. Remember, even Google had custom hardware very early on.
I think they’re mainly dismissing their big-picture usefulness, not whether they describe you well.

You could also group people according to eye color, and tell people with blue eyes that they probably have light-colored hair, but it wouldn’t necessarily be helping them understand themselves better.

(I’m undecided about how useful these tests are. Just trying to clarify why people might dismiss them.)
Up 'til his obsession with Olive Garden
Those four preferences interact to form a fuller picture of the personality type

I don't know what this means, and to be frank, it sounds like a lot of gobbledy-gook. The whole point of categorizing is that the categories should convey some information about the thing categorized. The point I'm making here is that these personality categories don't even come close to this. The problem is that personality is an extremely complicated concept, and one that is prone to constant change. I seriously doubt that you could say something meaningful about a subject's personality with 10 axes, let alone four.

To illustrate this, ask yourself two basic questions of these test results:

1) Are the conditions and results repeatable?
2) Can you use them to make any meaningful prediction of behavior?

My contention is that the answer to each is a resounding "No", and hence the results are essentially useless.
using my iphone right now. I would love an app that is able to sync with microsoft project. Anyone have something for this?
interesting background. as a history article it starts to get good.

terrible "news" article, though. nothing interesting in the statements it makes or the conclusions it draws:

> """Because young people develop different skills incrementally, rather than all at once, Professor Steinberg says, it makes sense to dole out rights and responsibilities incrementally. Maybe competent voting is different from competent driving, which is different from competent drinking.

> """"“Ask any parent you know,” Mr. Steinberg said, “they’ll tell you how confused they are that their kids are so smart in some ways, but still do such stupid, stupid things.”""""
A notebook. I have a 8.5 x 11 notebook that suits my big handwriting. I use 1 page a day.

EDIT: Moleskines are too expensive for me.
It's too bad they're on the East Coast, since I don't believe there exists such a fund here in Silicon Valley, perhaps due to the high concentration of "traditional" VCs.

YC's a non-starter for me, since it's nowhere near enough money to quit my "day job" (which, fortunately, is ramping up in terms of challenge quite nicely, at the moment), let alone a hardware-heavy prototype.
That's a fair analysis. Jeff Powers, co-founder of Occipital (the company that makes the #1 bar code scanning app in the iPhone app store), actually just left a comment on the article mentioning that they got a bump in sales from the Google logo.

So, while I agree that the attention was momentary and fickle (as most internet traffic is), I do still think that there is opportunity for some to turn the traffic (and the curiosity of consumers that it represents) into intent, and then into value.
Sorted results of that poll (as of 9:30 PM EST 11/15/09):

INTP - 207
INTJ - 188
ENTP - 76
ENTJ - 57
INFP - 41
ENFP - 30
INFJ - 27
ENFJ - 16
ISTP - 12
ESTJ - 11
ISTJ - 11
ESTP - 4
ESFJ - 3
ESFP - 2
ISFJ - 2
ISFP - 2
Hah. You got more than 0 and less than 1000 from me.
Not to belabor the point here, but I think you're falling for the old horoscope trick. These categories are so broad, and the concept of personality so amorphous, that you would probably find that most of them describe you "extraordinarily well".
Their homepage has huge distribution potential for all of their initiatives..

I find myself wondering how many copies of Chrome get downloaded from the Google homepage as well...
Nose, face, cut, spite: Blocking Google
Working link: http://www.transcapitalist.com/transcapitalist/2009/11/15/ra...
You're right, I don't think it's a fair trade -- I'm not going to pay money to beta test your admittedly unstable, rough-hewn software.

I'm not telling you this to be offensive. I'm doing so because it's clear you're alienating people who would both test and evangelize, and I think that's an unfortunate waste for a product I think has great potential (but is much, much too veiled in secrecy and a general lack of public information).

If you think the opinion isn't valuable, you're also just as free to ignore it as you see fit (... but given that I've contributed patches to Cappuccino in the past, I'm pretty surprised you don't think I'm in your 'target audience' just because I'm not excited to pay $20 AND test your software for free.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark

"Where a trademark is used generically, a trademark owner may need to take special proactive measures to retain exclusive rights to the trademark. Xerox corporation was able to generally prevent the genericide of its core trademark through an extensive public relations campaign advising consumers to "photocopy" instead of "xerox" documents."
Congrats you guys on launching the beta. I've been following Cappuccino for a while and, while I'm still on the fence about it as a developer, it is certainly an impressive technical feat.
I have done that. Very rarely, but when it happens it's like the rain stops, the clouds part and the sun illuminates the countryside with a fresh spring warmth.

And then there are days I've hacked through some muddy recursive reference problem in a few lines of code, just knowing the solution should be obvious but not seeing it.

The good moments make me happy to program; the bad ones make me think about becoming a lumberjack instead.
The Wikipedia link I provided describes preference interaction in depth.

It seems you're saying that a categorization system that doesn't describe its subjects in complete, full, everlasting detail is worthless. I'd have to disagree.

Look at the poll right now, or its predecessor. INTP has a higher tally than all the other types, which is particularly interesting considering its relative rarity in the general population. You could therefore conclude that an INTP is more likely to vote in a poll on HN than, say, an ISFJ. That's information. Useless information perhaps, but information nonetheless. If MBTI didn't actually indicate anything, then the tallies would more closely fit the type distribution in the general population.

Your concerns about the test's reliability are valid, but any attempt to categorize something that we don't completely understand is going to have its inconsistencies. It's a far leap from there to useless.
I up voted for your anti-herd thought. Even if it is a bit invidious for those that find value in it.

The Myers-Briggs typology based on Carl Gustav Jung's work, is in my opinion, an accurate and useful tool for generalizing intelligence types.

You are correct, in contending, that quantifying the psychic whole of a person to an absolute degree is absurd because the psyche of a person is constantly evolving. The MBTI type only seems to shift in a minor way, though, despite gnostic shifts in the psyche.

I can account for this. I was typed as an INTJ early in life when I mostly just built stuff, didn't socialize much, and sandboxed in my own mind; throughout life I've experienced many things and people that would be considered "outside" the profile of an INTJ. Those experiences didn't change my typing, they only made it more potent.

Instead of a socially inept introvert, I became a socially adept introvert. Instead of being intellectually rigid and intransigent, I became intellectually focused and discerning. My type hasn't changed at all, despite traveling through India, experimenting with psycho-active drugs, and working for soul crushing corporations.

I'm supporting your statement that it isn't necessary, because it isn't. At all. However, is it useful? Fun even? Yeah. It is.

I view Astrology in a similar light. Your "sun sign" is just a "blueprint" upon which your living of life molds and evolves (another discussion though).
Shrink your JavaScript with the Google Compiler Rails Plugin
Take a look at piston.

http://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/wiki/Home
It seems you're saying that a categorization system that doesn't describe its subjects in complete, full, everlasting detail is worthless.

No, what I'm saying is that a categorization system that doesn't say much of anything about its subjects is useless.

INTP has a higher tally than all the other types, which is particularly interesting considering its relative rarity in the general population. You could therefore conclude that an INTP is more likely to vote in a poll on HN than, say, an ISFJ. That's information.

You're using INTP in conjunction with a hacker news poll to draw a conclusion here; not INTP itself. The reason for this is that it's not possible to draw any meaningful conclusion from the INTP result itself. And even this conclusion is very vague: what does it tell you exactly that the incidence of scoring INTP is higher on HN than the general population? What prediction can you make from this fact?
microsoft onenote. if you havent played around with it i strongly encourage you to. imagine word with tabbed documents contained in dozens of precategorized folders of your making with a seamless interface to engage in free form note taking (clipping, drawing etc).
Ask HN: Why do we make soldiers hold mine detectors?
Hey .mil...

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=remote+control+metal%20detector
Social Map of #asw3 Hashtag - Atlanta Startup Weekend 3
I don't think those are private servers, and they are fairly poor on the storage/$ scale. But $25/year is a lower entry point then most, and if it is enough then good.
"Entertainment Shopping" sites rake it in, scam-style
You'd want it if you were going to leave it in a location with WiFi. Like when I use this (or a Mac tablet, if it's out sooner) to replace the aging 12" Powerbook G4 that my wife and I use to surf the net while we watch TV. It sits on my coffee table, in my house, where I've always got WiFi. It's been in that same room for all but about 10 hours of the last ~500 hours of its life.
Of course it describes you extraordinarily well you Mastermind, you!
Have you actually read the descriptions? They are concrete and specific. They don't leave much room for overlap. For example, compare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENTP#ENTP_characteristics and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENTJ#ENTJ_characteristics
Been playing around with Drew Conway's scripts he demo'd at the bay area R meetup at linkedin last week - saw it here: http://www.meetup.com/R-Users/calendar/11202074/

Files to do this yourself are here: http://www.meetup.com/R-Users/files/

Information on the libraries:
Igraph - http://igraph.sourceforge.net/documentation.html
twitteR - http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/twitteR/index.html
ggplot2 - http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/

Installation (for OS X):

- Install latest Mac OS X R build 2.10 - http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/
- Install latest tcltk - http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/tools/
- In R, execute: install.packages("igraph"); install.packages("twitteR"); install.packages("ggplot2");

Have at :) Beware the API limit.

Oh, the MS zoomable thing: http://seadragon.com/view/fvf
I asked "Are you a computer?", it said "I am a computer". Not particularly clever.
I down-voted it for poor punctuation.
Wow, the pattern seems to be, in decreasing order, NT, then NF, then ST, then SF. That by itself isn't surprising given the nature of HN, but what is surprising is that each of the 4 groups are grouped off perfectly. I wonder if it'll be the same this time around (my guess is no because it was probably a coincidence). Isn't there a name for the psychological bias where the results get screwed around if you know in advance what it should be?
Looking at the stats, we had at least 1000 extra new users for RedLaser on that day as a result (even though it can't scan that format).

I am going to assume that the overwhelming majority went for the free trial version, rather than the one which costs a whole $1.99. They are not going to convert, because they don't need a bar code reader and, even if they did, they don't need RedLaser. But supposing, fairly generously, that 5% of them converted, that would pay for about one hour of engineering time. I suppose that pays for you Tweeting about it or taking notice of it on your blog, but not much more than that.
I know you're probably joking, but for the record: Greenland was marginally more livable during the medieval warm period, but even so farming and ranching were only barely viable and the Norse settlers never ventured very far north or inland. The... very optimistic name "Greenland" (directly translated from Old Norse) was chosen by Erik the Red because "people would be eager to go there if it had a good name", proving that even Vikings cared about marketing and branding.

The vast bulk of the ice sheets predate human civilization and weathered the warm period comfortably; the modern melting situation isn't really comparable.
Social map of the #asw3 hashtag: http://seadragon.com/view/fvf
Obligatory references on the subject of the unvalidated Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®:

http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator#Cri...

http://www.psychometric-success.com/personality-tests/person...

"Overall, the review committee concluded that the MBTI has not demonstrated adequate validity although its popularity and use has been steadily increasing. The National Academy of Sciences review committee concluded that: ‘at this time, there is not sufficient, well-designed research to justify the use of the MBTI in career counseling programs’, the very thing that it is most often used for."

http://www.indiana.edu/~jobtalk/HRMWebsite/hrm/articles/deve...

http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Personality-Testing-Miseducate-Mi...

I found my type to be dead on accurate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect

http://www.skepdic.com/forer.html
Yes, I have read on this particular test in the past. And I see a lot of room for people of many different personality types to believe that they fall into a large number of the categories, especially if they have been presented with their category membership following a seemingly scientific test.
Computer-aided crash?
not unexpected results for hn but the NT groups are supposed to be the least common in the general population less than 4% if I recall.
They find new data. There's an industry that produces it, and it's quite innovative in finding new sources.
Automated Social Bookmarking Software
I was going to implement something like this a few years ago, then Firebug got its network stats page, and safari/chrome/webkit have it too. I was using bootchart ( http://www.bootchart.org/ ) for inspiration, but found out I didn't actually need an image of the loading once I could get what I needed from the browser's developer extensions, and I never ended up scratching that itch.
What it tells me is that most HN readers are introverts who like solving abstract problems, but that's news to no one.

A categorization system that could make accurate predictions about how a person may act or be or feel would be far more complete than MBTI. I think we agree on that. But I don't think that's what MBTI claims to be. What I've gotten from it is an improved vocabulary for describing my personality in general. My type didn't tell me much I didn't already know. What it did tell me was that my lack of meatspace organizational skills and my well-structured code (or meticulously organized music library) may share a source in my preference for introverted, abstract thinking. Which is to say, it highlighted an aspect of myself of which I was dimly aware and caused me to relate it to the way I behave.

Ultimately MBTI is a personal tool for limited reflection. Any larger conclusions about a population should be avoided or qualified with "generally speaking."
On Mathematical Diseases
Except that the theory suggests that a high prevalence of INTP / INTJ types on a forum dedicated to intellectual curiosity and rational discourse is exactly what you'd expect.

Couple that with the mentioned fact that the entire four set of rational types is less than ten percent of the general population and I can't see how you couldn't find that just a little indicative that perhaps they're onto something.
well_said <<QUOTE

Metaprogramming allows you to cut down on boilerplate code, making your programs shorter, easier to write, easier to read, and easier to test. Also, it reduces the impact of changes.

QUOTE

...and your JSON grab bag technique would make a nice blog post.
Reading Files in Clojure
Canadian natural disaster sparked 'Big Freeze' in Europe 12,800 years ago
The Problem with Twitter Lists
I use three tools postits(quick idea), notebook(Meetings, todo, discussions,work,thoughts) and Evernote(everything on-line,ideas,bookmarks...).
On the bright side, at least you don't have to deal with a language that includes functions such as mysql_escape_string(), mysql_real_escape_string(), and mysql_no_really_i_mean_it_this_time_escape_string().
Poll: What are the zodiac signs of HN?
With reference to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722 and the large amount of discussion as to how these indicators are little more useful or indicative of anything than a zodiac sign, and in the spirit of testing that theory;
Aries
Taurus
Scorpio
Sagittarius
Capricorn
Aquarius
Pisces
I was mildly surprised about that as well. And mildly pleased to find myself INTJ.
I use omnifocus for task tracking. I used rememberthemilk for awhile, but the lack of projects/taskgroups pushed me over the edge. Omnifocus has enough features to make me want to poke my eye out, but they've done a decent job at keeping the interface clean. I've even been using it for issue tracking lately.

For actual stuff organization, I throw things in random bins and photograph/track them in Evernote (i.e. your scissors are in Bin J). I've tried the whole "keep related things in related bins" thing, but the space/time complexity to resize the various bins when they get full is way beyond polynomial time. Whereas sorting and tracking randomly has O(1) lookup and O(n) resize (and resizes are rarely necessary).