skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you think the causation proceeds from:

believes in ESP -> reproducibly performs slightly above chance when doing ESP tasks

doesn't believe in ESP -> reproducibly performs slightly below chance (which should be impossible if the experiment is designed properly)

on the basis of some correlation, then you're wrong. A rational person would consider the other direction to be more likely.

Clearly having been told that you perform slightly better than chance when gamely trying to be psychic, would incline a person to profess more belief in ESP. But some individuals will always experience slightly above or below mean (since variance isn't 0).

What's funny is that people who believe in ESP because they feel they personally have experienced too many mystical things to accept as coincidence, mostly just miscalculate the odds of "things like that" happening to them. There are 10^15 (just a guess) possible coincidences that you'd notice and claim as noteworthy (i.e. odds of that happening are just 1 in a billion!), over your life, and most people don't appreciate the facility we have for recognizing things that align between e.g. our thoughts and others' in the same environment, our dreams and the possible events of our everyday life, our dreams and others' dreams, etc.

Of course, 1 in N people really are exposed to 1 in N better than chance past evidence of ESP. The beautiful thing is, if they're honest and firewall off those past coincidences, and perform new experiments without bias, they're almost certain to disillusion themselves. But people who have a belief tend to cherish and protect it.

And that's really all there is to belief in ESP.
I wonder if a more specific question, like, which language do you use the most on a weekly basis might produce more meaningful results. I get the sense that cross-language applications are becoming ever-more common.

We have code in C++, Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, Javascript and PHP, but there's a high concentration around the first three.
Planning on going to this one, thank you :-)
Ah, looks like I have some Rails 3 learnin' to do! Thanks! :)
The table at 20:55 UTC, sorted by points:

Javascript	147 points
Python	116 points
Ruby	81 points
C	72 points
Java	71 points
PHP	64 points
C++	44 points
C#	37 points
Perl	27 points
Clojure	26 points
Haskell	18 points
Lisp	18 points
Scheme	16 points
Erlang	11 points
Lua	7 points
Ocaml	7 points
Coldfusion	2 points
Go	2 points
Arc	1 point
Fortran	1 point
Smalltalk	1 point
D	0 points
Other	43 points

Mostly as I expected, but a couple of things surprise me: I thought perl would be closer to Python and PHP; I didn't think C# would get nearly so many votes; and I would never have guessed that Clojure would make the top 10.

I'm relieved to see that C narrowly beat Java for 4th place, but I'm a bit disappointed by the performance of Scheme, Erlang, and Arc -- even though I don't use them myself, I figured that more people here would.
The issue is that if a phenomenon is indescribable through either words or math then how can we collect any independently verifiable data? It would be impossible to create any laws governing such a phenomenon, because we would never be able to see whether or not the laws fit the past data and were capable of predicting the future.
Other: Standard ML
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation."

I certainly don't say things on HN that I wouldn't say in a face to face conversation, but that's because I'm honest offline as well as on (read: not civil). It can get me into trouble, but I sure as hell am not going to stop saying what I think because of downvotes (on HN) or in the name of good manners (IRL).
Honesty and politeness are generally orthogonal.
Screencasts seem to me like they are the right tool for explaining standard paths through complex user interfaces. This is especially true of poorly documented and/or very open ended interfaces (e.g., in my case, Emacs or Photoshop). (For example, I only realised that I could open a remote MySQL prompt through SQL-mode, using TRAMP, after watching a screencast.) That said, in the same way that people argue that good naming practices should obviate the need for many comments, I worry that people use screencasts as a crutch to avoid implementing needed usability improvements.

I think screencasts also guarantee that your thing sort of works, which adds an air of professionalism.

That said, gripes include: hard/impossible to speed up while watching, hard/impossible to bookmark a specific spot, hard/impossible to skip over bits that you already know, requires headphones/speakers/video, often hard to see what's going on, and easily goes out of date.
I've heard this phenomenon mentioned many times, but I've never seen any convincing explanation for why this happens. When you phone a big company, do they look you up on crunchbase to see who invested in you? Do they simply respond more to startups which have had the large amount of media attention which comes with being funded by a high profile VC? Do they have their arms twisted behind the scenes by said high profile VCs? All of the above?

I'm sure this is something you've thought about, so I'd love to hear what explanations you've come up with.
What is an example of that?
I am over 50 and you don't speak for me. I want tech and startup news and nothing else. There are many other places I can go for poltics, arts and culture on the web.

I value the HN community as a chance to network with like minded people. I sometimes feel isolated living in a rust belt state where coders and startups aren't understood and barely even tolerated.
I sure as hell am not going to stop saying what I think because of downvotes (on HN) or in the name of good manners (IRL)

Are you or are you not agreeable to following the HN guideline "Be civil"? Could you clear that up, please?
Yeah, you're right. The original intention was to make the beige almost invisible, so that it just added a subtle impression of a box bounding the text, but it isn't really working that way.

It works better on pages with images that are flush with the beige on both sides. If you indent the text, what do you do with the images? Indent them too? Maybe.
Other: assembly (M68k, ARM).
Having two ways to vote (one for agreement, the other for value) would solve this problem, but add a little more complexity.
I'm up-voting in homage to nostalgia. I still remember being giddy the first time I read Beej's network programming. Oh, innocence.
Popular belief among those lacking social grace. It is quite easy to disagree with people without being impolite about it. All it requires is a bit social intelligence and basic good manners. Being an asshole and trying to excuse it with "I'm just being honest" just makes you a far bigger asshole.
The VCs do the intro.
Iterating Your Way to Success
Charter Schools: Scholarly Investments
One example of a comment that I hoped would get an answer (I didn't care particularly whether or not it got an upvote, but it is an answer to your question) is my comment

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=967351

asking in full, "What online sources would each of you recommend as better articles on the meme concept and the strengths and weaknesses of that concept?" Alas, that comment received no answers, even though some other comments in the same thread had implied that some participants had read better sources than the submitted article that opened that thread.
No. Don't fix it if it works. On the other side if your brick-and-mortar company doesn't work then you better try something else.
Other: VB.NET (yes, really), Actionscript
I like the idea of orthogonal marking of comments, and wonder how many previous comments advocating that have been posted to the feature requests thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

(linked to from the bottom of the main page)

or posted in other threads.
Ok, but I don't measure inflation solely by wheat prices. The government puts a Fisher index on personal consumption expenditures, which include a lot of non-wheat items.

Also, I am single.
I'm assuming this is a different Erlang Day than the one I was here for, as I'm still a noob. (And on that note, how many have there been? And can we pick another language for subsequent days plz?)
Why Android Will Dominate Japan
If they truly think they're right they might just downmod using both methods. I assume a lot of people who think a comment is wrong, might also think it is stupid.
i used this last week! i was working out how best to coordinate access to a gpu (opencl) and decided on ipc - the shared memory messaging reduces overhead on the host, and we can have a bunch of processes running on different cores on the cpu all feeding to the gpu when appropriate. this was the best background on ipc i found.

(incidentally - does the above make sense? i am new to both gpus and ipc...)
By the way, the fact that there is a continued and unresolved discussion about voting based on agreement suggests that the voting feature is broken. There is a design defect in this web software, pg; please consider redesigning it! I would consider it fixed when a significant majority of users find voting intuitive and useful.
When .NET was first introduced, my natural language choice was VB.NET since I was coming from the classic ASP/VBScript world. Over the past 5-6 years, I've introduced more C# into my projects and now I've migrated mostly to C# + ASP.NET MVC -- in addition to Flex, Ruby/Rails. VB is still a useful language since everything compiles to the CLR anyway, but now that C# 3.5 is bringing more "dynamic" features it's more attractive to me. Plus, the syntax is so close to javascript and actionscript that it's a little easier to switch back-and-forth within the same project.But VB has served me well over the years.
Fuck this. Part of starting new things is to disrupt the status quo. At this point google is the status quo and they are not disrupting anything so the EtherPad guys are just douchebag sellouts.
That's a great point, but the nice thing is that you can actually detect that programatically. If a user always votes both up or down, the software can remind them of how they are supposed to vote.
Pretty much the only thing I don't like about Hacker News: the drive-by shootings. This was a serious comment, although clearly I need to expand on it.

Somehow this map has put The Blues Brothers between Frank Sinatra and The Beatles. To me that's just ridiculous, and a clear indication that their "similarity" algorithm is seriously broken.

They don't seem to explain it either. They talk about their recursive technique for starting from one point and fanning out, but they magically talk about "similarity" without giving any definition or indication of how they compute it.

Personally, I write dozens of programs every week to explore data, and I look at the result for stand-out stupidities. To me, this is one, and it says that the algorithms need to be checked.
I've been pushing for no downvoting: just upvote or flag for a while now.
I politely disagree and do not think David spread any FUD, but rather shared his opinion where other techies would see it- here on HN. Switching services not because you think one or the other is better for your needs, but only because you don't agree with the CEO's views/actions is a bit thick IMO. I might not think highly of certain things Steve Jobs does but that doesn't mean I'm switching to Windows 7..
To be fair, did Etherpad have many users outside HN users? I loved it, but was it widely used?
It's not broken, it just could be better. The same could be said for any voting system that exists today on the web. The reason why no one has quite solved it yet is because the solution is not obvious. It may very well be that the current system is an adequate approximation of a perfect voting system because a perfect voting system is too complex to implement well.
> It is quite easy to disagree with people without being impolite about it.

Maybe for you; I don't doubt its possibility, I just want to say that I find it extremely difficult to do myself.
And yet in the real world wheat prices peaked in 2008 (along with oil) and are now back to 2006 prices of ~$200/metric ton.

http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=wheat&m...

Don't base inflation on your local Safeway.
I was able to disable this in OpenDNS:

http://pstam.com/i/00130041dfa557f4a17323cbcb63d090.png

Then click apply to all networks. So you don't have to "setup every IP I might be making queries from"
Found a bug/easter egg: If you zoom all the way out and center Elton John at the top of your screen, then zoom in to the middle zoom level, you can see a map for TV shows as well.

http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/2796/tvmap.png
Orthogonal means that the two vary independently, which means I agree with what you just said. :)
My issue is in title, sure it will be read more stated that way, but the post still follows that line of pure benevolence.

"I live simply. I hate waste and excess. I have a good apartment, a good laptop, and a few other basics. But the less I own, the happier I am. The lack of possessions gives me the priceless freedom to live anywhere anytime.

Having too much money can be harmful. It throws off perspective. "

A better title would have been. "1.1 Million a year until I die THEN the remainder of my money goes to charity," would have been more clear to the situation. Instead the current title just brings a bunch of Kudos and warm fuzzies.

But, beyond the way it was communicated, Derek I give you Kudos. You are definitely disciplined to not cash out with the money upfront and go on a spending spree. That is more than what a lot of people would have done. You had a lot of decisions to make, figuring out what you really wanted, what was best for your 85 employees, what to do with the money? I hope they all turned out well for you. I hope you keep starting and building things and not lose the bug.
The specific example of 'da Bears' was a weak attempt at humor. I can't easily clarify what I'm getting at and keep this short, and I've got limited time so I'll do the best I can.

I see a lot of people using "informal" bayesian reasoning (meaning a lot of talk about priors and updating and reference to theorems but never any use of actual distributions beyond super-super-cursory examples applied to trivial situations like the boy/girl thing here or stuff like the monty hall problem).

I don't have any problem at all with bayesian analysis applied in a rigorous setting to a rigorously specified problem (like spam detection and so on).

In an informal setting I'm extremely skeptical of the uses I tend to see b/c there's no careful attempt to clearly delineate which informally-statable hypotheses are valid and which are "invalid" "meta-hypotheses" like the optimism thing.

What you've described here is a way in which someone reasonably smart would eliminate the meta hypothesis, which is fine. In general I wouldn't expect it to be feasible to take a full mental inventory, do a topological sort on your beliefs, and then apply the same procedure; most people most of the time will be running around holding partially-inconsistent beliefs (where "hold" means if you were to ask them to give an estimate of, say, what beliefs they had about what # of their beliefs were likely to wind up revealed to be significantly off in the future, or to give an estimate of what they believe about the frequency with which they'd encounter evidence leading to significant revisions of their beliefs, they'd have an answer on offer which would still have "work to do", the way the unexamined belief that "I'm too optimistic about the bears" really has work to be done).

What I'm curious about is if there's either a clearly-specifiable criteria for which types of beliefs or hypotheses are workable and which are "too meta to work", or there's some kind of theorem guaranteeing that starting out with "inconsistent" beliefs -- in the sense of "meta-hypotheses" like with da bears -- you can apply this algorithm to process evidence and over time you'll converge on beliefs that're at least more consistent than you started with.

It's hard to say much more without getting formal and I'm out of time for now; since I'm mainly concerned with informal use of "bayesian" metaphors it's not hugely critical to formalize this stuff but later I could give it a proper whack.
It certainly is. My original point still stands. Nothing is created out of nothing and quality of life is related to existence of various goods that are governed by physical and economic rules. So if some people have too much then others don't have enough.
In my case, network servers that need small-packet/high-throughput and extremely low latency (telephony stuff). Microprocessors too (AVR mostly) for various stuff.
A Brief History of Data Visualization (video)
When you say that your service, which intercepts and manipulates requests to get ad dollars, is better than their service, which does not --- for the sole reason that their service is owned by an ad company --- you are coming pretty close to objectively spreading FUD.

It's almost prima facie.
And it doesn't always come naturally to me, either. I had to learn. I would suggest this book; it's the best communication book I've ever read: http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Harmonious-Relationships-Prac...

This book is also a good read: http://www.amazon.com/Games-People-Play-Transactional-Analys...
please stop trying to do desktop things with web things...
Nah, it's all good - I've seen the trend too.
Did you have to sign up for an account, tying your DNS requests to personal information in their backend, to do it? Because Google "just works".
they'll figure this out some day.
Uh, I just went onto http://etherpad.com/ and I was able to create a new pad. Maybe Google is listening to the complaints?
I guess that is a general problem with the whole 'freemium' approach. I use a number of such products and services which I greatly enjoy, but see no reason to pay for because their free offering is more than enough for my limited needs.

Had they said pay us a few bucks or go without then perhaps I'd pay, but when they say pay us a bunch for a service you don't need just so that the service you do need remains free for everyone, it becomes a lot harder to whip out that credit card.
In response to pg's argument: assuming there is a flaw in the system, that is, assuming agreement does not correlate with quality, then downvotng would simply amplify the effect of opinion based voting, and thus marginalize quality based voting (because peopl's opinions are a stronger force).

So ideally a lot haters would vote down, and a lot of agree-ers would vote up. And it would balance it out. But this only works if we assume the right amount of people are backing a good idea.

What happens if it's an unpopular but good comment? Then allowing people to downvote would quickly suppress it without enough counteracting "I Agree" upvotes.

So upvotes can be used for more than quality indicator, but a downvote simply makes the system more volatile. If there were just an upvote and no downvote, then the novote will simply be the new downvote. Except the novote will be less volatile.
It's not like that. It's just a store where if you get lucky, you get it for a dollar, but it could take months to get lucky. A dollar store is not a gamble, other than gambling the item you bought is worth slightly more than in another store.
Screencasts are helpful for me, but only in a few settings and with one major caveat: There should be little if any transition/fade/time-lapse in the video. A discontinuity of presentation can really make it difficult to follow what is happening.

And I agree with many other folks here that a screencast should best be used for an introduction to a subject, and that it can never replace detailed documentation.
Yes, I do -- and I like 'em a lot. Although, not for everything. I love railscasts.com because of their concise and properly paced screencasts. Peepcode's, not so much. They try to cover way too much in a very short span. With that being said, I don't see them as a replacement for documention (for obvious reasons), but sometimes a 5-10 minute screencast showing a feature can be easier & funner than spending 30 minutes bouncing around documentation.
Not terribly far away from your April location, jsconf 2010 will be in Washington DC around mid-April.
A lot of my projects end up requiring C for speed or hardware access, but I prefer to prototype in Python. It basically ends up being that I spend less time in Python but get about 20 times done when I do. :)
> "It's not broken, it just could be better."

Yes, that's a much better way of putting it. It does work well enough to be useful, it just has some unresolved rough edges.
My favorite trick is if you start with 10 funds the first year. The second year kill off the bad ones and merge all the assets in to the good ones. Do this for several years and your funds look like they have really good performance! It is the same as asking everyone to flip a penny in a classroom of 100 students and every time someone gets tails sit down until there is 1 student left. Then take bets on if they will get heads or tails the next time.
Dealer Control Panel
Oh awesome! This must be recent, I was at Etherpad a few hours ago and that button was disabled. I hope Google heard us.
Other: Tcl. Good language, somewhat underrated.
I understood that people were asked beforehand about their beliefs. Afterwards would indeed be silly, and I would have been very surprised if 60 years of peer review would not have caught that.

Just checked the two links I pasted earlier. The second link (skeptics dictionary) quotes:

The expression dates back to 1942 and Gertrude Schmeidler,
a professor of psychology at City University of New York. She
asked her students whether they believed in psi *before*
giving them an ESP card test.

So your explanation doesn't hold here. People were asked first, and then tested.
and after they get $12,000 for the imac... they are going to charge you for delivery.
I don't really have any intuition as to where the The Blues Brothers should lie on this type of map, so maybe you could explain why you think their placement is so ridiculous?

The similarity algorithm appears to be taken directly from last.fm, which uses some kind of collaborative filtering method on user listening stats to determine artist similarity.

In general, I think this map does a good job of grouping similar artists. Mapping a high dimensional similarity space down to two dimensions is undoubtedly going to result in a few data points that seem out of place, particularly when dealing with content like artist similarity where individual perceptions can vary drastically.
Delphi and C for me - the Delphi compiler.
I have heard many people say this. But to me it means one of two things: either the VCs are very good at taking credit for work done by the entrepreneur, or the entrepreneur is failing at their job. As a founder, it is my job to be the best in the industry, and to have others in the industry introduce me as such to potential customers. VCs are a distant second in importance (but not self-importance).
They are fast because they have been coded by experts. So maybe they look cute - would your code that looks as cute run as well? Probably not unless you can match them in knowing why.
Preserve our Global Rain Forests Petition
Other: boo
Referring to prototyping. I mostly do them with Emacs Lisp. This may sound strange at first, but this allows me to focus on exploring the problem and takes away the pain of setting up an interface to test stuff when they are still fluid.
The funniest part is that once I had to help with a tedious documentation merging task on a tight schedule. Due to extremely limited time constraints I made a half automatic elisp solution that became the standard tool to perform the task. It's still used and by people never exposed to Emacs before.
Raphael Louis - Prime Minister of Canada Candidate for 2020
Student dramatically improves UK plug
How to integrate habits and virtues