I am currently taking a class in machine learning algorithms and am required to create a dataset to run machine learning algorithms on. There are no rules as to how this set can be created, and I thought it would be awesome to get some really interesting data on the Hacker News community, while at the same time pooling data in to an easy to use format. I do not intend to make any of this data traceable, and will delete anything that suggests an identity of the person filling out the form, so rest assured your data will be anonymous. I also plan to make this data available as soon as possible at http://davelyon.net/mldata.html for anyone who wants to use.
My hope is that people will fill this out quickly both to help a fellow hacker, and to learn a bit about the community. If there is interest, I'll be more than happy to post a quick analysis of the data with some fancy graphs and whatnot once I've collected enough data. For my class, I need at least 1000 entries, so if you could pass this around to your friends it would be a great help.