skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I find it interesting that they have a 6 year rule, when the average is around 10 years to get tenure.

I think you're interpreting this wrong; it's 6 years after the tenure decision, not 6 years to get tenure. As in, the articles says they denied her tenure back in 2004 and she would have to leave soon.

6 years is long enough that she had to have realized long ago that she would be leaving and so I'm not sure descriptions like 'snapping' is right; this seems more pre-meditated.
Such a theory is useless because it does not explain where the divine engineer comes from, or what is his nature. So it is just dodging the relevant questions.
IE just never gets the joke.
It does seem like the mentality that if it was a HN/YC startup it would be frowned upon but since its mega media corp is ok.
I would also say: what does it matter? Is the assumption that we should obey all commands from god, but not from an alien race? Why?

Would a universe where everybody just does what god tells them even be worth living in?

Playing devil's advocate against myself: what if elementary particles are basically just entities doing exactly what god tells them - apparently interesting results can still occur.
OneNote is almost worth buying a Windows tablet for.

iPad version please.
It's a nice site!

My JavaScript was turned off... When I clicked "what is wappr" nothing happened. Could it be a nonJavaScript friendlier (just a little :)

Nice work!

EDIT: JavaScript in my browser...
Um. This post is more than a little scary. The philosophy of "act, don't think" is equally as dangerous as "think, but don't act."

Edit: A better way to put it. "Think, but don't act" can only destroy your life. "Act, but don't think" can destroy everyone's.
Haha, good point. I should invest more time in better article titles.
Looks like it ended up making it to the front page of reddit; you may have to give it a few hours (unfortunately it may end up dying here before people get a chance to see it).
Do you have anything to back that up?

I have 1.4 billion data points that say plenty of people maximize the window at least sometimes :)
What does "half-excusing" mean?

Or...

In what way was does describing the factors influencing a person's behavior excuse it?
What you say is an indictment of the inhumanity of the prison system, not an argument in favor of the death penalty.
...or simply because her superiors were assholes

Really? I've had some of this kind, and even when I was in a very stressful personal situation, I've never even thought of resorting to any kind of violence, even less shooting anyone.

These cases seem to be caused by mental illness. I agree with the person you're answering to that trying to "explain" a shooting this way is plainly wrong.
<sarcasm>Does it work in IE?</sarcasm>
I think you mean <span class="sarcasm">Does it work in IE?</span>
That's not a loser, that's a quitter. A loser is someone who keeps working at something they hate day after day because they're sure that success is just around the corner.

"Winners forget they're in a race. They just love to run." -- Joe Pesci, With Honors
People create a lot of this "excess" technology not for its usefulness, but because someone out there will buy it from them.
I am assuming a low level of sarcasm in your post.

Isn't it funny when you need a font to mark subtle forms of humour because so many people won't get it without some help?

Damn... It's hard to do this when you don't know how many levels of subtle jokes are piled upon this topic...
I'll never forget having to explain to my credit card company that my frequent $8.99 purchases to GoDaddy.com were legitimate back in 2000.

When I got off the phone (with a female phone operator), my wife, who was listening told me - you know, they didn't believe you, they thought your "GoDaddy" purchases were for porn.

Now that I think about, I bet she did think that.
Citation if available?
The problem with this (and I think the difficulty in understanding what the author is trying to get across) is 'who owns the data?', or 'who owns the initiating platform.
Sure all platforms can communicate with the others, which is more akin to e-mail, but you still have a platform and a suppliers.

You wouldn't want a platformless environment where anything you post is spread anywhere and everywhere without your knowledge. You kinda have that with twitter now, but you can still delete your posts.
Automatic transmissions weren't invented for the disabled either. Would his point stand for those? After all, driving stick is only a little extra effort.
www.winkvid.com
I never thought I would see a mechanical integer overflow till I saw the cam example in this video.
Does this apply to fiction that one would otherwise be reading for escapism? Or would "fighting it" kill it, in that case?
Amazing that an entrepreneur-in-residence would use GoDaddy for hosting:
http://jonsteinberg.com/2010/01/risk-and-doors/

Some of his other posts are good though.
Amazing how dramatically they've had to rework Buzz in just a few days. Google will think twice about rolling anything out to millions of people at once from now on.
I think we need to change the discussion regarding climate change. For every scientist who says the world is warming, you'll can find another who says it isn't.

This just continiously leads to people trying to figure out if this species or that species is in danger, etc, etc.

If instead we focus on the amount of pollution, and reducing that, I think we change the argument. I don't know that scientists or anybody else can argue that pollution is good.

Is there a 'pro-pollution' argument?
I am not a driver, but I assume automatic transmission make driving easier. The can openers in his example made opening cans more difficult. I don't think he is arguing against technological progress in general.

Anyway, I see it more as a poetical piece. People will vote with their feet/money anyway.
In a pressure cooker the vapour has not many options: going through the security valve or making the cooker to explode. I don't think that's an accurate "description of factors", unless you take into account the killer is crazy, in which case the most important factor is precisely that.
This just shows how poor Google's think tank model of operation is. I mean how can all those people working on the Buzz team overlook this? With all their time spent analyzing which shade of blue they should use why not just ask people how they feel about an auto following model?
Our founders don't get a salary, we use the money to hire engineers.

We are very fortunate to have passionate users (#1 note app on Android) and need more folk to help us make something people want.

We are especially looking for data hackers, UX, and vis design people.
She found out that academia isn't really for her, so why would she want to stay anyway?
Most people use their tone of voice to indicate sarcasm. When someone uses a sarcastic tone of voice, I submit that we don't initially hear it straight, back up and rethink it.

Your thinking only applies to a true deadpan comment with a straight tone of voice - that's not the majority of sarcastic comments we hear.
What's there to disagree with? It's one big glittering generality and I wouldn't be at all surprised that the author is grievously misrepresenting the positions of his opponents.
Ford Attempts to Make Natural Gas Vehicles Relevant
I honestly love Buzz, but the rollout was terribly executed. It's rather ironic, since the product itself is one of the better designed social networking tools I've seen. Like Beacon was a real defining moment for Facebook, though, I think that the monumental amount of criticism that Google has taken over the Buzz rollout will teach them to be more careful about the second-order privacy implications from now on. It's just a shame that it took this much damage for them to learn.
but `this` is filtered by most js clean up libs.
I'm not her; I can't tell you. But most people don't immediately devalue a goal the moment they realize they can't reach it.
Is Reading Blog Posts Worth Your Time?
Probably making a solid amount of money.

Having shamefully owned a few typo domains in the past, I can confirm this is true. The ad click-through rate on typo domains is absurdly high (~33% IME), probably because the ad is for the domain they intended to visit.
> <cut for brevity>

>That's the moral case; note what I said in the parent comment about the practicality of capital punishment.

All I can say is that I'm ideologically opposed to this. Most people who know me in person describe me as naive and it's probably true. But I'm not able to look at people that way, and quite frankly I don't want to.
Can you articulate why you love Buzz?
I'm impressed they've been able to adapt it this much so quickly. Most large software companies, at best, take weeks to make the changes that Google made. It is also good to see them listening to the feedback, you don't always see that either.
I'm amazed that the described system works / is popular. At first I checked websites of gyms around me, expecting this scheme to be US-only - it isn't. Random UK gym has 8 membership types with 4 different access options (+ 3 different "offers" on top of that) without any price on the web. I've never heard of this before and it seems just crazy... I wonder if anyone checked how many people they would gain / how much money lose by having only 2/3-options with fixed, known prices.
Searching for Network Laws in Slime
But if it's so hard to get irony from text then how in the world can people read Shakespeare, Swift, Oscar Wilde, etc?
Outfielders use an optical technique, not trajectories, to catch fly balls
Because edge cases and extreme cases often reveal the difference between approaches/strategies/philosophies/ideologies/etc.

Our approaches lead us to different conclusions in this case, except for the fact that you look at reality and say that yours shouldn't be applied because in reality mistakes can happen. This is a perfectly valid stance, but it doesn't mean that the point shouldn't be looked at to analyse the differences in our approaches, as this is the most obvious case where they diverge.

There's also the fact that capital punishment is where this discussion began.
For all of my Rails apps, I use a combination of Munin (for trending and profiling over time), NewRelic (for daily and weekly profiling and optimization) and AreMySitesUp (for 15-min pinging).
That was an impressively quick response for a large company.
I hope you mean 2D pixelated CGI
I guess Google is a larger target than the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser ( http://www.co.palm-beach.fl.us/papa/index.htm ), or else he doesn't know it exists and gives way more information than Google does about his home.
Ipad competitor from India
This is one of the things I hate about the NYT... an imposed narrative contained in a headline without any identifying details. Wouldn't "Huntsville University Killer May Have Killed Over Lost Tenure" be a) more accurate b) less obtuse?
Actually, most people do. The official term is cognitive dissonance, and the unofficial term is sour grapes.
The pro-pollution argument is this - pollution is an unwanted environmental result of an otherwise desirable activity. Reducing pollution may mean curtailing the desirable activity (undesirable) or changing how the activity is performed to reduce the unwanted consequence. The second approach usually makes the activity more expensive and thus less desirable.

No one would argue that reducing pollution at a lower cost is a problem; that would benefit everyone. The problem is that pollution reduction is almost always a trade-off To understand the trade-offs you must understand the consequences and costs. The element that makes the whole situation intractable is that different people value the costs and benefits differently.

Sorry, this is a tough one.
made my day!
P.S.: I'm Russian :D
The pro-pollution argument is that if some kinds of pollution are not very harmful (e.g. CO2 emissions?) then it's not worth expending extra effort trying to prevent or clean them.
I think it's important not to confuse #3 (Think like Feynman...Imagine actively. Use the phrase “that would mean…” to force yourself to think on your own terms with your own vivid images.) with over analogizing.

Thinking about a concept creatively to see a different view is great but only understanding something as something else can prevent one from deeply understanding the concept. Even if one begins to comprehend a concept through analogy I think it's important to eventually think beyond it, and see "through" the analogy to the deeper meaning. Think of leaky abstractions.
Google adds opt-in on sign-up, and easy opt-out later ("Disable Google Buzz Completely" in Gmail settings): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1123873
And how exactly would that work?

Every time a user, or potential user, mistypes your URL then best case they end up on some keyword related site. Worst case - they end up visiting some adword-buying competitor.

If it's more profitable to direct users away from your site than to visit there's a problem with your business model.
> I don't see any evidence that the reasons I cited are statistically insignificant or temporary.

Really? So you think the overriding reason that people buy a product has nothing to do with whether they like it? Because that's the argument you seem to be making. I'm not desperate to defend Apple, I'm desperate to defend logic and common sense.

Honestly, I have no idea what point you were trying to make on this little aside to my original comment.
It's really not surprising though, imho, because no one likes having decisions made for them.

One of my teachers once told me what I thought and why I did things. I've always hated my teacher since that time- not because he was completely wrong, but because the principle of the action was disgusting. Google just decided we (gmail users) wanted this.
I think I'd actually signup for this. I'd be happy to donate, say, $20 a month to bloggers that I like, and I like that this gets me past the hump of having to make many independent decisions of how much to give.
Yes, I think in this particular case although it's admirable they moved quickly to correct the major problems this is definitely revealing a weakness in Google's ability to understand humans and their "irrational" reactions to products.

I posted in an article about Google's data obsession that Google products "have no soul." (And was downmodded!) This is an example of what I meant. They are so data driven and engineering focused that I think it was inevitable we'd see them release a product that consumers freak out about.

Putting your toe in the water and using data to iterate your way out of problems works great for many of the problems we're trying to solve. But, this problem, they decided, required a "big bang approach", since invite only won't generate the network effects. So, you had to get it right on the first try. For problems like this, you need a visionary decision maker with an understanding of human beings and intuition as to how they will react to the product. Someone who puts his or her foot down without being able to necessarily justify why.

Google hates intuition, since it's not data driven and is just an opinion. Better to try it, measure it, and prove it. Most of the time, this doesn't burn them. And in fact, it'd be impossible for Google to do what Google does at the scale it does it without this philosophy being burned in deeply to the culture. But this also makes it really, really hard for them to go into social networking with a "big bang" as they tried here, since social networking is largely about people, emotions, egos, and feelings and connecting users to other users in a way that triggers the right responses and network effects. It only partially falls back on data & algorithms to make things work well. (Arguably, Facebook got the former part right first, and bolted on data-obsession later, which is why they are winning this war.) Ie, it's not that great of a situation if you have to machine-learn your way towards realizing that someone's ex-husband doesn't belong on their friend list. You've then burned the bridge and it's too late. Better to have someone with common sense step in and avoid the fire.

So, I don't think this will be the first time we see Google have to backtrack like this. It was the perfect storm for their major achillies heel to be exposed, and I'm afraid there's not much they can do to correct the root problem since it is a cultural viewpoint that would cause the other areas of their business to suffer.
Isn't this kind of what xmpp or pubsubhubbub are about, decoupling the data created by a user from a service?

I think it would be interesting to see this combined with the personel web server concept seen in Opera Unite, to serve an xmpp feed from an individual user (and device) that is ingested by multiple services. This would give users control over their data (they have a local copy) while allowing it to exist in the cloud as well. The user would also be able to publish "deletes" to tell services indexing her stream to remove a previously published message.

Having control of ones data is extremely important however. A push for existing web services to have an open intermediary data is essential, users should be able to backup or migrate their data with ease.
> Even basic logic would tell you "God Exists" does not lead to "Therefore, God does not exist." in the same argument.

Incorrect. A common form argument is: suppose a leads to not a, therefore a can't be true or suppose a leads to contradiction, therefore a can't be true. Arguments of this form have been made on this topic based on morality (counter arguments exist: cf. Descartes).

But I'm not trying to do so, anyway.

My argument was solely that the God of the Bible is immoral. As the quote goes: "even if a God as described in the Bible does exist, he is not fit for worship due to his low moral standards." There are misotheists who believe Jehova is evil.

> Morality is relative to the information one knows. You, not being an omniscient deity, do not have all the information available to make a perfect judgement.

I would disagree. I believe that moral absolutes exist and that certain things are intrinsically wrong. I don't need to be omniscient to know that infanticide is wrong. Jehova commits Crimes Against Humanity and Acts of Genocide at several points in the OT.
It's one thing to decide that your users want something, but that doesn't mean it happens. You have to decide how you are going to fix it and then write a fix and then test the fix. Usually big companies require a group of people to agree on what the fix will be and how to do the fix. It often involves paper work and approval on different levels. It isn't usually just something that one of the programmers goes in and fixes (although that model seems to work often for startups).
Sarcasm shouldn't stick out at first, because half the reason for sarcasm's being enjoyable is the feeling when you "get it" without any help. I was playing around with making <sarcasm> render normally, but with a little grey square at the end of a sarcasm block, inline with the rest of the text, which, when you hover over it, higlights the text pink if it actually was sarcasm. There would also be <seriously>, which would have the same grey square, but wouldn't light up. in order for sarcasm to still get laughs/amused grins, <sarcasm> and <seriously> would have to be used in roughly equal amounts, so you'd never be able to accidentally scan ahead to realize which one you have.
Yes, italic fonts are not just slanted versions of the typeface. However, more simply slanted text doesn't necessarily look bad and has its uses. I prefer slanted Roman for long blocks of special text as I find it more readable.

Here is a sample illustrating Computer Modern’s Roman, italic, slanted, and “unslanted italic” fonts:

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~murray/tmp/slanted_vs_italic.png

It’s sub-pixel rendered for standard LCD displays (having noticed the sibling comment about that). Change .png to .pdf if you would rather have the document from which it was rendered.
Scroll to bottom of page on iPhone Safari [iTunes]
For one, the use of open standards promises wide interoperability in the future. Right now, my first six tabs are Gmail, FriendFeed, Facebook, Twitter, Voice and Wave. I'd love it if those were somehow tied such that I could look in one place for my news, but if doing so didn't tie me to a monopoly.

Second, I love Buzz for the same reasons I love FriendFeed. It aggregates my interactions, which goes a long way towards healing the massive fragmentation problem that I currently have with social networks.

Third, the integration with Gmail means that, much like Mozilla's Raindrop project consolidates communication, my inbox is replaced by a more generic inflow.
This article is a capsule summary of what Wyman's been writing for about a year now. Here's a much more detailed piece:

http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/five-key-reaso...

The piece you're critiquing is a WSJ editorial, written for a generalist audience. Wyman may be the only media critic out there pushing the argument that it's not just the business model but the technical design of newspaper sites that's holding them back. It's hard to say there's nothing to his argument.
He's probably more interested in their yearly profit.
Wait invite only won't generate the network effects why would you think that? Facebook and other social networks have adopted the "all our info belongs to us" method of propagation, but it's far from the only path to networks effects. Most of the major social websites have have blunders like this, and while they discourage people like me from using them, the social norms around privacy are changing.
This is nice to see, but in my mind, the damage has already been done. I felt really violated by Buzz's rape of my Gmail account.

It will take a long time to heal those wounds
I actually think their approach was pretty good. You can't usually guess what users want. The guys at Google probably thought, "yah people will really like it to automatically link without any work". It's tough to gauge what the users want until you put it in front of them. It may hurt sometimes at the beginning, but if it leads to a better product in the long run then I would say: keep it up.
Video: Notion Ink Adam, iPad alternative
Thanks! I didn't mean to be confrontational, and I appreciate you recognizing that.

Do you think Buzz could replace your FF usage, or do you think they're serving different purposes?
Even worse, I signed up to LA Fitness's pro results training program, took my free lesson and found out my trainer sucked. I looked at the fine print on the contract, I had 7 gym business days after signing, which it turns out include weekends, to either send a letter to their headquarters, or send a telegram to their headquarters saying I want out. Since it took me a few days to decide this, I had to Fedex my written letter 2 day express to get it there in time.

The ridiculous part is when the trainer called me up and said I "shouldn't have done that" and that he could just cancel me over the phone, despite the fact that the contract was quite explicit about mail and telegram (really telegram?) being the only two ways to cancel. I'd switch but it seems most gyms are run like 2 bit scams.
Why not? Buyers can be getting a huge range of results (from temporarily assuaging guilt to changing their lifestyle to finding a new set of friends they can hang out with every day). If you're selling something that could mean so much to so many different customers, there's no excuse not to charge them intelligently for it.
I would rather see the debate reframed from a battle of cooler vs hotter to "how can we control Earth's climate?".
The act of making the decision without care of consequence is what separates psychopaths and sociopaths from people.