skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's rare for a well articulated, reasonable, relevant, respectful opinion to be downvoted. But recall, a statement can be mathematically provable and yet fail on another of those points.

---

Since you brought it up: in the specific case you're probably referring to [0], you say that you're "not sure exactly what [the parent post is] taking issue with", but the original author of the piece responded to the parent post letting him know he'd corrected his mistake [1]. So while your assertion was technically mathematically correct, I would say it was not relevant, and in fact was dismissive of a relevant concern, which I think explains the downvotes. I do not think it's fair to characterize it as being downvoted because it "happened to go against popular opinion". (I cannot say for sure; I did not vote on any of those comments, but I think I understand the sentiment of those who did.)

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646343
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1648302
Noticing pain points. It takes time to develop a taste for good solutions. But when you modify or write code, and you say, "this is harder than it should be," this is a code smell and there is a better way to globally solve the problem.

Thinking first, writing later. When practicing for the ACM programming competitions in college, I discovered that when writing code before understanding the solution, I eventually needed to start over. I have never seen a counterexample.

Learning new things. Every year I try to learn a new major skill. Two years ago I learned Common Lisp, last year I hacked on some AI textbooks, and this year I'm teaching myself how to build websites in Python. Try for some variety - Alan Kay said "Perspective is worth 20 IQ points," and while I make no standardized testing claims, learning from multiple fields can connect the dots in interesting ways.

Reading code. Norvig's PAIP knocked me out of my Object-Oriented rut and changed how I think about coding problems.

Working with smart people. Surrounding yourself with motivated and effective workers has a great multiplying effect on your own productivity.
The article shows fundamental misunderstanding of why "just get started" is, indeed, a good advice.

It boils down to: majority of people under-start, not over-start.

Let's assume the following numbers:

10% start at the right time

10% start too early

80% don't start at all

Those are, obviously, arbitrary numbers, but I do believe them to be "in the ballpark".

When you're giving generic advice on the internet, that you cannot customize to an individual, the message clearly should be "just get started", because it targets the problem majority of people have. Yes, it's a crude approximation of truth, which is always more nuanced, but a blanket contradiction is certainly not the right answer.

What the article is saying is that it's better to start at the right time than to start too early. It is also an obvious statement and a shallow one because it fails to consider that there are more states to analyze: starting too early, starting at the right time and starting too late and not at all. Starting at the right time is clearly the best choice but if you are to choose between starting too early or not at all, starting too early is a better choice and most people make a mistake of not starting at all and not starting too early.
A Better Title Is All Very Well – But What About A Raise?
I continue to hope pg will modify the rating targets thusly:

[up arrow] X points [down arrow] by name y hours ago...

I suspect this would greatly reduce the number of mis-votes.
The key point I took from the article (and to prevent a possible 'Is this HN?' comment) was this (my emphasis):

"The players who end up making the team and having a sustained career in the N.F.L. are the ones who can process these details and apply them quickly."

So very relevant to any pursuit. If you can learn and change with agility (pun somewhat intended) you have a much greater chance of success.
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1. unplug. no chat, no web, no email, no phone.

2. Find a work flow that keeps you moving forward no matter how slowly. here is mine. Basically design, top down then code bottom up, testing each piece as you go. An example of when I finally get to coding.
a. write the comment for the function
b. write the signature
c. write the tests
d. write the internals of the function

It will never almost never work out that perfectly but you should have the goal that, when you are done with that function you should never have to look at it again*

* you will. I do. Being perfect would be nice, but it just isn't going to happen.
Good advice, but remember what Einstein said:

"Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."

To me, the best readings aren't ones that I learn directly from. They're the ones that spark thought processes inside my head. I haven't read past Chapter 2 of pg's "On Lisp", but I still consider it one of the best books on programming languages because it changed how I think about them in a lot of ways.
To quote Armand Hammer, "When you work seven days a week, fourteen hours a day, you get lucky."
This will definitely help, to a point. Reflecting on programs you've wrote and seeing the mistakes you made is also important.

I've had colleagues that had wrote hundreds of programs, but they were mostly the same boilerplate, same glue, with different business logic. Writing a lot of different, varied programs, is key.
15 Outrageous and Disturbing Costumes
Parties. Music events. Sports events. Just a few things can be made ‘better’ by not wearing regular attire and instead opting for fancy dress and costumes. Superman and Catwoman are very common ideas people normally run with but who cares about that? We’ve compiled a huge list of the weird, wackiest, and in some cases, scariest fancy dress costumes that people have subjected themselves and others to.
Noted agilist responds to criticism
Elisabeth Hendrickson responds do recent criticism directed at agile practice ("agile ruined my life", etc.). She argues that some of the criticism stems from people burned by faux-agile, while the more vitriolic attacks are from lone-wolf-type programmers (the argument is more nuanced that that).
For me (and I'll admit it perhaps doesn't apply to others), it has almost no effect. I use the firefox search box mostly.
Knowing when to stop.

When you reach a seemingly impassable problem, talking it over with other people and then sleeping on it will make everything clearer come morning.

If you work constantly you are a worse programmer than those who know to take breaks. These are the people who are thinking about what they're doing.
It's the very nature of the beast (social news, that is)

You can't have a site to aggregate the "best" news without restricting your user base. With fewer users, you can't make as much money.
Instant search is for exploring
Here's the actual Nature article - longer and with more detail - http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html

Edit: And a different take on the 'No' conclusion from the original link. Turns out 'Yes, in these situations, though maybe not and does that matter?' is the more accurate analysis of 3500 responses.
"TC had an interesting story on the reaction from Digg employees who found out that John Quinn was being fired via TechCrunch and not from their internal team members. That is insulting and alienating, but it also says a lot about Digg and how that team is running right now."

Damn.
And the accompanying discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1538329
I'm surprised at how nascent the Django developer community is portrayed in the slides. I've spent a fair amount of time in the drupal community, which seems to have addressed some of the issues that are presented. (Please -- this is not a "Drupal" vs "Django" question.) I more interested in how we share development processes across projects. Given all that we've learned from the various open source communities (Apache, Plone, MySQL, etc), it would be interesting to develop a "project framework." Not a framework for code,or the management of it, but rather for the community around it. How to set up an event, how to encourage collaboration, etc. Is anyone familiar with anything like this?
You're right. That was a mistake on my part, I'll take it into consideration for the future.
Really taking the time to learn your current framework really well. For example, my first rails site was written with a shallow understanding of both rails and ruby, and I ended up writing reams more code than I needed to, and the code I wrote was usually rolling my own when rails/ruby offered a cleaner simpler and more robust way of doing it.

In other words, don't go against the grain of whatever framework/library you are working in. Learn the path of least resistance.
"As one commenter quipped, if Twitter had fired engineers because of rocky launches and questionable code in the first few months of getting popular, there would be no one working at the company. (Ha!)"

I'm of mixed feelings about that bit (there was questionable code, but the launches were pretty smooth given the lack of hardware), but it's pretty obvious the person doesn't know the history of the site. But mostly that's because the PR team worked really hard to make sure people didn't.

The first 2 years were amazing. Digg is now six years old, Kevin has taken 7 digit figures "off the table," there's no question that this launch was unacceptable from so many perspectives. They just fired the wrong person.
Hmm. So this is all just based on what you feel MS will do without any real pointers. I was hopeful :(
edw519 arriving in 5..4..3..2..1
Everything everyone ever does can be viewed as self-interested in the appropriate lens, but it's for precisely the same reason that that lens doesn't give you more information on how to predict people's behaviour.

A father risks his life to save his daughter. Did he do it for his daughter? Or did he do it because it made him feel better? Or to avoid feeling terrible if he didn't act? Or because genetics compels him to take care of offspring sharing, on average, 50% of his genetic distinctiveness?

There may be a causal chain in these things, genetics -> love -> joy of helping, fear of loss from not helping -> acting on behalf of another.

But we lose much of our descriptive, analytic and predictive powers if we insist on only looking at what we think are the first movers in this chain. It's not productive to try and predict the weather on the basis of quantum theory; for practicality, we look at the system at higher levels of abstraction, with their own conceptual bundles, and yes, their own names.

So I can agree with you that, in the most facile and base senses, altruism is not a "proper virtue", and that humans are "intrinsically self-interested". But I can also say that some humans are more altruistic than others, and that some humans are less self-interested than others, because saying these things expresses more information than trying to describe how one human seems to have a causal chain whose self interest leads him to seem paradoxically less self-interested and more altruistic, etc. etc.

In other words, I'm talking about personality at the conceptual level of personality, using its generally accepted meanings of words, rather than pedantically hammering away at first principles of selfishness.
Considering that most of the species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct, it is not surprising to discover that the demise of one more would not have any catastrophic consequences in the grand scheme of things.

We were well on our way to getting rid of mosquitoes, incidentally, until we banned DDT. Millions of dead humans are the very real consequence of that decision.
"Neave and his team think head, trunk, wrist and knee movements show how healthy, vigorous and strong a man is.."

So, to conclude - a man's shoulders, elbows and ankles are not sexy. There really is no material value to this article.

Is it wrong to feel embarrassed for a (poorly executed) CGI dancing man? I don't doubt the researchers came away with some interesting data, but this is lousy reporting.
But, there is something that I'm willing to bet most of these successful people had in common. And that is a definite purpose[1], the ability to ignore what their friends and skeptics thought about whatever they were doing, and persistence.

[1] Rarely, this is substituted by insane amounts of luck.
The problem is easy. Seriously, it really is.

It's easy in the simplified mental model that you have constructed devoid of real world context. Any engineer worth their salt knows the devil's in the details. I'm going to stop arguing now because you're not even responding to my actual argument. It's not a zen thing, you should be able to get it if you actually read my comments, but just in case you need a koan, ponder this fact that I would bet my life savings on:

There exists a potential feature which could be implemented in Basecamp faster than in your product (and vice versa).
Writing distributed code. Once your data is too large and your logic too distributed to run or debug locally, you are forced to become a much more careful programmer. I have to carefully read the code and think about what is going on, whereas before I often used debugging and stepping through the code as a crutch.
Any guy that dances like that is very high or very gay (happy).
Yes, a Lisp. I want to write Lisp for Factor. dup swap only gets you so far.

Slava's posts are very enlightening, how he decomposes problems into a million words. But in practice, it just takes me too much time to solve problems (that don't involve just calling a library).

[edit]

Even though you could say I could write code using locals and stuff, but that doesn't feel natural. Or I'm just used to prefix, or prefix is better for some reason.

(+ 10 (* 20 30)) looks better to me than 20 30 * 10 +, even though, as Factor folks will tell you, concatenative languages are the ones with the "direct" syntax: Lisp is the one inverted.

[edit 2]

Another annoying thing: programming in Factor forces you to make a name for code you wouldn't normally name. Again, folks will say that that actually makes your program better, more testable, etc. In practice: harder.
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I thought that was an excellent, well written and entertaining article. Well worth the time if you are interested.

To me the only solution is to remove themselves from the EU and go back to their own currency. And for some type of structured devaluation of their existing debts to gradually -rather than overnight- allow the other european banks to write off the losses. Though I'm not sure how you could get it to work out in practice. But the inflation rate and deficits were all a sham, I'm sure they can come up with some sort of sham valuation on untraded paper.
huh? i looked at the ycombinator twitter and i don't see what the guy is talking about. is he confusing hacker news having 'why tumblr sucks' as a top story with an official ycombinator statement?
Greece does not provide its citizens with more social services than other European countries, I would say that they actually provide less. And although you are right about the deficit, again, the main problem is the inflated public sector with all its associated problems, like high pensions at a young age.

The private sector should not be burdened with this, and actually, it cannot afford to pay for this burden. If collecting more taxes is the solution here, it's certain that Greece will go bankrupt.

Regarding Germany vs the other European countries, what is easy to see is the direct contribution of Germany to the EU but the indirect benefits that Germany got because of the fixed currency are more difficult to see although very very important for them.
You have to take it with a grain of salt - social games can and do make tremendous amounts of money but for every one that does a lot of others don't make squat.

Distributed Flash games also leverage microtransactions with varying degrees of success using platforms like http://www.gamersafe.com/ and http://wwww.mochimedia.com/, Mochi has a bunch of writeups at http://www.mochiland.com/. Andy Moore http://andymoore.ca/ and Chris Gregorio http://kaitol.com/ have both been very frank about their numbers although neither has implemented microtransactions yet.

A Russian developer called Badim has a long-running series of posts about his experiences leveraging microtransactions from various providers in this form of gaming: http://blog.elite-games.net/blog4.php

In terms of market size the numbers are enormous anywhere you look - I track games on and off Facebook, with and without microtransactions, that have 10s of millions of views.

The real key is very simple but ridiculously hard - you have to make a game that people want to play. The people making serious cash off social gaming are ultimately doing it because people really want to play the shit out of their games, and most games of any type or characteristic simply do not enjoy that status.
CNN is turning into The Onion more and more each day.
Forth was my first language so I'm quite comfortable with it.
Why not extend that logic to malaria itself? Or cholera, HIV, or any other pathogen? Perhaps start selling "Save the plague!" bumper stickers?
same, but search box is only good for your first search
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Ya the 5% figure annoyed me as well.
Taking a nap.

Seriously, the most difficult problems I've faced have been solved easily just after taking a quick nap (30 - 40 mins). Most of the time it comes to the point that there's no solutions in the horizon, I'm pulling my hair out and biting on my keyboard and then, a quick nap later most of the problem is solved in 20 mins when I sit in front of my computer again. It's got probably something to do with unconcscious mind.

But the problem is employers may not see this "sleeping to solve problems" act as productive as you do. I read that Google has "nap rooms", and I'll definitely have one of those when I start a company.
This doesn't work at all for me in Opera. Has anyone else had success in Opera?

edit: Apparently Opera is not among the browsers listed here: http://www.google.com/instant/
I do a top down view and a bottom up view, even if just in my head. How should this look and function when it's done? What base classes will I need? Which parts go in between? Also, breaking up things I have left to do into small enough parts that they can mostly be done in a single sitting (obviously there are exceptions). Then I never have to leave feeling like I accomplished nothing.
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You can register for free and use a fake email address. Your browser gets a cookie and you never have to deal with it again.

I agree that the signup wall on nyt is hella annoying. I'd love to see the results of an A/B test on disabling it.

When they do go fully paywall [1] I'll likely stop visiting their site.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.htm...
1. Embracing paranoia - enumerating everything that can go wrong with my code and testing for it. Over time, learning to think of more things that can break.

2. Writing down every question that occurs to me about the technology I am working with, at any point, specifically the behaviour of libraries and nuances of programming languages: I am not an expert in any programming language. Then chasing those questions until they are resolved.

3. When stuck with a slippery bug, attempting to reconstruct the bug in a toy program. If reconstructed, fixing it is easier. If not, I know it's not where I thought it was. Sometimes I never make it as far as actually writing the toy program; the intent is enough.
One of my High School coaches loaned me this book by Jerry Kramer: http://www.amazon.com/Instant-Replay-Green-Diary-Kramer/dp/0...

It's interesting to see how these players experience such highs and lows during a season, they often get to the point where they would just quit but somehow manage to keep going. Great motivational book.
Maybe it's my undiagnosed Adult ADD, but:

* turning off Twitter & IM

* closing email and Google Reader

* headphones headphones headphones

* big ol' notepad for notes and doodles

Kill as many distractions as possible, make the ability to create & think ridiculously easy and just keep on truckin until you have something to test.
Never just shrugging some problem off with "boy that's weird." I usually can't let something go until I understand what caused an issue. It eventually became unrealistic to chase down every oddity, but I've done enough of them to learn a lot about different pitfalls.
I read a couple of books in my long-distant youth about the training camp ordeal. It played up the military boot camp aspect of it. This article is surprisingly intelligent and well written compared to those.
I definitely won't disagree with anything you said in the general case, but for this:

Thinking first, writing later .... I discovered that when writing code before understanding the solution, I eventually needed to start over.

I think this may depend on how and when you think most effectively. Having the discipline to be productive in pure thought is impossibly difficult to quantify. At times I feel productive working that way, but other times just writing code helps me think through things faster. I type fast so it's not a big burden to type a lot of stuff even if I have to delete it.

Of course, sometimes just drawing things out on paper helps as well. I seem to recall Dijkstra making some criticisms of that, but for me it is often highly effective.
I'm not sure I agree. Clearly Digg was having some kind of monetization issue. This whole episode might be pretty calculated really. They had to know those changes where going to cause general outrage. They had to think that the benefit would outweigh that.

In the end they might add tremendous value.

What they didn't count on was the site taking a huge step back in terms of reliability.
Microsoft apologizes for banning gamer from Fort Gay, W.Va
Prototyping semi-trivial cases. What I mean is that a solution of a problem might require some parameter so I'll just pick a value of the parameter that makes it possible to solve the problem in a brute force fashion and evolve the code base from that point. This is because I'm a visual and interactive thinker so any kind of feedback that helps me explore the problem space as soon as possible makes me at least twice as productive.
thanks for sharing such a useful information
I don't understand - do you believe the note invalidates the table? If so, why?

As for why I quote this study, the ATUS is the standard source for data of this nature. Feel free to post better data if you have it.
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What part of while difficult, this may be within our means do you interpret as meaning easy?

The person I was replying to was making the argument that there is no point to trying to categorize these things because we can't possibly do anything about anything we learn. My point is that the most common objects which can potentially cause significant damage are small enough that we could, given enough warning, plausibly do something about them.
Thanks man! Appreciate it...
Good chance it was convertible debt; thus there's no official valuation to report. What matters are any valuation caps on the conversion and the next-round valuation.

My guess would be the seed investors have terms that are essentially like having 20-30% of the current company. Selling an effective majority stake (or anything near it) in a 'seed' round isn't a typical valley thing.