skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if there's an age and cultural divide when assessing trolls on the internet.

I say this in that reading the post, and then the comments from you all-- I see a bit of disparity between philosophies. I mean, for the most part I think from it's very root, trolls are trouble makers, and we can all sort of agree on that. But, there are people here who revel in that, see a symbiotic nature (good needs evil), people who think trolls are important, and that they keep things interesting--people who've even been trolls (full disclosure, when I was younger and immature I partook in such acts...nothing malicious, but acts none the less). When I read things like this I wonder where and at what time these people were introduced to the internet and forums and the like. A lot of younger people (at least the ones I know) are familiar with the trolling culture, and share many of the same previously mentioned opinions, however when I think of my Dad who was introduced to things much earlier when the internet was much more "pure", he loathes such things, "there's no place for that".

As a non-formal study, purely for my curiousity would anyone interested write down their age, the time when they were introduced (ballpark it) to the internet and forums, and their stance on trolls.
You should know that Norton warns me of an attempted attack every time I load your page. It claims the "HTTP MS IE VML Fill Method BO" (http://www.symantec.com/business/security_response/attacksig...) attack was attempted from hosted.by.qudranet.com (This host has no DNS record as far as I can tell).
Disparate Impact is not a real explanation, because it's equivalently useful at any stage of the argument. For example, "Disparate Impact" might explain why banks don't lend so much to group X. So if we find some good underlying variable that explains why banks would be disproportionately unlikely to lend to group X, "Disparate Impact" now explains that factor. And when that factor gets explained, it explains the next factor.

Disparate Impact is just "God of the Gaps" for discrimination.
That is, until you realize that some of the biggest trolls are employed by the establishment media like John Dvorak, Rob Enderle, etc.

These folks make a good living by essentially trolling. It's a well-known media business model.
Maybe this is why people who are vehemently anti-science can't understand the rigor that is (supposed to be) at play in scientific "theories", etc.
I have only the best possible things to say about the video lectures, but the lab assignments are just too easy. For something that is supposed to be the advanced track, I was hoping that they would do something more than "take this description of the function, implement it in Octave, make it pass our tests".

Of course, I know it's their first class and you can't get everything perfect right off the bat. But I'd love to see the lab assignments being one larger project, some kind of task where you need to apply the principles learned to solve different problems. It would be also more effective in measuring/grading students.

On an unrelated note: I wonder what is the license for the classes/videos. I am working now in an adaptive e-learning platform. It would be cool to put their videos and questions in our system and see how effective the system is.
I do. This isn't 1511, it's 2011. We can make all kinds of appeals to the "noble savage" who survived just fine without porcelain bowls, but that would be disingenuous.

Even disregarding the sanitation, hygiene, and emotional impact of cutting people off from modern sewage, there are efficiency issues. The more time people spend digging latrines and putting up outhouses the less time they have to improve their own lot.

Imagine if we took away roads, and it took you two hours each way to get to the general store!

Infrastructure, luxury or not, are key to pulling this country out of the shit-pit (no pun intended) it's found itself in. Cutting people off from these essential services certainly won't help matters.

Sitting around debating whether or not people are crybabies for demanding modern sewage services, also doesn't help.
It will add mass to the black hole though, right? So that will affect orbits, no? Or is that just so infinitesimally small that it can reasonably be ignored?
I'm not a founder though, I'm employee eight billion at Bank of America. It's just that hiring people that are bad at programming is so demoralizing that it's better to not hire someone unless you're 100% sure they will turn out awesome. Otherwise, you'll spend all your time "helping" them, and neither of you will get any work done. (Nobody ever gets fired because it makes you look bad, or something, so if you make a bad hire, they're here for life. Especially since they are getting paid above market.)
I think one particular line got me thinking:

Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want
to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally
making a mark on the world.

Paul Graham has to make a caveat because it's too easy for someone to say, "WELL, sir, you have clearly missed that some graffiti is amazing. Banksy!" But there's a very important filter that should kick in: "Can I trivially amend his point in such a way that his argument still holds?" It turns out that I can, and PG should never have need to caveat his statement.

Let me propose, for what it's worth, that a "Banksy!" reply to a statement like the one above is the sort of accidental troll that invites the slow degradation into real trolls. Whether or not Banksy is graffiti or whether or not graffiti is art: these aren't the question of the submission. This isn't to say that tangents are always bad. It's rather that these sorts of discussions quickly turn in to "what color should we paint the dog house?"* That is: lots of firmly-held beliefs with little that can dissuade someone.

So: when posting why someone is wrong, first see if there's a small or trivial way in which you can 'fix' their point. If you can, their point wasn't really broken in the first place.

*I've long been trying to find the original 'why meetings go bad when you're talking about something everyone has an opinion on', but I can't. If anyone can help me out: much appreciated.
To expand on your point, if one was to sustainably grow all vegetables required for a healthy, sustainable diet, then currently this can be achieved on around 100-200m2 per person (on earth, requiring no extra fertilisers / soil etc) based on research by John Jeavons. This hasn't taken into account external rainfall or air movement, but the basic premise is fairly well established. Throw in water treatment / recycling and humanure composting to close the circle completely, then all you need is a light source (assuming a closed atmospheric situation....)

Assuming that we can compress that down into 50m2 per person, the spatial requirements for a sustainable colony blow out quickly to large proportions, and we don't have information over the long term of just how well such a closed environment can nourish a small population - there's literature and research suggesting that we must have animal products in our diet for long term health, so that quickly adds up.

Given all these factors, supply runs from a known good source (earth / the mother country / home) are a sensible choice - but once you start roaming much further, it isn't an option any more. This is the stage we'll find ourselves at in 10-20 years time, as space travel will be economical to the point of sending out pioneer crews to space.
Disagree. Karma systems actually do that quite well, or at least have to potential to. Humans are like clay, and mold themselves to their environment. If you have an environment where there are no repercussions for bad behavior, you can expect such bad behavior. (read the recent NYT article on Steven Pinker, and how he was an anarchist until he saw how quickly people start looting when the police and firefighters went on strike)
Over the last 5 years, I've seen a ton of hot air blown about wrt to auto-GPU code generation. The latest hot air is about how magical directives make everything run fast.

Truth is, compilers and code generators are crappy.

If you really want to get good performance, you either have to write your own low-level GPU kernels, or use a library of functions that have already been written at a low-level.

All other hot air, while interesting, has yet to be proven at scale on more than a few limited use cases.

Another disclaimer: I work on this, http://accelereyes.com/arrayfire
There are obviously people who don't add any value and instigate vitriol that should be banned.

On the other hand, you have people like Ted Dziuba who often provoke controversy and critique popular ideas/products. I find those critiques both entertaining and legitimate in their content.

I worry you lose a lot in a community when you rule out both types of Trolling.
> You would need a consistent html structure for common components.

Alternatively, a snippet of HTML could be supplied along with every CSS component.
Yes.

Any briefing involving a secure area will mention that phones can be triggered this way, and that your customer (military, intel, DoD, or DOE) forbids their access for the very reason.
>> I've thought a lot over the last couple years about the problem of trolls. It's an old one, as old as forums, but we're still just learning what the causes are and how to address them.

That's crazy. We still don't know what causes Trolls?
Security is hot,as Intel showed when it bought McAfee
It is a form of release.

Articles like these are not really about convincing believers, they are meant to be consumed by fellow skeptics.

Downvoters: I'm explaining it, not defending it.
Ahhh. I missed the date on the article and couldn't believe that HN was only getting 8k uniques/day.
Poll: As how much of an workaholic would you classify?
I'm at a point in my life where I feel like I'm too busy, doing too much and sacrificing too much of my personal life to my work.

While searching around I came across the Workaholics Anonymous questionnaire on which I scored a 17/20.

http://www.workaholics-anonymous.org/page.php?page=knowing

How much do other HNers score and what should we do with that information?
0-3/20
4-6/20
7-9/20
10-12/20
13-15/20
16-18/20
19-20/20
All that mass is already orbiting (on a galactic scale) right on top of the mass. It'll affect our solar system's orbits in the same way that the sun moving a few microns affects them, I'd imagine.
"I fell for it!"

I wondered on that myself ;)
"Right" is a word made for arguing about. Let's forget the word "right".

Clean water and sanitation are pretty much the two things which most enable us to maintain population-dense cities. Lack of modern sanitation repeatedly led to horrific pandemics in the Middle Ages in Europe, culminating in the Black Death. I don't have any statistics handy, but one would expect the presence of sanitation to be as big a contribution to personal health as diet, and what's more, poor sanitation is sure to harm other people through disease transmission.

So yes, I believe that clean water and sanitation are very important to human life at scale; important enough that we should pay a sufficient tax, so that we can give them to people who can't afford to pay.
that is really strange, i'd have to double check that. it could be one of the widgets i'm loading up on tumblr which i'll remove once i find it.
I'm curious if anyone else is seeing a trend of passive aggressive, or light hearted, "trolling" on social networks with family and friends.

For example, on Facebook, a troll might play out like this:

Sarah posts "Having the worst day ever, ugh!"

David "likes" this post.

Link baiting, tagging people places they are not actually at, and other forms of this exist as well. At least in a few of my friend circles they do. In fact, at one point, one of my friends and co-founders created a Facebook group called "Operation Troll Cullen". He invited around 20 of our mutual friends, and the idea was to respond to anything I said or posted with extremely positive messages. "You're doing so great Cullen! Well done!" or "This was the MOST insightful, amazing, article I have ever read. Thank you so much for sharing Cullen, you're amazing!" would be two examples.

I of course had no idea this was going on, but suspected something was amiss. It was quite the week for me, to say the least (and I did find it quite funny, after the fact).
Of course its a luxury, but its a cheap and easy one. It can and should be considered a "solved problem" in the "developed" world that this luxury can be extended to all. Letting go of this luxury has health implications to society far beyond the poor it directly effects.

When we have no problem spending billions on foreign wars with dubious moral justifications but can't provide clean water to citizens we have serious priority issues. Its the first really dangerous symptom of what might be a truly horrifying underlying disease.
Too soon. He was a very flawed person, but will be missed nevertheless.
When you have a universally well reviewed product and it's not selling, you have to change something. Usually the person on top.
Sometimes the trollish comments on articles/threads/posts are more entertaining and enjoyable that the content itself.
You should try then the 150 utilities from nirsoft which are bundled in one launcher:
http://launcher.nirsoft.net/download.html
And then use that launcher to combine sysinternals and nirsofts tools in one gui. Here is described how:http://www.thewindowsclub.com/integrate-sysinternal-suite-wi...
Sanitation and sewers are a public good. My health is directly affected by my neighbors' access to these things. Thus, it is in all of our interests to ensure that we all have access. Whether you call it a "right" or not doesn't much matter, I think. Bottom line is that it's something we ought to have, and cutting some people off from it will harm us all.
Regarding your tip: For anyone using a Magic Mouse, MagicPrefs (http://magicprefs.com/) can enable a third button area. Works great with Blender.
thanks miles, well stay tuned! follow me on @jaequery for updates.
Maybe that is why they didn't say they were going to do this—the sort of person who goes all in even with nothing to gain is what they're looking for.

(Lest I seem overly harsh, I'm in the same boat.)
http://bikeshed.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Trivialit...
To be fair, if dinosaur deniers really are on par with flat earthers, then there very well may be a "whole group" of them.

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

Religious people tend to cluster geographically/socially too, so the formation of actual "groups" would not surprise me.
Well I think he said that was the average and it worked for all levels of developer.
>>So, most of the robotics we deal with is pretty straightforward, right? For the algorithms, it's motion planning, communication, modeling uncertainty, and so on. For the hardware, it's control theory, light power supplies, strong materials, etc. These are not "hard" problems, they are merely expensive ones. Better technology or more funding will almost certainly solve these issues, and these are the main chunks of robotics research I see today--and that is why I don't consider robotics necessarily "hard". It seems to be straightforward engineering, not science or mathematics.<<

OK, I see the disconnect now. Agree, the mechanical part is not that hard. I'm talking about the software part. i.e. Building the software that will tell the robot how to walk (over any terrain), process verbal commands (Siri one early example of this), build a house, cook you a meal, etc. That is hard.

What will probably happen is that robots will be built first, and then developers around the world will sell software for your robot so that it can accomplish certain tasks. i.e. Cook you a meal. Build an engine from scratch, etc. Similar to how the computer market developed; some companies will build the hardware, and others will build the software.

>>This is certainly a wonderful dream, but we don't need robots to accomplish it. We already have the technology available to support life cheaply/freely--agricultural output and goods production is more than sufficient to accomplish this, provided policymakers do the right thing<<

That is the rub, you are expecting a policymaker to actually go off and do it.

With Robots, it will just happen naturally over the span of several decades. It will happen slowly but surely and will give our world society time to adjust.

>>if we aren't making sentient robots, we're making tools, which require people to run them--why not simply use people?

Because nobody else will want to work for you anymore since they will have their own robots to meet all their needs. So, like it or not, you will have to use robots. Everybody else will be too busy pursuing their own interests.
I'm from the US and know the term. I was merely giving a first glance impression. This is all very relevant to conversion... Even on the homepage.

Perhaps the wording on the submit button is what's throwing me off. Something more explanatory like "View our gifts", etc. that would help drive the point home to the visitor about what clicking that button will actually do.
I wish that the Isaacson's biography of Jobs had contained this level of detail. I just love reading about how all the different threads of the story came together to produce the Think Different commercial. I often found the biography to be brief on detail and too verbose when it came to repeating Jobs's flaws. Overall the book was inspiring but I felt it was despite, not because of, Isaacson's writing.
I'd suggest there's two types of trolls:

First there are the discourse enhancing trolls, those who provide value to a discussion by suggesting alternative, usually taboo points of view.

Then there's the troll trolls. You know the type. The ones who spew racist or derogatory comments just for the hell of it.

Many people commonly mix the two into a single bucket, which I think is wrong to do, since one is a ++ for a forum, the other a -------.

Anyway, that's my take on the situation as someone who has ran 3 mid size forums in the past.
Check iBook Store (iTunes) and you'll get the same stuff. O'reilly has had free eBooks for a while on iTunes store.
it has been developed behind closed doors for over 2 years

why behind closed doors?

is there any effort to make this an open standard?
By the name I assume you're an Israeli and while it's true that Matam has an high ratio of global corporations per sqm, I think that when people (both in Israel and outside it) think of "the Israeli silicon valley" they think more of Tel Aviv and its surrounding area (i.e. Herzliya). If Apple will purchase Anobit then they will have a beachhead in Herzliya... although two offices, both in Matam and Tel Aviv/Herzliya is pretty common (i.e. Google, IBM, etc.)
In my wish list: I would like to "save a configuration" of windows.

Often I'm programming away, with some perfect configuration, but then need to go look something up (maybe steal code from a local file), which entails opening other windows etc. I'd love to be able to come back to the orig config with a keypress.

Pointers welcome.
https://github.com/jaequery/bitcss
A few data points:

I was told by someone with lots of experience that I worked with for a few years that I should expect $110k when I graduate.

Someone I know just left $200k at a multinational megacorp for the same at a 50-person company.

A team of co-founders I know was acquhired by a different multinational megacorp, and they now make $350k-$500k before bonuses, although they've moved up from pure engineering to running teams and managing other developers.

So $200k is the lowest salary I've heard for people I consider "senior".
The people who have time for an 8 hour coding puzzle are the people who aren't doing anything else with their time.
I had a similar experience. The most egregious was a company that got back to me 8 months later. My answer was basically "Um, I got a job now, and why would you want to hire me if I couldn't find a job in 8 months of looking?"
Kinda OT, but forbes.com doesn't let me view the whole article on one page and as an avid instapaper user, this makes the experience cumbersome.
See also: Implicature

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicature
Ah, never mind: this article is 3 years old.
Google Patents Transition To Autonomous Driving For Cars
OP agrees with the standard model of history taught in public schools. Not sure what exactly he's skeptical about.
Was thinking the same thing. Depending on how you think about space-time it "is" happening 27,000 years go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way#Galactic_Center
Presumably, yes. It would be odd for the astronomers to use two different temporal points of reference; time of observation is the only time that matters. Plus, any excitement on the part of astronomers would be super pointless if they had to wait another 24824 years to observe it.
Yeah, things used to be rougher, but they also used to actually get something done on occasion. Can you see the current congress accomplishing that?
I've been hellbanned here on HN on at least three different IP addresses and accounts...that I am aware of. Probably more.

In each case nothing I'd ever said would be considered trolling by any rational observer. Here on HN, however, as with most communities where you start to recognize the regulars (tptacek, raganwald, etc), "trolling" is redefined to simply mean "going against the grain".

There was one discussion that I participated where I predicted that Apple would see declining profit margins due to increased competition. Remarkably this completely benign, seemingly obvious observation saw me declared a troll, and shortly thereafter yet another account was hellbanned from HN (whatever the mechanism -- is this the verdict of a bored PG, or has he anointed some particularly under-employed members to apply it? -- it is horribly broken).

Troll is, more often than not, a term used to circle the wagons.
What a cool service! I used to run a business that helped groups of people order customised clothing. The organisers of such groups absolutely loved the system because it handled all the ordering, payments and customisation-requests for them.

I really hope you guys are able to scale internationally. This would be huge for Londoners. Best of luck!
My go-to commentary on this general topic is the classic penny-arcade comic "John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory"

(Normal Person) + (Anonymity) + (Audience) = (Total Fuckwad)

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/
'PG mentions that people seeing "...their reputation in the eyes of their peers drain away..."'

I think part of the lure of karma is simply getting affirmation that what you are saying is accepted by others.

In this case the "others" are not people you know but people you respect in many ways because of the intelligent way they write or some other power they have. Or how they appear at least to be accepted by the group.

In a sense it becomes a challenging game to write something striking a balance between sharing some knowledge or opinion and not ticking off others by going to far out of bounds with what you are saying.

"quality of Hacker News remain the same without the novelty of individual karma "

I don't think it would at this scale. On a smaller scale though it might. There is a wide range of topics and people here. On a smaller site (AVC.com comes to mind with usually 1 idea a day posted) it is a core of users and while there is karma and likes it is far less important than on HN.
Couldn't the TV show inspector gadget be considered prior art?
If you actually mean “asynchronous”, could you please explain how that is relevant? Or perhaps you meant “asymmetrical”.
How OS X Executes Applications (2006)
That's correct. But never forget the idea of a "now" is deeply tied to a "here".