skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is why I'm such a big fan of the pomodoro technique: the majority of these 7 things are taken care of automatically.

1. Tasks are already broken down into manageable chunks

2. There is no multi-tasking during your pomodoro

3. No distractions either

4. Ok, so I actually check email at the end of every pomodoro and not 2-3 times a day, but close enough

5. This is the one that is not really handled by the pomodoro technique

6. I plan out all my pomodoros at the start of each day

7. I get up and walk around for a few minutes at the end of every pomodoro
I keep writing to men, but they're not responding even though our dating ads are both significantly male!
One of the elements that made the TV ad so effective (and is common today with premier brands such as Nike) - was that the actual Apple Logo only appeared for a few brief seconds at the very end of the commercial.

It's a fine line between setting the mood, and not being crass - (for the opposite, see "GoDaddy") but hopefully not being so subtle nobody can figure out what the ad was for.
"The conversations on Reddit were good when it was that small."

When reddit was small, it was full of, and dominated by, crackpots. It was barely even at the level of being entertaining, and I'd hesitate to call it a community at all. Intentional trolls generally don't mess with crackpots, for some reason. I don't know if it's because it's too easy or unsatisfying, but the trolls usually come with mainstreaming.

(There are still lots of crackpots there, but it's gelled to a far more coherent community that is much more fun to incite).
"doing too much and sacrificing too much of my personal life to my work"

Sometimes it's required. Especially if you are working on a startup and need to get your first product out there.

However, I think working too much is sometimes used to avoid other aspects in your life.
Commonwealth Bank suffers network failure.
The optional programming assignment is a standard quiz. There is really not much to it, and can be gamed without writing a line of code.
I agree the programming assignments have been very easy.

However, I doubt they have the bandwidth to manually grade thousands of assignments. Given the scale of the class, the grading is forces to be automated. It's hard to come up with such assignments and even harder to make them challenging, given an automated grading script.
Meyers-Briggs is not a respected test of personality in psychometrics circles; it was invented based on an amateur's reading of Jung's theories of personality.

Insofar as people say a pop personality test describes them, it's likely due to the Forer Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect).
I'd amend that to say you have to say something really fucking hilarious and you'll do okay. And that's fine, we just can't allow average jokes because otherwise you end up with reedit where a 30-level deep joke thread is at the top of every single post.
Yes, that the researchers don't push to publish them is what is dishonest.
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.

Even the software part isn't "hard" theoretically; performing balancing, walking, and such is an engineering challange. With a sufficiently large expert system and data set all problems can likely be solved with a lookup table--again, this is only limited by current technology and processor power. You see this effect when comparing older robots to new ones--people are just finally able to run known algos on hardware they can actually mount on a robot.

I'm still mulling over your other assertions... at any rate, thank you for a good discussion. :)
Didn't Alabama just export virtually all of it's migrant workers recently too?

Some crazy decisions going on there.

Let's see if people keep voting against themselves.
Elegant Moments
Yes I do believe it has, if it had not I would not be here and would not have been a member of the site as long as I have. That being said, I actually have a pretty good sense of humor, and find a lot of the trolling to be amusing. Even though I do, I have been around long enough that I have seen many a good sites ruined by it, HN created a culture where trolls, memes and humor are quickly down-voted, a new member usually comes in, gets down voted, asks why and is educated on the subject, they then tend to reinforce the culture. The down-voting has been surprisingly successful, as of recent though down-voting has been used more and more for "I don't agree" as opposed to "this is not worthy of this site" I wish it would head back towards a tool against unworthy information but such is the nature of these things, so long as it keeps the trolling to a minimum I think HN will continue to be a great site.
I read the argument precisely as "anything digital is pointless"

"One of the best things about the 'net is that, frankly, none of this really matters. None of it. It's a big joke. My twitters and my wikis and my posts don't mean anything. They're bits in the stream."

I Really don't see any other way to interpret that. The "bits in the stream" are having an increasingly large amount of impact on the world outside the internet every day, and to pretend otherwise is irresponsible.
I see. Thx for answering all my questions. Good luck with outperfmorming the static compiler :)
Heavy Holiday Reading List
Some reading list items I found via HN, others not.
Out of genuine curiosity, how would you define "honest discourse"?

Online forums are, by definition, right there on the 'net along with Google and Wikipedia and other resources, so flat-out misrepresentation of facts seems somewhat difficult. If somebody chooses to be irrational, they are readily identified as such, right? So where does honesty fit in all this?
Sgr is short for Sagitarrius, a constellation. If you mark off the boundary of Sagitarrius, Sgr A* would be in that region. The black hole itself does not have the name, but rather the radio source associated with it. (conjecture alert)I'm not sure where the * comes from, but I believe the A is associated with the fact that Sgr A is a super nova remnant. Supernova are typically named "SN [year] [alpha]" where [year] is the year discovered and [alpha] is an alphabetical character in order of discovery. A supernova remant wouldnt have a year associated, so i'm guessing it's given a constellation and then alphabetical marking.

Typically, astronomers have a mix of common names and many systematic naming schemes, but they get obsoleted when better instruments find darker objects. There was once a catalog of nebula called Messier with about 130 objects (M1,M2,..). We still use these designations, but suddely they found thousands more of these objects and had to rename using the New General Catalog, (NGC1,NGC2,NGC496). Even further the IC goes into many thousands.

For constellations, stars in each constellation are usually named alphabetically with greek chars in terms of their apparent brightness. Alpha Centauri is the brightest star, for example, in Centarus. Then there are common names like Polaris, the north star, whch is alpha ursa minoris.
Great summary - Ironically, your analysis is probably more accurate than Issacson's Biography, Job's Recall, and Siltanen's version.

Siltanen has the _core_ of a great idea, but without polishing, polishing, polishing - it likely would never have grown into the memorable campaign that it became.

Luckily, Clow as able to work with Jobs - and didn't give up as quickly as Siltanen did.
In the last 6 months I've been running an experiment. An experiment to make Hacker News better. Because I felt Hacker News was going to shit in several ways and I felt like I could help.

I couldn't stop naive newbies from making dumb comments, but I could stop fanboyism and groupthink.

I decided that I was going to take a different approach to commenting. In essence, I wanted to be like DHH - highly opinionated, strongly worded, and unafraid to call people out. To ensure comment integrity, I stuck only to topics in which I strongly felt I was in the right.

patio11, joshu, tptacek and pg were some of the people I spoke out against. I made the argument that those people were flat-out wrong. But not just that, I clarified -why- they were wrong in a reasoned way. And that was the key - explaining why. It turns out that people DID care about the truth. People WERE willing to hear out an alternate view and they voted with their upvotes.

I was able to move my karma from 3.5k to 5k and move my average from 7 to 14 per comment. Many of my comments took a very contrarian view to the HN status quo. Many of them were directly targeted at the "HN elite". All of them took their share of downvotes from those who thought my comments didn't add value. But in the end, they were the most successful comments I've ever made.

So don't lose hope! There is a way out of groupthink. But it takes hard work, great communication, and an academic view of persuasion. In the end, I think reasoned and rational discussion is what makes HN great, let's get back to that.
> 1) Devils advocate. People that interject with an opposing view, even one they don't believe. I often do this one myself cause another poster to go into deeper description. Often just asking for an deeper response will be ignored, but opposing a view will always bring out an argument.

I find this useful as a means of provoking discussion, but preferably labeled as such if you don't genuinely hold the position you advocate.

> 2) Denial and Righteousness

Many rational people have a low tolerance for irrationality, particularly when they have to deal with it often. Particularly when participating on a technical medium or technical topic, rational people expect rationality, and sometimes react poorly when they don't get it. Rational people should not react badly to corrections supported by evidence. However, rational people react quite badly to irrational "corrections", and I can hardly blame them. Personally, I react to irrationality through detachment: if I can't correct it, I write it off and try to make it have as little impact as possible; fortunately, I rarely encounter situations where I have no choice but to deal with irrationality. However, if you don't include the second half of that (giving up when not worth it), you fall into XKCD's "wrong on the internet" problem (https://www.xkcd.com/386/), and that quickly gets out of hand.
And this is why instead of a large city of Birmingham, you have a large amount of spun off mini-cities in the area each with their own schools and municipal infrastructure (Hoover, Mountain Brook, etc). Of the many friends I know that live in Birmingham, none of them actually technically live in the city of Birmingham.
Thanks for the correction; I meant asymmetrical.
I think this is a marvellous idea.

I would love to see a meta stream, that allows you to mark up semantics of stdout/stderr.

How would you go about creating a new standard stream?
Does that make a significant difference? What have we learned about trolling in the last 3 years that we had not already learned in the previous 15 years?
Keir, I've been following the progress of libmv for a at least 3 years now.
Seeing it inside Blender today is a real achievement. Congratulations and thanks for your efforts.

This summer, I used the "tomato branch" (Blender branch where motion tracking was developed) to track points in a landscape for a small project. It worked well but at the time the workflow to transfer 2D movement to objects in the scene was not obvious.

Thanks again.
Stolen iPhone? Your iMessages may still be going to the wrong place
"Right" is a term of art. If you are denied a right, you can sue to get that right vindicated. So in that sense running water is not a right.

But what do "rights" have to do with this discussion? Running water may or may not be a right, but it's a basic feature of first world civilization. It is an embarrassment to the nation when a major county in the U.S. can't provide its citizens with running water, because of the greed and corruption of some politicians and some banks.

I was born in Bangladesh (where running water is indeed a luxury for most people), and my dad has spent his life working in public health (not running water, but vaccine programs and the like). These are problems to be dealt with in places like Uganda, not in the United States.
Please don't muddy the waters with an insinuation of racism. He never once mentioned race, just asked whether or not something was a right or a luxury and gave his opinion. You can argue against it effectively without once ever bringing up race, because race makes no difference on the issue of whether or not cheap access to sanitation services is a right or a privilege.
"You are bringing up the argument for Welfare, Universal Healthcare, etc., that there is nothing that the schools can do"

You can give people all of the healthcare and the free money that you want, but it still won't automatically create a productive member of society.

This will only create generations of people that are dependent on the welfare system and can't actually go out and get a job.

As long as you aren't mentally or physically challenged, you should be able to work.
Steven Colbert might be the best example of how good trolling can lead to very enlightening statements. In an ideal case it could even bring a self-discovery in the form of a Socratian dialogue that illustrates certain "taking things too serious" positions.

Additionally I think one should draw a line between trolling and flaming. Just some "you suck" comments are not making a troll a troll.
Probation, with the time choosable via mod.
Investors flinch ahead of RIM earnings (and who can blame them?)
I think PG only aims to keep the "asshole" kind of trolls out not the ones that say controversial things, as he gave examples of how people tend to be stubborn and not delete their own comments that are being downvoted for controversy, but do delete their asshole comments.
I have seen the highest pay out of the NE US, I think they have to pay more because what they are doing is less sexy than the valley. Yet the have to compete for top talent. In my experience I have seen the best offers from that region on a purely compensation basis. As for the middle east I don't have any insight but if I where to take a wild stab at it, I would say that Indian developers probably have a higher presence in that market and therefore reduce the average wage. American developers really offer the middle east little advantage, because they have the same cultural and language issues that an Indian developer has in working on US based projects. To me it seems like that would be an influencing factor on that market, but as I said, I do not have insight into the market.
I would argue that all of positives you cite can be accomplished without trolling. What distinguishes a thoughtful but contrary comment from a trolling comment is that the troll wants to force other users into negative behavior. Trolls win when somebody blows up, or somebody's self-image is toppled, or whatever. That attitude adds zero value to a conversation.

Whether any of this matters or not is immaterial. If someone thinks it matters and you want to convince them otherwise, pushing them to drop the banhammer in anger isn't the way to do it.
As for downvotes, that button should be reserved for off-topic, vulgar, or otherwise obvious trolling cases and not just because "I didn't like what he said, he's stupid, or whatever."

I disagree. Why do you think that? I think that "I didn't like what he said, he's stupid, or whatever" (e.g. I think this comment is foolish, I think this comment is unreasonably rude, I think this comment is uninteresting) is a very good reason to downvote. The purpose of the up- and down-voting is to allow readers to decide which comments are good and which are not very good. Why would you accept that readers have the power to move up comments that they like, but not to move down the ones that they don't like?
Amazing story, but is it just me or does that article load as one massive block of pain-in-the-ass-to-read text?
It seems that this was sent to students with 100% aggregate score up to this point (after dropping the bottom two quizes). One acquaintance had 1 wrong in aggregate and another had 0 wrong in aggregate but two imperfect quizes, and only the latter claims to have received the letter.
Sadly, it's ironic to get advice which reads "AVOID DISTRACTIONS!" while participating in HN, the biggest distraction I have.
Carwoo (YC S09) raises $6MM
In the user preferences, blender has an option to emulate a third button.

Yes, Blender is that awesome.
I'm right in L.A. Nobody would give you the time of day for $750k, much less a 3 bedroom. :)

I _am_ a sr. dev., and I'm fairly certain I'm not making $200k.

But let's assume I'm not as senior as I like to think I am, and check glassdoor.com instead: http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/los-angeles-senior-softwar...

The absolute top of the senior ladder lists $200k. At one single company, for one job. (And checking the same thing for Mountain View doesn't yield a significant difference)

So I don't think $110k is "half the going rate" :)
The db midterm had a max score of 18, not 20. But I agree with the intentions of your post.
In my opinion, the top that needs to change first is Ballmer. I think the first thing holding back Windows Phone in the markeplace is the name. "Windows Phone" inherits the baggage of desktop Windows and of Windows Mobile, neither of which is that positive. Something like "Metro Phone" or whatever would inherit less baggage and would be doing at least a bit better. The naming decision was and is Ballmer's, so...
> humans have a natural right to not being aggressed against

In pastafarianism, humans have a natural right to linguine on Tuesdays. So what?
I forced myself to learn Vim for the same reason. I could rely on Vi being available on any system I logged into, which was quite a diverse set at the time with installations going back many years.

I've thought that I should learn Emacs just to see what the fuss is about and so I can make an informed decision about the differences, but the fact is that I no longer have the pressure to put in all that time. Vim works for me, and I there is no compelling reason to invest all that time learning another editor as an experiment at this time.
Four reasons why open sourcing webOS won't be enough to save it
Chrome Devtools auto save
I bet you're a master.
Well because down voting influences karma I'm probably posting 70% less than I would. I see HN more like a news site in which I sometimes share my view on something but not to comment or to discuss something (sadly).

First I saw HN as something to have an intelligent discussion, but after a few "controversial" posts, and having negative karma, I don't bother. I only post something when I think it's "safe" to post, or when I have time to write a detailed essay.

I think some people can have an intelligent discussion on HN, not for me, maybe because of my dyslexia I'm bad with words. But then again, maybe that's the price to pay to keep the trolls away.
Discussions like this remind me of my favorite scene from "Roadhouse", the best bad movie ever. Discussion forums are kinda like bars and hackers are kinda like coolers...

All you have to do is follow three simple rules.
One: never underestimate your opponent.
Expect the unexpected.
Two: take it outside.
Never start anything inside the bar unless it's absolutely necessary.
And three: be nice.
Come on.
If somebody gets in your face and calls you a cocksucker, I want you to be nice.
OK.
Ask him to walk, be nice.
If he won't walk, walk him. But be nice.
If you can't walk him, one of the others will help you.
And you'll both be nice.
I want you to remember that it's a job.
- It's nothing personal. - Uh-huh.
Being called a cocksucker isn't personal?
No. It's two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response.
What if somebody calls my mama a whore?
Is she?
(laughter)
I want you to be nice...
..until it's time to not be nice.
Well, how're we supposed to know when that is?
You won't. I'll let you know.

Sometimes we hackers work too hard to make things more complicated than they need to be.

Be nice.

(Oh, and by the way, I'm letting you know now when it's time to not be nice here: never.)
No, I don't. At all. I was specifically pointing out the "_everybody_ wants to have kids" line. It's not everybody.

But yes, having to make that choice is bad. For both men and women. It's usually worse for women - men can, from what I've seen, have kids (well, by proxy ;) and have it not impact their career too badly.
In the last 6 months I conducted a different experiment.

I turned on "showdead" and looked through the posting history of users with dead posts. About a quarter of the time, I would have disagreed with the hellbanning.

If you're going to ban a user, you might as well be honest and tell them up front.
9 Main Features in Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) that make it so amazing
The fact that you consider the observation obvious, is a sign that you were possibly trolling. You were probably being intellectually too lazy to make your point without resorting using tactics like calling your own opinions seemingly obvious.

It is not obvious that increased competition leads to declining margins. Often increased competition validates the market, and increases consumer demand far more than the effect on pricing. I have seen it in my own industry, where our sales increase when a competitor launches a big ad campaign.
Twitter's Down
Galaxy Nexus Officially Announced By Verizon
I would imagine that there are restrictions preventing the residents from installing septic tanks so their only option was the sewer system run by the city. The libertarian perspective would allow them to install their own sewage handling system as long as it didn't adversely affect others.
Currency in the economy of trolls is attention. When forums are small, trolling is much less rewarding and vice versa. Troll economy also feeds on to itself and upvoting/downvoting/karma mechanisms would be less and less effective as forum membership grows. To boost the attention economy, trolls would resort to upvote each other more frequently eventually outweighing votes of others.

From theoretical perspective this is very similar problem to links and webpages. A troll is equivalent to a spammy web page. Upvotes/downvotes are equivalent to traffic you get on your web page. When UserA upvotes UserB, a link is created between two. The goal of a troll is to get as much traffic as possible. They are incentivised to give each other upvotes in the hope of return favor, or in other words, create as many links to each other as possible. It would be mistake to think that few "good guys" can be used as gate keeper to protect the system against these trolls. In nutshell that is the hope and approach many early search engines had and they failed as the size grew out of their hands. The solution has to be technical and automated. Algorithms like PageRank or machine learning models is highly applicable to trolling issue. For instance, the real value of karma should not be a naïve count of upvotes (in the same way that real important of the page is not how many other pages points to it) but rather who has upvoted it. I think algorithms like PageRank can be easily applied to calculate the value of karma. If trolls upvotes each other 1000 times, their net karma would be much less than 1000 de- incentivising them for putting in the efforts for upvoting. Of course, there are many ways to fool PageRank and but I think algos like this should be sufficient for forums were you don't have to deal with more sophisticated folks like search marketers.