skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would be really interested to hear why you think robotics is easy?

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.

The Asimo is an excellent piece of engineering, and I would buy a beer for any of its engineers were I to run across them. That said, a lot of the reason it's taken so long is that the supporting tech has had to be worked around. If we had infinitely fast computers, with infinitely fast actuators, running on infinitely long-lived batteries, robotics would be damned easy--don't confuse technological disadvantages with real difficulty.

Humans will find other niches. Taking robotics to the extreme will mean that survival will become extremely cheap if not free since machines will be able to do most if not all for us. It won't matter if you are unemployed since your personal robot is already doing all the work. i.e. Farming, house building, maintenance, clothe manufacturing, cooking. Etc. Etc.

So you see, we may evolve into a society that may not need to work so unemployment is a non issue. The real issue is what will we do with all our free time?

I predict that most of society will still work but only in what interests them, no longer will people need to be stuck in a crappy job longing to work on their dreams. We may enter a true golden age like never seen before.

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. They would need to do the right thing, even with robots. That being the case, it's more profitable to simply skip the robot revolution and focus on the actual policy issues motivating it.

I'm sorry, my friend, but robots are a solution in search of a problem.

(as for the rest of your post, I don't really disagree save for one thing: if we aren't making sentient robots, we're making tools, which require people to run them--why not simply use people?)
At least they don't try to hide it. Be sure to watch their recent startup school talk/video/awakardness.
This is an interesting article that sort of answers a question I've had for a while: would the quality of Hacker News remain the same without the novelty of individual karma points?

PG mentions that people seeing "...their reputation in the eyes of their peers drain away..." is motivation enough to keep delivering high-quality content.
Trolling also wastes valuable time from reasonable and constructive arguments. You may not value your time, but I do, greatly. If ones goal is to achieve nothing intellectually on the Internet, then trolling is fine, but if ones goal is to learn and debate, then (given, only very skilled, non-obvious) trolling is destructive.
Typographical interfaces work well on mobile unless you're not a fan of navigation hierarchies
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OK, but I still don't see how my comment could be viewed as advocating for any political party.
Ever hear of JA Konrath? Neither did I at first. He's, at best, a mid-to-back list writer who had a few novels published back in the late 90s and early 2000s. He started self-publishing his old catalog of books once they were reverted (ie, the publishers saw little/no value in holding the rights, and released the rights back to him). He saw not much in the way of sales, but he pressed on, releasing ebook forms of old and new novels as he published them.

Then, the Kindle.

As of today, every new title he releases goes straight into the Amazon top 100 list. Every single new one. And, he's not alone.

Amanda Hocking, John Locke, Michael Sullivan and hundreds of other new and established writers, some who have zero published work or professional experience have made substantial living self-publishing, mostly in DRM-free epub and mobi formats. None of them are running experiments in digital distribution or DRM that I know of.

It's a proven method: For apps, for ebooks, for video (ie Louis CK for paid video and Ryan Higa, Freddie Wong, or Ray William Johnson for ad-supported video). We read (some with disdain, I might add) when someone publishes an ebook through ejunkie that sells a tens of thousands of copies at US$30 a pop, yet we don't question whether that's some "experiment" or not.

It's the future. We'll all have to embrace it eventually.
That's an interesting take, though it'd be only certain kinds of trolls imo. Some trolls inflame negative situations: the guy who shows up at comp.lang.lisp and restarts one of the many canonical flamewars is doing sort of the opposite of what a court jester is supposed to do. But I think comp.lang.lisp might actually benefit from a real court jester; there's a certain stifling, vaguely bitter seriousness that could use disruption.
Ask HN: Has Hacker News been successful at minimizing trolling?
The discussion of pg's "Trolls" at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3353593 got me wondering ... do people here think that the site has been successful at minimizing trolling and its impact?

If so, what do you think are the key factors?
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I think the fact that you don't allow downvoting posts contributes to this. I get that you want to keep things positive. But when you don't provide an outlet for people who want to simply disagree without forcing them to come out of the woodwork and defend their position, it is inevitable that some people will come out with a lot of ugliness.

I think there are a whole lot of reasons internet forums are different than real life communication. I think there are technical solutions that can change the balance. We all know there is a big difference between, say, the comments on YouTube and the comments on Slashdot. Do you think it is all "culture"? I don't. I think it is mostly that Slashdot has technical solutions that discourage trolling (and substanceless posts, etc), while YouTube doesn't. If the culture is different, it mostly because of the karma system (or lack thereof).
Before I got into web development I was involved in several open source blender projects, usually as a modeler (someone who creates the 3d objects, then passes them on to people who color animate and process them). I have used both maya3d (the oracle of the 3d modeling, powerful, industry grade software with a cost prohibiting casual experimentation) and blender, in addition to several other programs in limited amount.

Blender is everything that is right about the open source community.

The feature list is very comparable to commercial applications (which usually run > $500)

http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/features/

The community(s) are great, super helpful, nice, and diverse.

http://www.blender.org/community/user-community/
http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/
http://www.blendernation.com/
(and many more, in other languages)

But one of the most important, and as far as I know, unique things about blender and the community are the open movie projects.

The Blender Foundation establishes clear and detailed roadmaps for features (something many open source projects struggle for). Then they take a small group of some of the best artists and programmers from the community, and pay them to create a open source project using the current goals in the roadmap. The most recent was Project Durian, which created the short CG film "Sintel" with a focus on developing blenders renderer to do high res (4k) renders, and the animation system to allow for crowds and complex animations. They also developed some sfx like fire and explosions. At the end, not only was the film released as creative commons, but all the files from the film were too, so the community could benefit.

Where did the money come from? Presales of the DVD, which contained all the special features and files, and was released before the movie was posted to youtube, giving a "sneak preview". One project serving as fundraising, community support, community outreach, tutorial/teaching, feature development, focus grouping, beta testing/dogfooding, and publicity. Success.

Here are links to some of the other blender open projects.

- http://www.sintel.org/ - Project Durian - Sintel, focus on special effects, high res cinimatic rendering, and animation improvements. - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRsGyueVLvQ

- http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/about/index.php - Project Mango - Big Buck Bunny - focus on hair/fiber, work with outdoor/large scenes, improve animation system for cartoony deformation styled animations.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSGBVzeBUbk)

(Note: Chances are you've seen this somewhere, because of the CC licence, stores and online video hosts love to use it for a placeholder)

- http://orange.blender.org/ - Project Orange - Elephants Dream - This is the project which developed blender into a program that had all the features to compete with the big boys, added the node compositing and spleen animation controls, plus lots more.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFtg0WBD5Hc&feature=fvst)

I would advise watching all of those, besides being great artistically, the stories are actually pretty good.
Only difference between money and karma is that we can't easily trade karma. Modern money is not physical, it is just a figment of our imaginations. It has only the value we collectively give it.
> One of the best things about the 'net is that, frankly, none of this really matters.

I disagree. I think the shift from personal to electronic interaction is largely to blame for the level of shrill nastiness that pervades our present-day culture. It's okay to express yourself in ways that would have been completely socially unacceptable, or just plain embarrassing, in past times. Social norms can be stifling, and self expression is good, but it's possible to take it too far. And on the internet, it frequently is. (Although this problem predates the internet. Talk radio in the 80s and 90s comes to mind.)

Nowhere is this more evident to me than in the realm of politics, where things really do matter. The process is seemingly held hostage to whoever can scream the loudest. The result is the sort of do-nothing congressional bitchfest which is currently pleasing to a whopping 8% of Americans. I read accounts of the way things used to work (30+ years back) in Washington and am amazed--it's like studying a lost civilization.
Does anyone have experience developing games on the Mominis platform?
Playful discussion requires familiarity and trust. Trolls poison trust.
I don't understand why certain skeptics take it upon themselves to be such nasty people. For example:

"Then the site jumps into other crackpot ideas, like Tom Gold’s abiogenic origin of petroleum (long ago falsified), and presents a list of 19th century naturalists who talked about dinosaurs because they allegedly made up their discoveries in order to promote evolution! Once again, this doofus is so ignorant of history that he has no idea that half that list consisted of devout individuals who were “creationists” and most of them worked on dinosaurs in a religious context. Not only that, but they were not trying to “prove evolution”—their work was done decades before Darwin’s book came out in 1859. Give this guy an “F” in history…."

The primary point of this paragraph appears to insult the person being talked about. The paragraph doesn't actually say anything, it's just a summary peppered with insults. Furthermore, it's very unlikely to convince anyone that doesn't already agree with the author.

It seems like there's a large part of the skeptic community that doesn't understand you can't be so purposelessly condescending and yet convince the unconvinced--especially when you're pretending to be some rational authority whilst being so foaming-at-the-mouth. Which is a shame, because skepticism is a fine cause.
TL;DR The problem wont fix its self. The system will prevent solutions that limit it. Nothing will change until you do something. That something needs to be withing the current rules of the game.

What I find most amazing about any analysis piece on the problems of democracy and what to do about it is that they are almost always self-defeating. By this, I mean the very proposal to solve the problem prevents the problem from being solved.

The article is correct about what (one of) the problem is. Institutional corruption is analogous to the principal-agent problem except the issue is the asymmetry influence, not information.

But suggesting that the existing 'system' recognise the problem and then take action against itself is pure naivety. If politicians, those empowered by us to represent us, are being corrupted by special interest enough not to represent our interests, then those same special interests are going to ensure that measures to restrict their influence are thwarted. The system can't be changed from the outside without revolution, and revolution won't happen until things get really bad (and then generally turn out just as bad later)

The problem of special interest can only occur when the net benefits (expected outcome - cost of lobbying) for special interest groups exceed the net costs for individuals to fight it. Sadly, the benefit to the few is great and despite a net social cost, spread amongst the population the cost to the many is little.

The only way to solve the problem is to do so in a way that doesn't change the system. One way of doing this (and the only viable option I can think of) is to form a non-partisan political party who's only policy is to do what the electorate tells it. The candidate signs a legally binding contract to vote according to the will of their electorate and some kind of public/electronic forum allows issues to be discussed and voted. As long as everything is sailing along nicely, you wouldn't have to have any involvement if you didn't want. But, if a bad law is proposed (SOPA comes to mind), then there is no way it could pass if the majority was against it.

I'm sure that there will be opposition to this - it is devolving power to the populous and making politicians simple spokespeople, not deciders of the public will - but isn't this what #occupy needs? A way to use the existing system to devolve power to the 99% (well actually to the 100%).
He's got a single reference for one crackpot that wrote an absurd article. There are dozens of other tiny groups of crackpots on different subjects as well with opinions about a flat earth, a hollow inside out earth, the holocaust, and the moon landings as examples.

I have talked with moon landing deniers and holocaust deniers but in my life I've never met a single one of the dinosaur deniers. Dinosaur deniers are a very small group, on par with flat earthers. There are clearly many more people that deny the holocaust and the moon landing than there are that "don't believe in dinosaurs". This makes sense. Dinosaurs are difficult not to believe in given how many museums have skeletons available for viewing with bones that obviously don't belong to any currently alive species. Whereas with the moon landing, you have man made equipment in museums, but sure, to someone it could seem like it was all a big faked conspiracy to intimidate the Russians. That sort of at least sounds plausible even though it's not true, and few people actually personally know astronauts or rocket scientists. (I know several of both, but would still believe in the moon landing even if I didn't.)

So where am I going with this? His article is intellectually dishonest because he talks about a "whole group of extreme creationists who deny that dinosaurs existed", suggesting it is a large number of people, which it is absolutely not. He then tries to connect the whole thing to anthro global warming skeptics, which is a completely different kind of thing since you have real scientists and scientifically competent people asking reasonable questions, and people in politically entrenched positions refusing to respond with raw data. It's completely different from dinosaur skeptics who if we could find them would be easily discredited with a few days of museum visits.
"None of it really matters." That's your opinion. For some people finding a place, a community, with people disciplined enough to keep conversation interesting, to call people on BS without using troll tactics, that annoy and disparage, matters very much.

PG in his article, 3 years ago, describes the second kind of troll in more broad terms and notes, "Now when people talk about trolls they usually mean this broader sense of the word." 3 years ago. The first definition of troll is, in my opinion, near dead. The broad, asshole, troll reigns. They don't just 'sully the pristine conditions of these high-minded realms of discourse,' they break it down, and erode it.

A troll might think everything is a big joke, but many people deal with problems communicating in person: they don't have groups interested in the things they are near them, they have social and personality issues, they feel passionately about their views and enjoy expressing them but don't feel confident face to face or in a room of people. Connecting and communicating can happen legitimately on the internet, to say it's all a joke devalues that connection and that communication, which is how trolls hurt communities and people.
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Trolling is the spice or salt that keeps things interesting.

Too much can definitely turn everything brackish.

But seeing some humor/sarcasm even if it's pointed mixed in with all of the serious discourse keeps it all manageable.
Well, I haven't received any such email and my score in the class is 98% so far (with only the final exam pending this week).

I expected that around 10,000 people would have a perfect score in the class given my experience with Asian participation in online programming contests. There are a few countries in that part of the world where organizing a group to check each others' work and ensuring perfect scores is common and encouraged even when the official requirement is to do your own work. And those happen to be countries filled with millions of smart people. India, China, and Russia seem to be the heart of the phenomenon. Google, Facebook, and Topcoder have systems to deal with it but ai-class.org does not.

Anyway I'm neither surprised nor disappointed not to be in the top sliver. I'm not hireable anyway. It's funny that there is an identifiable top 1,000 at all instead of 10k+ perfect scores.
No. From what I understand, any material caught in the accretion disk is merely funnelling down into the black hole's event horizon, i.e. the centre. It will not affect any orbiting bodies, such as our solar system, but it will make the black hole pseudo-visible to astronomers because the material in the accretion disk will admit some light.
You are only represented today if you pay, this just means that the big troughs are closed and they need to start concentrating on individuals.

A couple of years back (90's) the majority of money collected by the Republican party where from donations in the amount of $50 or less (counter-intuitive but that why I remember it). So the small amounts matter.

Youtube and social media will probably gain in importances, so even no donors will have a bigger say than they did 20 or 30 years ago.

How does permanent resident (married?) work and is there a path to citizenship?
Please add (2008) to the headline.
The one big thing from Slashdot that I miss the most on HN are the "funny" comments. I know it's hard to separate the funny from the malicious sometimes, but there were/are some GOOOOD, and often creative, senses of humor over there. This seems to be largely suppressed here in HN, for better or worse...
I guess I just frankly disagree with that, though perhaps we have some different definition of "trolls". I haven't seen more trust (and community) in a forum than in the more playful/trollish forums I've been part of. Too much seriousness, on the other hand, I think poisons intellectual discussion.
Really only 8,000 a day? I've received 10,000 visitors from a single post on hacker news ... am I missing something? I definitely do agree however that the conversation on this site is top notch.
Just in time for the season.

I once had a very heated debate at a family Christmas party (the first my now fiance attended). It all started when I assumed my aunt was joking about dinosaurs not existing and ended in my being offended by her attempt to discredit my Googling by claiming that it's impossible to believe anything that comes off of a screen as small as my iTouch. She is now referred to as the dinosaur aunt.

No lie.
Considering the lightyears involved, I assume this means we'll see it in 2013?
There are plenty of places where it does matter, very much. e.g. support groups for abuse survivors, terminal disease patients, etc.

And even when it does not matter very much, trolls deny others the right to be serious, derail discussions, and spew bullshit. By insisting on turning everything into a joke, trolls are selfish.
They're bits in the stream. My karma is an int on a server somewhere

Like your bank account is just a database entry somewhere, like a dollar bill is just a paper, like all of your life's memories are just some information stored in your brain -- again just a few cells. In the end, everything is just some atoms anyway, right?

as someone who dabbles in trolling as a hobby

Oh wait, I fell for it! :)
Users can downvote posts, but only users with karma above a certain threshold. No user can downvote a submission, though - you can only flag them.
This fundamentally can't work. If you don't establish viability standards for who gets a tax-funded campaign, you get a pile of people just in it for the money, as well as a pile of people just in it for the lulz. If you do establish viability standards for who gets a tax-funded campaign, you entrench the established political parties, because previous funded campaigns help ensure future viability and future funding.

I see absolutely nothing wrong with private contributions to campaigns, as long as those contributions can never end up in the candidate's pocket (rather than spent on campaigning), and as long as they have no influence on the candidate's decisions (past or future). The logistics of that remain hairy to work out as well, but complete and total transparency seems like the right approach.

Personally, if I ran a campaign, I'd accept all contributions anonymously, to avoid any inadvertent bias or even the appearance of bias.
I worked with a guy that believed all of this stuff at a game company. Granted, he was an artist and not a programmer, but still odd see someone with beliefs like that work in a tech related field.
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The tone in his usage of the word tome reminds me of tl;dr, or rather, tl; did read but will not argue your points.

Although the original post does come off as ad hominem.
They call us on our bullshit.

It's recursive, then.
As for the recommendation to use his custom testing/benchmarking library: don't! It's based off an old version of jQuery, it duplicates functionality of better-maintained libraries, and it opens up a new vector for arbitrary code evaluation/execution ($.bm);
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