skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, having experienced plenty of recent death in close family / friends. I found it quite an insight and got what he meant...

All of the vitriolic outcry against something that was insightful but misguided (and badly worded) is just a little staggering to be frank.
Is irrational actually the word you're looking for?
I do agree with the overall theme of your post but its not a "wash your hands of it and move on" situation.

The fact is we're in such a rush to launch our websites and start being businessmen who actually talks this kind of thing through? Who's asking themselves how best to moderate comments and chat as they scale to protect children. What's your response to someone posting obscene or inappropriate content? and how quick do you act?

There's definitely an inherent danger here, often we build and engineer so quickly and cheaply that we sacrifice having the kind of staff numbers we need to live up to our ethical responsibilities.

All the best to the guys at justin.tv and anyone involved, I'm not judging you for your statement sure you have the best intentions.
Sweet, I can now say I've been told "fuck you[r downvotes]" by a professor from Cornell.
I think most people here are probably a little too ramen-profitable to buy tickets from ticket brokers anyway
Excellent comment - I share pretty much the same thoughts :D you put it so much mor eloquently than I could manage!

> So, is News.YC a gathering of friends, where we speak frankly even if it may offend? Or a PR event for promoting our projects, where due sensitivity to all potential listeners must be observed? I suppose it's somewhere in between.

Excellent appraisal ^^

I'd like to think more of the former. If I asked for criticism of a project here I'd hope for (and expect) frank assessment.

Someone's brand of humour might not appeal to everyone here: but at least try ot respect it!
The question is. Do I upvote that and look like a dick for apparently celebrating this fact. Or downvote it, look good, but add to the negative karma!

Abstain :(
Sad for his family and friends. Nothing to add about the legal/corporate aspects, as you have already addressed those. Human tragedy. Here's a helpful resource for the prevention of teen suicide you can share if you wish...

http://www.SpeakUpSaveLives.org
Perhaps it is best that we just let this hacker news item go away on its own.
Why can't we downvote submissions again? This is just redundant and unnecessary.
You can downvote but not until you have enough credit. Patience...
This blog post seemed rather silly to me. It's poor journalism and quite frankly not news worthy. It feels like something that the author hopes gets picked up by Digg/Reddit/etc.
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Hacker news for the most part is a great community but some people I have seen follow the mentality of those chatters.

Why ...continue to be mean-spirited towards someone else work you don't like, when its unprovoked? If we wish to hold ourselves to a higher standard - a civil community, don't continue your vinegar beyond Ask HN for feedback post. It was not asked for beyond initial post!
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The author writes for the same blog as I do and I disagree this not being news. It is on the front page of HN right now with 50+ comments. If so many people care about it it is newsworthy.
This whole thing is an absurdly tragic event that is triggering all sorts of trollish behavior here. It is very sad, but the resulting discussion about tragedy and the meta conversation discussing the discussion of tragedy is just mean-spirited because this whole thing is making people feel very emotional.

Please flag this post and move on, the blogger doesn't deserve the traffic.
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Newsworthy isn't the same as "can get me traffic from hacker news." The initial event was newsworthy. But this meta discussion is just inciting angry behavior from people. That type of behavior drives traffic, of course, and I think it is extremely inappropriate to be using such a tactic with regards to such a sensitive subject.
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I hate bloggers. If there was a Japanese TV show where they torture bloggers, I'd watch it.
BigTable is totally unrelated to MapReduce though. It gains scalability by stripping 90% of the query and indexing features of RDBMS. It may be a reasonable tradeoff for a datastore that's supposed to support one single relatively simple application that's hit by millions of people. Not many apps work that way though, and those who do may be equally well served by a plain file system.
Not everybody reads HN. The fact that it is OLD news here doesn't mean it is NO news.
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Agree on #2. I have seen the average commenter on the internet, and he depresses me deeply.
Something that 58 (and counting) people care about is newsworthy?
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The title was misleading. It's quite unfortunate that irrational choices can seem appealing when the market is manipulated, and it is even more tragic when it is done in the name of the American Dream and ends up wrecking families' finances permanently.
this whole thing is making people feel very emotional.

Serious question: is it?

I know people are saying things like "It's so sad", etc, but till now I was assuming that it's somewhat in the same vein as people who say "ROTFLMAO" 99% of the time. They're not usually rolling around on the floor laughing out loud, but they want to relay the spirit of as if they were. That is, it is sad that these things occur, but it doesn't affect one's emotional state due to the lack of connection to the event.

Few who aren't personally involved in the story are "emotional" about it, right? If they are, I'm intrigued. It shows an interesting cross over between fiction and reality in the emotional lives of some people - one I'm sure has probably already been studied to death by all the psychologists out there.
Open Source -- Can It Innovate?
Honestly, I think the syntax sugar is great because thats what I need the vast majority of the time.

And the scaling aficionados probably prefer single table selects anyway. ;) (Not that it makes a difference given how little traffic my blog gets)
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Honestly, I'd say the opposite is true. The more the language design changes, the more implementor time is going towards servicing the changes and not squeezing the fat out of the implementation.

That being said, the two often occur together because changes are exciting and attract effort.
This was available software for previous firmware versions, but Apple stopped their customers from using it.
In fact, a lot of people already don't care. I disapprove of this front page submission more than the original comment that was tucked away at the bottom of a comments page.
Looks good, but I like when such articles show the old design along with the new.
I suppose my comments are delving into a larger problem with the media in general, and the constant use of sensationalized stories and facts in order to get more exposure. All the main news organizations are doing it as well, but I wish journalists would cover things that actual mattered. We blame the government and greedy businessmen for the current state of the economy, but honestly if we still had independent journalism, it probably would have never happened. What a man can do, a man will do, and in our society, what a powerful man can do is limited only by what the media will call him out on.

Anyway, I'm getting off topic. The bottom line is that page views != value. This seems like a blatant attempt at page views.
Certainly true, however most people also don't think their social value is something they can work on. Hence a feeling of helplessness that they project onto others.

Learning to work a crowd is like learning a programming language. Humans are individuals, but they tent to have the same basic needs and desires - to be entertained and sexually stimulated is among them.
"visiting assistant professor"... isn't that like a glorified TA?
I don't think you can downvote submissions, only comments.

I know I can't.
The Reddit discussion on this is really good:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7eoth/sounds_li...
You make it sound like page views were invented by the Devil himself. Page views aren't bad and a good reflection of what people find interesting. Yes, this story is interesting. The 50+ comments are extremely interesting and highlight all the aspects that make this story interesting. Every blogger writes for an audience and having more people read your story is a good sign. The fact that this story was posted here (by someone not associated with that particular blog) is proof of that.
The last time I saw that sentiment in a book review it was on a Dilbert book.
To quote Shakespeare: Much ado about nothing
I mean emotionalness in the meta discussion, not sadness about the actual event. "Act emotionally" would have been better to say than feel emotional. People are saying angry things to each other that they probably wouldn't say to each other face to face.
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The blog post is clearly sensationalized. A poll option to fire him, really? There's also zero original content or insightful commentary, It's essentially just a copy/paste job from drama that happened on this site, with a bit of spice for page views thrown in.
I don't understand why he is so morose. I could understand if it had been revealed that Chopin was actually a computer. Being upset about this seems akin to being upset that the world's fastest sprinter can be equaled or bettered by a motor car. Surely what makes the music so great is that it is a product of human ability.
I liked the article, but I think Hofstadter is overrating the philosophical importance of his own subjective experience and emotions here. Just because you had a profound emotional experience listening to human-composed music doesn't mean it's the end of the world or human creativity is ruined if you can get the same feeling from somewhere else. He could probably get the same feelings from the right drugs.

"Spiritual experiences" aren't that rare or objectively profound and Hofstadter would do well not to generalize too much from his own.
That's what makes the musician great, but it doesn't make the music any better. Usain Bolt is very impressive but I'm not going to rely on him to carry me to the supermarket.
It seems that to some extent this article is a response to obvious trolls: anyone who seriously makes the generalized claim that open source cannot innovate is either a fool or a troll. Its quite easy to come up with cases where open source has innovated, and just as easy to come up with those where it hasn't. Of course, in our anecdote-happy blogosphere, people are often willing to use examples of the latter as proof of a ridiculously over-expansive generality.

The real answer isn't that "open source innovates" or "closed source innovates": rather, people innovate.
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Innovation has less to do with open or closed source and more to do with organizational structure and chain of command.

Innovation comes from individuals - not from groups. If one person is in charge and has the power to drive his ideas through an organisation, whether that is an open source project or a company, he will be able to realise his innovative ideas. If consensus in an organisation is that decisions are made by committee innovation is less likely to happen. Committees have a tendency to boil away anything that is radical, new, or not proven.

Apple is innovative because Steve Jobs is the supreme leader.

Python is innovative because Guido van Rossum is benevolent dictator for life.

Bittorrent is innovative because Bram Cohen had an idea, programmed it himself, and had no organisation to answer to.

Linux is innovative because Linus Thorvalds is even better at divide and conquer strategies than he is at coding.
I voted up your original comment. I thought it was smart and witty.

I think people who voted you down probably regularly vote up witty remarks about the Bush administration or the war in Iraq, and are guilty of extreme hypocrisy.

Human beings make fun of everything, including death, pets being run over, wars of occupation, rape, incest, ignorance, stupidy, disease, racism, the holocaust... Perhaps the same crowd would have voted down Benigni's "Life is Beautiful" because of the jokes about an event in which 6 million jews were murdered.

Some jokes are less appropriate than others, but no subject is off limits. To censor your ability to jest about something is to censor your ability to think about it. I truly loathe people who impose their sensitivities on others as censorship. Fuck them.

Stand up for your comment. Even in a minority of one, the truth is still the truth. You're not alone in having the freedom of thought to find a humorous angle in unlikely places. We're with you.

PS: For reference, my comment on that justin.tv thread was equally caustic:

"Idiots: also available on justin.tv."
Why choose Ruby in the first place?

I tried both at the same time and granted haven't coded anyhting real in Ruby but Python just won handsdown on every point that mattered for such a language:

* Readability
* Libraries
* Rapid protoyping
* Integration and support with other platforms, bindings to libraries n other languages
* Documentation
* Support form industry(while Ruby is pretty much only used in webapps Python is used in bioinformatics, engineering, GvR works at Google hacking on Python, it is used at NASA, has numpy+scipy+matplotlib).

I just don't see much reason to hang on to Ruby. Switch to Python and let Perl and Ruby die.
I think he's being a bit too histrionic about EMI here. It produces good music, but it has to be highly "inspired" by a human composer first. Without the works of a genius artist to consume and process, EMI would not be able to produce anything lovely itself. It can only elaborate on a composer's style, not have one of its own. For now, computers still don't have real creativity.
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You're not seeing it because it's not there. There's only 417-400.
Aha! Well, my questions still stand for anyone bored enough to ponder them, but yes, it seems in the meta discussion it's bit like the Normal Person + Internet Anonymity = Total Jerk comic strip ;-)
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"every channel is riddled with pedophiles"

Seriously? Do you have proof of this?
There are many other appropriate comments. Perhaps it's the only appropriate comment you can think of.
1) They weren't egging him on, apparently, just letting him get on with it without interfering.

2) This is a very well known psychological effect called "diffusion of responsibility". It's the same effect that allows hundreds of people to walk by while someone is being beaten up in the street, when almost none of them would just ignore the event if they were alone or in a very small group with no one else around. It's neither surprising, nor "wrong" per se - it's just human nature.
What has gone wrong in the development of Parrot that it's taking so long? Also, what about Perl 6? Is it just because Parrot isn't 1.0 yet, that it's not out?
So what? Disrespect is at the heart of much great humour.
Behavioral economics play a much larger role in macro economics than most people believe, explaining such things as sudden drops and surges in share prices that classical economics have serious problems with. Unfortunately, as the article argues, much economic commentary by massmedia is stuck in the era of classical economics.

If you want to learn more, and gain some insight into how these mechanisms work I recommend watching Daniel Kahneman's 45 minute Nobel prize lecture from 2002: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/...
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If you move to the US at 55 work for 10 years and then retire SS is an great return on investment but it's still a tax. What you pay in and what you get out are somewhat related, but there is no advantage to working from 18 - 67 at minimum wage and paying into SS over investing that money in the same time period. They just look at your 30 highest income years which is great for people who don't enter the job market till mid 20's but it sucks for those who skip collage and work till retirement age. They have almost 50 years to save and invest and SS still does not fully replace their salary.
I think it's great that people in this community still feel they can comment without a chastity belt of righteousness strapped around their mouth.

Shame to see that going away thanks to people like you.
What's a shame? That you won't be using it? I'm sure we'll all survive.
It could be made clearer that it won't work outside US/Canada.
You shouldn't have apologised. Shame on you for giving in to the righteous hordes, from a moral standpoint. From a business standpoint, it may have seemed the only practical action, but in my mind you compromised your personal integrity by apologising to these people, and I'm sorry that you did.
I'm sure they have no problem in that area. Do you?
I think if you find this community offensive to your sense of maturity you should leave.
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"America" did get what was coming to it. Its foreign policy of the last 50 years has been brutal.

However, the people in the towers weren't "America", they were people like you and me, and they were not guilty of "America"'s foreign policy any more than you and me are, and it is a tragedy that they ended up being the victims of this event.
as a PHP and ruby programmer (these are my two primary languages) I have to say I agree completely with your comments, you express perfectly a nagging thought that's been, well, nagging for quite some time now. I am very interested to know which you think are better languages that a young programmer might learn next that avoids these pitfalls whilst still retaining the 'practicality' of PHP & ruby for 'getting things done'

many thanks in advance
Please keep your sanctimonious righteousness at home.
How would such a trial proceed, though? Would the judges then have to decide what course of action would have been the best for the company? And how could they ever prove that their opinions are correct? How could they prove that raising the wages would not benefit Ford in the long run?

So in effect one could buy really cheap managers who screw up and then sue them. Then one could get the "expertise" of the law courts for free to decide on the best action for a company.
I agree but personally I view art in the sense that it is an intermediary between the artist and the audience, a symbolic representation of the true value of it: the semantics of the piece and how the artist chose to express themselves and not the physical manifestation itself. In a vacuum I don't think artworks are special. They are after all just noise or shapes and colors.

(Apologies if this sounds very pretentious but I couldn't figure out how to say it any other way :) )

Edit: This view was cemented for me when I read the book 'The Power of Art' by Simon Schama. After I read the book I realised that what made most of the great paintings great was the context in which they were created. The fact that some of them are aesthetically attractive or required consummate skill to create is besides the point. Their value comes from the messages in the paintings. For example there was a time painting divine biblical characters with dirty feet was seen as humanizing them, blasphemy. Something which I would never have noticed about the painting if it hadn't been pointed out. And even then I would not have deduced its significance which was that it supported a deeply subversive movement of religious reform.

That being said, traveling forward 400 years or so. The music of Gordon Sumner, AKA Sting is self professed 'doodling' yet it can probably evoke a stronger emotional response than arguably more significant works.

So I retract my previous position and now I don't know where I am :/
This is really an awesome product with a classic, real business model: "Here's something that lets you build stuff to make money a lot faster than before. Please give us money for it." I love it!

Also: international outbound calls are hopefully around the corner, since that's a key requirement for what I have in mind.
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I don't see a new version of the iPhone SDK. Does the SDK not care what version you're running? I thought it only "liked" versions 2.0 and 2.1 of the firmware?
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Obviously the root subject matter is very serious.

Neverless sadly there are many deaths and suicides in the world. So...

Please let us not turn this place into something like a reality TV series where the participants become more important than the content.
Street View in Maps is slick (very smooth panning and zooming), but not very user discoverable: click a pin, then click the little person icon.
"I hope that you do not feel negatively about our company; one that I work on each day because I want to make it better for our users. And, if nothing else, please do not think poorly of Dan, YC, or anyone else. If you want to hate someone, please simply let it be me; I'm much better adjusted to it."

Its very clear that he is apologizing just because he is worried that his business is impacted because of what he did and not because he realizes that it was wrong thing to say.

You may down vote me for saying this but, thats what the truth of the matter is.
I understand your pity... However I still think the the words "I'll be Bach" should appear somewhere in this article.
Why do I get down voted for saying this. I believe this is a valid legal point
I use Python most of the time I have to program. For the past months, my working tools have been Outlook, Project, Word and Excel, so, my impact on the art of programming is negligible. On occasion, I have been seen coding in C, C++, C#, Java, Forth, Perl, PHP, Dataflex (on Unix), Mantis (on IBM/370s - I miss the 3278 terminals), several different BASIC implementations (back all the way to Apple IIs and Sinclair ZX series), various flavors of SQL and even Bash when the need arises. During my higher education, I used FORTRAN several times. I learned OOP on Smalltalk and made some simple programs in Actor (a ALGOL-ish language very much inspired by Smalltalk).

Feel free to avoid any language you want. The point I was making is that I have no energy to deal with childish behavior of toxic community leaders and their abandoned minions. Life is too short and my to-do list is way too long. :-)

I am not saying I will not use Ruby or Rails - it's a very nice stack. But, most certainly, I will not invest much time contributing to it unless the rest of the community sheds away its more toxic members.
What happened the to great potential offer by Maglev and Avi Bryant's presentation a while back about putting Ruby on the smalltalk VM? Was that all just vapour ware? I have not heard a peep about in since!