skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For some reason, we socialize people today that criticizing people means that you are smarter than them. I've had people pick apart parts of my comments that weren't even germane to the discussion at hand simply because I said something "wrong"

This is why most journalists have a one-email rule: you can write and say hello or thanks for the article and get a reply, but very rarely can you continue a conversation past a couple of exchanges. There are simply too many people on the net who like to argue and criticize.

How do you deal with coworkers doing/saying stupid things

Learn the four magic words, "Help me to understand..."

There are 3 possible conditions. 1) They are mixed up and you are correct, 2) You are mixed up and they are correct, and 3) You are both mixed up. Given equal weighting, 2/3rds of the time you're the person who is mixed up. So when somebody says something that doesn't sound right, ask them to explain it to you. Heck, you might learn something.

In that same spirit (humility and learning), you may want to offer some education to somebody who is struggling. But that's only after you listen. Listening gives you the right to talk.

To save time on the net, I usually try to restate what I think the other person is saying and then provide the way I understand the situation. "If I understand you correctly, you're saying that large weasels were the first inhabitants of the New World. That's very interesting, because as I understand it, there have been no large weasel fossils found here. Help me to understand. Is there something I might be missing?"

Part of the problem with the net is that deep in our minds we view other posters as somehow just part of the machine and not real live humans, whether we acknowledge that or not. So we say things in comments we would never say face-to-face. Programmers are very analytical. When something appears in a program on in a thread that is "incorrect" we must jump in and stomp it out immediately! That little Mr. Spock in all of us turns on and immediately whips up a retort and criticism to show to others just how much more we know.
Sounds interesting... How do I change to the Colemak layout on Windows XP?
Yep, that's a fair comment. I wrote this one before I read that thread, hence why they are two separate replies. I could probably have merged them as a single response with a bit more forethought.
In college I ran across a guy who used genetic algorithms to shift the keyboard around based on his own typing patterns. He took code he typed, blog posts, emails, IMs, everything and logged it and after two weeks of collecting he then ran it through as the data source for genetic algorithms, assigning numeric values determining the viability of the arrangements based on distance a hand has to travel, etc.

He found DVORAK was a very good layout, but he came up with another one which was extremely odd and unusual. I played around with it but found that I never had the time to retrain my hands, I was always in the middle of a semester and thus not really free to be less productive.

This is a good blog post but not what I specifically discovered: http://bit.ly/17e6G
If you want to create a keyboard layout or use a new layout, this is the tool: http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/msklc.mspx
And in terms of scaling Ruby is likely to be the cause of your problems rather than the solution...
OK firstly you stole my point and secondly it is more accurate to say that most death is caused by lack of oxygen to the brain.
> There's nothing like attacking something you are oblivious to.

This is why, when it comes to rejecting a particular ideology, I believe you need to have adopted that ideology to the point that you genuinely grok it. If you can't replicate the mental operations that allow a subscriber to make sense of the world, what its problems are and how to solve them, and the ways they derive comfort and validation from those operations, then you're guilty of being uncharitable to their worldview. And if you're uncharitable, you're unlikely to develop an argument that demonstrates how an ideology is flawed given its own values and assumptions, or how that ideology actually conflicts with one's pre-ideological values and assumptions.

The ideologies that survive are always more resourceful at countering counterarguments than a non-grokker will expect. Which is as good a reason as any to actually try it out, first.
How do you authorize new machines?
This is where you attempt the defense that such activity is "initiation of force." The ability to make many varieties of libertarian philosophies practical hinges on how broadly you can handle interpreting initiation of force and the government's responsibility to stop that. Monopolistic behavior could be considered initiation of force in the sense that it unfairly and aggressively limits someone else's success or freedom for gains without right.

Then, of course, you get to decide whether drunk driving is initiation of force, whether very noisy neighbors late at night are initiating force, and so on and so forth.

This is not a critique of libertarian philosophies. Pretty much every philosophy is made practical through interpretation and compromise because life is more complicated than policy (and even poetry).
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Absolutely agree. Which is why the goal of any net conversation should not be to persuade, but to understand how the other ideology deals with arguments against it. That can sometimes sound like bickering, but the real goal should be understanding, not to "win" or "lose".
Greenspan was a self-proclaimed libertarian who used to support a gold standard.

Of course then he gained virtually unlimited power by controlling the entire US economy. Power naturally corrupts, he renounced his views, encouraged every American to spend more than he or she possessed, artificially lowered interest rates and caused the entire housing boom.

Article is a joke. Can't believe this crap gets out there.
Criticism can be motivated by a desire to communicate useful information and/or motivated by status-seeking/dominance. Criticism that repels even secure people is the kind that appears to have that self-promoting agenda.

I like the way Ben Franklin put it in his autobiography:

"I wish well-meaning, sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive, assuming manner, that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat everyone of those purposes for which speech was given to us, to wit, giving or receiving information or pleasure. For, if you would inform, a positive and dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention."

He describes how he cultivated "the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced any thing that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken.
...
When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny'd myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear'd or seem'd to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag'd in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I propos'd my opinions procur'd them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail'd with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right."
It took me about two weeks to learn Dvorak well enough to type at a reasonable pace. I don't think I type any faster, but it's much more comfortable than QWERTY so I enjoy typing more.

OS X has a Dvorak keyboard map that switches back to QWERTY while you're holding down the command key. I don't know if there's an equivalent for Windows.
I really tried using DVORAK layout in 2003. The short cut keys and the punctuation were bad, but the worst part was that I would lose about a month's worth of progress if I took a week to two weeks vacation from DVORAK (when stuff we due in University). Also, I hated having to remap FPS games all the time, so I eventually just decided 60 wpm with QWERTY was good enough.
I've been using colemak for the last 3 months and the result has been very positive:
- The wrist pains I used to have disappeared (since that was the main reason to switch, the switch is a definite succes)
- It took me about 1 month and an half to regain my normal speed (my biggest problem was the inversion of 'r' and 's')

I never really managed to type in a proper way (though I did touch type with 7 fingers, I didn't have my fingers in the proper row and the proper position), since starting colemak I started having a correct finger position since it just feels more natural to keep your finger in the home row when so many letters are there.
technically yes, but I find that more often than not, people think it is the critic who is wrong. Should the critic really continue to fight the society he is part of? it only serves to hurt him/her in the long run.
Yes, exactly. As a recent fortune cookie fortune put it:

"The purpose of argument, should not be victory, but progress."
Which newspaper?
I would love to have parallel list comprehensions, for instance.
If you are a normal Linux user, then you'ļl be fine, and modern ARM plus support chips should be less power hungry than Atom and chipset, although Intel has been making progress. I think it is about 9Watts average on Atom with newer chipsets, compared to first Atoms which use older chipsets and are consuming 26Watts.
That "new" AMD chip for netbooks is an atrocity (IMHO) using about 45Watts.

If you want to run Windows, then you'll want to pass on ARM netbooks.
I got really used to the low travel of keys on my laptop keyboard and just can't stand using external keyboards from that...
I think the "What about X" approach often comes across as condescending. It translates to "I figured out what's wrong with it in 2 seconds, but maybe, if I give you a few hints you'll see it too.". I've noticed though that people who don't like criticism (become defensive, etc) respond better to the "what about X" approach.

You suggest tactlessness should be dropped. But plain language is almost by definition tactless. Tact is something you add on top of your opinion/statement because you don't want to hurt somebody's feelings. Adding boilerplate tact is bound to give you poor results when it's not sincere. You're emphasizing the good parts merely because you don't want the other person to become defensive. Not because you think the good parts really need emphasis. When I use the "what about X" approach I often feel insincere because I can't directly get to the point. I end up respecting the person I'm talking to less for having to take the insincere route.

To give another example of boilerplate tact: often people advice to combine a compliment and a criticism with "and" instead of "but". Instead of saying "I like the layout, but I think that column should be wider"." you're supposed to say "I like the layout -and- I think that column should be wider". It's so obviously insincere.
Chill out man. Perhaps he's not a native English speaker.
It's quite obvious that the guy has no idea what he's talking about (e.g. "Money was very quickly given to corporations with no government oversight. Exactly how libertarians would want it.")
Rhetorical questions are still phrased as questions. It was "declarative sentence structure married to a question mark" that I was joking about. HN didn't think it was funny, clearly. :)
I would add to that list:

3. Higher-order types

(Yes, C++ has had this with templates for a while and Java has it with generics, but they bolted it on later, after the syntax and many essential libraries had been fixed.)

4. Type inference

Type inference is a REALLY BIG DEAL to me, because it makes programming in a strongly-typed language much less painful, and with that pain gone, I can better appreciate the compiler using the type system to cover my ass.
That's not "simple" at all. Coercion has always been part of human relations. People have conflicting interests, and when these rise to the level of open conflict, there needs to be some sort of coercive solution.

What libertarians propose is that all coercion be in defense of property ownership. This seems "fair" until you realize that "property ownership" is itself a complex historical object. The feudal system is named after a form of property ownership - the feodum or fief. The colonial system created property for Europeans by appropriating it from natives. The system of slavery was also based on a certain kind of property definition.

Saying "don't use coercion except to defend legitimate property rights" is like saying "don't use military force except to defend against legitimate threats." It seems like common sense, but all the complexity of politics is swept under the rug in these phrases "property rights" or "threats". In my view, no one is born with a "right" to property, property is just a concrete representation of the political equilibrium that exists at a certain time.
When I worked in japan, I often got tired of people witholding their criticism out of politeness...
For example, just to get my coworkers to actually correct my japanese took a few month of me insisting that no I won't be angry at them for correcting me and that I want them to do it.

Some people can't handle criticism but it doesn't mean that you shouldn't try at first to give others constructive criticism, see their reaction and drop it off if they are too defensive.
How people react to criticism is also a good test to see if someone is interesting and likely to evolve his opinion or not...
There is always the possibilty of obvserver bias though. If you able to accurately assign the never-give-ups, middle and slacker groups before the process started then the 'attitude => result' case would be pretty watertight. But if you only determine that during their startup progress then it still leaves 'result => attitude' as a possibility. Beyond the obvious metrics, the founders may have a feel for the way things are going that they can't articulate but influences their decisions.

You could argue that 100% believing 'attitude => result' is the best way to think even if it is not so true. But it seems to me that each person involved in any endevour needs maintain their own cost/benefit analyses of the situation. If the costs mount and the chances of benefit shrink they are actually doing the right thing by changing path. I can see why this might not make for good coaching advice though.
I was so sad when A+ mofos bought inCider and killed off many awesome programming articles that had code, which my little sis and I used to spend days typing into our Apple //c, and instead dumped pages and pages of ads on it :-( Early memories from childhood. Dislike for suits began then.
DoS meaning you can lock people out of their accounts, not that the site is brought down.
Hey! Put some carriage returns in there! You're screwing up the page rendering...
Which fails against any attacker with a botnet, so, solve the lockout problem first, and deal with DoS (which you can't ever really solve) later.
How will they make money? They need to make a LOT just to repay investors. The path to profitability is far from clear from my pov.

A business does not choose to run at a loss. They are currently running at a loss because they have failed to monetize. Investors keep giving them money because they assume (have faith) there will be some way of turning a profit in the future.
'I criticise by creation, not by finding fault.' - Michelangelo
What to Submit

Off-Topic: ... cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

(http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
I think it's ok to criticize as long as it's constructive.

I can't speak for others, but I really appreciate good criticism. I'm talking about the kind that is brutally honest.

It still pays to be polite, I don't take shit from people who are rude.

I think it's great that Hacker News has the 'Rate my Startup' style threads. One of the things that stands out is the quality and honesty of the criticism, there's always some interesting points brought up.. and everyone here so damn nice too!
which I suspect was before the creation of scrubbing brushes.

You suspected wrong, as I was using "scrubbing" as a metaphor for household work in general.

the mundanity of a suburban housewife's life is an historic abnormality

As is the widespread availability of alcohol and other chemicals, which I suspect is a more important factor in the conduct of life.

we have our needs for intellectual stimulation every bit as much as men

If by "we" you mean "we women who read hacker news", sure. I'm looking at the aggregate. It's not a men vs. women thing, as men are also not driven to abuse by "mundanity" or other silly things.
Dale Carnegie never used Vista.
And that's being known as a "practical libertarian"
I also learned dvorak, but it did not impair my quert(y|z) abilities. In fps games I either go with querty or I'll remap the keys anyway.
Agreed - what's worse is that some idiot has modded it up.
Probably mainly the lower power usage, better battery life etc I'd say.
"You're not entirely wrong to be frustrated, and I'm under the impression that most people here would agree with you that you shouldn't have to be a emotion-pandering brown-noser to get ahead."

Very valid point. Once can express one's opinion even if it is against the "consensus reality" of a company as long as it is done in a polite and non demeaning fashion. I am known as a "straight shooter" in the corporation I work for and I often find myself disagreeing with my colleagues, mostly about "soft stuff". I keep my tone polite, explain why I think they are wrong, and express a willingness to be corrected by facts and logic.

This is a learned lesson for me but I find that it serves me a lot better then the days when I used to loudly proclaim my preceived truth. Awareness of politics and playing politics are two different things (and the latter is not necessarily a bad thing). "Brown nosing" is a very small subset of human behaviour in groups or companies. There will always be a small subset of people who practice this, but they are not necessarily more effective than people who don't.
A very good example of misconception. The manual of the digital watch shows explicitly that there are too any functions for a single button.

When examining an object design or a user interface, usually a tech object, I use to think like this : if my little sister (15, lives in a new tech world), my father (53, hardly knows how to use Google) and me (student in IT engineering) are capable of understanding how to use it mostly without the manual, then it's a very good user interface.

For example, the iPhone : easy to use, my little sister knows how it works, my father had to read the light manual but everything here is well explained, and I didn't need the manual, but I found plenty of useful power-commands on specialized geek sites.

It's the same thing for the Wii, from a primar use to a power use.

Unfortunately, we gave my father a HD videocamera : my little sister knows how to record a scene, I needed to look into the manual to find how to watch a recorded movie and my father just can't do anything without reading continuously this manual. User interface FAIL.

Two years ago, when I was teaching people how to use a computer, I realized that Windows XP is the perfectly wrong UI : there isn't any bit of this software that is easy to understand. The desktop-icons-directory is easy for someone who already used a computer, but not for someone who is new to this. I realized that my students who were using Mac OS understood about five times faster than people with XP (who needed books and asked me continuously what that dialogue box meant). And last year, I showed an 80 years old engineer and doctor, who was stucked with Windows XP, my brand new iPhone, he immediately knew how to use it, how to scroll between pictures, how to magnify text or web pages, how to start an application...

I could go on, but I think I made myself clear : WE SHOULDN'T HAVE TO READ THE FUCKIN MANUAL.
I have used Dvorak full-time for 5-6 years now. Back in high school, a friend of mine discovered Dvorak and a few of us switched cold-turkey; everyone else switched back within a week, but I'm still going! It took about two weeks for me to be comfortable with it. If you're like me, it's the punctuation that will screw you up the most when switching.

I'm an Emacs user, but I learned Emacs after I learned Dvorak, so I don't find the keybindings to be awkward. I do some strange things, such as using Escape as the Meta key (with my left thumb on the chord letter).

Vim, however, is hard to use (e.g. "HJKL" are in the "JCVP" positions), which may be part of the reason I gravitated to Emacs. For games, I either rebind the in-game commands, or I switch to QWERTY while I'm playing (e.g. "WASD" being in the ",A;H" positions is just no good).
That man Raju (CEO) is one of the biggest conman India has seen in recent times.

How could he do that?

I've been following the news here in Bangalore, and its so sad especially to realize the helplessness of the employees....

He should be put behind the bars!!! Imediately!!!!
I think that most people who are confrontational and critical online are just like that in person. People can be quite blunt face-to-face, and are perfectly OK with it when people are blunt to them. Blunt interaction has the big advantage that you never have to second guess what a remark means. Consider how many relations (between friends/colleagues/etc) break up because somebody reads too much in a simple remark. The most tactful people also tend to be those who (needlessly) worry the most about what other people say. I say this just from personal experience, so YMMV - but it's worth considering.

As for the Mr. Spock argument, I think that has a much more mundane explanation. I, like most people, read far more on the internet than I write. But when I read I read to learn. Therefore, I want to be reasonably sure what I read is correct. Because of the Mr. Spocks amongst us I can read the comments and use that to figure out if the blogger made any sense. More often than not the comments reveal serious flaws in the blogger's post. It is this interaction between blogger and Spocks that leads to better understanding. Both for visitors like me and the blogger.

So the Spocks fight against the pollution of the internet by incorrect statements%. It's a futile fight, but I believe it's a noble one. Frankly, I think posting uninformed and wrong comments is far more inconsiderate than pointing out to all future readers that such a comment is uninformed or wrong.

%) You called it an internet maxim in another post.
Frankly the old version of the site sucked. I finally got around to launching the new version this past summer. I was hesitant to push it considering I had no real QA other then myself. It would have sucked to spent a ton of time/money to market it and then find a huge bug that drove all those users away.

Now that it's half way through the school year and there haven't been any issues I'm more confident. But it doesn't make sense to market it now, since teachers are already in their routine for the year. Next August I plan on making a bigger push.
"In fact bigcos can not exist without government support"

That is a mighty big claim which flies in the face of practical experience.
I use colemak and it feels a lot better.