skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"[T]here may simply be not enough important things to do to keep everyone busy."

More and more these past few years I think of a favorite old science fiction story by Frederik Pohl called "The Midas Plague."

All production is done by robots. Production has become so, uh, productive that humans spend all their effort just wearing out everything made by the robots. "Poor" people must live in giant mansions with several robots and wear out more stuff than "well-to-do" people, who live in small cottages with few to no robots and enjoy leisurely, intellectual and social pursuits. Comically (or tragically), it's illegal to get a robot to wear something out for you.

I think I'll reread it today.
Those are good. But, I still think there is more to be covered, and I'll try to put in my .02 in the coming months.
I disagree, it is more than possible - it was the likely outcome.

As Shakespeare once wrote "If you prick us, do we not bleed?"

I think the problem is that people are blurring the lines between the professional Arrington and the personal Arrington.

Let me highlight it using a hypothetical but extreme case.

You start up a new web app. For every 100 user signups, I get to kick you in the groin (literally, not metaphorically) - How would that make you feel?

I think if people want to attack his professional life - great, compete hard with TC, refuse to do business with him, boycott his blog - whatever... but when you start blurring (or crossing) the lines between a personal and professional attack is when situations like these arise.
'What you just said means absolutely nothing: "backed by the taxing power of the US government".'

Money is recursive. The US government's acceptance of dollars is the base case. The US Military, Police, and various other force-directing agencies are the induction step.

It isn't entirely worthless, nor is its worth entirely intrinsic. It lives in the middle. Glib generalizations that put it on one end or the other are wrong.
Arrington blames Valleywag, AllThingsD after spitting incident and death threats
If you're worried about it, I'd upgrade to the paid version, which seems to have at least a modicum of support.
Hmm, that does seem to be a strong vibe with the popular comments. Still, acting free, for me, means spending a lot of time thinking and programming on certain subjects that aren't really my job. Plus, I want to study a lot of stuff. So, acting free is only an offtime exercise for me.

Alternatively, I could go the zen route and say I want whatever it is that is currently happening to me...but it wouldn't be honest.
I remember a common phrase from my early computing days which I feel applies to all the hubbub over the TC threats, etc:

Don't feed the trolls.
Freedom: yes.
Ruby is a tool that you use to build things. This is like saying that saws are dying because less wood was cut over the last few months.
Antonio,

on HN, you wrote --

"I hate how being harsh has become fashionable. Whatever happened to manners?"

on your blog, you follow up by saying --

"I stand behind those words. Acting bitter on the Internet seems to be increasingly gathering the popularity amongst an audience that’s used to being amused and entertained by cheap attacks."

Two points: the first is that you use the word "bitter" to back up an anecdote of someone using "fucking" as an adjective to describe a poor User Interface experience. I disagree with that assessment, as there's nothing that suggests bitterness by using "fucking." It's merely a more extreme descriptor of the user's anger or exasperation, but it doesn't suggest bitterness, which has a distinctly different flavour (if you will excuse the pun).

Secondly, I don't believe anything "happened" to manners. There have always been people, often a vast majority of a given population, who used much coarser language to describe their everyday life and experience. Often this was a class distinction, thus the reference to "swearing like a sailor" etc. I expect that many people posting here were exposed -- in the context of software engineering or computer science -- to colleagues who were either used to communicating in an academic or professional context. Although coarse language is to be expected to some extent, written communication about features, bugs, etc. in a corporate US context tends to avoid direct expletives for various reasons ("lack of professionalism" etc). This isn't the case in parts of the OSS community or parts of Europe. You may have seen this before -- http://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/ -- the number of fuck/shit/crap uses in the Linux source code. Do you similarly think that the Linux contributors who provided the patches (or indeed Linus himself) need to "grow up?"

Different contexts, different modes of communication.

But the truth why that dude used "fuck" all over the place? It's a very quick and easy expression of dismay or outrage, and it gets cheap laughs. Whether or not that's an adolescent desire I can't say. Yet some of the most serious commentators on, say, international politics heavily use 'fuck' throughout their own communication. Read some interviews with Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, for instance -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh
I solve problems by asking yes/no questions. And, by golly, you'd better give me a yes/no answer. No blah blah blah, no roundabout story. Just say "Yes" or "No," dammit!
Idea: Crowdsource your "backup" front page.
The idea is to better explain other people's startups so your link(s) rank higher in the related section.

The problem being addressed here is users visiting a site but leaving because they did not understand it in a few seconds.

With such a service, they might enter the domain to view additional attempts at an explanation before giving up.

Note that you don't need to explain your competitor's startups in this service: you could explain startups in a completely different domain.

I suppose this is a bit like Yahoo Answers, but specialized to explaining novel web sites in few words.
Maybe a mentally retarded person stole his girlfriend :D
Refactoring yourself out of business
Something has been nagging my brain and I was trying to work out what it was. Reading this article jolted it loose.

This whole horrible situation Michael Arrington has found himself in is incredibly similar to Kathy Sierra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra).

The same comments by reasonable people are being repeated about how unacceptable it is, and yet 2 years on it's happening to a different internet personality, albeit not a woman this time.

Frankly sometimes I feel like I'm a hostage of the people the democratization of web has enabled. Although, I'd still say there is much more good than bad (I'm not Andrew Keen!).
Don't Believe The People Telling You Not To Believe Games Programmers
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no one that participates in this forum is in danger of starving due to lack of income. you could make zero money in the next year and not starve. someone will feed you. it is also highly improbable that anyone that reads HN would find themselves without a roof over their head by making zero dollars within the next year. these fears are highly overrated.

the fears are real for others. and to build an economy around solving these problems is interesting.
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Sony Ericsson w810i is a complete phone that has walkman, camera, large and clear screen, light in weight, great speakerphones and everything that you can’t imagine.
"Experts aren't really experts. They suck at what they do. They just suck a little bit less than everybody else around them at the time."

Disagree. There are "experts" and there are Experts. Some Ruby on Rails blogger guy is an "expert"; Plácido Domingo is an Expert.
RSS was a welcome addition, but its not quite there yet. Any decent mashup still needs to screen scrape.

Screen scraping craigslist is easy, and I don't mind it at all. Only problem is the fact that if you happen to become successful, they'll shut you down, so there's much of a point.
You're so right. I just finally looked at a youtube video of the display tech in the new kindle (the "broadstreet" version of e-ink) and it is indeed far slower than is necessary even for simple text editing.
Only a fool would give up control over his computer because he's afraid of wiping it. You can bet your last dollar that promise will be enforced against you as well.
Pornography 'systemic' at National Science Foundation
Indeed. This is the point that gold-standard people don't seem to get. Gold is just as arbitrary as anything else. More so, even, because it is absolutely /useless/ in any aspect except as a valuable. It's too soft to do anything with. Furthermore, it has issues with being a finite supply that is occasionally moved around (no control over the monetary supply).

Steel. Now /that's/ what we should back our money with. Everybody needs steel. At least until carbon nanotubes get popular...
Focus is really easy. Or at least simple. Pick something, and focus on it. Take it deadly seriously. Focus like your life depends on it. FOCUS. Keep doing it. Do not stop for anything. Do it many times per day for long periods of time.

That's how I got started. Since I was REALLY planning to focus, I wanted some basic assurance that I wasn't throwing my mind into some kind of black hole I couldn't get out of. (Remember how seriously I was planning to try to focus.) I decided that an alarm clock or timer would be my signal that I could release my focus. I was sort of worried about losing myself or my ego entirely, so I would tell myself that there's no possible way that could happen. (I'd eventually fall asleep, wake up, and my personality would be reloaded.) I made sure that everything could stay on hold for a couple of hours--no fire on the oven, whatever. Mostly, this was just to get rid of any possible excuse for not focusing to the highest degree I could ever achieve. Anyway, I did this for many hours per day while I was unemployed, and ... it works. You will focus like you've never focused before. Amazing things will happen--I remember meditating in my room, and hearing a family member call my name... except that I only perceived it as physical sensation. It was only after I was done meditating that I recalled the sensation that had hit my ears and knew that someone had tried to call me--it had no meaning during the duration the meditation. It actually can be kind of dangerous if you do it like that because you can go past the level of unresponsiveness would you get in sleep. You reach a point where even if you felt pain, you just wouldn't respond. The neurons would fire, you would perceive it, and your mind would assign no meaning; you just wouldn't "care."

If you focus to that degree, you can't be stressed, because you simply have absolutely no thought of anything that can stress you, and even if you did, you would not comprehend / respond do it. Getting good at meditating like this can steam-roll everything. I swear I was in states of mind where losing an arm wouldn't have concerned me in the slightest.

I remeber afterward, in times of stress, I would start meditating like this again. Eventually, you're just different. Like, I would feel stress start to rise, and then just decide to block it out. I don't know exactly how to describe it, but it's like if you can push your attention around so rigidly, you can just refuse to pay attention to anything, and it just goes away. You can feel the stress rise, then just focus on it an ... extinguish it. It's hard to explain. You can stop it as if it were an ordinary voluntary thought.
I don't deny that there are ways in which encryption can be very useful and that a very organized company can guard against ever losing their data because of a password mishap. I'm just saying I've never met one of these companies and I've done my fair share of consulting work for companies large and small,

People are used to security that can be circumvented if need be (through an administrators password or at worst a disk recovery service). When you're talking about hardware based encryption that option is no longer on the table and I think that rightfully makes a lot of people uncomfortable. In that way it's a huge risk.

Which is why things like bitblocker (again, built into Vista) don't get used.
I've already worked 32 hours this week (I usually work a 40 hour week) and I've been wondering that myself.I don't even really care about the money except that if I get laid off I don't have to worry for probably a year or so..
Meditation is not a quick fix. It is a journey inside oneself where you uncover a lot of things about yourself and especially your mind.

Stress relieving can be done in several ways such as: running, yoga, swimming or even just something simple like doodling or painting.

Few good books if you really want to look into meditation are:
http://www.amazon.com/Wherever-You-There-Are-Mindfulness/dp/...
http://www.amazon.com/Minute-Meditation-Quiet-Mind-Change/dp...
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Secrets-Keys-Love-Meditation/dp/0...
...Let's all of us who consider ourselves human beings and who want the internet to continue as a forum for free and frank debate get together and decide on a few rules of engagement...

This, I believe, is what HN offers me today. Cheers for that! Sometimes opposing viewpoints get downmodded to oblivion, but as I see from recent discussions, people have already started taking notice of this phenomenon [for e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=446176] and have taken it upon themselves to fix it..
Others have similar advice, but I get my best stress-relief / combined workout and meditation from martial arts (Shorinji Kempo), yoga and hiking. Zazen is something I've started a little bit. It's very challenging but fascinating in its own right. Also pottery has been good.
There is no mythical secret to why I work so hard, its quite simple really.

I work hard, because I enjoy what I do.
I wouldn't call the idea of physical access not being the highest level (to hardware state) particularly innocuous. From the article - "You can't even sell it [a stolen drive] on eBay". Theft deterrence is nice, but the piles of bricked drives left over from xbox upgrades are disgusting.

The same eviction of malware can be achieved through a documented hardware interface to the lowest levels of microcode (say, JTAG). The current problem is not due to openness, but closed CPU microcode.
The point is that MR and MC are not fixed. MR tends to go up with number of users (network effects), MC tends to go down (economies of scale).
Yes, I have. I have placed certain bets against the dollar. There is not a single doubt in my mind that the dollar will keep loosing it's value - with some minor exceptions in the short term.

With all the billions of fresh created money (created out of thin air) being pumped into the US economy at the moment, the real devaluation of the dollar will pick up speed.
No, you're right. They've only been stalked, threatened, had pictures taken of them every time they go to the beach, been the butt of jokes on TV every single night, sometimes been assaulted, kidnapped, or shot. But thankfully I can't remember any of them getting some saliva on them lately!

I'm not saying the life of a celebrity is a living hell. I'm just saying there are thousands of people who already deal with the downside of a huge audience, and tech reporters will have to learn how to do the same. That's a pain, we all wish it could be otherwise, but it's not like Michael Arrington has to put up with half the crap that anyone with a hit song or TV show goes through.
It is actually its finite amounts that make it valuable. Anything that can be produced at will not hold up as a currency.
Stop being pedantic. At some point everyone must trade their labor for goods other people produce. This transaction incurs taxes that you must pay in dollars, or you go to jail.
this is democracy blatantly taking credit for capitalism.
Poll: Rails Deployment: Passenger or Mongrel or?
Simple question. What do you use to deploy your application? Why?<p>Side questions:
Do you use a staging server?
Passenger 64 bit (mod_rails)
Passenger 32 bit
Mongrel
And so began the thread that everyone was a little afraid to post "hooray!" in.
I'm glad to see this perspective here. It's bizarre how much of a sense of entitlement we can get working at jobs whose high-level description is 'go build cool stuff', and where if you're any good and you don't like the one you're at, there are 10 more looking for you even in a down economy.
Man, Hacker News is full of UW students, eh? I see people reading it in class all the time, this article is just more evidence...
Interesting; what kind of bets?
I never stated that the dollar would be completely worthless, I only stated that it's backed by absolutely nothing.

For all the same reasons, it does not matter that the US government accepts dollars. It matters what you will get back for those dollars. When, if ever, people will come to collect en masse, the US government will have no means what so ever to pay of those creditors, in other words, the government becomes insolvent and the dollar plunges.
plentyoffish: top 10 site on 8 servers -- admined, designed, developed (in asp, no less) -- by one guy, and profitable

can yc/angel/vc backed startup be plentyoffish killer? i doubt money will help shrug
Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library
The Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library was established in 1948 to support UCLA's teaching and research programs in East Asian studies. The library selects, organizes, and makes available Chinese-, Japanese-, and Korean-language materials, and its staff provides reference and instruction services to optimize access to and use of the collections.
Let me rephrase with less gusto:

If you read the article, and think it is correct and well done, then you are not intelligent enough for me to want to have discourse with.

Saying you suffer from Down's Syndrome was a way to call you retarded without saying 'retarded', therefore doubling down on the thing you complained about.

To answer your question, I have nothing against them. I wouldn't bother to debate a person with it though, it would be a silly thing to do since their impaired mental capacity would not lend itself to an ability to develop theories and then argue and provide support to those theories, which is where you come in.
In Australia, we have a phrase for this kind of attitude.

It's called "Tall Poppy Syndrome"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
I do agree that this is over the line.

But I'm also slightly conflicted - why did I laugh when the Arabic reporter threw his shoe at Bush a few months ago? In retrospect, that event should have been just as inexcusable. What if Georgey wrote up a similar blog post about his experience? How would I have felt then?
10 years of Game AI papers archive from AAAI
Forrest Gump killed my father.
Before compilation, Forth words don't exist. During compilation, they are flat lists of other words, not nested lists of other words. After compilation, they can be just about anything. Forth is great for embedded DSLs but it's not because of its great ability to deal with nested lists of words.
Next to buying small amounts of gold and silver, I have made a couple of lucrative forex transaction. Since I receive my income in euros in Europe and live in Thailand (baht rate is connected to the dollar), I have been able to increase my income quite a bit when the dollar hits new lows.
This is why it helps to have one or two colleagues you really respect, who really respect you. If you're confident that they're very good, then if they think you're good too, you must be good, right?

I find this satisfies my need for the approval of others, while being much safer than looking for the approval of a dozen, hundred, or ten thousand readers or users.
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What's the hard part of the syntax compared to a language like ruby? Interfaces? Classes? Inheritance? Templates? Exceptions? Ruby has equivalent interface elements, and there is not much of a difference in difficulty level between learning the one or the other.

I learnt C++ in 2 weeks 7 years ago, and it was easy. The difficulty comes with learning to use the libraries and host APIs, but that is exactly the same for every other language I've learnt since then.
IE=’\v’==’v’
Universally across human cultures, throwing a shoe is considered hilarious whereas spitting is considered is rude and gross.
This does not mean that C++ is difficult. It just means that you may be used to easier languages, and your brain is not flexible enough to deal with C++.
Honestly, I don't want trials to ever be quick. If you're talking about putting someone in jail, you better be really freaking sure the guy is a threat to society and not just having a really bad week.

I have threatened bloody murder to many a bad library author, and the last thing I need is to get jailed because of that ;)
It gets better - here is their forecast for 2008.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/02/jpmorgan-predicts-2008-...
My background: I have spoken at OSCON, SXSW, Webstock, RailsConf, and more -- venues shared with Kathy Sierra -- and I have been an OSCON organizer, and I was behind the creation of the new "People" track. I am a programmer, and a usability expert.

Allow me to respond to your points:

A) she doesn't pretend to speak as a programmer

B) her stuff is not generic PR & marketing, it's about user engagement and results in concrete recommendations about the business of building software, AND

C) she cites psychological research, not marketing handbooks (she's pretty damn current too, the lady does her homework)

D) she doesn't name drop or publicity whore, podcast, screencast, chum up to people for photos or videos, or write product reviews (unlike Scobl

E) she actually made her career with the invention of the redonkulously succcessful Head First book series, and that is why she is paid to speak -- tech books sell like ass... except hers (and Missing Manual, another O'Reilly line)

F) Her talks are a bit repetitive, but I wasn't aware that giving the same talk (slightly updated) a few different times was reason for death threats to be acceptable.

Would I have reacted in the same manner?

No, but then again, I'm not Kathy Sierra, I am a 24-year-old girl who grew up online, and don't even have a hamster to worry about much less a teenaged daughter.

I simply cannot fathom the ridiculousness of accusing Kathy of "vapid self-promotion" (totally unfounded) and basically suggesting that she was asking for it.

It has "socially disabled adolescent boy" written all over it. Just like the original "griefing" and threats.
One of the reasons I always register under pbrown or paul_brown. It keeps me clean, honest, and accountable.
-Paul
This is the most stupid essay I have read in my life. Most scientific advances have not been made in democratic governments - The old Islamic Discoveries, the old Chinese Discoveries, the old European Discoveries were all made under King-like dynasties. A huge number of inventions were made under Fascist Germany.

Democracy is in fact really bad for science, because in a democratic society, you need to convince many people you are right. In a fascist or monarchist society, you just need to convince the king.

And then stupidly equating this with china - china is where it is right now because of a very strong central government with tight control. Without this government, the chinese people would have collapsed into civil war and split up - it would not have been at the level it is at now at all.

Old men with limited experience should not go meddling with systems they do not understand and that seem to be working, based on their ideology. The alternative could mean the death of millions - look what happened when they thought to bring 'democracy' to Iraq.
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