skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just to chime in, it's generally counter-productive to meta-post about being downmodded, unless your meta-post is clarifying something that might be misinterpreted into a downmod.

For example, saying: "I can't believe you people are downmodding me." will most likely just cause people to pile on and punish you.

But saying: "To those downmodding me, if you think I meant this, I really meant that." or "Just to clarify, I meant it this way." will often defuse a misunderstanding and cause people to at least put you back up to 1.

Really the key is to be civil. It's rare that someone gets dogpiled just for dissenting. However, if you dissent in a rude manner, people are tempted to see how negative one comment can get.
One of the nice things about the English language is the difference between U.S. and UK rules, so you can mix and match them to your own taste and people can't tell you you're doing it wrong.

So for example I write "center" not "centre" but "axe" not "ax".
"Someday, I suspect, browsers will dump their search fields and just use the address bar for everything."

Google Chrome does that; personally I love it. (When I go back to Firefox I always resent having to press an extra tab to go to the search field.)
I did claim they have a monopoly position in certain segments. I did not claim they are destructive. For some reason, people seem to equate monopoly with "evil." I guess I unintentionally helped that with my comparison to MSIE. Sorry. I've added a section to the post to clarify what I meant.
It can be done in 8 bytes.
I get what he is saying, but what I don't get is he's basically describing the blogsphere as it is right now.
Yes and no. On one hand, I think it prevents me from saying silly comments that I might not think twice about saying on Reddit.

On the other hand, Reddit also has karma, but I get far more negative votes there than here, not because they're mean/nasty comments, but because I enjoy criticizing some of the stupid that goes on there (uncreative pun threads, etc).

"Hmm will this be unpopular and ding my karma. In my case it seems like HN Karma encourages group think."

I don't see a lot of negative karma voting due to people disagreeing with opinions. Usually it will just hover around 0 if most people disagree. Only when a comment is clearly wrong, immature, stupid, inappropriate, etc will it reach negative values.
Why? Because you mention casual sex and irony as something similar to racism and homophobia. I hate racism and homophobia while I don't see nothing wrong or "mean" with casual sex and irony.
Have you read "Autobiography of a Yogi"? I'm half way through the book and am loving it.
I have no idea whether or not Obama will be a great president, though I suspect he will. What makes him unusual, if not earth-shaking, as far as successful politicians go, is that he seems to be a truly great human being. I'm not pol-bashing; I don't think most of them are bad people. I just don't think many of them are great people either.

Casual sex is an example of the crudeness and nastiness of the current era, and I cited it as such.

Bigotry is much less appropriate as an example of the Reagan-through-Bush-2 era's nastiness, because even though it's a lot more evil than casual sex, it's been a problem more or less throughout this country's history.
Actresses, singers and presidents are a little different though. Actresses/singers want much of the popularity, but struggle to maintain the right balance. And presidents -well- many folks have logical reasons to want them dead. I can't see the logic behind wanting Michael Arrington dead though, and I don't think he wants to be popular himself (as much as to make his blog/events popular).

And somehow I hope our industry is special, that we're less likely to do crazy things in general. We're trained in science and reasoning after all. How many techies do you know that are rabid fans of celebrities?
TechStars' David Cohen: you can do it in any reasonable start-up community
It's also worth noting that if you process payments at large scale, you might also have some fraud-related chargebacks. No matter how you customize the descriptor, you can't completely eliminate those, because the person receiving the bill actually didn't buy the product.
Not really:

$ echo 'echo $0' > 'Hello, world!'
$ chmod +x 'Hello, world!'
$ 'Hello, world!'
Hello, world!
$ wc 'Hello, World!'
1 2 8 Hello, world!

8 bytes. I think that's probably as small as you can get.
I'd like to see the code for "Hello World" for biological systems.
The idea that Bush caused internet incivility is one of the stupidest things I have ever seen attributed to Bush in a long line of stupid accusations.

(I'm not saying they were all stupid, but there sure were a lot of stupid ones.)

The internet was uncivil before Bush, the internet will be uncivil after Bush, and if Obama gives a speech tomorrow directly exhorting people to be more civil on the internet it won't do a damn thing, because the internet takes absolutely none of its tone from the US President.

Drink a little less of the Kool-Aid, OK?
Oh, brother, formatting.<p>
<pre>
$ echo 'echo $0' > 'Hello, world!'
$ chmod +x 'Hello, world!'
$ 'Hello, world!'
Hello, world!
$ wc 'Hello, World!'
1 2 8 Hello, world!
</pre>
I asked David about Paul Graham's claim that "One of the most common emails we get is from people asking if we can help them set up a local clone of Y Combinator. But this just wouldn't work. Seed funding isn't regional, just as big research universities aren't."

David said: "You can't do it anywhere, but you could do it in any reasonable start-up community."
His page seems much more relevant to humanities grad school. Dropping out after two years of engineering/CS/science is called a masters and you go get a job in industry.
this. for the vast majority of people, meditation does not relieve stress. its good for other purposes, but not heavy-duty stress relief. and this comes from someone who meditated almost daily for several years.

in general, the best ways to relieve stress follow the rule of thumb: "take care of yourself". sleep long/well enough, exercise, eat right, ensure personal health (go to doctor/dentist, get a massage, etc.), and take the time to do the things you enjoy.
TechCrunch is not a marketing plan
My use of the word "irony" referred, in particular, to the hipster phenomenon and the general "fuck it" attitude toward life and other people. Hipster "irony" is often about making fun of the disadvantaged. It has nothing to do with literary irony.

Casual sex is not nearly as evil as racism or homophobia, I agree. I didn't intend to make comparisons in that list. But I do think casual sex is impractical, and often an expression of latent misogyny. Does casual sex necessarily lead to misogyny, erosion respect between genders, lower self-esteem among the participants, and a permanently damaged ability to form lasting love relationships? No. In practice, does it almost always produce these things? Yes. Casual sex works in theory but not in practice; humans aren't meant to have their hormone levels and emotions jacked around like that.
There was a thread about this on HN several weeks ago. In it, pg seems to imply (to me, at least) that the behavior you talk about is just fine.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392228

I got modded down for suggesting people should not downvote posts that have merit but that they just disagree with.. but hey :)
Have a condition where I always need to carry some single-day use medical equipment around.

I have created a mental invariant that says that unused, spare units are in my right back-pocket, the one that is currently in use is in the left front pocket, while the left back-pocket is for trash.

This allows me to easily "poll" for whether I'm equipped to leave home, and has made sure that I have not once in 15 years found myself without it. I attribute the success of this system largely to my "programmer mindset".
I don't think people get upset when they self promote on Hacker News.

There is a very fine line between self promotion and spam. I've said it in other threads - I can't think of anything cooler than the "review my app" posts here, and love it when people email/twitter me cool stuff.
Problem is: ugly sells
You asked for reasons why you got downvoted, which is what you got. Your reasons for posting those were fairly clear, the issue is that people disagree with you.

I certainly don't see casual sex as being an example of "nastiness" or "evil", and it may be that this is what most downvoters are taking offense to.

Plus, it's off-topic. The article is about being rude, callous, and insensitive towards others. Specifically, about the hypocrisy and cowardice involved in doing so anonymously. Your post was both off-topic and (potentially) offensive, and as such you're getting hit with two different sticks.
The Basic Rules In Marketing - What You Need To Know
Some very important marketing rules
Bush is a symptom of the social illness more broadly described as the "neoconservative era" that began around 1980. The man himself had almost nothing to do with inciting internet incivility (aside from sometimes being a target of it) but certain civil erosions ushered in by the 1980s did.
I find that background for the text really annoying - the lines of the graphical background doesn't match up with the actual text.

Good article though.
Self-promotion already is socially acceptable, so long as it's tactful and respectful. Submitting a ton of blog posts to social news sites and twittering non-stop about yourself is neither.

"The vast majority of startups probably don't get a fair chance at success"

No one comes to deserve success just by starting a company.
Craigslist's users may like it as it is, but that's only because the majority who have tried it and are dissatisfied with it don't count as users. I've heard many, many stories from friends who couldn't effectively find what they wanted or had unpleasant experiences. That's what prompted me to write the post. I also helped a team write a business plan for a Craigslist competitor, and doing the research for that helped me realize there's a lot of ways Craigslist falls short.

Yes, I said Craigslist isn't "doing more," which I used to argue that the time is ripe for someone else to unseat Craigslist. I didn't use it to argue that someone should force them to do more. I don't see the problem.
People should not be accused of spam no matter what. That's why things need to change.
There was a thread long ago about this for those that are interested: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=147098

(And rokhayakebe, I agree, responding is infinitely more useful than anonymous downmodding, provided the response is civil.)
A new feature, perhaps? non-anonymous down-voting?
That's why we need new kinds of mutually beneficial self-promoting services where non-stop self-promotion is the norm.
I am curious to see how American Internet is different from other countries in this regard. I have long had the suspicion that our love for hatred online and South Park episodes comes as a psychological defense against insane levels of in-your-face politeness, fake plastic smiles and excessive "political correctness" dominating our offline lives. Even our everyday language is affected by this: people don't die or get fired, they pass away and being let go. George Carlin said it best: soon we'll be calling a rape victim "an unwilling sperm recipient".

Perhaps the cure for online rudeness is being less hypocritical offline.
Scrapbooking Videos
erm, so if I started ending all my comments with my website -- you wouldn't consider that spam?
they link to venture beat, scobelizer, sillicon alley insider quite a lot, I think.
Whatever downsides "fuck it" attitudes and casual sex might have they are not comparable to racism or homophobia in any way IMHO.
Don't be so moralizing, if you can't say anything nice...
Broadly defined, NO I don't think it is solved by a long shot. In the narrow Hey-look-I-made-a-multi-user-blog sense, then sure. But beyond that think there is still a lot of room for innovation. For instance, I've been looking for a CMS that would let multiple authors submit articles directly to a digg-style rank-based page, but none of the solutions work without a real mishmash of code. Also, it seems as if a lot of systems out lack good out-of-the-box rich media support. It would be nice, given that it is 2009 if you could record right from your microphone/webcam/still camera and publish to your site without needing some third party tool.
Not only that. Think about those who have MSFT stock. Where will MSFT copy stuff from if APPL ceases to innovate due to the health of its main driving force ;-) ?
I would never have downvoted it to 0; it wasn't a 'bad' comment needing censure. But, when it briefly reached +3, I just tried to downvote it, and hit upvote by mistake instead. Oops! So take that as a hint as to how arbitrary individual votes are, and why you shouldn't worry too much about them.

Why didn't I want your long grandparent "quick comment" to be a +3 or higher?

At one level, you almost seem to be implying "that nasty Bush and people like him are why Arrington was spit on, and now heroic Obama will fix everything". I think that's a simplistic and unhelpful worldview. (It doesn't even help Obama to treat him like a superhero.)

You vent a laundry list of grievances with the past 30 years. Well, if you want to write hacker-themed analyses of 'casual sex', 'classism', 'internet harassment', 'homophobia', 'racism', 'so-called "irony"', the 'heartless health insurance system', or anything else, more power to you. But using the labels as shorthand slurs about how 'barbaric' our current 'era' is just makes the discussion partisan, impressionistic, and emotional. You're pressing buttons, and such threads degenerate quickly.

Finally, while I was born before your 1980 cutoff when things started to go bad, I imagine most of the participants here have spent their whole lives in what you call "a barbaric era of unbelievable interpersonal nastiness." I can imagine them taking issue with that characterization, now and in the future when "people look back".
I rememeber that for a while, PA made a point to send out warning notices to people they were going to link in their news posts.

Did they happen to send one your way, or did you find out when your site's traffic spiked like a champion volleyball player?
Yeah, kind of neat. But ca-a-a-a-areful here... We're still busy fighting the war against Flash, the armies of open-standards loving geeks can't fight on two fronts, so we need Moonlight to lurk in obscurity for a while.
Would you still be delighted if the person had spit into the cream pie before throwing it?
The "and/or" thing actually sort of makes sense if you take "or" to mean "xor", since (A XOR B) OR (A AND B) equals (A OR B)
Yes, on demand streaming is difficult, but it's not "the lie of internet video".

Perhaps he's aiming his blog post at TV executives. If they believe that they are going to be able to stream the Superbowl instead of having it on broadcast TV, then yes, internet streaming is a lie. But there are only a couple of hundred content producers that would be true for. Think producers and distributors of hit television shows or event broadcasters.

But, for the vast millions of content video content producers around the world that now have an audience and distribution, internet streaming is a dream, not a lie.
Palm Brushes-Off Apple's iPhone Patent, Says it Can Defend Itself
Lessons in startup failure
I'm sorry if you thought I was trivializing the worse evils (which are orders of magnitude worse, in this case) by listing them in conjunction with petty ones. This was not my intention at all. I see all of these social illnesses as interlinked through a root disregard for humanity, but I didn't articulate this well and seem to have unintentionally offended a lot of people. My apologies.
AOL axing 700 employees
I agree with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. My goal in meditation is to stop "thinking in words".
I found out when an old friend sent me an email:

subj: Holy Shit!!!!!!
body: You hit the Big Time!!!!
Looking for a star developer? It’s probably one who’s got a hobby programming project on the side.

Sounds good, until that programmer runs slam into your company's IP policy over some code he wrote or some idea he had in his or her own time that the company now thinks it owns.
sorry for making a topic, wasn't sure how to go about flagging users.
He is an entertainer in that he leverages popularity to make money.
He's up to date on technology, and has a sense of humor too :)

See http://tinyurl.com/cx39vd
Seven Twitter Tips that Will Blow Your Mind Out of Your Skull
- Try not to follow more than follow
- Say something interesting
- Don't complain
- Track things
- Tweet at the right time
- Engage in conversation
- Here is my last tip

More in the post - of course.
That may be true because Viaweb was the first, and for a long time, only thing that fit that description.

Wufoo, on the other hand, is just one of about 20-30 choices for online forms. Including, of course, paying a lackey on elance $15 to do it. (Now elance, they haven't created jobs, but they did do a lot to move labor around.)
The powerset crew plays a good bit, we either use the lan or setup a virtual lan with hamachi.
If you were an inert body that could be the case, but given our ability to react to the environment there is a big difference between a punch you are expecting and one that catches you unprepared.
Pro Boston Startup Culture ("Paul Graham... See you later")
writing = cute. twitter = not cute
DIY: How to write a book
Not really, every party is an unreliable narrator!

This is undoubtedly a troll and goes way too far, but the base of his criticisms ring true:
http://www.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Full-Disclosure/2007-...

"Kathy hollers like a stuck pig as she wonders why the trolls escalated to magnitudes which she could no longer control. The answer is obvious: she fought the LOL. The LOL won. She flew off the handle trying to silence criticism of her books, and this is what she got."
Dup. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=452966
Curved Spaces - flight simulator for multiconnected universes by Jeff Weeks
If anything, not being in the Valley will keep your brain from turning into mush.
I don't think I'll be able to explain it to your satisfaction with words; if I had a good CAD program with a skeletal model that'd show heat-maps for the amount of pressure applied across various bones, joints, and connective tissue I could probably get closer: holding and moving your body in a way that keeps the soft tissue deformation from strikes as shallow as possible, while minimizing skeletal deviation from a stable but agile base is the key.

The trick, of course, is that nobody's fast enough to do that kind of calculation in the middle of a fight. A simplifying model helps--the most popular model involves "chi"--but even using that model, conscious analytic thought is too slow for anything but mostly-scripted practice.
But if there is deflation, supposedly there is a reason for it? Seems to me like introducing artificial inflation is just messing with the symptoms, not removing the cause.

I also don't think people wouldn't spend anymore. They need things, so they have to spend. If they don't need things, they shouldn't spend. I don't think making people buy stuff they don't need is really helpful in the long run.
Twitter is totally cute, no?
I imagine sending pg or someone else thats a mod an email would be the proper way to go.
I think the attractiveness of twitter as a chaotic yet useful and fun medium relies on the fact that there is no need to confirm to rules like "Don’t complain."
Shameless plug: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/trevisr
The user was created an hour ago. Odds on if it's banned, the individual will create another, similar username and then carry on. Many of the comments are on items two years old.

Added as an edit: Yup - he's done that. We now have http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=M_Arrington spamming the site.
Just 'flag' his comments. If you can't yet flag, trust in those users who can.
Everything old is new again. The first browser to do this was IE 6 (or maybe even 5). People didn't get it (it wasn't discoverable enough), and people complained that the browser was helping Microsoft spy on them.

Google only improved the UI a little and made Google the default instead of MSN search.
From $80,000 a year to eviction
I wouldn't know how to find the email address of a mod. Is that documented somewhere? I've had a quick look, but it didn't seem obvious.
wasn't sure how to go about flagging users.

Clicking link on a post [EDIT: on a comment] presents the flag option. You can then flag the post [EDIT: flag the comment] that way, which is the closest thing to flagging a user.
Does HN ban IPs for users? How can arrington be prevented from creating new users?
I know from experience on other forums that solving the user-banning problem is an important feature of forum software. More power to HN if there is a good, clean technical and cultural solution to that.
Why don't more software applications look like clean desks?
Always in bug-fixing, problem-solving mode instead of just listening (which is sometimes all my spouse/kids want)
Sounds like we might work for the same news organization with a content sharing agreement with TC. I was appalled/not surprised at all when that happened.
Sorry guys, I guess I accidently hit 'reply' twice. My bad. Don't kill me too much.
"You simply can't have a system which rewards nastiness over niceness..."

I don't think the internet is to blame, it is simply in the human nature. People bond by agreeing to hate some other people together. It is not the only way to bond, but it is a very common way.
Be careful. Meditation is a buzz word and has a big industry built around it. Most of it is junk. The best meditation advice is offered by people that have taken a vow not to accept money (other than donations), so if you're being charged something other than a nominal fee, it's likely a scam.

Meditation is not about relaxation, stress relief, and being in peace with yourself and the world. These things only come as a byproduct.

Meditation is not a band aid you can apply to your life to make it better. You cannot continue living your life exactly the way it is now, medidate for half an hour a day and expect improvement. It is psychological self exploration. If you maintain your life the way it is now, you will very quickly hit a boundary and will make no further progress in meditation until your life is changed.

Meditation is about observing the way your mind works. The only way to do that is to anchor it by sustaining an incredibly focused attention on a single object for prolonged periods of time. It doesn't matter what the object is (although it's normally breath) - your mind responds to any object and by learning to sustain uninterrupted attention you will observe how your mind works.

I would suggest you to seek instruction in Anapanasati from a competent teacher. Ignore new age stuff, buddhist cosmology, relaxation and stress relief business, or any related stuff. None of it will make any lasting difference.

In a nutshell just follow your breathing, one breath at a time. When you discover you've lost attention, relax, smile, accept whatever emotions you're feeling, and go back to the breath. Seek a teacher once you discover how incredibly deep and subtle this process can be.

Good luck!

EDIT: I suppose I should add a disclaimer. I am far, far from an expert. If someone (including me) claims they completely understand meditation, they probably do not.
but he hasn't submitted anything, so I'd have to flag entire random threads?
Does HN ban IPs for users?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373929
I stand corrected, I have to hit reply to see the flag option.
The news.yc editorial cabal keeps its membership secret. Just email PG.
Microsoft Ships Python Code... in 1996
Based on an example that appears to have been removed from the front page just now, I'd like to see an easy way to flag a user who is spamming up the site as well as the current way of flagging particular submissions.
Yes, I'm aware of pg's opinion.