skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree in principle, but I feel like the author might be missing the point; the reason "tldr" is used is because it has evolved as an efficient speech marker.

If you think about forum posting as a medium, then a "tldr" makes sense -- generally, you scroll down a list of messages. When you encounter a wall of text, you can either start reading (to see if you'll want to read the rest), or keep scrolling past until your eyes reach the "tldr" symbol, which draws you to the main "point" of the post without requiring you to mentally invest in reading the whole first paragraph.
Yes I agree. tl;drs versions are especially useful for high quality content like the articles on http://longreads.com.
I like how the first sentence embodies the very idea it is espousing. If you read only that sentence and close the page, you've still have taken away 80% of the information of the piece.

An important UI component for this technique to land: the first sentence must be short, and on its own line. Do that well, and a "TL;DR" prefix is optional at best.
Coldest place on earth
Oh yeah, they would have had a case for trespassing.

BUT THEY DROPPED THOSE CHARGES.
> Unfortunately, the people who wrote the platform I use - which deals with money - decided they're "too slow".

I've had the same problem (that platform wouldn't ha. It's… annoying (also bullshit: in the worst case — CPython <= 3.2 — basic arithmetic operations will take ~20µs on my machine aside from divisions which take a bit more and if that shows up in profiling use cdecimal, CPython 3.3 [integrated cdecimal] or pypy)
I don't usually engage with people in this manner, but may I ask why you feel that jacquesm is a troll? Especially a "known troll?" He seems to be a rather passionate person who is willing to stand up for his views.
Jared Diamond: It’s irrational to be religious
Ask yourself whether or not you want to be working for a company that sieves through applicants using washed up interview questions from a 1950's HR textbook.
There are people who watch a huge amount of porn but have a perfectly healthy sex life and relationship with women. It's about understanding what it is and it's context, and realising that there's a difference between that and reality.
JStor is not a publisher, so they don't have the same relationship to authors that IEEE does, it's not possible for them to do what you're talking about.

All JStor does is get scholarly output from those who do hold the copyright or publishing rights (for which they pay these rightsholders), aggregate it on their own platform (which has a much better UI than most of their for-profit competiters), and then resell access to others. Their prices are largely determined by those set by the actual rights holders they have to pay for the content.

Whether or not JStor is doing enough to increase public access to scholarly content (I think nobody in the industry really is), they are doing _more_ than most of their peers in the industry, and are _far_ from the worst, the most greedy, or the most venal in the industry.

I'm not saying don't pirate JStor content, pirate whatever scholarly content you want as far as I'm concerned, no skin off my back.

But if you're looking for a target as the worst or the most evil or the most responsible for inequity in and high cost of access to scholarly output, you're looking in the wrong place if you're looking at JStor -- I'd look at the publishers (not aggregators) and for-profit ones rather than non-profit ones. Google "most profitable scholarly publishers" and see what companies you are led to by following links (it won't be JStor).
PLoS and arxiv seem to have figured it out. Require federally funded research to be posted on a similar platform.
No, because that is ludicrous. A porn addiction is bad for you, but watching other people fuck isn't necessarily bad. Just like certain electronic components exhibit weird properties when taken to extreme levels, we wouldn't write off using op-amps because they go funky when abused.
Surveillance shot that ruined tragic Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz's life
+1'ed for the most obvious title ever!
This is a hard question and in my initial post I wanted to write a paragraph rant about it.

I think there is a case for the similarity between the slow stream of aleatory snippets that characterize the websites like the New York Times and the way we receive information concerning our everyday lives. The way we get information in our lives is certainly granular, contains much noise, and is primarily observation. Novels are not granular with little noise. Philosophy is explanation and we may miss out on the initial gather steps. Although it would be fun to phrase this a testable hypothesis.

I think its a different kind of critical thinking.
I don't agree with the Douglas's interpreting an author's own writing of a TL;DR as answering the question of whether the author himself read it -- rather, it is pre-empting the question that might be asked by readers.

While it is true that it is entirely possible (and common practice) to provide the content of a TL;DR in the first sentence, it might not always be there. The reader can only know if the first sentence was a summary by first reading it (see the Halting Problem).

TL;DR is an elegant solution to this problem because it only requires five (minimally four) characters to be read to identify the summarizing statement, and then consume its content. And with the immense amount of content begging for my attention on the Internet, I for one appreciate being able to quickly determine if reading the article in question is something I will likely want to do.

TL;DR: TL;DR != opening sentence
I don't really understand this "mental illness" obsession on Hackers News. Yes, there is probably such a thing as "mental illness", but it is not directly comparable in most cases to physical illness, and what we refer to as "mental illness" is really a very complex interrelation of a range of factors including an individuals life circumstances, stress factors, history of abuse and trauma, drug usage, relationship issues, and possibly actual brain disorders that are purely physical/genetic in origin.

Historically, accusations of "mental illness" has been one of the most common ways of denying and shielding abuse, and then provided as an explanation when victims commit suicide. Its downright scary that this same term is being bandied about without any sensitivity to its historical context. People who commit suicide may be mentally ill, or they may be trying to escape intolerable and unbearable events in their life - but simply defining suicide as a symptom of mental illness ignores the underlying complexities of why someone might reach this decision.

Imagine the case of a young girl being sexually abused over many years by a close family member whom she fears. Her behaviour becomes more erratic over time, and is diagnosed as being mentally ill and forced to take medication. In a state of unrelenting emotional anguish, and unable to share her pain with a world that is motivated to explain everything as mental illness and unwilling to look at a dark reality they would rather avoid than confront, she takes her own life. Was she mentally ill? Well obviously something wasn't right, but to describe her as suffering a "disorder" when clearly the problem was something external being imposed seems almost inhuman. What if she hadn't committed suicide, and eventually escaped her abusers and went on to live life, but continued to suffer depression and anxiety decades later. Would you describe her as mentally ill then? A doctor today almost certainly would.

Who knows why Aaron committed suicide. Clearly he was faced with extraordinary life stress - can anyone here really imagine what it must be like to face 35 years in jail for doing something he though was right? It would be reasonable to assume this played a part, probably a large part, is his decision. However, the actual reasons for his suicide, or the nature of his "crimes", does not excuse the prosecution for it's excessive and overblown nature. It would have been just as wrong had Aaron not taken this decision, and instead received a lengthy jail term for a fairly benign crime, as the present tragic outcome.
well, no question is the old or new, or perfect or not.
I believe that what actually happens is that, the person in front of you, has the job you want in his pocket, all you have to do is convince him to take it out, and give it to you. So to convince himself, as long as he doesn't ask you, personal questions, have you ever kissed a girl? you are to deal with it.
I always thought that the response by Daria Morgendorffer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daria) was one of the better ones to this question.

Q - "What is your greatest weakness?"

A - "My inability to answer stock questions with stock answers."
Does it have a social aspect? The pitch seems to be all "you ... your photos ... you decide ... your photos", with no mention of sharing.

What I really have in mind is a way to share photos (follow, be followed, comment), not just upload them for safekeeping, which I'd guess is probably a use-case far fewer people are interested in.

Again, I'm just responding to the home page and "overview" subpage... if there is a social aspect your team should mention it more prominently.
Yes, tl;dr (too long; didn't read) was originally used on the somethingawful forums as a dismissive reply to a long wall of text post. Eventually, an OP would preemptively include a TL;DR line in a post to give a warning/summary.

http://www.quora.com/TL-DR/What-is-the-origin-of-TL-DR seems to offer a decent history of its early usage.
To quote [1]

"After a user creates a petition, he or she will receive a direct link to that petition that may be sent to friends, posted on social networks, or otherwise shared in order to gain signatures for the petition. If the petition meets a pre-set signature threshold within a designated time period, the petition will become visible to individuals browsing or searching the White House website. If enough users sign the petition to reach a second pre-set signature threshold within that time period, the White House commits to respond to the petition in a timely fashion. The White House may also elect to respond to any petition before it reaches the first or second threshold. Once the White House responds to a petition, it is closed to additional signatures."

That last sentence implies that a petition will continue accepting signatures, irrespective of any thresholds or deadlines, right up to the point where a response is posted. Surely that means that there is great value in continuing to promote and sign this original petition? A steady stream of signatures over time would attract attention in the system and demonstrate ongoing support. Eventually it might grow to the point where it is impossible to ignore.

[1] https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/how-why/moderation-policy

----

Addition:

Indeed, the signature count is still ticking over (gone from 53136 to 53149 in the last 15 minutes). Listing "popular" petitions [2] shows that the petition is significant, currently ranking #8 in terms of number of signatures collected.

[2] https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petitions/popular/0/2/0
W3.org down?
I guess http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/ and other events on meetup.com are a good start (and don't require a pre-existing network)
Yeah, I did notice that. I thought it was far less egregious than errors in the Carmen Ortiz petition, though.
I hope not as much as people say. Everyone pushed me for an MBA, but I passed and chose MS in Technology Management. An MBA would have kept me too far from the technology that I love and need to completely understand in order to be a more effective leader.
It also hurts employment (not just if you want to be a lawyer...) and even housing prospects. Being a felon very effectively makes you a second class citizen.

Even ignoring all of that, there is the factor of being forced to submit before an unjust power. The "felon" assignment did not represent just a label, but also total submission. Just summing this up as a problem with his "ego" may seem a good way to marginalize this consideration, but it is incredibly transparent.
well thats a risky answer, without the buttering tone. If he is in the bad mood just that day, or out of focus, you are out 9/10.
> We have normalized porn very recently and it is just a piece of modernist faith that it is harmless

Do you abstain from television, computers, rock and roll, role playing, comic books and video games by this same line of FUD?

Mass media has the power to create unrealistic expectations. Someone growing up in the age of Petrarch and Dante had unrealistic expectations of romantic love. It's easy to imagine that someone growing up in the age of internet porn would have unrealistic expectations of sex. Beyond that, I'd have to see hard, consistent evidence before I'd write off porn as especially harmful.
All NIH-funded research must result in open access publications. How does it work? Basically.. the NIH set up a website and the journals submit NIH-funded papers there, where they are freely available.
The basic idea is that the research papers should be open access 6 months after publication. 6 months is enough for publishers to recoup their costs of publication.

The reality is that publishers make all their money from site licenses. Harvard, e.g., will spend $15 million a year on subscriptions to various publishers like Elsevier, in return for access to all the new papers, and the back catalog.

Most papers that are downloaded, around 80%, are from the back catalog anyway, meaning that universities are incredibly price insensitive with respect to site license subscriptions. Journals could offer the new papers for free, and still universities would pay for the site license subscription.

This is what has happened with the arxiv: most new papers in theoretical physics are on there for free, and yet physics departments still subscribe to the theoretical physics journals. Why is that? It's because the departments need access to papers in the back catalog, which are not on the arxiv.

The upshot of this is that site license revenue wouldn't be affected by requiring open access on research 6 months after publication (or even 3 months, or 0 months, in my view). There is enough price insensitivity in the system for existing revenues to be unaffected by a change like this.

The reason the journal industry hates legislation like this, despite it not posing an economic danger to them, is that they are worried about the general trend of the government getting involved in changing the scientific publishing industry.

The journal industry would like to freeze their business model in the form that it was in during the pre-internet days. They believe that it's in their interest to fight every piece of pro-change legislation that the government suggests, in order to slow down the rate of change.
Totally chilling, both with respect to the Chinese policy and this response to it. Our values should be optimized for freedom, democracy and diversity.
...it requires a great deal of honesty and openness...An interview is a place for none of those things.

Wrong. It's exactly the place for both of those things.

For every instance in the class QuestionsAskedToMe, including "What is your greatest weakness?", I have a simple rule: Just tell the fucking truth.

If you're so concerned that the telling the truth in an interview can come back to haunt you, then you shouldn't be interviewing with that company in the first place.

[My answer: I am very impatient. I always have been. People close to me have even pointed it out. (My brother reminds me for every time I make a hasty decision.) Sometimes this has served me well, but it's also caused problems when working with others. I have made a lot of progress trying to be more patient, but I still have a way to go.]
Mit.edu is down
Alain de Botton has written about it, too:

"A brain originally designed to cope with nothing more tempting than an occasional glimpse of a tribesperson across the savannah is lost with what’s now on offer on the net at the click of a button: when confronted with offers to participate continuously in scenarios outstripping any that could be dreamt up by the diseased mind of the Marquis de Sade. There is nothing robust enough in our psychological make-up to compensate for developments in our technological capacities."

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/12/26/why-we-should-limi...
The best response to this question is: "yeah... I think we're done here?". The retards who think this is a good way to filter a good programmer from a bad programmer are idiotic enough to offer you a job because obviously you are exactly the kind of kick-ass person who can shock people awake and repair the defective nature of their company, the fact that working there would be like working at Initech from Office space.

The real source of the question is to sense your desperation levels. If you answer it the canned response way: "turning the negative into the positive". It's a sign across your forehead that says: "please....please.... I'm desperate! Please dominate me!".

Seriously. Just try it once. Laugh at them and excuse yourself, you'll fall off the chair in memorization when you see the job offer pop into your email inbox. I've done it.

It'll leave you with existential questions: wondering who the hell designed this idiotic physics engine we've found ourselves in. How can people survive making these calibre of poor decisions from day to day?
> And in all of this noise we've only heard a few whimpers about the systemic failings that have brought about this tragedy, with vastly more voices calling for specific heads to roll.

"Calling for specific heads" is a perfectly reasonable response to systemic failings. The system is fucked up and it's not even as if they can say "I was just doing my job". There is a large amount of discretion involved here. Even hypothetically conceding that some crime was committed and that this is just how the game is played to get people to plea doesn't justify ruining someone's life.

Hold these specific people accountable and the message will be sent that these tactics are no longer accepted. It's just a band-aid but it's a start.
Really?

Keep in mind how accessible those documents were before the non-profit JSTOR library opened, and whether those documents would exist in digital format at all if JSTOR didn't have the ability to sell access to them so they can pay their owners to license them.

And then you really want to compare trying to break that system with trying to free slaves? The analogy would only very tenuously hold if you thought the slavers were helping blacks by taking them from Africa and enslaving them.
All the organizations (MIT, JSTOR, etc.), specifically the people directly involved in bullying Aaron Swartz may have publicly announced their condolences, but to me they all sound like sugar coated empty jars. I can sense that when they all go home they'll be saying "Regardless of what happened, Aaron Swartz will always be remembered as a thief, a radical, and most of all a criminal". I bet those people are feeding large amounts of coal into their legal department to avoid being blamed for Aaron's death.
websites like this already exist.
As a counter data point, I immensely enjoy both porn and real sex. I've never had troubles "getting it up" or ejaculating.
Hemingway is not the example you’re looking for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_Theory
TLDR; TLDR has a higher visibility.
It's kind of funny that your honest answer is the stock slightly dishonest answer that most people give while answering that question.
I doubt you can apply moderation to your sex life.

You can moderate your intake of cookies; but limiting yourself to one kind of porn and not the other doesn't feel a working solution.

You can try to limit your porn consumption to once per a period of time (a week?) but I bet it will make the symptoms worse.
A TLDR already has a name, a "summary". Not only a mere extra 4 characters, it's not an acronym for a phrase but a word that says what it is. Amazing, really.

The biggest problem I find with TLDR is that people that use it do so incorrectly. You don't put your summary at the end of the article. You put it at the beginning.

I also find many writers who use TLDR explicitly are rather poor writers. Lots of spelling and grammar mistakes, and the inability to make concise, cogent points. And not knowing what cogent means.
What did he mean by "MIT Medical is available to provide expert counseling"?

edit : and why is this on pastebin?
How about, "That's not a very good question for a variety of reasons, so I'm not going to answer it. This is both an answer and a meta-answer."
This is absolutely true, and goes for any silly question like 'where do you see yourself in five years?', 'why should we be working with you?', and the like. If you drive conversation to topics that you think should be discussed, you will be respected for it.
I would argue that if somebody asked me that question, it is a signal that I do not, in fact, want the job. It's a red flag that management is not capable of adequately assessing talent, and that you are likely to be surrounded by bozos if you get the job.

In a seller's market, (in this case, the market being labor), the applicant is often interviewing the company just as much as they are interviewing the applicant.
Just for stealing a mouthful of bread
Sadly, that just invites a discussion. Laughing it off nips it at the bud and allows everyone to climb down from the idiot tree.
Java update process on my Windows 7 machine:

1) Be notified of an update through the automatically running update check (probably with weak crypto and verification, given their track record...)

2) Clicking launches the MSI installer

3) "Java is wasting cycles on 6 billion (right now) insecure devices. Update now."

4) Remember to uncheck the Ask.com toolbar installer (Are you even trying at this point Oracle? Just kill it outright)

5) Installing

6) "Remember, Java is awesome, and for the moment its secure again"

(Not a comparison, just to make the point that the "experience" is equally great on the other side)
That's pretty awesome! Although I think the elements of the "poor" example that draw attention to some potentially pertinent information shouldn't have been removed. (For example, the fact that the applicant is not mission-essential during a training cycle, and that given he has not previous cold-weather injuries, he may be less susceptible to them.)
ArXiv Business Model
Wait wait, so you complain about the mass and short battery life, and when I give you an example of why that's not really true you go ahead and try to compare it to your desktop? That's one of the worst counterpoints I've ever come across. I have a small rack in the corner of my study and the machines there will considerably outer perform not only my t420 but most of the consumer grade machines either prebuilt or enthusiast built. On the other hand, my t420 has better specs that most of what's considered normal for most consumer based setups. I need to run various virtual machines for starters.

The Thinkpad series is know for having some of the best keyboards ever used on a laptop. Even though I prefer using my happy hacking keyboard, I'll take the Thinkpad's keyboard over pretty much anything else. It's so good that they even sell the damn keyboard as a standalone option to regular keyboard. Trackpoint and all. And yes I write code all day.

Regarding my "logic": You don't need to own an Apple to product to be a fanboy, and as such I never said that you owned any. That's all on you and your logic. I ended my post with the same type of sarcastic fanboish retort that you used at the end of yours.
There was quite a lot of dissent about 29c3 primarily because it moved. I think that is also the reason the schedule suffered, so hopefully it's just temporary. Here's Harald Welte discussing why he didn't participate this year: http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2012/12/18/#20121218-29c3
http://www.silicondrinkabout.com/ and the other events run by https://twitter.com/3_beards would be a good place to start