skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Humor is a strange duck online.

Use the <sarcasm> tags. Explain your jokes. Make sure somebody who isn't paying any attention at all to your comment will recognize it as a joke. Even then you'll probably lose half of the audience.

And don't respond when some person misunderstands it. Half the time you'll just dig the hole deeper.

I'm still torn with whether to respond or not. If the person replying obviously hasn't read it, or if it is obvious on re-reading my comment that most people would understand it, I don't.

But if the person is really confused, I hate to leave somebody wondering. So I am very tempted to reply.

It's just -- tough to do.
I think the commenter meant his post in a sarcastic way - related to procrastination itself. (i didn't vote it up)

anyhow...you stand right in your assertion - comments like these don't add to the discussion.
"If you downvote, add a comment (why?)"

That seems to be what kyro did. A one liner simply doesn't add much to the conversation - as you said, it's a fine line.

He seems to have been overly critical and could have reigned it in a bit (no need for "childish, baseless", etc.). Points on both sides.

Seems to boil down to this: Post thoughtfully, and critique kindly. Easy enough.
It's mildly funny. I don't think they were going for more than that, nor do I think it's a good idea to vote into oblivion all people who want to be mildly funny.
Comedy isn't going to be funny for everyone. Doesn't matter if it is online or off. I tell my wife many of jokes that get an angry stare while I am laughing my ass off.

You can remember that the most important rule of comedy is timing or incorporate the rule of 3 -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing). Also if you have to flag your joke as sarcasm or a joke then you should put a little more effort into.

------------------

"Oh, and if you have a smarta$$ remark, go for it, but make it clever. After another 300 lines of code, I could use the respite."

Only 300 lines of code and then you need a break, kyro is right you are OLD.

I was going to go with the pussy comment but because I don't know you; so I will leave that until I do. Consider this our introduction ;)

Plus using the OLD comment allowed me to bring in the other person as someone who seconds that.
Microsoft bans memcpy()
> And your model of different reproductive rates for blue-state vs. red-state people assumes that children have the same values as their parents. I know quite a few folks who were raised in red states and fled them.

Anecdote != data.

There are "defections" in both directions.

Even if kids have the same values as their parents 51% of the time, you'll see the effect.
Video: The fastest PC you may ever see
Yes, thank you very much.
How is a 'thanks' worthy of down-votes? Because I dared to present it implicitly? Can't you muppets extrapolate anything?
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Alex Faaborg has posted the first draft of the new icon:

http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2009/05/15/new-firefox-icon-...

Apparently successive revisions will follow every 24 hours. I like the way they’re keeping the redesign process in the open!
Phoenix is pushing Windows into a VM, permanently
I agree, I don't think we should mislead or trap users, but rather accustom them to boxes of information which are there for curiosity, "related" stuff (graphically different : smaller grayish text?), or at least some kind of placeholder (a grey box will do).

Those should definitely not be involved in any workflow of the service.

My point is just to soften the transition, by preparing some ads areas so that they don't appear one day, stealing space from the app.
The Security Implications Of Google Native Client
I'm wondering what would happen if you took surveys that asked questions about specific cases: "should a woman have the legal right to an abortion if she doesn't think she can afford to raise the child? ...if she doesn't feel psychologically ready to have children? ...if the child may be disabled? ...if she intended to use birth control but the birth control accidentally failed? ...if she intended to use birth control but forgot? ...if she was raped?"

I suspect that people's answers to these questions will be pretty consistent from year to year, and what's really changing is the salience of the different cases; all other factors being equal, if you hear a lot about women having what you consider inappropriate abortions, then you will be more likely to label yourself "pro-life", but if you hear a lot about women being prevented from having what you consider appropriate abortions, then you will be more likely to label yourself "pro-choice".
IBM is also a vertically integrated company, they do many things like services, software, chips, etc. It's not really a good comparison.
The problem with humor is when people trying to have an actual discussion are overwhelmed by people just posting tired slashdot cliches. Look at reddit...there are great comments there, but they're usually buried by pages of people snarking on the top comment. After a while, people stop trying. If you think you have a witty remark that doesn't really feed discussion, it's probably better to let it go, or to flesh it out with something more substantial.

Not responding to something like that for 24 hours (or even just ten minutes) is a great idea. Off-the-cuff reactions are often pretty defensive. If you have an articulate counter-argument, that's different, of course.

Also, as a general rule, it's probably worth trying to avoid being snide. In purely written conversations, it's easy enough to read criticism into comments that are just too terse, and you're responding to another person, not a text box. Be respectful, regardless of how you feel about their ideas. (I tend to edit my comments quite a bit. Often, on re-reading, I realize that my attempt at being concise made me sound like a dick instead.)
81 Years Old? I think the Internet kicked when you were around 65, not 14.
Just for myself: most of the smarta$$ remarks waste my time. I'm looking for interesting information, and they don't provide any.
Yes, that's still better then PDFs, but it's not exactly great. That's why I think there's room for a company that does it well.
Title borrowed from here:

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1233739&cid=27...

which summarizes well the potential of this "OS in ROM, with hypervisor for VMs" approach.
"Only 300 lines of code and then you need a break, kyro is right you are OLD."

Old enough to know how to get something done with 300 lines of code when so many others need 1000 or more.
Most of us just give up on commenting. PG clearly has no interest in fixing this.
Yes, but is the defection rate in both directions equal?

If conservative parents have been having more children than liberal parents for the past few decades, then why hasn't the voting population become more conservative since Reagan was president?
That's only because people on blocked IPs usually do figure out that they are blocked and just move on with their life instead of begging for the mods to fix something that the mods don't care about.
What is your personal signal to noise ratio? Seriously -- sometimes it helps to frame the analysis in an analogy having deliberately non-emotional terms.

People are here in good part for the high S/N. Humor is much appreciated, but only when it doesn't start to materially impact S/N.

Too much navel gazing is also frowned on; self-analysis becomes N rather than S.

The personal connection that develops to the site has a significant foothold in the respect that the members exhibit, as demonstrated in the high S/N.

Just to be clear: I don't mean this comment to be a criticism, in case it comes across that way. And I'm not saying my S is particularly high. This is all stuff that others have said; there have been some very interesting conversations regarding what makes HN special. It is simply my take, and distillation, and a simple mental framework I use for myself when participating.

Finally, I'll add that my response is not particularly personally directed, but is made instead for and to the overall thread.
Be nice. There are already so many mean people out there.
I don't understand the problem with Singapore?? People want to get there and not to quit!
I thought the original comment was pretty baseless, but it's only karma...

>> "kyro, would you have said that to me in person?"

I don't think the whole "What you say in person" test is useful. If someone tells you an offensive joke in person, you might politely laugh. If someone tells you an offensive joke on the net, you'll probably call it out as being offensive. Some people would have been offended by your original joke (accountants for one).

I too enjoy the humorous comments though.

>> "Oh, and if you have a smarta$$ remark, go for it, but make it clever."

Sorry, but IMHO your original joke comment wasn't clever. It was just easy. Better luck next time ;)

>> "24 hours later, I haven't forgetten"

It was just a joke some people didn't rate. Not life or death :/
That's not procrastination. That's planning.
I believe :O is the appropriate response.
Since you studied accounting, can you translate the combination of expense and profit per employee into return-on-investment (ROI) per employee?
In this case B != B prime. By that I mean that the evolutionary drive to pass on one's genes is not the same as a human's happiness.

Even natural self interest is more subtle then it would appear as there are corner cases where your genes work against you, like in many social insects.

But humans are self ware and capable of advanced tool use. I'd have to consider crack pipes a tool and smoking crack the shortest path to the greatest and most self contained happiness.

But objectivism isn't simply a repetition of natural selection, nor is it an argument for drug fueled oblivion.
Franky I'm not sure what it is?
Knol suffers from a poor brand. You can't tell people about it without having to spell it, the domain is not knol.com, the logo is weak, and the site design doesn't inspire confidence.
Another important part of comedy is the setup
"Why should other people be forced to subsidize that kind of lifestyle?"

Is drug addition a greater problem in Norway than say the US? The alternative is for Mr. Bruum to rob, pimp or deal to feed his habit.
What? CouchDB gets a lot of hype. Naturally people are curious, and they try to use it to solve their problems. Sometimes these problems aren't the problems CouchDB is good for. You can't fault the "software hipsters"--- the CouchDB documentation does a terrible job of explaining the "Why" of CouchDB.
You can always put NOT NULL DEFAULT='' everywhere in your schema. If you do use nulls (I use them mostly in foreign keys), it will be good to have the capability, but nobody is required to have them.

That said, NOT NULL probably should have been the default. It's easy to update the schema to allow nulls if you decide you need them later. You need to make up some data to replace the nulls if you decide to take them out.
I wonder if it's possible to have a social news site where certain members can be given the "Blue Pill?" That is, their comments and submissions do not appear on the regular site, but instead appear on an alternative version of the site generated for them. There could even be a Markov chain reply generator that replies to their comments, and a Bayesian filter that fake-upvotes them. (Trained by upvoting on the normal site.)

Better yet, have a "red pill" instead. Have an elitist site-within-a-site that only select members could see. Have it only available to members with a certain Karma, and then require that they get an invitation from another member already there.

Actually, it would be best to have all 3 levels!

EDIT: Another wrinkle. Have the "Red Pill" be divided up into groups, each requiring a separate invite. Membership to multiple groups would be allowed.

EDIT: Actually, something like this idea would be even better on IRC! Also, receiving the "Blue Pill" would look on the surface just like getting a "Red Pill" invite. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
mine friend code is 212-624-941. add me.
This is a cute but silly measurement, isn't it? Salaries are part of the expenses you subtract out to get profit.
my friend code is 212-624-941. ADD ME!
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Great site: http://top.searchyc.com/
Walkenfs: a distributed filesystem using FUSE and Mnesia
And looking at the numbers for HP and IBM, I am becoming ever more convinced that small is the way to go and big companies are just not the place to be.
It's about redundancy -- a backup on one backup server is better than nothing, but if you care about your data, you should be a little more careful than just storing it on two different machines. Store it on lots of different machines, store it on optical media and USB keys, store it in the swarm if possible, etc. People who think that having one tarball on one machine is sufficient have really not thought things through.
... and mean people suck!
It's odd. People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of the them to be strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how they speak, and liberal in how they listen. You'd think that would also be obvious. Instead, we're taught to express ourselves.

--Larry Wall

To wit, try not to be offensive and at the same time try not to be offended.
I think the mindset behind the comment is a good one- in general, joking one liners are discouraged on the site.

Personally, I find most of the ones posted here hilarious- however, they're also usually downvoted into the basement. That discourages people from posting more, which encourages a more serious discussion. People still post jokes, but the downvoting discourages joke threads and a more reddit like atmosphere. This duality manages to maintain awesome and funny comments while discourages them from being rampant.

It's a good mix.
This sounds like a question for Wolfram:

((birth rate of pro-life families) * (rate of (children of pro-life families) that are pro-life)) vs. ((birth rate of pro-choice families) * (rate of (children of pro-choice families) that are pro-choice))
Respectfully, saying "I never should had said it" regarding the pussy comment, followed by "I still think he was a pussy" smacks of insincerity to me.
Rack Middleware for setting a rate limit on your web service
What happened on grey's anatomy last night
dude you totally made my day =D
The trouble with humour on HN is that HN is full of other people.
I chat with kyro quite a bit on #startups... I'm pretty sure he would have said it in person :-)
I love how simple and practical this is. This is exactly the sort of tool I never know I need until I desperately need it, and by that point, I typically don't have the time to build it. Wonderful.
So they're replacing

memcpy(dst, src, len)

with

memcpy_s(dst, dst_len, src, src_len)

To me, this seems a little desperate. Aren't they just shifting the bugs to a later stage? I guess a spurious read is slightly better than a spurious write, but it all seems incredibly arbitrary.
There are plenty of uses for null. For example: last failed login date. What do you put if it never happened? You put NULL.

As a general rule, there is no good "empty" value for things that are not strings, so you use NULL for those.

For your boolean: you have a new user and want to ask if he wants the widget enabled. They could say yes or no - but until you ask, you set it to NULL, and it's an excellent flag for your application that means: ask the user.

If you have never used NULLs in your databases, well, that's more a failing on your part than a failing on the concept of NULL.

Sometimes you want them, and sometimes you don't - that's why the database asks you.

NULL is used as the answer to x/0.

NULL is used to indicate lack of records on an outer join.

If you ask for the average value of something - and there are no rows, you get NULL - what else should it return? 0 is not the correct answer.

> a computer that says "I don't know" is not a useful computer

And a computer that returns incorrect information is worse. You asked it "what are the total sales for august". You did not ask "what are the sales so far for august".

Without the NULL as the answer, how does your front end application know to collect the running average to display to the user? You most certainly do have to detect NULL.

I will admit it's very rare to use NULL instead of an empty string (in fact in some versions of oracle NULL and the empty string are the same). But NULL is used frequently for other datatypes. And it's used frequently in other parts of databases.
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Samsung SGH-F200 RED music phone that features taller dimensions than the SGH-F210, but lacks the camera and large internal memory of its sibling. Only 5MB of internal memory is available for the device, though this can easily be expanded with microSD memory cards up to 2GB in size.
Hi modoc, please humour me with using your username to elaborate on a fictional and over the top Personally Branded Modooc,

Personal Branding goes beyond what used to be called simply Expertise . To prove expertise one used to have a body of work reinforced by a portfolio of articles and recommendations.

Personal Branding advocates having a specific Modoc(TM) Way.

---

Personally Branded :: The Modoc(tm) Way of deploying ATG systems is far superior to the rest. Have confidence that if you partner with Modoc(tm) your ATG worrieswill disappear

Expertise :: Hi, my name is Modoc. You called me regarding some help with your ATG project. I see you saw some of my work on my blog. How can I help you with your project?
Managerial accounting was my area of specialty; I was simply pointing out that there is also a cost associated with treating employees well. I think Google's numbers may be a bit high because it has so many people who work for it for free.

Now, if we could get some metrics about salaries, this could become even more interesting.
Thinking something and saying it are two different things. Explaining this fact necessitates saying it, but we're in a different context to the original. I see no insincerity in that.

"I never should should have said it, whether I still believe it to be true or not" might have been better, but I think it's presumptive to assign it to insincerity.

You could say the same for "smacks of x" being proceeded by the word "respectfully" - why say "smacks of" with its derisory connotations, when you could say "seems"?
How do you make it re-appear?
In the U.S. a variety of factors caused law enforcement in the major cities to break down in the late 60's and 70's (factors include: supreme court rulings, the great society, demagoguing politicians, lawsuits). As a result, crime shot upwards. In the 80's and 90's there was a backlash, and law enforcement increased significantly (Rudi Guiliani, etc). As a result, a lot of criminals ended up in jail, and the crime rate dropped.

The paradox of lax law enforcement is that in the long run you have a much higher rate of imprisonment because lax law enforcement creates more criminals. Conversely, Singapore, with its ultra-strict enforcement has very low crime.

In terms of policing, America is like the awful parent who alternates between allowing their kid to drink and get in trouble, and then every once in a while throws a fit and beats the kid. The recipe for good law enforcement is consistency and nipping problems in the bud. If you've ever studied American law enforcement, you'll find it operates in the exact opposite manner.

The crime rate differential between the U.S. and Europe goes back a long time. If you really want to understand it, I highly recommend this book: http://books.google.com/books?id=NGBLAAAAMAAJ&printsec=f... Written in 1920, it barely needs any updating today. And what is the primary causes of the difference in crime rate? President Taft sums it up the best: "It is not much to say, that the administration of criminal law in this country is a disgrace to our civilization, and that the presence of crime and fraud, which is greatly in excess of that in the European countries, is due largely to the failure of the law and its administration to bring criminals to justice."
I find that it helps me to assume the following:

- whatever the topic at hand is, I haven't thought about it enough yet.

- my attempts at humor will not come across in text (without context).

- the person I'm corresponding with is smarter than I am.

- Despite my best efforts, I will be misunderstood.

One of the best quotes I've seen on this topic is from Mark Dominus: "Advice to people wishing to become smarter: Get in the habit of assuming that everything is more complex than you imagine."

I think this probably applies to humor as well.

[edit: formatting]
Kinda everywhere. I travel most of the year, following the sunshine to spots with good climbing, surfing and wifi. I'm in the Lake District (Northwest Engand) at the moment.

I seem to find myself in the 'states for about 3-6 months most years, usually in LA. If there were a hacker crag session when I was in town, I'd be there.
I don't know, I think it's pretty straightforward. If you're going to use a piece of software that's based around map/reduce, you should understand the how and why of map/reduce first. CouchDB is actually a pretty straightforward piece of software. The documentation is totally fine. If it seems sparse, it's because CouchDB is a pretty sparse piece of software! It actually has very few features compared to most database systems.
Who's watching you?
Another thing to keep in mind is that while a remark like that may pass if it's one of only a couple on the screen, sometimes a very interesting discussion (or a few) does break out on what seems to be at first an innocuous post. When that happens, your comment can find itself all alone at the bottom and following a few interesting threads. Then it can take hits because of the glaring contrast.
I'm not too much younger (1975), and I disagree. I didn't get an internet connection until I was 21. How could a geek think not having the internet is better than having it? When I was young, if I wanted to learn something I had to go to the library, where they may or may not have had something relevant. There's lots of other tech that was not available to the '71 cohort as well. If I could have chosen my birth year it would have been later, not earlier.

As far as pop culture goes, the '71 crowd may have been able to see Star Wars in the theater, but I'd rather have a larger selection of movies on tape or DVD than get to see a few movies in the theater at a few particular times. All the SF stuff (books or movies) is still available today, and if a book or movie is really worthwhile it'll still be worthwhile a few decades later. It'll always be the same book or movie, it's not like the difference between seeing a band live in their prime and listening to a CD.
Keep in mind AMD was the one lobbying worldwide for anti-trust actions against Intel (even as their market share was growing). Setting up your competition to get slapped with a record-setting fine on dubious non-sworn evidence is playing pretty dirty. I suspect Intel is looking for ways to return the favor.