skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If that were the case, the solution would be simple: just skip reading comments.

On the contrary I often learn useful things from HN comments. Sometimes I even submit stuff to HN because I am curious about the opinion of HN commentators.
What comments am I tired of seeing, you ask?

This one:

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

If you want to argue against surveillance, please do it with your words instead of just going "Well Benjamin Franklin said..."

I'm not saying don't quote him or use his arguments in yours, but simply quoting a man who has been dead for hundreds is not an argument.
The best thing I ever did for my accent was doing some simple low paid part-time jobs in restaurants and night clubs in UK. As a foreign bartender, waiter or a bouncer you are forced to speak and most importantly to be confident in a foreign language.
Yes, but on the other hand, fallacious reasoning is rarely the source of disagreement or controversy in a debate. At least in my experience. All you're doing by saying "ad hominem" is shifting the focus to technical delivery of the argument rather than focusing on the real matter of the discussion.

And most people forget that calling something an ad hominem attack does not mean that it's wrong. Most things which get called ad hominem are usually not, in fact -- saying "you are dumb and your arguments is wrong because of X, Y, Z" is different than saying "your argument is wrong because you are dumb" (the latter would be ad hominem, the former is merely an irrelevant statement)
Well, it also handles lifetimes, which is certainly a huge improvement in terms of safety, though it comes at, shall we say, syntactic cost:

pub fn to_rigid_body_or_fail<'r>(&'r self) -> &'r RigidBody<N, LV, AV, M, II> {
So we're on the cusp of having driverless cars and driverless airplanes, but driverless trains are impossible?

I've ridden the driverless train systems in Singapore, Tokyo and Copenhagen and they're all great.
This annoys me too, it's just people who want to feel superior.
Sweden authorities abducted a child because of homeschooling
> The author says "If there's some specific reason you think a a study is wrong, describe it". Unfortunately, this is very often precisely the problem: many times not in the study itself but in the way it's reported.

Too true. My recent favorite was a popular account of a marijuana study. The popular article was titled "Marijuana causes psychosis" or words to that effect. The popular account went on about how teenagers went crazy after smoking killer weed. The study itself said, "We don't know whether marijuana use sometimes causes psychosis, or psychosis sometimes causes marijuana use. More study is needed."
An excellent example of the techno-fetishism and efficiency/dataset worship surrounding a modern nanny state. To quote some prominent graffiti I walked past this morning in central Rotterdam, one mere hour ago: "Is this freedom?" Clearly, no. Holland's pretty totalitarian these days.
You don't see either as often here as certain other sites, but two more that are invariably abused: "Most people..." and "You've obviously never..." The former is almost always code for "Most right-thinking people who fit into my personal worldview, which I am terrified of breaking...", while the latter is "I've got some domain knowledge here which on face value contradicts the precise words you've just written. It therefore follows that it's impossible for me to be wrong about..." and is more often than not followed by a demonstration of exactly how wrong it is possible to be.

Any time I see either of these, it's end-of-thread-time.
Why is it a problem? Someone wants to live modestly, trading consumer power for free time. Why do we need to stop them?
Dude, where are your sources?
Market ticker forums-

http://tickerforum.org/

Zerohedge-

http://zerohedge.com
This is the kind of headline I am tired of seeing.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it.
And by that you probably mean "BBC English" am I right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_pronounciation

Try to "overdo it". Singing also helps (even though there are few singer that sing like that). My way of learning is finding someone that imitates it and then I "get it".
Books for programmers
What's odd to me is the focus on specific individuals. For one thing, why not Dean/Ghemawat facts, at least? I always hear they participate on an equal basis; or does Dean carry Ghemawat like Sherlock carries Watson?

Furthermore, when I actually read things about such universally-held geniuses, the hype often contrasts sharply with the moderate, logical introspections of the geniuses themselves. (Not always, like I vaguely recall of Nietzsche; but most often in my personal experience.) Quite often, the hype even patronizingly dismisses the person's own claims as mere humility. (As with Hume's coverage of Newton in his history of England.) And it often beats up on people who quite reasonably had issues with the person (as I hear with Socrates' spouse Xanthippe).

When one hears breathless accounts of someone's superpowers, a logical first reaction is, "Cool, how can I attain that?" I wish it were otherwise, but the hype is always misleading for this end.

As far as I can tell, it's storytelling. The hype fits in a certain dramatic constraint, like with profit-seeking movies which naturally can't portray too pedestrian a reality. In Dean's case, one of my suspicions is that US "nerd" audiences are more able to vicariously fantasize themselves as a "Jeff Dean" than a "Sanjay Ghemawat". Which, if true, would say something about the lack of imagination and homogeneity of such fantasizers.

(And maybe these people serve as mainstream characters everyone's supposed to be in awe of, but it just wouldn't fit within current society if everyone could follow their interests. Who'll serve you at the store and mop office floors?)

Anyway, sorry for the long random wondering about silly topics; clearly I'm procrastinating.
5 Free Bitcoin up For Grabs
You can delete your message from the receivers phone.

That second bullet point set off my BS detector (and is where I stopped reading). No system on earth lets you reliably delete a message sent to another device over the Internet, after the fact. Neither can any such system reliably prevent users from sharing pictures that they can see on their device.

This site reads like an add for a perpetual motion engine.

Which is too bad, because open-source encrypted mobile chat is an interesting thing in and of itself, without impossible pie-in-the-sky claims.
Interesting thing about accents is that while you are trying to improve your accent you also improve your ability to understand the accents of others. I am native Czech speaker and I have a friend who is from UK and who tries to learn and speak Czech. None of our Czech friends understands what he is saying - I seem to be the only one who is able to handle his really strong accent. I am explaining this by the theory that living in foreign countries and trying to hear the differences between the way native speakers pronounce something and my pronunciation trained my ear to pick the content out of the noise.
You can have A/C, cable TV, meals, and still have a totally unstable housing situation, unable to maintain personal property over the long-term... Sorry but just because TV is cheap doesn't mean poverty is eliminated. Keep an eye on the rent checks.
> Who'd've thought you could put two apostrophes in the one contraction?

Yes, and perhaps more interestingly, what will it look like 500 years from now? Many common modern words that we assume to be self-contained turn out to be pastiches of two or more older words. Like "shire reeve" -> sheriff.
Emphasis on the "mindless". I'm horribly spoilt in that I'm always hideously disappointed when cool tech comes along that's not open source, but there's some very interesting work going on behind closed doors that is worth evangelising.
Is it necessary to make groundless claims all the time? The reaction you are seeing has a context of serious subject matter. If you want silly disposable comments, try Reddit
The "citation needed" thing is pulled out any time people disagree, however, even when the comment is something where a source could be found rapidly using Google. It is not the onus of someone in a friendly discussion to have to anally cite every comment they make that involves some random fact: instead, it should be the onus of every person involved in the discussion to keep an open mind and do some due diligence. If you disagree with the other person's fact, then you bring up your own fact and cite the hell out of it to make it clear how wrong the other person is, you don't just demand citations. The real reason people do this is just because they want to undermine trust in the other person's position without having to do any actual work, and it is a great strategy as no matter how well cited something is, there will always be something, potentially in the citation itself (going one or even two levels out), you can take issue with and scream "citation needed" about.
I was expecting this to contain the inevitable "why didn't you do this in Haskell?" that seems to come and go in waves. I've come to think that there's a non-trivial percentage of HN users that are simply bots (written in Haskell) that insert this into a random percentage of threads. If they're responded to it then brings in a human to continue the conversation.

More seriously, these aren't just gripes, most of these have some kind of remediation step too. Most of the comments here seem to be missing that.

That being said, most of these are still very valid things to be said here, the problem is not that they're being said, but that they have to be said. People in general are lazy and carry around terribly poor models of the world in the heads. 8 of these are really constant, low pressure attempts to correct this problem with the last one just being a cultural issue that this isn't reddit.
Didn't they end up destroying the name recognition buy.com had in the US? Had they kept the name the same and put more money into the business it would have made sense. I don't understand their business.
Neat little API. Would be cool if there were a way to generate users with a particular locale - e.g. so I could generate UK users with UK addresses, telephone numbers, etc.
I'll go with people who read your full paragraph, find the not quite 100% perfect analogy in the 5th most important point, and worry it like a terrier with a chew toy

These people should be shot in the face with a double barrel shotgun.

(You may now commence to argue over whether or not both barrels are really necessary )
How do you know this? If it is true, then why did it take so long to get the big leaks?
For instance, the accent of one of the main characters in Monty Python's Flying Circus. Which one is it?

Or any other std TV shows, which have more or less standardized accents, no?
> "Only the person you send the message to can read it. Period."
> To use this kind of sentences on new software not reviewed by the comunity is dangerous. There is people that risk their lifes using this kind of app.

It is also false, since it seems that their threat model also includes the server being able to transparently MITM you and read all your messages. A pretty egregious overstatement, I think.
Here's the way I learn new accents. Bear with me.

I have a hard time learning from people with the accent. Rather, it's easier for me to learn from people who imitates it. Weird.

I know what the American accent (let's say, the 'regular' one, not the Southern one) sounds like. I couldn't talk like that (or at least, I didn't know how close I was). British accent, easy for me, because I learned from someone who could mimic it.

Cue that Monty Python sketch where they're speaking like Americans (it's the Philosophy dinner, I think). Bam, clicked right in.

Charlize Theron mentioned in an "Inside the Actor's Studio" that she solved her accent by "overdoing" the accent she wanted to sound like
No. This is wrong. Extra point conversion is never a sure thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(gridiron_football)
As a Spanish, English, Portuguese and French speaker I completely agree, but I'd add there are too many sides in this issue.

I notice there's a context switch every time I switch language that destroys grammar and pronunciation. I get back to "cruise" proficiency in about 30 min to 1 hour. except for my native language.

I'd advise you to look for conversation with natives, as I've noticed I dumb down my pronunciation and expression due to the low English level of my coworkers, and every time I hit a Brit and have some beers it feels refreshing and like a different language.
My personal favorite is "The plural of anecdote is not data".

Correct. The plural of anecdote is conversation, which is exactly the reason we're here.

I think this one comes down to people misunderstanding the reason we're here in the first place. If you start to notice that the discussion here resembles the sort of conversation you'd have around the watercooler, that's probably has to do with the fact that Hacker News is indeed the internet's watercooler.

Complaining that that seems to be the case and asking people to stop having lively conversation is not really helping anybody. As much as some folks want this to be the Royal Society for Correctly And Properly Dismissing The Ideas Of Other People, it's not.

Good thing, too. That place wouldn't be any fun.
This.

Just because these comments appear quite frequently it doesn't necessarily mean that they are responsible for making your eyes tired, after all, correlation is not causation. Maybe try to adjust the font on your browser or use one of the popular HN chrome extension. Remember that HN is a free site and if you're not paying for it, you're the product, so try to see how you can improve your comments, thereby improving the product.

Even though Pg has a legal duty to maximize shareholder value for YC [citation needed]
changing how people comment would be premature optimization - why don't we see how the site shakes out after a couple of years. Saying that this is a place for discussion is at best a leaky abstraction, like Playboy magazine, I come here predominately to read the articles. I feel that I understand most of the technical articles posted here, even though some people say I suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect I feel that is just a needless ad hominem.

You can read more about this in a blog post I wrote:

Is the quality of HN discussion falling?
Seriously secure mobile messaging
Doesn't seem like much work at all to me, compared to creating random users.

Then again, maybe it's just me that isn't creative enough to be able to come up with names other than "Test User", "Another User", "Somebody Else", etc. :-p
"provide an equal number of counterexamples, then."

Equal number to what? What is the number we are looking at - did anybody even count anything here? I already mentioned several female action heroes in other comments, like Underworld, Resident Evil, Buffy, Dark Angel, Aliens, Aeon Flux, Nikita. If you only count movies that are actually worthwhile, the comparison to male hero movies is not bad (I can only compare to mostly worthwhile movies).

Also some things don't make sense, as somebody pointed out, WW2 didn't have that many female soldiers, so why would you expect 50% of WW2 movies to be about female soldiers? You could go on and complain that there are too many WW2 movies, but that is hardly convincing as a feminist issue.

"Your last paragraph is blatant sexism, fyi."

It's not actually. Would "women have boobs" also be a controversial statement? It is very obvious that it is easier for women to reproduce than for men, and it is statistically proven. Just because you can't see it (like boobs hanging off a person) doesn't mean some difference does not exist.

Men get to do the life threatening jobs because men are more expendable. Women are the limiting factor in reproduction (only about one baby can be produced every nine months per woman).

It doesn't mean that women can't do life threatening jobs, just that there is a reason they usually don't have to.

If it is sexist to assume that there are differences between men and women, then maybe it was sexist. Then I'd have to say I'd rather be sexist and stick to science than give up logic for ideology.

Edit: I wonder what is the feminist explanation for less women doing risky jobs? The patriarchy doesn't want women to be cannon fodder because they could start believing they can be aggressive and revolt against men? Or really just the media - if more female warrior movies were being made, women would be flocking to the military by the millions?
Well, they didn't say "reliably". Many apps do this on a best-effort basis, it's usually good enough but people shouldn't trust it too much.
Flat Design was here before
The temptation to reply with one of those was great. But I resisted. Nice Post :)
Sensationalized, misleading titles are not helpful.
fwiw the most popular 2D libraries are less than $100.

2D Toolkit - $65 (http://u3d.as/content/unikron-software-ltd/2d-toolkit/1Wi)

NGUI - $95 (http://u3d.as/content/tasharen-entertainment/ngui-next-gen-u...)

Uni2d - $90 (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/3826)

All of these have more features than what Unity just introduced so I don't see their usage declining anytime soon- until/unless Unity makes some serious improvements to their built in 2D library.
I fell down laughing. Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman top the list? So much for popular votes.
Miyazaki Announces Retirement
Nasty negative left margin.
Thanks! How do I learn modern OpenGL specifically - is there an authoritative book everyone knows, or a very good tutorial?
What grates me is people that use "order of magnitude" for everything. It's fine if you're talking about different kinds of memory access or the acidity of some lake due to acid rain. But writing phrases like "Ever since I started biking to work, I feel an order of magnitude better" just makes you look pretentious, to me.

Of course this is more of an aesthetic gripe rather than a gripe with some rhetorical device.
Identifying errors in reasoning isn't the same as explaining why someone is wrong, though. Given the basic definition of an argument as a structure linking premises to a conclusion, a fallacy is simply a flaw in the structure. It doesn't invalidate the premises or the conclusion, only how they relate to one another. So while you're certainly free to attack the structure behind a conclusion, really you're better off attacking the conclusion itself with an argument of your own.
This, also, is not useful to point out every time an article title ends in a question mark. I'm not advocating for articles with titles that end in question marks, only that there is no value in reflexively pointing out "this article's title ends in a question mark" every time it happens: Bettridge's law of headlines exists, the point has been made, and even to the people who haven't heard about it, it doesn't give the reader any insight. I maintain that the only use of that particular comment is to make the person writing it feel smart for knowing a jargon term.
Thank you, from the lazy.
Such work is not worth evangelizing. It is worth technical discussion. There is a difference.
Tangentially, I'm convinced there's a worthwhile (small) business opportunity in hooking up py.test to Excel to Fix The Spreadsheet Problem(tm). Not something I can iterate on right now, though.
UX Design of Google Glass Apps
My native language is Czech which is a Slavic language and we do have something similar to English articles. I think that sometimes it's more difficult to learn something that is kind of similar to what you are used to but not entirely the same - it gets really confusing.
The cables are what created the celebrity. Relatively very few knew or cared about Assange before that point.
It looks fine on my end; what browser/OS are you using?
If the work's going on behind closed doors, the technical discussion won't happen without some kind of evangelism.
Yeah, there's stuff that nowadays is phrased as "a job" because it has to be, that would become "a vocation" when jobs went away. Programming is another obvious example.
Here in India, Windows phone is not only gaining sales it is also gaining market share relative to others. Windows Phone momentum has never been as high as it is now.

I think it is same all over the world.
The bowling example reminded me of how all the problems about bowling as a group activity. It's rather easy to imagine why these people are on their phones instead of chatting together or cheering for the other players.

1) You are often playing against the other players. When your friend gets a strike, it generally means that these points are scored against you. That makes it a little hard to be enthusiastic about your friend getting a lucky strike. Two-player coop in games is great because you get to win together.

2) The ball is pulled from your hands the moment you start getting into the motion. Then it's back to more downtime. Bowling with friends is almost 80% downtime, but it's just short enough that you might consider just sitting it through and not necessarily engaging in conversation with someone that you don't really know.

3) When you do have a good conversation going, the last thing you want to do is to have to leave it there to go throw the ball at the pins for a minute and have a hard time resuming the conversation afterwards.
I'd like to offer a counter-point here.

I work in a Chinese company with more than 200 Chinese programmers, I'm the only foreigner.

It is obviously important for a software developer to "know English", and all my colleagues do, just as it is important to know how to find your way in a reference book, or how to ask a question to Google and StackOverflow. It is a tool, an important tool, but only a tool.

What I have experienced more than often is that young Chinese people who are proficient in English and spent a lot of time getting their accent out of the way, are not always the best hackers and the most interesting persons. For them English is more than a tool, and they spend less time coding and more time discussing about code.

So to all these pro-English posts here: Yes, it is necessary; but only as a tool, and should not become a finality (unless we are talking about students in linguistics).

Why would I insist on making this point here and there (and get holes in my HN karma)? Because insisting on "fluent spoken English" and "Foreign accent" just makes life more miserable and humiliating to the so many people who open their mind and their life to the world, by the mean of this new Lingua Franca.

Americans know no fear, feel no shame. It's what makes them so strong and optimistic and creative. "Shy american" is an oximoron, but "Shy Chinese" (or Japanese) is a tautology. Let's not forget that other people are made differently.
> Given the basic definition of an argument as a structure linking premises to a conclusion, a fallacy is simply a flaw in the structure. It doesn't invalidate the premises or the conclusion, only how they relate to one another.

True, and there's a name for that logical error -- it's the "fallacy fallacy" or "argument from fallacy", the error of assuming that, because there's a fallacy in one's argument, therefore the conclusion must be wrong.

> So while you're certainly free to attack the structure behind a conclusion, really you're better off attacking the conclusion itself with an argument of your own.

Yes. On the other hand, such a reply may serve to strengthen or clarify an argument, and is therefore sometimes appropriate.
> I understand this is a place for serious debate and constructive criticism, but sometimes it's more uptight than getting interviewed at a border control.

and the most uptight are the ones who feel the need to pretend.