skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What explains the ad hominem rampant in online discourse?
Dear HN,

I was recently bothered by a thread here in which there was a glee in attacking someone and their idea. There seems to be a noob tendency to compare HN to Digg or Reddit whenever a post doesn't fit some people's eyes of HN quality (even as there's a clear, and easy, mechanism for dealing with submissions of this type). A primary reason I never wade into the comments of Digg or Reddit is because of the rampant ad hominem. So when I start to see that here, I worry, but I also know that pg will never let that happen.

Still, with how big the internet is, why do some folks seem to take delight in ad hominem? Is it as simple as folks who have bullied, or been bullied, regressing in these semi-anonymous spaces?

Don't get me wrong. Honest criticism is extremely valuable. But as soon as it becomes personal it loses any importance it may have. I'm truly interested in deeply dissecting ideas and products. But if you attack me or my ideas, then I'm almost immediately uninterested in whatever you're saying. Disagree without being disagreeable.

With how easy it is to find alternative content online, why is there this rampant negativity? Take HN for example. There are hundreds of posts each day and thousands of comments. If you don't find something to your liking, or without good feedback to add, it's trivially easy to ignore it and move on. So why do some folks linger long enough to throw feces from their cage?

I think comments may be a big part of it. They fit nowhere else in the real world. Heck, someone simply commenting in a movie theater is soon met with glares and are at-risk for being ushered out. But while comments may make it easier to trash people and ideas, that doesn't explain the ubiquity of the ad hominem.

Can you help me understand this phenomenon? Of course, if there are extended treatments, I'd love to read them.

Thanks.
The devil is in the traffic source. Organic vs. Paid?
it also rejects .ca emails for schools in canada (i.e. uwaterloo.ca)
Red Hat eyes REST standardization
After Gmail, Now Google Calendar Goes Down
YouTube Moving Toward Paid Content
Walmart files absurd trademark claims against site for Walmart workers rights
Anonymity.

If you look at the people that go off on rants like that invariably they do not have a profile that allows you to identify them.

As soon as people are out in the open with their name and/or other identifying information they usually are a lot less abrasive.
So, I watched the whole 17-minute screen cast. It turns out that "impromptu" is some kind of LISP environment with OpenGL and music-synthesizer bindings. I sat there watching typing for a few minutes, wondering when he was going to hit "compile" and demonstratethe output of his program-in-progress, then suddenly I noticed that the soundtrack was changing as he edited the source.

Colour me impressed.
When I was in high school, one of our teachers was actually struck and killed by another car while refueling his own car on the side of the road late at night. I know it's a remote risk, but I'll still always prefer a car that has the fuel door on the passenger side just to be safe.
I dunno, it goes from 23 -> 35, ~50% increase in response.
With Cloudwatch I don't have to manage munin, cacti, and a server to run them on. If there's network connectivity issues, or sshd falls over, or if my server load goes so high that I can't login - then I still get stats on what happened.

Sounds like a win to me.
A little black book of everyone you should know in the UK tech scene
NetReach Australia - Melbourne based Web Design and Website Developers
Former MySpace Exec Allen Hurff Working On A Startup Incubator
American Vice: Mapping the 7 Deadly Sins
Depends what you're trying to compare. It's interesting if you want to ask the question "how much can a company do with varying amounts of resources".
How do you fit 1,000 words into a 140-character tweet?
Many high-frequency traders are the equivalent of un-sponsored market makers. The reason why a market must be "made" is because liquidity can quickly get out of balance (too many people want to sell, no one wants to buy). The job of the market maker is to be ready to stand on the other side of a transaction to ensure the market continues to function and does not freeze.

I call HF traders "un-sponsored" because most exchanges formalize this responsibility. For example, becoming an official market maker on the CME requires that you make a continuous market in the instruments you trade. For this, an "official" market maker is given special price treatment and other benefits.

Market making has been around forever, and is a required function of orderly markets. Generally, the more market makers you have the better: liquidity goes up, spreads go down. HF traders, being unofficial market makers, are making these markets without either the special responsibility of making a continuous market OR the benefits that go along with it.

It is suprising to me how little most folks understand about the functioning of markets. For example, if you have ever placed an order to Sell 100 shares of CSCO at 75.25 Limit then you are doing two things: (1) you're offering an option to someone else to buy--the compensation you receive is known as the spread; and, (2) you're prioritizing price over immediacy. If you remove the price from this order, and simply Sell 100 shares of CSCO at Market then you are: (1) purchasing an option from someone, in this case someone who has placed a Buy Limit order--the price you pay for this option is the spread; and (2) you're prioritizing immediacy over price.

In the first case, the case of the limit order, you are making one side of a market. Congratulations, you're a market maker; however, if you only continue to make a one sided market you'll go out of business quickly because you're inventories will either sky rocket (you'll own too many shares) or it will plummet to 0 -- this is bad for market makers. The goal of making markets is volume and speed because, if applied correctly, you can achieve a balanced inventory which is the goal of market making. Inventory == risk, and therefore it has to be balanced to the level of risk a given market maker wants to take.

Please don't make statements like, "Good luck, retail investor", when you don't fully understand what's happening. HF traders have nothing to do with credit-default swaps or under-capitalized mortgages. They do, however, make the markets you want to participate in more efficient.
Well... As far as anonymity goes, I am doing my part. There are already very few Bánffy's in the world and, AFAIK, no other has a first name starting with "r". It's remarkably easy to google me. I also tend to use "rbanffy" wherever I can, so, it's easy to relate my various on-line personas.

But the other day I saw something commendable: a public apology as a "Tell HN" article. This makes me believe this place is slightly different than Digg and Reddit. Slashdot allows anonymous comment but there is a lot of very clever people (and clever nicknames ;-)) around there.
COBOL: It's Everywhere
The title is misleading here, Microsoft was granted a stay on the on the injunction that would prevent them from selling Word. They still need to appeal or settle the Texas court's ruling if they want to continue to sell Word after the stay.
Lots of room for misinterpretation online. You type something and you think its clear, but the next person who reads it misinterprets. You don't get a chance to explain yourself before the person gets mad and replies with ad hominem.

This is especially true when this happens on a subject someone is sensitive too. Someone sees something that resembles something else they think is horrible and they go nuts.

Though its tough to do this all the time, I think the best thing to do online is give someone the benefit of the doubt. If you think someone is suggesting something immoral, ask a clarifying question.
That is am amazing library. Someday, maybe I hope to have one that even remotely comes to one like that.

Having said that, I for one, tend to read quite a bit, but find myself discarding books (esp. fiction) because I know I will not read those again (with the exception of a few). I have since moved my source of fiction books from buying to checking them out at the local public library.

I wonder if Neil Gaiman finds himself doing the same thing, and if so, then this collection would be the books that he found himself keeping in his library. That makes me think - how much has the man read in his lifetime?
PixelCrayons Now for Small Businesses
Hmm, interesting, although I'm not sure that we're quite comfortable yet about GM here in Europe, especially for things that enter the food chain.
Discover Current Trends in Curcumin and Breast Cancer Treatment
Private Exchange to Aid Startups Seeking More Cash
Obligatory:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/
Vampires Deconstructed: 10 Iconic Visions of the Blood Sucking Undead
Choose the best dresses for the special occasion
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We need science to tell us this?
Act gay, get hot chicks. Got it.
Internet Black Market
This is quite fantastic, more selection than some public libraries I know.

I would not be surprised if he has read a vasy majority wholly and the rest partially. Some people just seem to really enjoy the escapism offered by books over that availible through other means (TV, Film, Video Games). Just imagine what portion of his day is either spent reading (for work and relaxation) and writing. Astounding man.
It would probably be a more interesting story if there was a concrete example from the author's experience about how hiring a power-hiting CEO too early was the seed of a startup's failure.
Selector uniquing in the dyld shared cache (Snow Leopard performance)
A Javascript date library
How A Team of Geeks Cracked Spy Trade
Although pg might not allow it (just quite how I do not know) if the level of abuse rises to a significant level for long enough people will leave. So for example a couple of trolls go on the rampage (and it doesn't require many people, just a few with far too much time on their hands) for a week you could lose quite a few members and when the trolls leave or are banned not all of them will come back.

The abusive behaviour needs to be stamped on hard and fast as others might just get plain fed up if nothing is done about a troll and leave. And it is not just abusive behaviour, just imagine that on every post someone posted the (ir)relevant xkcd / penny arcade / dilbert link to go with the post and the discussion gets flooded with chatter about the cartoons.

You could completely ruin HN without a single swear word or sexist / racist / whateverist remark.
The general impression I've gotten is they go for pure animal magnetism when looking for a good fuck, and sensitivity, intelligence etc. when looking for some chump to help raise their kids.
You typically wouldn't load your entire layout via Ajax.

Depends on the application. Flex doesn't compete with your average listing-based HTML webapp. It's competing with GWT and Ext in the field of complex, desktop-like GUIs ("RIA").
I note that the email address of the person doing the apologizing is publicly visible. That doesn't make it less classy, but it does underscore that people that are less anonymous tend to behave better.
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Recession hits hard- people take to selling kidneys online
People are trying to sell their kidneys online as the world struggles with their debts
Smartphones: A Tower of Babel for developers
Addicted to the Internet? There’s rehab for that
I got stuck on the first one and couldn't make it further down the list to where the (presumably) good advice lives.

"Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source" is just such terrible advice that it's hard to even articulate why. If you're stuck writing meaningless accounting code for some giant company, the last thing that will distinguish you would be to write some meaningless device driver code for a giant open source project.

How about, instead, you register a domain name and build an interesting product to put there in your spare time. Charge people to use it, make money, make a name for yourself, possibly even get yourself out of the Actuarial Tedium Developer role permanently.

Fulfill your Ambitions by Fulfilling your Ambitions. Not by giving away your time on somebody else's thing.
I've experienced the flip side of that. I used to use my real name online, and then someone took exception to something I said. Net result was a deeply unpleasant episode of cyber-stalking that still hasn't entirely gone away.

I'm not completely paranoid, but I won't easily reveal my real-life identity. It's not too hard to find, and a few have found it, but I'm not going to draw a big arrow at my house and say "I live here ..."
I totally disagree. I mean for a start you seem to think the book was about Godel's theorem. It was about something more general, that's Godel's theorem was merely one instance of, what exactly that general thing is..... is probably the heart of almost all philosophy. But that's just my take :)
It's been more than 20 years since I read it. But please explain - because to be honest my hunch is that the book just leaves one with a vague feeling that something cool is going on ("the heart of all philosophy"?), but not with real understanding.

Looking at a three page formal proof of Goedel's theorem somehow helped me understand a lot more than reading GEB.
The future of libraries, with or without books
And a JS timezone library: http://js.fleegix.org/plugins/date/date
I wouldn't call it reproductively focused, that's way more than most men think when they meet a pretty woman. I'd say carnally focused; reproductively focused comes a few hours later if they've forgotten a condom.
Doing predictions with instance based methods can be really expensive.
http://xkcd.com/481/
I believe nuts are the problem . . .
I would still call it "reproductively focused". Condoms and being legally forced to support your biological kids have both been invented since we stopped evolving ;-)
> Other than being kind of small

You can click on the graphs to expand them.

> tracking only 3 things,

Depending on how you count, 3 or 5:

* CPU Utilization
* Disk Reads
* Disk Writes
* Network Traffic In
* Network Traffic Out

The graphs are integrated with the AWS Management Console, it is easy to start (or stop) collecting data, you don't need to do any setup, and you don't need to find a place to store the data.
I resemble this problem.

More to the point: if you write, publishers will insist on sending you books -- review copies, stuff to cover blurb, multiple copies of your own publications. They mount up. Then there's the stuff you read for your own pleasure. And the books you buy for research on specific projects and dip into. And the stuff you buy because you might write about that topic, next year maybe, and don't get around to reading. (At least Amazon.com has relieved that particular pressure! Now I can afford to just jot down an ISBN and move on.) And, and ...

Damn, I need to go order another eight bookcases. Wonder where I'm going to put them?
No support for fortnights?! I'm shocked at the omission of this critical unit of time, used throughout society.
You're exactly right, Tom. We dropped the ball on having the security@37signals.com account setup before this issue so reports went to our normal support team. A specific email address with an associated GPG key has since been added to our security page and there is a person who is tasked to respond. This was added on August 23rd when the problems with the process around the previous XSS problem were discovered.
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Just in case anyone from Vienna, Austria is reading this: There's a talk on exactly this topic at local hacker space Metalab tonight: http://metalab.at/wiki/Metaday_25 [german]
I tend to buy books still, as I have limited time for reading and don't want the hassle of a return date or not being able to find what I want. When I'm done, I give them to the library once my copy has made the rounds with people I know who may be interested. I used to keep them all but was moving about once every 12-18 months and one time just got tired of lugging around 20 boxes of paperbacks that I would doubtfully ever re-read.
That's very spiffy. I wonder how it compares to some of the smarter Perl date libraries?
Don't assume he's read even a quarter of them.

From Black Swan, regarding Umberto Eco's private library of 30k books:

"... a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know [as possible]." (emphasis Taleb's)
I had the strangest bug with this library on Konfabulator a while ago where all Date.toString()'s returned an object instead of a string.

Not really a useful thing to know but I wanted to post it anyhow.
I've used the library in a real project, and I'm on the mailing list. FYI, there doesn't seem to be much development activity going on, nor is it so perfect and complete that further development is unneeded. That's not to discourage anyone from using it, since it's the only JS lib I know that fills the same niche, just to let you know you may need to get your hands dirty. (I've got a patch waiting for integration but not enough attention available to test it for use cases that are not mine and really push it through. If you do have the interest and bandwidth to polish whatever improvements you make, you could probably help quite a bit.)
Google News: Biased or broken?
Women Are Sort Of More Tentative Than Men, Aren't They?
Same article as these:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803968

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803993
What parts did you miss?
What's new in Oracle's 11g release?
First Unassisted Paraplegic to Summit Mount Kilimanjaro
Truly inspiring guy. Incredible will power.
My college uses the edu.ph domain. So I can't register too.
I'm guessing because project teams are more independent than one might think. Perhaps they're of the mind that too much central management will stifle innovation?
Some interesting tidbits:

Woolworth was originally a major retailer in the US, which expanded into the UK in the early 20th century. The Australian Woolworth was so named to capitalize on the brand recognition from the US/UK retailer, which never operated in Australia, so had no trademark there. The last Woolworth stores in the US closed in the 90s.

Tandy was originally a leather goods company in Texas, named after its founder.
I can't see how it could not shape the way we think, at least a little.

The piraha tribe in the amazon only has words for "one", "two" and "many". Some researchers have found that members of this tribe have an incredibly hard time grasping the concept that adding 3 rocks to 4 rocks is any different from adding 4 rocks to 5 rocks.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/20/0354222&...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirahã_people
Sign of a true nerd/geek/hacker: the books are alphabetized by author (at least in the first two pictures).
I'm pretty open about my email, phone number, real name and so on, my physical location I keep somewhat obscured until I've had a chance to get an idea who I'm revealing it to.

Too many cranks out there. People with a high profile and their name out in the open attract all kinds of weirdos, especially if they are female.
What Happens When There Are No More World Records?
Really nice marketing hack. But someone should alert him to the invention of thumbnail generators :)
Being software engineers, I don't think we need to worry about pretty women in the workplace degrading our work performance.

Hacker News itself is 94% male, according to the poll that was up a while ago. That's a ratio that goes unmatched at the nerdiest tech schools.
The Myth of Technological Progress
Funny, but I've always thought the 37signals team was bipolar.

On one hand, they're pretty much "our way or the high way" about any support concerns/feature requests.

But, once caught out in public about any issue, they're all over it.

I suggest a very strong dose of self-administered humility for their founders would go a long way. That doesn't mean being un-opinionated; it just means being realistic about human nature and its vagaries as it applies to themselves.
Also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=802016
Aviary outs O'Reilly contest exploit, calls for revote
X-Forwarded-For HTTP header was used to trick the poll into thinking that the request was coming from different IP addresses
Front-running is when a firm places a trade ahead of its client's trade. High-frequency trading isn't front-running. Usually the firms are trading with their own capital and don't have clients to front-run.
What is Open Source Bicycle Design?
in all seriousness, it did seem less intelligent than what i've seen (on RTM.com for example). next june returns June 4th? wtf?
Unless they fake the data, researchers do not have control over the results.

Yet I hope the article is not being upvoted as startup advice: "Don't hire beautiful women."

Perhaps heterosexual men can also train themselves to think of beautiful women as people first instead of as sex objects primarily.
There is a broken image on this page. To see actual images look elsewhere on the site, e.g. here:

http://worldbike.org/about-us
Aren't this and the open source digital camera solutions in search of problems?
Koobface behind the scenes
Positive thinking is a good start but positive acting is even better. For instance it works perfect in raising children. See Triple P
http://www.gov.mb.ca/triplep/
If retail investors want to participate in day trading and high frequency market making, then indeed, good luck.
Why you need to take holidays and/or make sure you're getting enough sleep.
Walmart is infamous for all kinds of human rights abuses.

They even kill people for shoplifting:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-norman/another-shoplifter-d...
Changing Mimetypes for Text Responses in BeepBeep
Use bit.ly to shorten URLs in Tweets and status updates
I don't understand your question. Can you reword it?
TwtApps For Sale; $500K Gets You 11-App Suite
well today is the 4th. - which day in June 2010 would you pick as the default?
It's a poor title for the article since the conclusion of the article is that both men and women are tentative about subjects that are considered the domain of the opposite gender while having the same level of tentativeness within gender-neutral topics. It's interesting research and I hope the follow it up with how it affects things that have great social impact (like job interviews, how people work in an office, etc).
Well, Microsoft has no strategic interest in helping the web, as that would interfere with their desktop products. This is well established. IE was just a big Trojan to slow (yes, slow) and mess the Web world.

A reference, just off the top of my head, is Spolsky's API War: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
The spreadsheet is from an older post, it is at:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=twRSWnj1h-j_F3IHRXxwr...
Is Yak Shaving Driving You Nuts?
Syfy Channel Considering Cooking Show
The Singularity and the Fixed Point