Kisil

I agree that we are too slow to point the blame at ourselves. It's healthy to be self-critical.

That said, there are programmers who are legitimately lacking both in basic skills and desire to attain those skills. It's orthogonal to the problem you're talking about, but these people do exist, and they're not as uncommon as one might hope. I can teach the difference between pointers and references; I can't teach you to care.

And I've said this before, but I'd love to see votes for [dis]agreement, even if votes for contribution/karma may be better hidden.

I would vastly prefer not to die at all, and science is moving us in that direction.

That said, I don't think death is necessary as a motivator to "make today count." Today is a motivator to make today count. The living is the thing. Every attempt I've heard to bring extrinsic meaning to life falls flat on inspection. You have to chase what moves you, and that doesn't change as a function of expected lifespan. At least, not much.

Side-note: Many users vote, or withhold votes, based on some sense of what the comment "should have scored." Awarding karma only for quality votes allows the reader to register assent/dissent without running up the score. There's a frequent problem where the first comment builds momentum just by being first; this change would at least partially address that problem.

How about separating "quality" and "agreement" into separate scores?

While it complicates the interface, it would be much more useful for both authors and readers. It naturally leads to measuring controversy - the most interesting comments would be those with high quality and mixed agreement. Having a sense of HN's opinion would direct posts towards areas of maximum contribution. It would also re-direct some of the pile-on upvoting from low quality but obvious/funny/mean/etc. comments, so they could drop down the page despite having some appeal.

Some example cases: a) I may agree with the snarky comment that calls out someone's obvious mistake, but I can simultaneously downvote for snark. b) I may disagree with someone's analysis of the iOS vs Android market battle, but I can now register my disagreement while acknowledging that the poster made a good point. c) I made a comment that came off as means-pirited, though that wasn't my intent. The quality downvotes are an unambiguous message, which I can't just write off with "I guess HN disagrees."

I believe the idea was to package the ideas in an approachable (and perhaps potentially more viral) format. The ideas are more succinctly expressed at http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences, but I can't see your average Harry Potter fan stumbling into those and sticking around.

Services make sense when you add value on an ongoing basis. Since it's not only possible but pretty simple to build this as an app, it makes much more sense to sell it as an app.

More importantly, anything that depends on having active service is much less reliable, and an alarm clock should be reliable above almost all other factors.

I see this cash discounting frequently, and it makes sense, as it's easier (faster, more certain) for the doctor to take the cash than to deal with billing the insurance company.

For more discussion of the subject by the same author, see his blog post: http://www.quickanded.com/2011/01/the-most-important-higher-...

And did you find out how many of the up and neutral clients also came from the yellow pages? That bit of information is useful only if it draws a distinction, e.g. what if the agency only had one working form of advertising?

(Of course this almost goes without saying, and I don't doubt you thought of it, but this is such a common logic error that I thought it shouldn't be left hanging in a public forum.)

Perhaps in an ideal world some people should self-select out of voting; I haven't thought enough about that ideal world to say. But HN in general, and this page in particular, is the wrong forum to push for such self-selection. I would be willing to bet that the average HN reader is better informed, and better qualified to understand that information, than the general population.

HN readers, please vote today.

(Waring: US-centric answer)

I agree that capitalism relies on government-supported stability and infrastructure, but I don't think Carmack was arguing the opposite point: >>This is not to say that it doesn’t provide many valuable and even critical services ...

The argument concerns dollars spent at the margin. Should the amount of government we have increase, or should it decrease? At the margin, I agree with Carmack that there are many places where we would be better served with less interference, and that we should be cautious about adding new government programs. Clearly there is some fuzzy line between "the justice system" and "corn subsidies". I wouldn't argue that the government has all the program it needs, but neither would I argue that the government needs all the programs it has.

At the risk of flame baiting: I wish I could vote for fiscal conservatism without also voting for hateful and intrusive social conservatism. I also have low confidence in either major party reducing the government in the areas of real excess (see farming), as opposed to e.g. creating new pork-flavored subsidies in the guise of tax relief. Suggestions for concrete ways to battle Parkinson's Law are welcome.

It seems obvious to you and many others here that everyone slides down the slippery spending slope. I have the same problem understanding this position that I have understanding "compulsive shoppers" who buy luxury goods on credit cards. Wouldn't one just... not do it? It seems that the type of person who overspends when rich will also overspend when poor, i.e. that it's more a function of willpower than income level. I don't overspend now; why would having more money make me any more likely to overspend?

I'm starting to think there's some major psychological division here; why is it so hard for you to imagine having willpower, or for me to imagine not having it? I'd like to say it's just that there aren't that many more things I want, but perhaps that feeling is a higher function of willpower, and I've just conditioned myself not to want things I can't afford. If this kind of cognitive shielding is involved, it might partially explain why the two sides have so much trouble relating.

Not to recurse on your comment, but can we build a web app for this some weekend?

>> When someone says "you're too smart", or "you sound too smart" or "try to dumb yourself down", most of the time they're not really saying that you're too smart. They're saying "can the act."

Perhaps some people who use big words are putting on a show, but that's far from universal. Big words stay in our language because they convey subtly different meanings than their simpler synonyms. But there's a trade-off between being precise and being easily understood, and to get it right, you really need to know your audience. A lot of people hear "you sound too smart" because they're going over their audience's heads.

I get this a lot - I come from an articulate, educated family, and I was brought up using big words. I think in big words and long sentences. I read lots of books. So I have to consciously simply my sentence structure and my vocabulary around most people. It's not necessarily that they're "not smart." It's just that they're used to simpler words and structure.

It's almost as if we speak subtly different dialects. I have to do the work to translate, so that they don't have to. Most people haven't read many books, and don't think in big words. People usually talk to similar people, so they may not even have a mental concept for this translation. But they know and notice when someone's unusually hard to understand.

Now, if you use bigger words than your audience, and you're also subtly condescending (because you think you're smarter, e.g.), people often assume you're trying to "sound smart," even though you're actually bad at communication and lack self-awareness. The same thing happens when you use lots of jargon and acronyms, only that alienates an even wider group of people.

edit: formatting

I imagine it's also for tracking how far through the article readers get. That would be useful feedback for the writer: "Katy, you lost 44% of the audience after page three..."

Your comment reminds me of this story: http://www.astatespacetraveler.com/have-you-ever-wondered-wh...

Broad strokes: Startups directly create new value, which by definition makes the world a better place, at least for someone. In contrast, the finance industry adds value indirectly by optimizing capital allocation. At best, finance increases efficiency, but it's very hard to measure whether it's helping or just exploiting the complex rules to skim off the top. In contrast, startups without a value proposition fail.

The seeds of innovation were there earlier, though. The rifle industry comes to mind - I remember reading that innovative rifles with better range played some part in colonial militias' success in the US revolutionary war. One could argue that was more craftsmanship than innovation, but there's a strong connection between making things well and making better things, and China isn't famous for quality goods either.

Right: how GM foods affect health is an entirely separate question from how processing affects health, yet the two are conflated all the time. I'm sure it doesn't help that the most common wrong reasons for opposing processing (e.g. "getting back to nature") also oppose genetic engineering.

(But processed foot is actually quite delicious.)

His analysis of the difference between the trustee and participatory models is insightful, but he didn't address how what he's building is different from aggregators like HN or reddit. Loosely, it sounds like he's putting together a news-focused forum, which would be different in that its content is hosted centrally. This has been tried; the standard argument against is that the barrier for entry to blogging is so low that anyone who wants to participate already can. Forums work for focused communities, but "news," by virtue of its breadth, seems to defy this type of centralization.

It's not that I'm against it in principle, I just don't get the value proposition.

Shorter version of the article: Meritocracy, when it even works, makes the winners smug and the losers depressed. Economic gains do not equal what we lose in community. We should discourage some necessary conditions for meritocracy (e.g. mobility) to promote traditional symptoms of community/culture (e.g. immobility).

I don't agree with the article, but I enjoyed the cognitive dissonance. I think economic gains more than make up for whatever we've lost, and society is adapting to preserve the things that really matter in new ways. But even accepting that personal accountability negatively affects happiness, it seems easier to try reshape attitudes about personal value, rather than restructure society to make everyone feel included.

>If you want to tell your children they can be anything they want, you can't end up with a perfectly egalitarian society as a result.

Perhaps an easier solution than the author's don't-let-anyone-excel would be to de-stigmatize lower-talent positions. Tell your children they can be whatever they want, and then let them follow whatever they're good at. Even if it's plumbing or retail. Fundamentally, I don't think meritocracy is incompatible with mass happiness. (More technically, I believe there exists some value system in which pursuit of excellence is encouraged without associating a sense of shame to "lower" professions.)

> when someone proposes grand social engineering plans: What does it mean for a given person?

We have to be very careful here to view imbalances as potential indicators of underlying problems, and find and treat those problems rather than the symptoms. To use your example, we have to determine whether systematic pressures are keeping women from choosing CS, and correct those pressures, rather than adding new pressures to choose CS. This point gets made frequently around here, but the mistake is made often enough that it bears repeating: adding different counter-pressures that fix the statistics may mask the problem, but often also exacerbate the underlying issues.

But there's a difference between the common weakness ("I focus on trivial details at the expense of the big picture") and the common bullshit response ("I work too hard"). I don't ask this kind of interview question, but I imagine one could tell the difference between those two responses.

I doubt the correlation between length and value is that strong. Brevity is the soul of wit; let's not penalize high information density.

Theft

The business model is predicated on other people's honesty.

Leil Lowndes' "How to Talk to Anyone" is an excellent primer.

It's a brilliant essay, but then what do you expect from Paul Graham? It's eloquently put and finely crafted. This is a really interesting analytical tool.

I think there's some amusement to be found in an agreement hierarchy:

  AH-0: Raw compliments.
  AH-1: Ad hominem compliments.
  AH-2: Compliments on style.
  AH-3: Agreement with the main point.
  AH-4: Extension of a minor point.
  AH-5: Major corollary; extension of the main point
  AH-6: Citation to make another, more overarching point.