pbateman

We are the ones who serve them coffee, deliver them food, suck their cocks, watch their kids, and mop their floors

...

To this end, we now make our first clear demand of Google. We demand that Google give three billion dollars to an anarchist organization of our choosing.

On the one hand I feel sorry for Kevin having to deal with these crackpots, on the other hand these crackpots are so bad at PR it's hilarious.

Well, it's not going to be a popular opinion but I think it's a shame he's been forced out. Simply having the wrong views shouldn't make him ineligible for a job.

socially inept

Good to see we're staying classy. Next time you might like to work in a zinger about autism, neckbeards and/or fedora ownership.

I'm sick of it. Goodbye, Hacker News.

I know this is going to come across as unfriendly, but I'm always bemused when people make these little plays for attention. It's a massive site, you're not one of the notable commenters, if HN isn't delivering value why not just stop reading it quietly rather than announcing it to the world?

You're getting downvoted because:

1) Despite your disclaimer you are sounding unfeeling.

2) It seems convenient for a (presumably) relatively healthy and youthful person to be advocating large sacrifices that will hit others first.

3) Many of us don't share your pessimistic view of human progress. If we can figure out how to thwart death from disease, we can probably figure out how to deal with overpopulation.

4) And of course the obvious, and entirely heartless rejoinder: if you're so keen on death to reduce overpopulation, isn't it a bit selfish of you to keep on living?

Here is exactly how you deal with some guy writing in to tell you you're too fat: delete the email and get on with your life.

It's simple, it's easy, it solves the problem.

Of course it's not the modern solution of publicly bullying your correspondent into a retraction while claiming the moral high ground but it works and it's less unpleasant.

My, how entitled we are!

Lord! Do it yourself!

Your complaints infuriate me!

It feels like at some point the quality of the discourse on hackernews went downhill.

I've got one of the schnozzle bags with a compatible mat. It is categorically not cumbersome, not tedious, weighs the same and is filled with down so it has an R-value[1] of 5.9 instead of 1 which is what really matters when you're using a sleeping mat in a tent on a cold night.

[1] The R-value is a measure of how insulating a mat is, higher is better.

You've made, on average, one comment per hundred days you were here[1]. Nobody noticed you were here in the first place and I doubt they will notice you are gone. I have no idea why you are telling people you are leaving instead of simply not visiting anymore.

[1] And they're not grellas-style quality long form comments either.

Agreed. It's also a massive red flag for the future of the relationship if you can't negotiate over something like this.

I would personally enjoy some kind of hack that causes the White House to respond to successful petitions with something other than glib dismissal.

Great point! Perhaps we should also hobble the Africans who manually track poachers so we create twice as many jobs!

This is a blatant advertisement masquerading as an article. The new incarnation of SimCity might turn out to be a great game but this is nothing but an EA press release.

I see a few problems with this:

* The website doesn't have critical mass or any special hooks (like pg's essays and pg himself, for instance) to help build it

* I'm not "applying" to post on a website

* Costing people karma is going to drive everything towards a hive mind as soon as possible; if you're going to lose karma by posting you're going to try to make sure that you'll earn that karma back. People are also not going to burn karma making civil responses, everything will become a political performance.

It's news because Joachim Kempin has got a book to sell and he or his publishers have hired sufficient PR talent to make it news.

His net worth is $15.7 billion[1] so I doubt he's concerned about "squeezing as much out of it as he can".

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer

From the link in the article:

Depending on how many of the counts Swartz is found guilty of, the sentence could conceivably total 50+ years and fine in the area of $4 million.

What an absurd and unreasonable level of punishment. Carmen Ortiz, the prosecutor who was behind this[1] needs to be publicly shamed.

[1] (source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/reddit-co-founder-c...)

1) It pretty obviously is gentle. In the most extreme scenario pg is bullied into briefly making a minor change to the CSS.

2) HN is a community site, which exists and thrives largely because of the community. I can't see anything wrong with members of said community making suggestions on occasion, particularly on occasions like this.

3) People are far too quick to take offence these days, particularly on the internet. IMHO the world would be a better place if these people were instructed to get over it rather than pandered to.

4) Finally PG is free to say no and I for one will not judge him ill for it.

Calling a gentle suggestion from the HN community to make a minor change to mourn one of our members "very offensive" is a bizarre overreaction.

I'm being quite restrained. I'm calling for a feeling of guilt, not their public lynching. If I'd been involved in the prosecution I'd be feeling guilty for proceeding in too heavy-handed a fashion and I'm sure most of the people on this forum would too[1].

Frankly if someone is incapable of self-recrimination when something like this arises I don't want them in this kind of role.

[1] Of course this presupposes a motivation of "doing what's best for the country/society" and not "showing this uppity young guy who's boss".

Probably.

To be honest if I had to imagine the people at the attorney's office who decided to prosecute this I'd imagine vaguely malevolent bureaucratic dullards who derive validation from enforcing the rules in a heavy handed fashion.

A tragedy that this caring young man has taken his own life. My heart goes out to his family.

This feels a bit inappropriate but at the moment I hope that some members of the US Attorney's Office are wracked by guilt.

I'm a bit puzzled why both the $30 and $100 levels both state that Your donation can purchase 1 USB bracelet for 1 youth!. Surely the $100 level should be able to provide at least three.

Zoe Fox (the author) probably has a quota of articles to hit and cranking out anything but the barest impersonation of journalism would cause her to fall behind.

The tragedy is that people still give views to these shoddy content mills.

An interesting idea but there is no way stuff like this should be patentable.

I'm not sure the government is particularly concerned about cost containment. It's the canonical example of people spending other people's money.

Two points:

1) Kahneman's model is probably too high level to apply to solving NLP problems. It's an interesting abstraction, not a road map to human reasoning.

2) System 2 is Effortful Reasoning, not just doing math. For example, if you were engaging system 2 to plan how long a project was going to take system 2 would think about what kind of questions were relevant to generating an answer (how long have similar projects taken, are there any differences between this project and the others, etc.) and then think about how to combine these to produce an answer. Computers do not perform this kind of reasoning well at all.

Ideally your thoughts/experiences with all of them but my first two preferences would be Thinking With Type and Understanding Color.

I remember what I learn more if it's relevant to work I'm actually doing.

So if, for example, I'm thinking about landing pages and I read some links on HN about building better landing pages then it gets lodged in my brain and I learn something worthwhile.

If on the other hand I'm just procrastinating I don't remember much or extract much value from being here.

One of the best uses I've found for HN is searching for past links related to what I'm working on; there's a lot of value in the old comment threads.

Not wanting to be negative or anything but I'm a bit puzzled why this post is here. There's only six books, the descriptions are sourced from Amazon and there's no comment as to whether the books are good or not.

At the very least some reviews would be helpful.