alexandros

It seems to me that Arrington does not realise that managing coders is not the same as managing journos on a blog. Maybe writers can churn and churn while working miserable hours for years on end. It does not work that way in coding. One hour of coding without thinking carefully can have a large negative contribution to your company's ability to meet its goals, by way of causing bad architectural decisions, bugs, and/or downtime.

Hacker news is near the optimum of what a site of this size and type can do. By type I mean the slashdot/digg/reddit social news format. Pg got a lot of things right to shore up the format. ui geared towards a certain community, strong focus on community, seeded with essay readers, slow scaling, quasi-non-profit so quality remains almost top priority. Its just that the format of squeezing the subjective realities of more and more people into an objective 'top intellectually interesting articles right now' list cannot scale civilly when everyone is subtly pulling in their own direction just that little bit. The tension adds up. Maybe limiting max number of users (one joins as on leaves) would do it but that is extremely drastic and probably defeats the point of hn.

How do three anecdotes strung together justify the 'often' in the title?

"humans have qualities that machines can never possess regardless of if they pass Turing tests or not"

I don't think you understand the Turing test.

Let me add to the OMeta love. I did my PhD using OMeta/JS, and I'm using it now in my startup. I find it's a perfect companion to CoffeeScript, both of them compiling to JavaScript as they do.

I was hoping this would make the case that big innovations still happen in computing. If anything it made the opposite case.

What stops you from writing a GAE app to do just that? There's papers out there on how to map SQL to REST APIs, I've written a few myself.

"..have been done so poorly for so long and have for so long been associated with poor service, that the technology itself has bad karma."

Like, say, smartphones?

Please read the spec. The authors clearly said that the side-effects cannot be ones that the user is responsible for, not that there should not be side-effects at all. GA's logging is not something that should concern the end user.

I'm curious why an application-layer concept such as RPC is making an appearance on a paper that discusses network architecture. Perhaps they are using RPC as a short hand for any roundtrip between two machines?

In any case, some background to the precise definition of RPC and why I find the use here objectionable: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/vinoski-rpc-convenient-bu...

Would you guarantee that any system you build/manage will be safe?

Ok, I'll be the mean one. While I am happy for heroky and everything, I am not sure why this move matters. Was hosting what was holding back the facebook app ecosystem? I was under the impression that the only successes there were Zynga and.. i'm sure there's others? Modernising hosting and support is great, but I thought it was the inconsistent policies and favouritism, and maybe the nature of the medium that killed that scene, not lack of hosting support.

I've said it before, sufficiently advanced spam is indistinguishable from content. If this comes to pass, I'm not sure who will have won the spam wars, but I'm. Inclined to say that the low end content authors will have lost it.

I first heard of Meyer in my information retreival class when implementing an algorithm from a paper she wrote. That's pretty 'techie' afaict.

Fair point. I must admit I only skimmed through. I guess the answer to my question is yes.

Since the context was human (online) society, the backlash is part of the experiment too. Also, the experiment continues. I personally wonder if the experiment will produce a regret reaction from the publicly non-cooperating participant. For the moment it seems to be producing a 'deflect / damage control' reaction.

What's there to stop blogs with problem solutions or how-to's from popping up?

I can never understand this sort of comment.

Obviously the people who criticise the lack of updates are not the same people who are criticising the update.

This observation can only make sense if you aggregate the public into a single person represented by the loudest complaining minority's opinion at any given time. Well, yes, then that person would be wildly inconsistent. But it doesn't actually exist.

It could however have been the world's largest talent acquisition, and talent Sun did have in droves. And it's not like Google doesn't have a hardware arm with all those data centers. It's still a strech though. And a lot of the talent my have gone to Google of its own volition. Maybe I just really wish Google had given Java the reboot it needs.

What about the filter bubble of me only searching for what i am interested in? Will DDG throw in some random results in every search to save me from myself?

The thing with Groupon is that it can't afford to keep it's implicit promise to merchants. It's a conflict over customer loyalty. If the customers become loyal to a couple of local restaurants, Groupon loses them and must 'purchase' new ones. If they remain loyal to Groupon's offers, then they will not be worth the merchants' expense to put out the offer. Based on this, Groupon must either keep spending to acquire new customers, or new merchants. Either way, the large marketing costs are here to stay (until they saturate the one market or the other and burn out). I don't think Amazon had any such fundamental conflicts to deal with.

"Thiel is quite open that his main motivation is that he thinks universities promote politics he dislikes, so he'd like to destroy them for that reason."

[citation needed]

I can see three ways of getting these in line. The obvious one is that if you do what you have to do in less time and with less expenditure of willpower, there is more time and energy left to challenge yourself.

The second one is what I do: Schedule challenges as a ritual. What I do is solve a projecteuler.net project every morning. Helps me stay sharp all day.

The third one is a bit meta: You can have a constant thought process going that examines your rituals and injects as much challenge as you can handle in the form of optimizations. This way you can keep improving your rituals, keep things interesting, and gradually free up more time for productivity. This is what I aspire to.

The subtitle for this piece is '5 ways to maximize your cognitive potential'.

Shouldn't that be -realize- your cognitive potential, or maximize the utilization of your cognitive potential or some such? What good does it do to maximize my potential?

I'm sure you can sell that for more than $2.56. Hell, if you get one I'll commit to buy it off you for $5 plus postage. Email in profile.

So that would mean that using ready-made software that uses proper hashing (Simple Machines Forum comes to mind) would become illegal in France.. Interesting times.

PageRank-style algorithms are so fundamental to current search tech that I would be shocked if Microsoft wasn't using something along these lines on Bing.

> Even Mussolini got the trains running on time.

Or maybe not: http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/trains.asp

The bots are doing nothing 'wrong' as such. There are certain feeds from where >90% of the material ends up on HN. If somebody writes a bot to auto-submit items from that feed, it's helping HN be faster in accessing new and (mostly) relevant posts. What is not relevant should (in principle) not reach the home page.

The problem is that submission is winner takes all, i.e. first submitter reaps all the upvotes. Also, HN does not reward finding new sources of material more than posting from the predictable sources.

The logical endpoint of these two facts is auto-submission bots rising to the top of the Karma tables. If Karma is used as a way of anti-gaming (need karma threshold to downvote, etc.) then this is a way to circumvent that for a sufficiently motivated manipulator. They can make a bot that auto-submits from the known sources, and use it to build up an arbitrary number of accounts, from which they can then boost the articles they want (or bury the comments they don't like). For all we know, this could already be the case.

I have two suggestions that can sidestep this problem to a certain extent:

1. Reward articles from predictable sources less than articles from rare sources.

2. Split the karma benefit between the first submitter and the people who upvoted the article early (of course, this needs to take into account how selectively and successfully the user upvotes to avoid blanket upvoting 'just in case').

This all is still gameable, but probably not as easily.

Umm.. the nametag for www2010 was very similar. It opened and had the schedule for the conference inside along with other info. (plus the name was on both sides)

This is taking the concept a bit further to be sure, but I don't think this is an innovation of the scale it is being presented to be.