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dhson Dark Patterns: dirty tricks designers use to make people do stuff

Oh but these are examples for making people not do stuff (like not flag, vote, or even come back to the site). I don't feel like that's evil at all.

dhson "You Don't Understand Ordinary People" - Feynman Gives Advice to Wolfram

Citation, please.

dhson The end of :hover?

Here's an intro into media queries: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/

dhson Forget Greece: Europe's real problem is Germany

"I thought it was commonly known and accepted that it was in large part German banks that were being bailed out when bailing out Greece."

That's how I - I'm German - understand it, but I think it's pretty much the minority report around here these days. The vox populi still argues that we shouldn't have done it, as if there were an option out of it even now. The majority doesn't grasp what's happening and why it happens, and it seems to be very easy to keep them in the dark right now.

dhson What happens to an unprotected human body in space?

Don't panic, and a ship powered by an infinite improbability drive will pop up. Happens all the time...

dhson Burn-out visible in the brains of patients

The point is that, when dealing with people who's sense-of-self is pathologically affected, I suggest you steer away from the "victim" concept, because it is ideologically loaded. Whether depressive or not, people often want to think that they can "choose to not be a victim", which can be a very destructive idea for some. It's much more healthy to think in terms of "patient", because most people don't think that one can "choose to not be a patient".

dhson Burn-out visible in the brains of patients

No, they are not victims - they are patients. This "victims/non-victims" meme is just wrong, and it's toxic. Please don't spread it.

dhson Burn-out visible in the brains of patients

You obviously have no idea how often and prominently thoughts like "I must not be a victim!" or "I must pull myself together" feature in the compulsive thought patterns of a depressive's experience, deepening the depressive state, especially if the person used to be very creative and productive. Seriously, please do not suggest to a clinically depressed person that they "just need to power through this" or something, because they are quiet likely to try, and they might end up killing themselves because it doesn't work. It's like persuading somebody with a broken leg to run a marathon, saying "Don't be such a wimp! No pain, no gain!".

"Victim or not" is simply in the wrong ballpark. A depressive person is a patient. Many of them have real trouble with accepting this fact, which is a symptom of their disease. If you're not depressive, you should have less problems understanding it. Please don't make it harder for them by pushing in the wrong direction.

dhson Ask HN: Does the idea of a "reduce-map" function make any sense?

Thanks a lot. Your "It's like taking a word frequency (output of MapReduce) and building original text with that? You just don't have data to do that" made me understand what doesn't make sense to you. Your last paragraph made me understand why it doesn't make sense to you. The weird thing is that, from my point of view, your "you don't have the data" statement is not really true, because in my model I have an oracle (more specifically, one or more human authors) which supplys the missing data (before compilation), so I can in fact "build original text" from the input. Now I'm looking for a name which describes that this happens. Any suggestions?

dhson M.I.A.'s album "/\/\/\Y/\" is ungoogleable

+1. Case in point: Today I was thinking about a problem: "Maybe I need a something like a "reduce-map" function here; maybe that would be the right metaphore for what I want the program to do here." I wanted to know whether this thought had any currency, so I googled program "reduce-map":

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=program+%22reduce-m...

And got back a slew of map-reduce tutorials.

Still don't know whether that "reduce-map" idea is a dead end.

dhson Mona Lisa heist of 1911 concealed a perfect—and far more lucrative—crime

Probably selling CDOs.

dhson The Shirky Principle

From where I see it, it looks like people who call themselves capitalists would generally like to reform the regulatory/legislative system so that it only supports the capitalists.

dhson Duck Duck Go is starting to get coverage

I think it's definitely better than nothing!

Here's an interview with Rob Janoff, the designer of the original Apple logo, in which he debunks this and other stories about its design: http://creativebits.org/interview/interview_rob_janoff_desig...

dhson How to Stay Stressed

My experience is that different personalities stay stressed in different ways. E.g., I very much tend to do the former, and have repeatedly picked partners who tended to do the latter. It sure makes for dysfunctional relationships.

dhson French President Pushes For 'Google Tax'

It's not at all clear that they can. According to German news media (e.g. http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/0,1518,670897,00....), the European Commission doubts that Google's alleged "dangerous dominance of the market" is real, and says they will check whatever the French propose for legality. And a concrete proposal hasn't even been made - so far, it's all just some big talk.

dhson Microsoft rips off Plurk

So Microsoft VPs want to find out why people do not accept their products. Could be a good thing, if they would then insist on improvement of the products guided by the data that the "dev evangelist" provides. You, though, make it sound like it's a bad thing. Care to explain?

dhson The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk

Found the PDF. Thanks for giving that clue :-)

dhson A terrible tragedy: Dan Haubert of Ticketstumbler (fallentimes) has passed away

In a bout of major depression, creativity is just lost. The feeling that I will never get it back was a main source feeding suicidal thinking. Luckily, I sought treatment, and an analyst told me that this is normal, that it's part of the illness, and that basically nobody can be creative while being clinically depressed (yes, I was in a clinic at that time). That helped, at least a little.

I'm fighting, and I'm slowly getting it back. But it's hard.

dhson The end of AI winter?

Apparently Google's Peter Norvig does, e.g. http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-6754621605046052935&... (he starts talking about the relationship between Google and AI at 06:40).

dhson Internet Explorer 8 runs ten times faster with Google Chrome plug-in

Maybe users who must use IE because of the policies of their company?

dhson Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research

Thanks for digging up this link.

dhson Social Media: Why it pays to be super awesome to almost everyone online

Did you try http://www.archive.org/web/web.php to retrieve your poems? It worked for me on several occasions, particullary if I still remember the year and the domain name under which a text I searched for where published.

dhson If you want to be rich, first stop being so frightened (2006)

I found the claim that "you can't get rich in Sweden" quite interesting, so I looked up some data. Here's my calculation:

    Rank 	Nation 	Number of billionaires 	Population  People/Billionaire (rounded)

    1 	 Germany 	54 		 82,210,000	1,522,407

    2 	 Russia 	32 		141,950,000	4,404,687

    3 	 UK	 	27 		 60,587,300	2,243,974

    4 	 Turkey 	13 		 71,517,100	5,501,315

    5 	 Italy	 	12 		 59,337,888	4,944,824

    6 	 Spain 		12 		 46,157,822	3,846,485

    7 	 France 	10 		 64,473,140	6,447,314

    8 	 Sweden 	 9		  9,234,209	1,026,015

According to this, about one in a million Swedes is a billionaire, a ratio better than anywhere else in Europe.

Sources:

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

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

Edit: For comparison, I calculated the ratio for the USA (population 306,798,000, billionaires 859, according to the Wikipedia), and found that about one in 357,147 US citizens is a billionaire. So while it's appearantly relatively easy to become a billionaire in Sweden compared to the other European countries, it seems to be even easier in the US. I guess that means you're about half right...

dhson Top Domains posted on Hacker News

So what do you suggest? "Ban 'em all - let God sort 'em out!"...or what?

dhson Bumpy Ride for Boeing's 787 Dreamliner

So compared to the 777, the 787 is claimed to reduce fuel consumption by 20 percent, but it only carries 250 passengers instead of 300 - about 17 percent fewer. It seems to me that surprisingly little energy per passenger is going to be saved by replacing aluminum with plastics as the base material here. Does anybody here have an idea about the energy requirements of aluminum vs plastics in plane production? Are there significant savings zu be expected?

dhson Fast Bikes, Slow Food, and the Workplace Wars

Pssst...read it here: http://design.caltech.edu/Misc/pirsig.html

dhson How to store data for a billion years

Whats pedantry to some is quite an interesting aside for others. Thank you, and keep it up :-)

dhson They are known as the grass-eaters: Japan's Generation XX

According to the World Association of Newspapers [1], they are Yomiuri Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun, and Mainichi Shimbun; also, those are the largest newspapers in the world. In terms of political leanings, Yomiuri is conservative, Asahi is liberal, and Mainichi is somewhere in-between.

[1] http://www.wan-press.org/article2825.html

dhson The Taming of Comment Trolls

I like that feature a lot, but I'm sometimes tempted to do CTR-A, just to see what others have "censored". Must...resist...