visakanv

Excuse me sir, but it appears that you're trying to have fun. This is Hacker News. Fun is strictly prohibited.

It suffers from the same malaise that all online publications suffer from – articles and headlines are increasingly optimized to get people arguing about it on Facebook (and Hacker News, and anywhere else).

> No longer can a scientist say "take this vaccine so you won't die," now they must also have a witty sign that infotains people.

Implying that this wasn't the case before?

From what I remember, the guy who said "wash your hands so your patients don't die" basically got ostracized [1], and even Leonardo Da Vinci had to sell himself in his resume's cover letter [2].

I think Dan Ariely has the right attitude towards all of this [3]. When we design things like buildings and bridges, we take physics into account. We know that we can't build a bridge a certain way because it'll collapse. Similarly, when we're designing for people, we have to take human nature (behavioral psychology, whatever you want to call it) into account.

Facts are important, but so is a sensitivity to the person you're trying to convince of those facts. That's just the reality of communication, I'm afraid.

_

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/12/37566392...

[2] http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/skills-of-da-vinci.html

[3] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_...

> I think there are thousands of better examples but they might not be at the scale of Dropbox.

Of those thousands of examples, which are the closest to Dropbox's scale?

Perhaps clichés are clichés because there's something true about them?

This is beautiful.

Fascinating!

I thought it was pretty fun!

> This sort of text generation is like a magician's trick where he appears to saw the woman in half and put her together again.

That's a really good analogy!

I like it! Very nice.

That actually makes a lot of sense, great point.

Hahaha! Yeah, maybe that's part of what makes the output distinctive. Do you have any good recommendations for a person looking to improve their shoddy writing?

Are you talking about the submission title? =/

> The giddy excitement of being on the verge of unlocking the power of language slowly turned into confusion and then decayed into disappointment as i slowly realized that the task was maybe a bucket of orders of magnitude harder than i thought

This was very wonderfully articulated! Do you have a blog or something?

You should totally do it! Would love to see what happens.

Haha yeah it's a little disappointing (yet interesting) how it comes close but misses the mark. I wonder how far away we are to having machine-generated output that's tough to distinguish from the input you put into it.

Interesting. Why do you think that is? (More readable, that is)

I am, actually! :-) I also happen to be generally curious about everything.

A separate discussion that I'd like to have is – why do people drink so much, to the point of drunkenness? Why is this so common? Has this always been the case? Will this change?

All of these things are also huge for people who are disabled (deaf, mute, etc) and for people who are in foreign countries, and all sorts of other situations that most of us might not typically think of.

I really enjoyed Westworld, you might too. (It's about robots, not space, but still does a good job overall.)

I'm working on a writing project to write 1,000,000 words, just for the sake of it. Currently 66.2% of the way through.

It's on Brian Chesky's radar, I'm sure: https://twitter.com/bchesky/status/813800346116128769

Isn't that technically the moon's "year"?

> Where were the protests when Obama wiretapped the world?

There were protests in over 80 cities in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions_to_global_surveillan...

> I've always felt it's a bit of an odd value proposition — "pay me more, and I'll fix my flawed, buggy software".

Hmm. I think it makes sense if you begin with the assumption that all software is flawed and buggy by default.

> The Pentagon is essentially a round building

I burst out laughing at this comment, because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism

Aristotle: the essential qualities of an object are those properties that make the thing what it is, without which it would not be that kind of thing

jonwachob91: a pentagon is essentially a circle

Aristotle: u wot m8

I think you might've meant to say "how appropriate", or "how fitting". A situation is ironic is when the outcome is contrary to the expectation. (Eg: getting run over by an ambulance)

> "if your story was really credible it would involve a lawyer"

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. "Aha, she's got a lawyer! She's making up this nonsense to try and get a fat cash payout from Uber!"

> Personally I haven't heard many such stories from women in tech.

Women learn from a very young age to be very selective about who they trust, in a much more nuanced way than men do.

If you haven't heard such stories from women, it's quite probably because they're not comfortable telling you such things.