pbateman

...

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.

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 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?

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?

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.

Lord! Do it yourself!

Your complaints infuriate me!

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

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

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

* 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.

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

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...)

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.

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".

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.

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

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

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.

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.