Ask HN: Are NDAs Just Security Theater? - <AUTHOR>

For the past couple of years I've felt NDAs are a form of security theater. They create the illusion of safety, and don't actually make you any safer.
An NDA won't stop anybody from disclosing information, and only regulate the aftermath.
Personally I don't sign NDAs, and was wondering if you generally do sign an NDA? And why, if you ask for somebody to sign an NDA, you do? <comment><USER2> 1) NDA may stop someone from disclosing information.... it may not, but it may. That has a degree of value and the document is generally pretty short and simple to understand so not too problematic.

2) for the same reason many people will not sign an NDA (trust, hassle) you may want them to- trust, commitment.

3) even if an NDA only serves to regulate "the aftermath", that too can have value, especially in the rare but possible cases of mis-use of information e.g. by a competitor...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the answer!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Many companies where I have worked typically ask potential suppliers to sign NDAs because they don't want details of future product plans either being made public or, more likely, discussed in the industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the answer!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't it the policy of most tech companies to force all new employees to sign an NDA as a condition of employment?

</comment><comment><USER5> Some previous discussions you might find useful and/or relevant. There are many, many more, some of which you can find through this search:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=sign%20nda&sort=byPopularity&p...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=sign%20nda&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

</comment><comment>==

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7158091](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7158091)

        Why I Won't Sign Your NDA (svbtle) (ryanckulp.com)

</comment><comment>==

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7160262](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7160262)

        Show HN: Why sign a NDA when you can just
                 pinky swear instead?
                 (pinky-swear.herokuapp.com)

</comment><comment>==

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7234094](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7234094)

        Why I Won't Sign Your NDA (medium.com)

</comment><comment>==

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7587687](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7587687)

        When startups should sign non disclosure
        agreements (startacus.net)

</comment><comment>==

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7604500](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7604500)

        Don't ask me to sign your NDA (medium.com)

</comment><comment>==

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7731724](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7731724)

        Should freelancers in gamedev industry
        sign NDAs? (t-machine.org)

</comment><comment>==

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7933163](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7933163)

        Why I Won't Sign Your NDA (landonschropp.com)

</comment><comment>==

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8169957](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8169957)

        Ask HN: Would you sign an NDA?

</comment><comment>==

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8284681](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8284681)

        Why You Shouldn't Ask Us to Sign Your NDA
        (atomicobject.com)

</comment><comment>==

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9172583](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9172583)

        Ask HN: A potential investor in my startup
                asked me to sign an NDA. Should I?

</comment><comment>==

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9195949](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9195949)

        Ask HN: What does it mean to sign NDA?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the list.

I asked on purpose again for a couple of reasons: most of the answers were over 1 year old, most focus on why people shouldn't ask and not why they do ask or why they do sign.

<comment><USER5> Personal opinion, and it's very likely you know all this. I'm sorry in advance if it seems patronising, but here are my thoughts as they occurred. Even though some are invalid or unjustified, I thought there would be value in seeing them "up front" like this.

There would have been value in saying so in your question. I can imagine that most people would go - been there, done that - and just moved on.

From what you say you have done your homework and looked at the previous answers, but there would have been real value in collating the answers, presenting them, and then explaining why you feel the question is worth asking again. What do you feel has changed? Why are those answers no longer relevant, or complete?

Just asking the question with no reference to previous answers makes it feel like you haven't done any checking or research.

The document has its short-coming, and it's for a different context, but let me quote from "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way"[0]:

        Before asking a technical question by e-mail,
        or in a newsgroup, or on a website chat board,
        do the following:

            Try to find an answer by searching the
            archives of the forum or mailing list
            you plan to post to.

            Try to find an answer by searching the Web.

            Try to find an answer by reading the manual.

            Try to find an answer by reading a FAQ.

            Try to find an answer by inspection or
            experimentation.

            Try to find an answer by asking a skilled
            friend.

            If you're a programmer, try to find an
            answer by reading the source code.

        When you ask your question, display the fact that
        you have done these things first; this will help
        establish that you're not being a lazy sponge and
        wasting people's time.  Better yet, display what
        you have learned from doing these things. We like
        answering questions for people who have demonstrated
        they can learn from the answers.

A lot of that is not relevant in this case, but enough of it is that it's worth knowing.

[0] [http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart- questions.html](http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> To paraphrase ESR: thank you for this grandmotherly kindness. :)

<comment><USER5> Yeah, sorry about that 8-/

Thing is, it really is helpful when asking questions to provide a summary of what you've done, what you've found, and what remains to be answered or updated.

But, you know. Sorry.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry, I was trying to be funny. I really found your points valid, and the helpful reminder was very appreciated as it will get me better answers next time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Interview with Daniel Brusilovsky, The Writer That TechCrunch Terminated - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/daniel-brusilovsky/

<comment><USER2> Moments worth pointing out:

1\. Early in the interview Daniel admits that he even published his first story without approval from TechCrunch editors.

I spent almost three years writing for The Escapist (<http://escapistmagazine>) and started when I was 16. When it came to writing and researching, I was given free reign. However, when it came to PUBLISHING, it was made pretty clear that an editor would have to vet the story before it was released. Editors would prefer that I call them on weekends and at least give them a heads up on the situation before releasing a story.

We might've differed from TechCrunch in that we strove for quality as opposed to breaking news. Point being that the Escapist editorial system worked very well, with everyone knowing the content going onto the site.

2\. TechCrunch didn't have Daniel sign any paperwork or give him a title when he joined as an intern in June 2009.

3\. In general, Daniel does provide a really good insight into how TechCrunch operates: management structure, the editorial process, etc.

4\. Admits he doesn't really have any technical background.

5\. Says the company involved was one that TechCrunch had covered multiple times before.

6\. Says he never received the Macbook Air and the type of post the company requested was never written.

7\. Says he has not extorted companies for products, but received products from Intel for an unrelated project he was involved with that he discusses on his blog.

8\. The evidence used against him were joking IMs and emails.

9\. Received an iMac from a friend who works at a tech company as a thank you for making an introduction to another company, not for TechCrunch posts. Then later wrote about one of the companies that was involved in a big legal discussion with Apple (iPod Rip).

10\. Advice Daniel received from Mike Arrington the night before Teens in Tech (Daniel's conference): Neither party wants to have a public fight about this.

This was another quality Mixergy interview revealing Daniel's side of the story and more details about a still mysterious topic. The entire interview is worth viewing.

<comment><USER3> _8\. The evidence used against him were joking IMs and emails._

Has the "I was only joking" defense ever worked?

<comment><USER4> I think I believe him, actually. Or rather, I believe that he didn't seriously mean to trade a post for an Air. It looks to me like he just didn't have the experience to realize that you have to be careful when you're joking about an ethical violation. I'd like to believe the conversation went something like: "We have this new product coming out. Could you write it up?" `Hm. I don't know, I have a bunch of posts I'm currently work on, not sure if I can take on another for a few days.` "Is there anything we can do to change your mind?" `How about a <pie in the sky request>?`

For a 17-year-old (even a fairly-well-connected one) an Air is a pie in the sky request. If he had asked for a nugget of platinum or an Oscar, it would have been obvious that he was joking. As it was, he (probably) asked for something that to him WAS obviously joking, but to most of us is an easily- attainable object; that inequity easily leads to the current situation.

I'm not saying that's how it happened (also: I have no inside information or anything) but this is why I'm not prepared to burn the kid at the stake for it. A lack of experience led to a critical mistake; one that I don't think he'll make again. It sucks for him that his mistake is so public, but that's that's the way it goes.

<comment><USER5> I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt since he's so young and seems to generally have a good head on his shoulders, but a MP Air is definitely not pie in the sky, especially for those in the tech industry. Had he said a Porsche, that may have been entering the "joking" territory, but even then, it's hard to say for sure. From his posts and tweets, he seems like a smart, savvy, mature-beyond-his-years reporter and should've known better than to insinuate, even jokingly, that his coverage could be bought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Daniel stressed the fact that he never actually received the MacBook Air and he seems to be under the impression that opinions will sway in his favor once people realize this. I don't think he realizes that just because he never received the payout doesn't excuse him from asking for it in the first place (whether he was joking or not). Despite all of that, I don't think this kid is going to be too impacted by all of this in the long run. Life goes on. Someone will accuse Mahalo of more SEO trickery and all of this will be a thing of the past.

I think the bigger story here is that he gets to have late night IM sessions with Woz. I'm jealous!

<comment><USER7> To be fair though..

 _in June 2009 I was brought in as the Events and Business Development Intern. So I wasn't hired as a writing intern. I started writing for TechCrunch by accident, actually. And it's an interesting story. I was up at 2 AM and none of the other writers were up and a story broke about the iPhone 3GS Jailbreak and no one else was up and it was a breaking story, so I took a huge risk and I hit the publish button._

This guy is a risk taker. That includes good risks like the above, but also stupid risks like trying to roll some payola. Most risk takers who go on to become big successes make some stupid and unethical ones..

If Daniel can learn from this and restrict his "stupid"/reputation-breaking risks to his youth, he could go far with his can-do, proactive attitude. Even with this little payola scheme, he's still contributing a lot more to the world than the average 17 year old kid eating junk food and playing Xbox all weekend.

<comment><USER8> He was eating junk food and poring over the MacBook Air tech specs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find this refreshing about Andrew:

"I didn't want to do a confrontational interview where I'd either come down hard on him or slam TechCrunch. That's not me. I want to help build people up, not tear them down."

<comment><USER10> I think it's the reason why he has built such a following. He's a truth- seeker. He seems to be 100% focussed on finding what can be learned from an interviewee. In the media environment that he is surrounded by, it's a rare thing for someone to be indifferent to hype and scandal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Am i the only one who found this whole thing kind of depressing? this kid is 17, right? he's very impressive, but talking already about how he lives a 24/7 lifestyle and brings a laptop with him on vacation? he sounds like he's about 35. i hope one day he gets in touch a little more with himself or he's just going to come across like an ass, not a wunderkind.

</comment><comment><USER12> Ethics and compliance is a huge topic in bigger companies for a good reason. Cool hip web start-ups shouldn't forget that it applies to them as well and giving a 17yr old some ethics training before letting him write on a blog that makes and breaks businesses seems logical.

<comment><USER13> Under no circumstances does a post on TechCrunch 'make or break' a business.

<comment><USER14> I don't know about breaking. But it can definitely _make_ a business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> LOL. At about 37 minutes in Daniel answers a phone call from his Mom. Pretty rude to the interviewer but hilarious as well.

<comment><USER16> True. Though as it turns out she was actually helping him organize the conference which was due to be on the next day. (The Interview must be from Friday)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Daniel is such a good kid, and I've been waiting for a few days to hear his side of the story. I can't imagine him extorting a fruit fly.

What I can't imagine is why he doesn't just publish the damn chat logs already - or at least excerpts. He's someone I would have loved to work with, and I very much want to trust him.

<comment><USER18> What would it take for you guys at RWW to give him that second chance? Sounds like chat logs (as long as you believe they're not fake).

<comment><USER17> I don't know - that would be up to Richard.

Personally, if I were starting my own tech blog, I think he'd be a fine person to have on the team because he's so multitalented. He'd make a great business partnerships coordinator and events coordinator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The transcript is now about 95% so I posted it.

<comment><USER19> Andrew I was really glad to read even a transcript that remains in the objective realm. Looking on twitter there are folks ready with flaming torches and pitchforks. I'm not getting into the issue of what was done or not done rather how experienced adults are so fast to judge someone young and clearly in need of guidance and mentoring.

Arrington's apology on techcrunch itself was obviously heartfelt and sincere (if not shocked) still well done for staying amongst the cool headed on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> this made me laugh when I saw the headline. Very shrewd move by Andrew Warner, well done.</comment>


Texas Movie Theatre 'Kicks Out' Texting Audience Member - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110607/us_yblog_thelookout/texas-movie-theater-makes-an-example-and-a-psa-of-a-texting-audience-member

<comment><AUTHOR> After she was kicked out, she left an angry voicemail that the theatre turned into an in-house preview.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L3eeC2lJZs></comment>


Tesla Energy's goal? Changing the "energy infrastructure of the world" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2015/05/tesla-energys-goal-changing-the-energy-infrastructure-of-the-world/

<comment><USER2> there are some powerful interests that oppose this.

Not long ago I read quite a disturbing article in the wall street journal, that went on at length about the threat that wind and solar power presented to traditional electrical generation.

The article concluded with the statement that we could not let a trillion dollar investment go to waste.

So let's suppose we preserve that trillion dollar investment: mercury in our fish from burning coal, burning innocent people when oil trains derail, up to our eyeballs in nuclear waste for the next half million years.

That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but the kind of people who read WSJ, that are concerned about their trillion dollar investment, are the same kind of folks with the spare cash required to attend $35,000.00 per plate dinners, as was held by President Obama here in Portland a few days ago.</comment>


Researchers Track Online Sales of Invasive Plants - <AUTHOR> https://www.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2015/10/trade-in-invasive-plants-is-blossoming.html <comment><USER2> This ecosystem worldwide is already being mixed up through different channels. I would think the US regulations not to bring foreign living systems, fruits or seeds applies also to eBay. It seems eBay or the users are breaking the law.

</comment><comment><USER3> Url changed from [http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/ebay- inva...](http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/ebay-invasive- plants/408892/?single_page=true), which points to [http://phys.org/news/2015-10-invasive- blossoming.html](http://phys.org/news/2015-10-invasive-blossoming.html) which points to this.</comment>


Ask HN: Top universities in the world? - <AUTHOR>

I remember seeing a post here before that had a ranking of the worlds universities but I can't find the right one. Or maybe it wasn't here but somewhere else.
Anyway: here are some links if anyone is interested. I'm mainly interested in finding out the quality of universities in Australia and New Zealand.
Top european unis:
  * http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/results/2008/regional_rankings/top_european_universities/
Top in the world ranked by peer reviews
  * http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/results/2008/indicators/academic_peer_review/
Top tech:
  * http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/results/2008/subject_rankings/technology/ <comment><USER2> I didn't expect Canada to have 3 universities in the top 13 in the peer review category. Good for us;)</comment>


Cone Programming Langauge - <AUTHOR> http://cone.jondgoodwin.com <comment><USER2> While I like a lot of the ideas described on the website, I don't like how they're written in the present tense and like Cone can currently do all these things when in fact they're just aspirations and aren't even designed in detail. I had to go to a file in the Github to figure out what actually exists.

I support your quest but actually implementing the language is the hard part. Languages like Rust don't even mention features on their websites even when they have working implementations that just aren't stable yet, it would be nice if Cone's gave a clear picture of what exists and what's an aspiration.

<comment><USER3> That's a fair critique, and I will edit the website to make that disconnect between current reality and aspiration clearer (more than the disclaimer I have on the home page). Because there is so much left to do, I have made no effort to market the language for any sort of use. So, I got caught flat- footed that a website I am still building up piece by piece, primarily for personal clarity and private communications, has gotten premature publicity. I will adjust accordingly.

<comment><USER4> >I have made no effort to market the language for any sort of use.

Didn't you say it was mainly for the 3d web or something?

<comment><USER3> Yes, but that's not what I meant in that quote. Cone is not ready for any use _right now_. So, I am making no effort to market it right now. When it is at least MVP (at least a year or more away), I will get more serious about marketing, including especially for 3D web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The language description declares it is safe, but since you can dereference raw pointers, the language is not memory safe. Maybe it should be made clear that you are not claiming memory safety.

<comment><USER3> It is memory safe in the same way as Rust is. Rust allows you to de-reference a raw pointer, but only within an explicitly de-marked `unsafe` block. Cone will require a similar explicit mechanism. If you want the compiler to check your code for memory safety, don't use this mechanism. If you do use it, the responsibility for safety within rests on you, the programmer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interestingly, the logo is a direct copy of UCF's academic logo: [https://www.ucf.edu/brand/brand-assets/logo-identity- system/](https://www.ucf.edu/brand/brand-assets/logo-identity-system/). I wonder if there is a connection.

<comment><USER3> There is no connection. I was unaware of the similarity to UCF's logo until recently. It is something I will need to replace, as much as I like how it looks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> No matter how enthusiastic the creator is about a "3D web" I doubt putting it as a top design goal does the language any good (I nearly stopped reading right there).

Perhaps as the language seems to be influenced by Rust it would be good to outline what specific differences it has to Rust in terms of goals.

<comment><USER3> A summary of key differences from Rust: A richer collection of build-in memory management strategies (e.g., tracing GC), Pony-inspired permissions (esp. safe shared, mutable), structural subtyping (as well as nominal), and a bunch of features intended to improve ease-of-use and productivity. At some point, I will write up a page on my web site to explain Cone better for someone coming from Rust (or C++ or ..).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool language. It is good to see people still trying to innovate! However, the marketing seems like a contradiction - concise and readable are antithetical as well as "flexible typing" and type safe. I am left confused.. what paradigms does it employ? Imperative?

<comment><USER9> > _concise and readable are antithetical_

Not really. If anything concise core can be much easier to read. The key is to discard BS boilerplate and ceremonial code, and have the intention of the code clearer in less lines.

Python is far more readable than Java, for example, and far more concise.

> _as well as "flexible typing" and type safe_

Not if you support variant types and the like.

<comment><USER8> Hmmm, you assume everyone understands that fn means function and that a void function is the same as a procedure. Everybody and their grandma can read Pascal and Ada, but abbreviated keywords and magical symbol require foreknowledge. And the more abbreviated, the more you will have to continuously look up things in the reference manual until they get cemented.

> Not if you support variant types and the like.

Not sure what you mean here - discriminant unions? classes?

<comment><USER9> > _Hmmm, you assume everyone understands that fn means function and that a > void function is the same as a procedure._

No, I don't assume that. But I think that that's irrelevant. People didn't know "def" means function in Python or Scala either, but they learn it on the first day and don't have a readability problem with it.

Very basic keywords like "fn" are not the things that make a language unreadable, nor is calling the keyword "fn" instead of "function". Those are memorized in a day or so and you're done with it.

It's other things that make languages unreadable (too many sigils, overloaded operators or keywords in different contexts (C++, Perl), single letter operators (e.g. APL), too low level, too much verbosity, etc.

In any case, whether a person that first encounter a language immediately recognizes what a keyword means is not what makes the language readable. It's how readable it is to its programmers, after they know the language and have written code in it that matters. Familiar != readable.

> _Everybody and their grandma can read Pascal and Ada, but abbreviated > keywords and magical symbol require foreknowledge._

And almost everybody and their grandma dislike their syntax (especially Ada's), and would prefer something less verbose.

> _And the more abbreviated, the more you will have to continuously look up > things in the reference manual until they get cemented._

It's after such basics "get cemented" that readability comes into play, not before. If someone has to look after 2-3 days with the language what "fn" means or how to declare a function (and similarly, "def" in Python/Scala, etc), they have some serious memory issues.

(Btw, Rust, Clojure, and others also use "fn").

> _Not sure what you mean here - discriminant unions? classes?_

Yes, aka variant, aka tagged union, aka sum type...

<comment><USER8> > overloaded operators or keywords in different contexts (C++, Perl)

Woa there, ever look at vector math libraries in C - horribly unreadable and ugly.

> too much verbosity

Verbosity describes a programs behavior without implied knowledge thus a reader of some code will understand exactly what is meant. I disagree that the definition of readability is all about how quickly you can skim source code - and ew too many words.

> And almost everybody and their grandma dislike their syntax (especially > Ada's), and would prefer something less verbose.

Well, they were objectively designed to readability based on studies of other languages (at least Ada). And hey, I like it but I guess I am biased : P

<comment><USER9> > _Verbosity describes a programs behavior without implied knowledge thus a > reader of some code will understand exactly what is meant._

Readability is not just about "understanding what is meant if you take the time". It's also about each piece of code being easy to scan and understand to find what you need. Devs have to scan whole projects to find what happens where, and there's a balance between cryptic very succinct statements and getting lost in expanded verbosity.

Verbosity hurts that by making less code fit on your screen, the code having more stuff that's needed to convey the meaning, etc. You get lost in the extra details, and have more baggage to keep in mind.

It's the difference between saying, e.g.: "Yeah", and "I am indeed craving something savory with lots of melted curdled milk and processed pork cuts, and I believe that we can immediately proceed with the thing that we were just now discussing to do".

Which is one is the more "readable" answer to "Wanna go for a pizza?".

<comment><USER3> Very well said. This is very much what I am after. Some _common_ idioms in Rust or C++ just feel unnecessarily verbose to me (e.g., `<exp>.unwrap().borrow_mut()`), and I am looking for straightforward ways, often borrowed from other languages, to express the same intent more succinctly and clearly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can designers make a political difference? They're going to try - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/figma-design/can-designers-make-a-political-difference-theyre-going-to-try-978ae212d48e#.uq12sdx4d <comment><USER2> Can bot writers make a difference? Well they did.</comment>


Ask HN: Does the No-Humor Policy Have Unintended Consequences? - <AUTHOR> I had a friend send me a link to some jokes yesterday. I laughed for about an hour.
Then I realized that I hadn't laughed or smiled at web content in quite some time.
So today's topic: humorous nerdy phrases on T-shirts -- of interest to hackers or not?
I think humor and light-heartedness is very interesting and also good for you. I just posted "Nerdy Cute Girls. In T-Shirts" and it was deleted within minutes. There was no nudity, no profanity. It was just funny nerd jokes on shirts with cute girls under them.
Now I could give a shit whether HN wants to delete this post or not, and I really don't want to promote myself in those keyword areas, but the post wasn't controversial or off-topic. Lame and trivial, perhaps. But fuck dudes, there are a zillion lame and trivial posts every day. Just don't upvote them. Instead I got the immediate "what is this? Reddit?" (Which I thought was hilarious in itself actually. I could just picture some overly-serious internet curmudgeon banging away the required response)
So what do you guys say? Can we share jokes and light-heartedness every now and then as long as we identify in the title what it is? Or would the presence of jokes derail the community forever and lead us down a path of wanton banality?
I know the standard response. I'm just thinking that I've become much less happy over the last two years, and hanging out in a joke-free zone with a bunch of Mr. Spock wannabes might be part of that.
So while I understand the theory in "no jokes" I wonder what the long-timers think of the effect on them after a while. For those of you wanting to psychoanalyze me, probably a more useful response would be to post some links for receiving tech humor on a daily basis. This not only makes you look like less of a jerk, it helps other people with similar questions.
What do you guys think? <comment><USER3> "I just posted "Nerdy Cute Girls. In T-Shirts" and it was deleted within minutes."

This is as it should be imo. (No I didn't flag that post - didn't see it even but if I _had_ seen I _would_ have flagged it. )

"the post wasn't controversial or off-topic"

Of course it is offtopic. Read the guidelines. Why would anyone come to _HackerNews_ to see "cute girls" in T shirts with "funny" jokes on them?

"Can we share jokes and light-heartedness every now and then as long as we identify in the title what it is?"

Please, please, please don't. Plenty of options out there for people who want these things. If there aren't and you think there is a need, create one. (Hey startup idea?)

The answer to

"I'm just thinking that I've become much less happy over the last two years, and hanging out in a joke-free zone with a bunch of Mr. Spock wannabes might be part of that."

might be to hang out in other forums dedicated to posting jokes with no "Spock like" [1] people, or even better, meet non "Spock like"people who make you laugh in the real world. I have plenty of idiots sending me lame jokes and they _don't_ make me laugh. Laughter in my life comes from interacting with funny/humorous people in the real world.

The last thing _this_ HN user wants to see is to see "[Joke] blah" posts here. I for one will mercilessly flag any of these.

I have filters for idiots who send me jokes by email. If I can get filters for HN, i.e, if I can make specific posts/users/topics "dispappear" in my view I wouldn't mind so much.

Just my personal opinion but you did ask "What do you guys think?"

[1] I don't think of HN users as "Spock like" at all fwiw.

<comment><AUTHOR> _I have filters for idiots who send me jokes by email_

* I don't think of HN users as "Spock like" at all fwiw*

Ah, the irony.

<comment><USER3> "I have filters for idiots who send me jokes by email

Ah, the irony."

Not really. Let me try again emphasizing some words. I don't like ---> _idiots_ <\---- mailing me lame jokes . Your "nerd girls in funny t-shirts" is ultra lame, for e.g. but there are some people who email such things to me without me ever asking for them, and in spite of requests not to send them to me. "Oh but this is so _funny_ you have to read it .."

I do have filters for such people and posts. They get to send cheesy stuff , I get to ignore cheesy stuff, everyone is happy.

I know and interact with a lot of humorous _people_ in real life and face to face. Being (genuinely) funny in real life (vs sending of something scraped off the Internet to a few dozen email addresses) takes some doing, or at least genuine insight.

Is "avoiding cheesy jokes in email and HackerNews" such a strange concept? I think you interpret "Spock like" to mean "people not like Daniel Markham", the lone human in a world of Vulcans ;-).

 _You_ might like getting lame jokes (sometimes with pretty girls wearing TShirts) in your email. Nothing wrong with that. Other people don't. Nothing wrong with that either.

But if that makes them "Spock like" in your world view, then so be it. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not feeling the love here, Plink.

There is a principal-agent problem that I just described with Ed. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1367176>

I am sure you are a very funny person and have lots of interesting friends that send you good jokes. Hopefully I'm not on your idiot list.

There was no commentary intended towards HN'ers except we have a tendency sometimes to be overly-analytical when lightening up a bit might be better. That's not "you guys" that's "us guys" The question was a variation on "to what degree is that useful on HN?"

So apologies if I offended anybody. I interpret Spock-like as the well-meaning and useful application of the maximum amount of brainpower and logical thinking possible to solve problems. Which is the amazing part of this community. All good things, however, have not-so-good aspects about them.

<comment><USER3> Your "principal-agent problem" seems to reduce to (emphasis mine)

"But once it became a place to hang out, _my_ goals and the site's goals diverged."

The P_A problem is a little different.

[wikipedia] "In political science and economics, the principal–agent problem or agency dilemma treats the difficulties that arise under conditions of incomplete and asymmetric information when a principal hires an agent, such as the problem that the two may not have the same interests, while the principal is, presumably, hiring the agent to pursue the interests of the former."

The key word is "hire" or "employ".

If you enjoy a site (or a book or a movie) at certain age say, and your outlook changes for whatever reason, that isn't really a "Principal Agent problem". Your tastes changed. That's all. Happens to all of us.

So anyway, after your post got deleted, you asked HN if it was ok to post "cute nerds girls with T shirts with jokes printed thereon" and you specifically asked "what do you guys think?". Now you are getting an answer from various people including me.

I (and I don't speak for anyone else) don't expect HN to change continuously to meet _my_ changing expectations. If my tastes change so I value a life full of mystery and danger should HN follow suit and become more mysterious and dangerous? What about the _other_ HN user whose tastes changed to valuing a life of extreme clarity and certainty?

HN has a focus which is of value to me today. If it changes to some kind of lame humour, look-at-pretty-women site _I_ will leave (and others will no doubt continue or join). If I suffer some brain damage/undergo a radical personality change etc and decide to give up on hacking startups and focus on butterfly collecting, say, I would not spend time on HN. Sure I can _ask_ it to change I guess.

Fwiw, I am not insulted by "Spock like". I was just amused with your interpolating it with someone setting a filter for lame jokes and calling it "irony".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the answer. We have no disagreement. You are not sharing me with anything that I do not already know. I do not expect HN to change to meet my expectations, I understand the value of focus, and I appreciate the feedback. It's all good.

As far as the Spock thing, happy to amuse you, if you are truly amused. For some reason, your comments sounded angry. It sounded like you were more interested in talking about what my goals or reasons were than in the question about humor, technology, and social sites in general. I don't mind explaining -- in fact I'm happy to especially if you thought I was slamming the readers here, which I most definitely wasn't doing. But I didn't get a counter-thesis, suggestions, or much of anything useful in our chat. Perhaps I missed something. I'm glad HN is topical and self-policing. I hope it stays that way. Long-term use may have unintentional side-effects. What's your opinion on that and suggestions for other readers? (repeating the topic)

<comment><USER3> Let me assure you, I bear you _no_ ill will, I wish you well, I could care less about analyzing your intentions/goal/reasons etc are :-).

I am _not_ angry and I don't see where I "sound" that way. I do think your submission was a cheesy one, violating HN guidelines, and more importantly, hardly insightful. It _is_ true that I don't think you have much of a "thesis" (beyond the inapplicable Principal Agent concept) to counter.

"Long-term use may have unintentional side-effects. What's your opinion on that and suggestions for other readers? (repeating the topic)"

I am happy with HN's focus on startups, tech and stuff of interest to hackers/of intellectual interest to them. Any unhappiness I have with HN is due to (perceived) _deviations_ from that focus and I don't want HN to include "pictures of pretty girls in TShirts with lame jokes" or otherwise focus explicitly on "humour".

I don't have any suggestions for "other readers" beyond "Stick with the HN guidelines. Please don't post such "humour" here. Please go elsewhere for such things. The Internet is a big place and there is a site for everyone" (repeating the answer)

You asked a question and got an answer. Do with it what you will. Continuing this thread (it just triggered my thread depth tripwire) would be a disservice to other readers and so I am done with this thread.

Thanks for reading and Have a great day!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The hacker news unwritten rule for humor seems to be:

      Laugh at something you can find anywhere else ---> flag
      Laugh at something that makes you think, too  ---> upvote

I love a good joke as much as the next guy, but I really love "hacker humor", something that makes you think, too. Something that non-hackers may not even understand, not because it's an inside joke, but because they haven't bothered to raise their level of thinking to "get it".

About once a day, I read something here that really makes me laugh out loud. Usually something very clever coming in from left field. Something I would never find anywhere else.

I have often typed "humorous" responses myself, but I usually think better and just close my browser before submitting. Then again, I often just let 'er rip.

You got me to thinking so I went to searchyc.com and listed my comments sorted by descending points, looking for "humorous" responses that did get upvoted. Here are a few examples of what others seem to have appreciated:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025798>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926644>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1086527>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=202154>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=829338>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Ed. This is great feedback. On topic, with practical advice that can be followed.

I find that I edit myself with humor much more than other things, especially on HN. Interestingly enough, this seems to have carried over to real life, with not such good results. Sometimes you just need to be yourself.

There is a principal-agent problem here as well. HN (or any other site) exists for some sort of narrow market segment. I know I came here because I wanted to go to one place to search and discuss items of interest to startups. From that idea the site has evolved into "stuff that interests hackers", mainly because there is only so much material you can mine using the narrower niche.

However, and this is interesting in terms of growth-for-content-sites, the reason I stayed wasn't because the topic area widened up, it was because _then it became a place to hang out with other hackers in the startup community_ , which I _also_ found useful.

But once it became a place to hang out, my goals and the site's goals diverged. The site's goals is still to provide some kind of content niche that it does well. That, after all, is what makes it useful. My goals, however, are more like the goals anyone would have in a community: camaraderie, humor, exploration of common ideas and problems, understanding of motivations, discussion of mores.

There's not a lot of room between those two goals, but there is some, and I wonder if over time the effects add up.

(I don't know the answer. I was just wondering)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is (so far as I know) no no-humour policy. There is a _humour- isn't-enough_ policy.

Example: That paper on the dynamics of cows. 32 points, a reasonable amount of discussion. HN-worthy because as well as being funny, it had some actual _interest_ for, at least, a subset of HN readers.

And yes, there is a not-lame-and-trivial* policy. If some lame and trivial things make it to the front page anyway, that's a bug not a feature, and it isn't a reason to abandon attempts to keep lame and trivial stuff away.

No, HN is mostly not a source of things that will make you laugh for an hour. It's also mostly not a place to get laid, or a good place to vent about an annoying co-worker, or a good place to get constructive advice on a SF book you're writing. Not because there is anything wrong with laughing, sex, being annoyed, or writing SF, but because a community that tries to do too many divergent things at once is likely to end up doing none of them very well.

And (do I repeat myself? very well, I repeat myself) that doesn't mean that HN has a no-sex or no-annoyance or no-SF policy. If you find or create something that's genuinely interesting to hackers and posting it happens to get you laid, express exactly what's wrong with one of your colleagues, or help polish your writing, no one is likely to mind at all. But it needs some HN-relevance to belong here, and those things don't give it that.

</comment><comment><USER6> 1\. It really doesn't help to have HN overlap other internet communities. Adding stuff "of interest to hackers" that isn't really about startups or hacking is a little like creating bloatware (Studies show that the people who buy our code editor use Twitter to share photos. Let's add Flickr integration! And an instant tweet hotkey!)

2\. That being said, there's absolutely no rule that says that something can't be funny just because it "Gratifies my intellectual curiosity."

      There was a young fencer named Fitz,
      Whose blade was exceedingly brisk.
      So fast was his action,
      The Lorentz contraction,
      Reduced his rapier to a disc.

Question: Does Fitz's speed also reduce his _opponent's_ rapier to a disc?

<comment><USER7> Jeez, I was waiting for the right moment to unload _this_ limerick, this post seems ideal

There once was a lawyer named Rex With a diminutive organ of sex When charged with exposure He replied with composure De minimis non curat lex

This is a great way to remember this Latin phrase (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis>), which by the way is of interest to HNers, e.g. you don't report small items in your IRS return.

<comment><AUTHOR> Every day we could have one post on HN that is something like "Say something funny"

And keep the humor to just that.

It would add some balance, give us a place to vent/joke/whatever, and also give the community a place to point to if commenters got out of control on other threads

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think Hacker News should do one thing and do it well.

If you really want to laugh then there are a million and one sites to do that. We all read other sites, it's ok for you to do that too. Hacker News shouldn't be the one-stop-shop for all things interesting to DanielBMarkham. I'm not sure I would want to spend as much time there (no offense).

There's a "delay" setting in the user profile if you're spending too much time here getting all depressed. ;-)

Or maybe this… start a thread called "Ask HN: What website made you laugh today?" and get it all out in one shot.

<comment><USER9> Its hard to say it better. I have a penchant for lolcats and I go to a couple of sites with lolcats most mornings. But that is in addition to hacker news.

Definitely enjoy your humor it makes life more pleasant, but find it in appropriate places and this not one of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just don't see how what you posted[1] is all that funny. I do think that some people here on HN are quite humorless, but there are more than enough people here who will appreciate a joke if it's a good one. If, however, you want to see more of the kind of humor you linked to I recommend surfing Encyclopedia Dramatica (NAASFW).

[1] [http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/05/nerdy-cute- gi...](http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/05/nerdy-cute-girl.php)

<comment><USER11> Now that I've seen the post in question, the easiest answer is that the submission just isn't funny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> pretty much every internet community has devolved into primarily sharing funny pictures, there arent just plenty of other places to go to find funny stuff, it is the rest of the internet.

I dont think many people think of new.yc as a humour free zone, its just the humour has to be on the side of the content, not the content itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sigh. This sounds more like an argument starting.

But here goes: XKCD. Dilbert. Cute girls with funny technology T-shirts.

Explain the difference.

I am assuming that the cute girl does not somehow render technology jokes and drawings ineffective. You put an XKCD comic on a bosom, it's still an XKCD comic.

EDIT: And if you say something like "but the fact it was a girl was part of the content and not just the tech" then the point is that it's an integrated art form. The pieces have to work together. It is still tech related.

EDIT 2 (an hour later): I made the mistake here of starting to defend my actual article. This was off-topic from the question posed. I took the bait, and I should have known better.

<comment><USER13> I don't think people would be big fans of XKCD or Dilbert posts here either.

<comment><USER14> They have been upvoted in the past (I'm not certain but I think xkcd.com might be a banned URL now though) and hit the front page.

I think there is a distinct difference between them and "hot girls in geeky tshirts" or whatever. Usually they were "on topic" or actually amusing!

<comment><USER15> The Dilbert submissions that make it to the front page are not the comic strip. They are posts from the author's blog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Most stuff that people think is funny isn't that funny for most other people. So a humor-tolerating, polite community will most likely end up with lots of trying-to-be-funny stuff that's just tired, and signal-to-noise goes down. An option is to drop the politeness and harbor a culture where people vocally heckle things they find unfunny. Third solution is to discourage humor.

I like low humor tolerance more than having a low signal-to-noise ratio or low community politeness.

</comment><comment><USER17> As others have said, humor can be found virtually anywhere on the internet. Hacker News is one of the few places where I know that if I see a few comments on an article, there will be actual meaningful discussion of the content rather than easy joke sniping. One reason why I've grown to like HN better than reddit is that I never know what the top comment will be, except that it will usually be a decent and generally well thought out opinion on the topic. On reddit (and other sites, I'm using reddit as an example since I'm familiar with it), the top comment is almost always an mildly amusing joke that I can predict the subject of, if not get it word for word. Anywhere on the internet, I can find laughs, but I come to Hacker News to think.

</comment><comment><USER18> You do realize you're allowed to frequent more than one community website right? IMHO, I like that HN is kind of specialized on specific types of content. When I want more general stuff, I'll hop over to Reddit, Digg, MetaFilter, etc.

The nice thing about HN though is that we have great discussions around topics that are specialized enough they'd never get "upvoted" enough to be visible on "those other" sites.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't know whether this consequence is intended or not, but at times HN feels unbearably stuffy, self-important and, well, humourless.

I've always thought of hacking above all as a _fun_ activity - in the way that posing and solving puzzles is fun ... or in the way that posing and solving jokes is fun.

Humour is all about thinking around corners, framing and reframing a set of premises, melding logic and creativity to produce surprising[1] results.

Killing humour to keep a hackers' discussion on-topic is like killing inductive reasoning to keep scientists focused on the big picture.

[1] <http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> _but at times HN feels unbearably stuffy, self-important and, well, humourless._

Thank you

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is plenty of room for humor here without having to resort to pics of girls in T-Shirts.

Go find the next Steve Yegge or something.

</comment><comment><USER21> You could always register an icanhascheeseburger account.

You _will_ get a torrent of funny pictures and the comments are about as far from Spock-like as can be found. Once you've gorged yourself and start feeling your grip on reality grow wobbly, then come back here and spend time here in the "joke-free-zone", as you put it.

</comment><comment><USER22> I agree with your sentiment but this is because of a more general conflict between those who see Hacker News as a place about Hacker stuff and those who see Hacker News as a place for Hackers. It's an important distinction - <USER2> would allow "light-hearted" hacker stuff (like dailyWTF) and the other allows "light-hearted" general stuff (like your T-Shirts, although they are kinda borderline because they're geeky jokes but you get the point).

<comment><USER23> I think the relationship between the content of hacker news and the userbase is like an ecosystem and maintaining the fidelity of this system is necessary to preserve the mission of the community. People are attracted to hacker news because of the content and they in turn become a new source of similar content. If hacker news were to allow more lightweight material to the site then we may see users joining for that type of content and the repercussions of this I would would be undesirable. So while the perceived authoritarian nature of HN may be a bother sometimes I think it's a small price to pay to keep it the way it is meant to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't think I'm humourless, but I value HN as one of the few places on the public internet where intelligent discussion is still possible without being drowned out by regurgitated memes and fart jokes. While in theory it's possible to have both, I haven't seen it happen elsewhere.

The comparisons to Reddit are discouraged not because they are baseless, rather for fear that they may be self-fulfilling. Reddit used to feel like a community as well, and I used to enjoy reading the comments there as well. It's worth asking 'What changed?' and 'What could have been done differently?'

I just looked at your link: [http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/05/nerdy-cute- gi...](http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/05/nerdy-cute-girl.php)

It struck me as a parody of the worst possible thing you could post here: non- funny, sexually stereotyped, ethnocentric, and devoid of insight; but with just enough of a hook to get a significant number of upvotes. It's soft porn with a plausible excuse. And once people saw that this was acceptable, I'm sure we'd see more of the same.

If I were the moderator, I'd have not only deleted it but emailed you to tell you that if you do it again your account will be banned. This isn't because I'm against humor, or against porn, but because I can't see the community I enjoy remaining intact while adding this sort of boorish fluff.

I don't want to pick on you too much, but did you picture the conservative religious users being amused by this, or did you set out to offend them? Did you consider how it might seem to a young female programmer to see your post on the front page? I'm very far from politically correct, but I can scarcely conceive of what you were thinking.

</comment><comment><USER25> Like others have said, I believe that having a focused remit is critical to maintaining a community. I don't want to see jokes here just because they are funny, and possibly a little geeky. And I say this as someone who loves to tell jokes. (See <http://www.google.com/profiles/btilly> for proof that I tell lots of jokes. Just not here.)

</comment><comment><USER26> Why weren't there any cute boys?

Also, is HN really the only place you hang out? You might want to try hanging out in some other places as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Post one and I'll upvote it.

I started googling "funny t-shirts" just on a lark last night. After getting a zillion, I narrowed it down to "funny girl t-shirts" because I liked that better. I like girls and looking at them made the shirts more entertaining to me (This also had the benefit of going from hundreds of thousands of printed jokes on jokes to a much smaller number of actual modeled shirts). That took me to about 200 shirts. I had no idea what to do with THAT data, so I further narrowed it to nerd jokes. Which took me to about 17.

Different paths give you different results. But really the only discriminator was that they made me smile, and the topic was nerd stuff (which is why I shared here)

Hacker News. Where even the jokes have algorithms

Okay. $20 bucks says if I had posted an article on "Erlang for humorous T-shirt picture selection" I could have ran the same article with 10 lines of code at the top and it would have been a hit.

<comment><USER27> On a whim last year I searched for "atheist t-shirts" and to my delight found that there are actually quite a few available and that most of appeal to my sense of humor (mostly things along the lines of "my imaginary friend is better than your imaginary friend" etc.).

Then I remembered we were going to Egypt on holiday and suddenly this didn't seem like such a good idea.

(To be fair, Egypt is a lovely place).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Intelligent humour has always done well here (mostly in comments). Banality less so. _shrug_ I quite like that.

Also: OMG geek girls is such an old and tired "joke" I'm not surprised it was killed.

 _and hanging out in a joke-free zone with a bunch of Mr. Spock wannabes might be part of that._

HN makes me laugh or smile daily, perhaps you are looking in the wrong places.

</comment><comment><USER28> There's only one thing worse than silly "FUNNY PICTURES!!! LOL!" posts and that's posts complaining about submissions of said fluff being deaded.

We all know how to use the Internet here, so we can go to any of the millions of places where that would be considered a top contribution any time we want.

</comment><comment><USER29> How would HN women feel about 'nerd jokes on cute girls'?

</comment><comment><USER30> The other day there was a post here on a DAAS startup that offered 'write once' memory in the vein of Amazon's S3, called 'S4'. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1360436>

It was very humorous, even if it was a variation on a very old theme, and I think it made the top spot on the homepage.

This one is _also_ humorous, but not as much.

I woulnd't have flagged it, I would have just ignored it. Flags are for spam, this was clearly some work to put together, there was no offense given as far as I could see.

The cost of ignoring it if you're not interested is near zero, the cost of depriving someone else of what they might like is non-zero, and unless someone posts a page like that everyday there really is no problem.

On another note, I've seen enough DanielBMarkham posts by now to know that he was up to something, my guess is that he was planning to have this discussion and I thought this discussion and some of the responses in it was a nice insight in to what motivates people to visit a certain site.

If it is OK to put a message here that the water mains in Boston has broken (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311198>) then you have to realize I'm in the Netherlands and that it is not of interest to 'the hacker community' even if you're in Boston _and_ a hacker. The majority of us are _not_ in Boston.

But that one sat on the front page for a long long time and nobody said a word. I didn't flag it because it did not concern me. but arguably it had a lot less to do with hacking than Daniels original post (I don't mean that in a literal sense but as a shortcut).

Lighten up.

If you are so serious about startups and making money then you shouldn't be on HN at all except for reading from Patio11 and grellas, between the two of them the rest of HN is light infotainment anyway. Have a critical look at the homepage right now and tell me why 'nerdy girls in t-shirts' is out of place there with a straight face.

</comment><comment><USER31> Hey! Get off my lawn!

The thing I like about HN is that humor is appreciated but you have to work much harder to make it original and topical.

Posting a link to someone elses humor doesn't fit the spirit of HN ( to me ). But humorous insights in comments can be golden when well executed. And executed if not golden. I personally enjoy the challenge and the differentiation from other sites.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if on Reddit there are guys going "Hey! What is this? HackerNews?"

<comment><USER32> Well I guess that it is ok to post humor on HN as long as it is intelligent humor or gives you some insight. It's banal humor which is not desired. I see some links to DailyWTF or XKCD from time to time and no one complains.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm not opposed to people posting whatever they like and having the community decide via upvotes if its worthwhile. Deleting posts outright seems too heavy- handed to me.

Personally, I look to Reddit and Fark for mindless frivolity and Hacker News for more thought-provoking articles. You don't have to _only_ hang out in the joke free zone. It's possible to participate in more than one community.

</comment><comment><USER15> There is no reason for every discussion site to become like reedit. I am sure they would appreciate your banal humor.

</comment><comment><USER34> I come to HN to get away from being spammed with picture posts I've seen a dozen times before.

</comment><comment><USER35> I go to HN to learn useful stuff for web startups. I go to Reddit for nerdy humor. When websites specialize I can get what I want, when I want it.

</comment><comment><USER36> You posted a pic spam link to your own blog.

I think the consequences were entirely intended.

</comment><comment><USER37> So a digger, a redditor and an HNer walk into a bar.

They get drunk and have a good time.

</comment><comment><USER38> Your assumption: HN readers only read HN.

</comment><comment><USER39> The day that Cute Girls N Nerdy Tshirts makes HN's front page is the day I'll know that it's not just suspending in the air over the shark, but actually over it.

Now, I get what you mean. HN seems largely humorless. Everybody's trying to out-intellectualize everybody else (with a greater or lesser degree of success).

For example: People stop using contractions, or wanna/gonna. "You are" "I am" "It is" -- even you were doing it in your replies to what I'll call the 'Spock subthread' here on this item.

Other signs include the (usually incorrect) applications of rhetorical/logical fallacies, and talking about 'the facts' as if any one blog post or video could possibly convey all 'the facts' about a situation, and that which 'facts' are chosen to be presented is not an entirely subjective thing.

When I write "gonna" etc. here and use smilies, I'm pretty sure people think less of me. That's fine, cuz I know I'm smarter than they are. ;) But when I write a really hilarious essay ripping something up, and that something is related to startups or programming, it typically ends up on here one way or the other. I'm not the only one.

Then the comments are all deadly serious. Such is the cycle of life, and HN's tone, for better or for worse.

But HN isn't actually humorless, it just likes to keep it hidden under its hat... you know, the one with the special proturbation up front for our unusually prodigious forebrains.

<comment><USER40> To allow a meter of incongruity with the current culture would result in a mile of abuse. I would prefer a humorless HN than a 4Chan style ego trough (for the lulz) to satisfy people that should not be here.

<comment><USER30> I think part of the problem is how serious people take themselves. HN is a reflection of all the personalities of all those that take part in it and it exhibits a tendency to pretend to be very busy making millions of dollars, whereas actually there seems to be more interest in which celebrity is using what gadget.

If that's the choice, then I'll take the humorous post of Daniel any time over the Fake Steve jobs item currently on the homepage, at 131 points and 124 comments it must be really important, or the latest joelonsoftware or sethgoldin post that is going to make us all millionaires.

<comment><USER39> _exhibits a tendency to pretend to be very busy making millions of dollars_

Haha, yeah.

But, regarding Daniel's humorous post, a combination of cute girls in geeky shirts is more sad than funny, don't you think? In a meta sense:

"Why is this remarkable?"

It's like posing sleeping kittens and babies with 40s of Mad Dog. The humor is in the incongruity. Meaning...

1\. We don't talk to cute girls

2\. We wish cute girls wore these nerdy shirts so we'd feel validated

3\. The girls who actually do wear these shirts, we don't like

4\. Boooo.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: OWC DIC – An easy to configure IoC dependency injector for Java - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/opsbears/owc-dic <comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks, I'd really like some feedback on this before I push the final version to Maven Central.</comment>


Inferring Algorithmic Patterns with Stack - <AUTHOR> https://research.facebook.com/blog/1642778845966521/inferring-algorithmic-patterns-with-stack/ <comment><USER2> Here is a recent Facebook research paper that addresses the problem I believe this paper is intended to solve.

Towards AI-Complete Question Answering: A Set of Prerequisite Toy Tasks [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.05698v6.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.05698v6.pdf)

This recent paper is an algorithm to solve simple question answering from the context of a conversation... like the ones in the older paper... for instance.

John is in the playground.

Bob is in the office.

Where is John? A:playground

I believe a traditional LSTM RNN would have likely cleared the information about John from from it's long short term memory vector. Whereas you would still have access to the information about John in a stack.

fta: "Since the machine can essentially learn how to operate its memory, it can learn how to program itself by producing sequences of instructions."

<comment><USER3> If people are interested in playing with the dataset from "Towards AI-Complete Question Answering: A Set of Prerequisite Toy Tasks", I added an example to Keras that uses recurrent neural networks[1]. It achieves similar accuracy to the baseline LSTM approach in the paper. I also did a write-up that explains the task and architecture[2].

The dataset (bAbi tasks[3]) released by Facebook is interesting but has a number of limitations. The code used to produce it is also not open source. If someone has the interest and/or past experience in MUD style environments, creating an open source dataset would be amazing!

[1]: [https://github.com/fchollet/keras/blob/master/examples/babi_...](https://github.com/fchollet/keras/blob/master/examples/babi_rnn.py)

[2]: [http://smerity.com/articles/2015/keras_qa.html](http://smerity.com/articles/2015/keras_qa.html)

[3]: [https://research.facebook.com/researchers/1543934539189348](https://research.facebook.com/researchers/1543934539189348)

<comment><USER4> Oh!! This is something I must try.

I remember you've mentioned issues with the bAbi question set previously. Have you (or anyone else) tried using the same approach on a non-artificial dataset?

I'm thinking something like blending this with the approach Richard Socher used on the Quizbowl code[1].

[1] [http://cs.umd.edu/~miyyer/qblearn/](http://cs.umd.edu/~miyyer/qblearn/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder why gradient descent (gating all compute/memory operations with parameters, gradient updates to parameter vectors along sample loss gradient) ended up dominant over genetic programming (algorithms as parse trees, mutate/recombine to minimize sample loss). Both seem equally theoretically unjustified, although I guess SGD is more friendly for gpus.

Also I wonder if all programming should just be done by showing a sgd-solver example i/o. Of course this notion has been around since the 80s with prolog but apparently representing "concepts" as 1000 dimension feature vectors is more robust than single boolean variables.

<comment><USER6> With SGD, you know how to take steps in the direction of a better solution. You don't have that with genetic programming, there you just know if a solution happened to be better.

<comment><USER7> There's a weight perturbation algorithm, which is somewhat similar to genetic programming. The reason it's not as popular as SGD/backprop is it's computationally intensive, and it's hard to parallelize.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can someone knowledgeable in the field elaborate on the differences between this and other NN approaches that also use additional memory structures (LSTM, etc)?

<comment><USER2> I will hazard a guess as to why this might be better than LSTM. LSTM maintains a vector that represents the long short term memory, but once information is cleared from the vector, there is no way to get it back... whereas a stack you can keep going further down the stack if needed.

[http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding- LSTMs/](http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding-LSTMs/)

<comment><USER9> One related work that came to mind was Neural Turing Machines, which augments the LSTM network with a (fixed size) memory [1]. I did see a brief reference to the Graves et al. paper in the paper linked to in the original post, but I'm also wondering if someone more knowledgeable could elaborate on the difference.

My own guess would be that the models are similar (both using NNs with external memory, trained through backprop), but this has a simpler memory structure and so could be trained more easily. It seems like the choice of regular RNNs vs. an LSTM network doesn't matter much since the Graves paper also compared LSTM vs. feedforward controllers and the results were about the same, with the feedforward controllers actually learning a bit faster. The key of both works seems to be in making a continuous system that can be trained to use external memory through backprop.

[1] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5401](http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5401)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "It should be noted that similar line of research has been pursued by several research groups already in the 90's"

I chuckled at that, because I bet it's a reference to Schmidhuber. :D

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if this sort of thing would be useful in american fuzzy lop? (It already uses genetic algorithms.)

</comment><comment><USER2> Reasons this high has probability of credibility: Research probably used on Facebook digital assistant M. Tomas Mikolov, the author of word2vec. Paper _with_ source code.

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.01007.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.01007.pdf)

[https://github.com/facebook/Stack-RNN](https://github.com/facebook/Stack-RNN)

<comment><USER12> I doubt that it's used in M.

"Why not just build M with neural nets from the beginning? Without the right data, neural nets couldn't provide a service much more powerful than, well, Siri, and Wit.ai's tech can get things started with relatively little data. "This is a good way to bootstrap. With a few thousand data-points, you can start to build a model," Lebrun says. "Then, using this model, you get more data, and once you have about a million data points, you go to Yann and get some deep learning."" [1]

[1] [http://www.wired.com/2015/08/how-facebook-m- works/](http://www.wired.com/2015/08/how-facebook-m-works/)

<comment><USER2> That was a month ago... I'm sure they have some data by now or at least a plan on what to do once they get more data.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Neapolitan Pizza Dough Hydration Calculator with Common Pitfalls - <AUTHOR> https://dough.pizza <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

I have been trying to figure out homemade Neapolitan pizza for quite sometime, early on I blamed my oven, then pizza stone, then loud motorcycle down the street. After watching numerous YouTube videos and reading blogs I've settled on this method, it works but requires precision - i.e. one has to use a weightscale and a thermometer, and a pizza steel - pizza stone just didn't work in a regular home oven. Cooking has been a relaxing escape during this pandemic, Neapolitan style pizza requires multiple days of prep and at the end results are delicious delicous pizzas that delivery just can't replicate.

Thank you!

(disclaimer: links to Amazon are affiliate links, I'll see if those can cover the cost of domain, if not I'll just use a generic github or netlify domain)

</comment><comment><USER2> Interesting! Never heard of pizza steel before. I've been using a pizza stone in a regular 230 °C oven for quite some time now. Do you think a pizza steel will make a difference at such a "low" temperature?

And one more question: why should I want to choose a higher/lower hydration of my pizza dough?</comment>


Fans of George Eliot are celebrating her bicentenary - <AUTHOR> https://standpointmag.co.uk/issues/february-2020/internal-adventures/ <comment><USER2> I had the pleasure of reading Middlemarch during my last semester at University. To paraphrase Rebecca Goldstein, reading her work is an enormous experience that can really enrich your inner and moral life.

Btw, George Eliot was not only an amazing writer, but a serious scholar; she translated Spinoza into English!

[https://fivebooks.com/best-books/philosophical-novels- rebecc...](https://fivebooks.com/best-books/philosophical-novels-rebecca- goldstein/)</comment>


India's transport minister vows to ban self-driving cars to save jobs - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/indias-transport-minister-vows-to-ban-self-driving-cars-to-save-jobs/ <comment><USER2> > "I am very clear on this. We won't allow any technology that takes away > jobs."

What a stupid thing to say.

So no ATMs then, get to the bank to withdraw money by a human ? Oh they already did that some months ago.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how well will self driving cars adapt to Indian roads and traffic conditions.

</comment><comment><USER4> Modern Luddites. That will only hurt your economy, silly.</comment>


The Joy of Stats  - <AUTHOR> http://www.gapminder.org/videos/the-joy-of-stats/#.TmJwpFOk3O0.hackernews <comment><USER2> Related to what Google is doing with their search statistics:

<http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/draw></comment>


Tactical Tips for Startup Marketing - <AUTHOR> http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/9008/Startup-Marketing-Tactical-Tips-From-The-Trenches.aspx

<comment><USER2> This is a really good checklist on how to market your product.

</comment><comment><USER3> tactical tip #1: Before you submit a link to your website on HN, do a little bit of capacity planning.</comment>


What is wrong with SV networks? YC demographics - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@JDcarlu/what-is-wrong-with-sv-networks-a2f203431ea6

<comment><USER2> The author is responding to a very short article, but I'm not certain that he/she carefully read it.

> Michael Seibel: 11.8% of the founders who applied were women and around 3% > percent of the founders were either Black or Hispanic. Of the founders we > funded in our most recent batch, 11.1% of the founders are women [...] 3.7% > of the founders are Hispanic, and 4% of the founders are Black.

> JDCarlu: Knowing that only 3% of YC batch is latino makes it feel like > something is wrong. The issue is to understand why is this happening? How > many latinos teams apply to YC? How many makes it through?

> Michael Seibel: The good news is that there is no disadvantage to applying > to YC as a female or minority founder. The bad news, of course, is that > applicant percentages are low relative to the entire population.

> JDCarlu: Is there a problem with YC filter or are latinos not interested in > tech?

So, the questions become: Why is the applicant percentage of latinos so low relative to the population? And then, if that is something you would like to see change, what is the most practical means to effectively change it?

<comment><USER3> The critic is not to YC (which are actually the only ones that recognize the problem) but on the system. We (include myself) have to play by this rules but we shouldn't have to. We could effectively try to incorporate more Latinos and blacks into the selection by encouraging or helping them to apply. If we keep going on the same path it will certainly not change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Even though I agree with the author in terms of moral hypocrisy, what is the better alternative for the existing system?

Of course, we can suggest many alternatives. But the implementation requires the buy in from the people who have loads of money. Then, this boils down to the personal preference of capitalist or the moneyed interests.

Isn't it (one's personal preference, that is) the same as people of the same kind club together. Like alumni clubs of elite schools; paypal alumni; friends of the big money and power. How can one destroy such networks? Even some hypothetical system destroys such networks, such a hypothetical system ends up setting up another network: think of the polit bureau of the Chinese community party. These politburo members own various industries in China.

<comment><USER3> I think the key is not to destroy but to open. I like what #500 (Dave McClure) is doing by investing all around the world bringing SV mentoring and investments to other cultures. The new startups once in #500 have 2000 founders they can network with (many, if not most of them, from Silicon Valley). This same solution can be applied on our own Bay Area by just taking the same approach but with Latinos and African Americans.</comment></comment>


US national parks cause public health concern as visitors flood in - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/17/national-parks-cause-public-health-concern-visitors-flood-in <comment><USER2> Most parks are just outdoor resources and people want to be outdoors.

I think it makes sense for the parks to stay open, but close the visitor centers and any other place people congregate.

</comment><comment><USER3> Many people just won't listen, attractions have to be closed if you don't want people to come.</comment>


Crypto CEO dies holding only passwords able to unlock millions in customer coins - <AUTHOR> https://www.seattletimes.com/business/crypto-ceo-dies-holding-only-passwords-that-can-unlock-millions-in-customer-coins/ <comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dies%20-explodes%20-Everest%20...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dies%20-explodes%20-Everest%20-Wright%20-Adams%20-Eating&sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=pastWeek&type=story)</comment>


Electronic education: Flipping the classroom - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/21529062 <comment><USER2> From the submitted article: "The NEA and its supporters will eventually lose this fight, says Kate Walsh, the president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a think-tank that unions love to hate. 'It will be considered fair game to collect the data' and to use them to get better teachers in America's classrooms, she says."

The National Council on Teacher Quality

<http://www.nctq.org/p/>

is an interesting organization, with helpful publications on how to help learners learn more by helping teachers teach better. I especially like the council's publications on mathematics teaching,

[http://www.nctq.org/p/edschools/standards/viewRationale.jsp?...](http://www.nctq.org/p/edschools/standards/viewRationale.jsp?id=18)

[http://www.nctq.org/p/publications/docs/nctq_ttmath_fullrepo...](http://www.nctq.org/p/publications/docs/nctq_ttmath_fullreport.pdf)

<http://www.nctq.org/p/docs/nctq_nmsi_stem_initiative.pdf>

which needs much improvement in the United States.

<http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf></comment>