Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.  - <AUTHOR> What is the point of downvoting someone?
I apologize to anyone who may take offense to the following, but I find it very barbaric.
Most people, I believe, downvote because they do not agree with someone's opinion. I cannot see how that is different than someone throwing a stone at another person just because they do not agree with them.
Maybe web communities are still primitive, or maybe there is a real flaw in current commenting/rating systems.
If there were some consequences to downvoting, i.e. we knew who downvoted whom, what do you think would be the result? <comment><USER2> I downvote the following kinds of comments:

\- comments that have a high excitement to information ratio, such as brief comments that include profanity or attitude, and of course garbage one-liner humor comments. But not good one-line comments (such as the best comeback of all time), and usually not the kind that are nested two or more levels deep in the tree.

\- most comments made in reply to an article that definitely should be flagged.

\- comments that deliberately ignore standard English in a bad direction. For example, those with sentences that end with the word "lol". On the other hand, saying that you "... vote (up|down) to manipulate ..." is ignoring standard English in a non-bad direction.

\- comments that show an inability to appreciate rational discussion or approach things with a sufficient level of detachment. This often results a chain of replies between persons A and B, with person B getting several downvotes (by people voting for similar reasons) on every post and person A getting upvotes. Sometimes both A and B both get downvoted. I think that when people complain about being downvoted, usually it's because they were downvoted for this reason and begin to feel persecuted.

\- certain types of self-indulgent comments. I suppose everybody writes comments because they want to share _their_ opinion, but some are indulging the poster's desire to tell others about his worldview without being written in a way that could influence other people's worldviews. There were a lot of these, if you want examples, in the justin.tv suicide thread.

\- comments that blandly recite a reader's opinion or reaction about an article, that don't add information, especially when there's a long tail of them and they're all the same. These are the less exciting kind of self- indulgent comments.

Basically, with that formula, I vote with the intent of making this site boring and unwelcoming with a high signal:noise ratio.

<comment><USER3> And yet, my only comments that actually get upvoted are garbage one-liner humor comments.

EDIT: I believe this is what we call irony: <http://i588.photobucket.com/albums/ss323/araneae/hn.png>

<comment><USER4> I upvoted you for the rather ironic screenshot. As for the best way to get upvoted: "Agree with the rest of the crowd." HN is a very "Go with the flow" crowd. In my observation it doesn't usually pay to have a difference of opinion, which is slightly ironic since this site is aimed at hackers, who, you would hope, should have unique viewpoints.

<comment><USER5> Every community has a set of shared assumptions and a particular viewpoint, this is pretty much axiomatic given the definition of the term. Most forum systems on the net are unable to deliver much nuance in terms of expressing this viewpoint, so it is easy to perceive "groupthink" when the bulk of the community disagrees with you. Where things get interesting/contentious is when people who share community view A assume everyone else agrees with B and get indignant or defensive when they discover that this view is not shared. There is nothing about "hackers" or startups or other standard topics of this community that necessitates a unique viewpoint, so why assume the rest of the community is going to tolerate large divergence from a standardized norm? Too much input from "unique" viewpoints usually leads to chaos, and that seems to be one thing of which the community has a low tolerance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I always find opinions like these to be illuminating whenever people claim that people don't care about karma, as it's obviously just a silly number in some computer running this website. As it turns out, some people find losing just 1 point to be indistinguishable from throwing a rock at the person.

For what it's worth, the downvote is for the comment, not the poster. It influences a sorting algorithm that shapes the way people read as well as serves as a signal for how the community feels about a given post. The value of this signal is debatable, but that's the point.

When I personally down-vote your comment, it's because I think you're wrong or your post is of zero or negative value (spam, noise, etc), and it really has nothing to do with your worth as a person (or any desire to hurt you).

<comment><USER7> Even if you do not care about karma, a down vote is still symbol of negativity, just as is someone who doesn't care about earthly possessions being robbed.

The sorting algorithm can probably work fine with just an upvote button.

I don't think you really help sort comments when you down-vote if you personally think the person is wrong. You should reply and correct them if they are wrong. Comments that aren't wrong and contribute > 0 should be upvoted.

<comment><USER8> So what action do you propose for a situation where some person writes an incorrect post and is then corrected, but the whole thread doesn't deserve to be upvoted?

If you just upvote the correction, you mark it as significant in some way. But if it's only correcting a flamebait, why would you? It seems to be better to leave the correction there (so that people who read it get more information), but force the whole thread to go down by downvoting the first incorrect post. I think it's a good protection against flamewars which may contain a lot of "correct" posts, but you may want to push them down anyways.

The problem of course is: what is correct / true and how sure are you about it.

<comment><USER7> > The problem of course is: what is correct / true and how sure are you about > it.

Exactly. So rather than try to determine "correctness" because sometimes it is subjective, just try to determine what's clearly "better."

Up voting better comments will have the side effect of pushing down comments that are not as deserving.

<comment><USER9> If you can't judge a comment for a degree of "correctness", you can't judge one comment as "better" than another.

<comment><USER7> Yes you're right. We each have our own definition of "better," as we do have for "correct." But it's less detrimental/errpr to just have you judge "better" than to have you judge both "better" and "worse" which is what happens when we allow judgements of "correct."

<comment><USER9> Why?

Really, please explain.

<comment><USER7> Because we can still sort comment by just up voting. But removing down voting would slow down the sorting process, therefore less power is there to disrupt the organization of comments.

I'll agree this may be viewed as one disadvantage of the system, but it also means there is less power in the individual to to push down the comment. It would require a bunch of up votes _all_ the other comments in order to push down a comment.

That's why letting people to only up vote is less capable of silencing an opposition or unpopular view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _I cannot see how that is different than someone throwing a stone at another person just because they do not agree with them._

You don't think there is any difference between throwing a rock at someone and reducing their overall vote count by one vote in an electronic voting system? If someone downvotes me, I have a reason to look again at what I posted and whether or not it fit the discussion. If someone throws a rock at me, I have a reason to report a case of assault to the police.

<comment><USER11> Both, however, are instances of expressing disapproval without in turn adding something valuable. It was a ridiculous simile, but I understood his feeling because it's one I have also. When I take time and effort to argue something and get voted down, the message I'm given in liu of an actual counterpoint is that my effort in a community has not been appreciated. It's not as drastic as my being hit by a rock, but it's still something that engenders an emotional response on my part.

Of course, I then go on to contribute to the pool of negativity by downvoting people without responding to them, so it's not like I'm blaming everybody who's ever downvoted. But I do understand where he's coming from.

<comment><USER12> You're taking it too personally.

How do you know the reasons your post got downvoted?

And why do you revenge against community after that?

Community has it's moods too, if it annoys you too much at some particular time you're always free to leave. That's what I do, but I know there's some value in this community so I return. But revenge is simply immature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I vote (up|down) to manipulate the way a thread is displayed.

<comment><USER14> More generally, downvotes exist to provide negative feedback into the system. It's a useful and well understood engineering principle that negative feedback is a useful tool for molding the output of a system.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "What if we knew who downvoted whom, what would be the result?"

I love that idea, but extend it also to upvoting, and use it to create a killer social network and/or dating site.

If you and I love the same ideas and hate the same ideas, than we should meet. We may not enrich each others worldview, but that's what HN is for. You and I, in such a scenario would probably get along really well and be great friends. A great way to find that out is a "similarity heuristic" in voting patterns on a site such as this one.

<comment><USER16> Then we would care [a little?] more about the person commenting and less about the content of the comments. Perhaps content would still win but people would be influenced with decisions like "he downvoted me" or "she believes Y" (where Y is orthogonal to the issue) or dimiss salient point based on past arguments.

Which is fine if that's what you're after.

<comment><USER15> The data would be pretty confusing, without analysis. I'm also assuming people with enough of a life that they wouldn't try.

Instead of (or in addition to) raw upvote/downvote data, you get a "compatibility score", where 100 means you're soul mates, and -100 means you're mortal enemies!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I downvote because I have been personally offended by something that has been said. Most often I have been offended by the sin of bad taste. This is, granted, a pretty wide area, but when somebody writes something egregiously distasteful—whether it's a terrible sense of humor, or a misinformed righteousness, or craven pandering to the self-important 'social media' upper crust, or indeed the myopic, worthless blather of said upper crust—I am aesthetically offended by that sort of thing. It offends my sense of decency, my sense of wit and interestingness. I suffer in the same way as I do when I witness incredibly stupid people on television, or very bad music, or indeed when I find myself buttonholed into a painfully tedious conversation with someone who is similarly lacking in good taste, be it social, intellectual, aesthetic or otherwise. I suffer and therefore I downvote, in an attempt to exorcise my pain.

Maybe that would be the easiest rule of thumb, then. If you say something which would, if I were chatting with you at a cocktail party, make me fearfully look for some excuse to go refill my drink, I will downvote you.

<comment><USER18> > I downvote because I have been personally offended by something that has > been said. Most often I have been offended by the sin of bad taste.

> I suffer in the same way as I do when I witness incredibly stupid people on > television, or very bad music, or indeed when I find myself buttonholed into > a painfully tedious conversation with someone who is similarly lacking in > good taste, be it social, intellectual, aesthetic or otherwise. I suffer and > therefore I downvote, in an attempt to exorcise my pain.

Are you for real? I guess I should downvote you for deeply offending me by needing to get over yourself.

But I won't, because I agree with the OP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've noticed that sometimes interesting answers get downvoted, and irrelevant/badly thought-out answers get upvoted. So I don't take downvotes so seriously now. However, there's a backlash: if I get a bunch of upvotes, I'll now think that it's probably just a bunch of those idiot voters. Which in a way is a good thing, because it means I have to fall back on my own judgment, instead of being guided by karma. (I do listen to intelligent rebuttals and counter view-points, as they have actual content, unlike a downvote).

For a long time, I didn't down-vote anyone. Now I'll sometimes downvote, to put comments in the order of insightfulness; and very occasionally for irrelevance/childishness. For really obnoxious comments, I'll downvote to grey them, and also flag them. But my usual response is to reply "please elaborate" (for a content-free comment), which offers the human behind the comment an opportunity to grow into the community; or an impartial recital of the facts (for a mistaken, inappropriate or irrelevant comment).

</comment><comment><USER20> _Most people, I believe, downvote because they do not agree with someone's opinion._

If they do, they're doing it wrong. Downvote someone for not contributing to the discussion.

<comment><USER21> _One_ of the problems is that people don't down vote for the same reasons. Some down because they disagree, others to resort topics, others because they don't like the person's comment, tone, bias, etc...

Without a consistent use of the down vote, the effect is undesired by most.

<comment><USER9> "the effect is undesired by most"

Says _who?_

<comment><USER21> says whoever upvoted me.

<comment><USER9> One person upvoted you, at the time of my writing this.

One person is not "most". Everyone commenting in this topic is not "most". Everyone who's ever started a thread against down-voting is not "most", as best as I can tell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's an interesting argument in favor of downvoting here: <http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/>

For context, the author is someone who posts on HN and was (at the time) trying to launch a new community.

</comment><comment><USER23> Ask the submitter: Why don't you get a blog?

Edit: OK, I will answer the question. People downmod to get people to convince themselves to go away. Imagine I don't like your viewpoint, and you place value on imaginary points I can take from you. I take those points, you get upset, and you stop posting stuff I disagree with.

That's all there is to it; reinforcing groupthink.

Similarly upmods encourage people to keep submitting. Knowing that people like your work encourages you to make more.

<comment><USER11> This is a very HN-focused point. No reason he can't just post it directly, in this case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If someone posts something that is negative, detracts from the discussion, or is generally of negative value, the way to provide feedback is to downmod. If there is value to be had from doing so, a followup comment is indicated.

Many people downmod simply because they disagree, and I think that's wrong. But that's my opinion. Personally, if a comment is of positive value I'll upmod it, even if I don't agree with it.

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't think that most people downmod for just disagreement, but rather for stupidity, noise, trolling. Sure, some people vote a comment down to express disagreement, but their votes are often cancelled out. And it's not so unusual to see two HN'ers having an argument and both gaining karma from it if their arguments are well-formed, respectful, and informative.

On the other hand, comments such as 'more like CLOWNvote, amirite???' don't really improve the quality of the discussion, do they?

</comment><comment><USER26> I like to scan the newcomments page to see if there is anything worth commenting on.

Doing that, I noticed a long-time poster making the point that the community has changed and asking if anybody else has noticed it. So I said yes, it has changed, and quite a bit.

The reward for my comment was several downvotes. As it turns out, his comment was part of some Rand thread. My comment was viewed as supportive of his position, so I was punished. Everybody who took one position was getting upvoted, and everybody who took another was getting downvoted.

Now was that what really happened? Or was my comment simply empty and a pointless waste of bandwidth? I honestly don't know. All I have is up and down scores to go by. So for all of you who think the up-down arrows enforce community behavior, I have a simple question: how can the community push me to conform when I don't know if it's giving me a "we disagree" or a "poor quality" message?

I know I can (and have) made the same comment in other discussions and actually got voted up, so I don't think the quality of my comment had much to do with it. It looks a lot like context and opinion matter the most to me. Probably also the time of the week and time of day.

In short, the voting system is broken. A lot.

<comment><USER9> Maybe responding to single comments out-of-context is a questionable methodology.

<comment><USER26> I understand what you're saying, but my initial reaction is WTF! Now I need a freaking methodology to surf the net?

I like to think of users as always being right, even when they do things I do not expect or would not approve of. So in this case, even if it weren't me we were talking about, I'd have to take the side of the user poking around at the system, trying to get it to work as well as he can.

<comment><USER9> "Now I need a freaking methodology"

Sorry, I was trying to be less blunt than ending that sentence with "is a bad idea."

"I like to think of users as always being right"

Here's the problem - you weren't a user being resisted by software in that context. You were a person interacting with other people. You weren't poking at a system, you were having a conversation.

<comment><USER26> Yes. Of course you are correct. I made the mistake of not being fully informed about the conversation before responding.

But I still think overall this process works fine. I just need to take some time to check out the entire thread first.

I view the board more like IRC -- a conversation can start one place and end up somewhere else. So as long as you have 2-3 parents in mind when commenting, you're free to go in a slightly new direction. Some folks, I imagine, view the topics more hierarchically. The site design encourages both views, actually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've never seen an option to downvote. It could be because I don't have enough "points" in this game (130 as of the time I'm posting this) or it may be because I haven't been around long enough. Once, I did try to downvote something by kludging the "dir" variable. I was told I couldn't make that vote. What parameters must be met for a person to get downvoting ability?

Enough with the goofy meta-talk, though. Since I don't have downvoting ability, I didn't even know it existed until I saw comments with zero or negative scores. Coming at it from my neophytic perspective, I am torn. At first blush, "not upvoting" and "downvoting" seem like they would serve similar functions: floating better content to the top. My only guess is that downvoting is a catalyst that makes it happen faster.

The only things I've wanted to downvote if I could were trolling, spam, and tangents. To that end, I think "not relevant or contributing to the discussion" is probably the most popular reason.

</comment><comment><USER28> It's just behavioural reinforcement. Upvote the positive but on the few occasions someone acts out of line with the spirit of the community, there's got to be a way to deal with them. Imagine a troll running rampant on HN with no downvoting; it'd be hard to get them to stop, since there is no consequence for their actions.

As it is, behaviour that acts out of the norm - lame jokes, empty-but- offensive remarks and entirely pointless trivia - all tends to be rewarded negatively, reinforcing the community values nicely. If you get downvoted, it's usually simple enough to figure out why - and if it really is a disagreement of opinion then the downvoters are doing it wrong, _or_ there's also something about the way you express your opinion that is repellant.

<comment><USER29> I agree that it enforces the spirit of the community. One of my first comments was a joke and it was down-modded hard (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=684509>). This quickly taught me the community's expectations in terms of quality of comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The possibility of downvotes creates an element of risk in posting a comment. Without that element of risk the only deterrent to trolling or violating community standards is deleting or banning by the moderators. Moderating a site like this is an awful lot of work. The down vote arrow allows the community to police itself.

It's certainly not perfect, people have been down voted to oblivion. Pg has put in safeguards so people can only get down voted 5-10 points. I think that it's helped keep the community on track.

People take their karma very seriously for some reason. Notice the amount of angry posts when someone gets downvoted. :)

<comment><USER31> Respectfully, I doubt downvoting is a deterrent to any troll. Trolls are already determined to anger the community. Downvoting is more of a deterrent to people who care what the community thinks of them--they might refrain from posting their contrary opinions as a result.

That said, I still think downvoting is a useful function, because the point is to filter discussion.

<comment><USER9> I personally like that trolling comments tend to rapidly vanish into light- gray text.

<comment><USER31> Yes, that's what I'm saying about the filtering, is that it serves to hide trolling comments. That doesn't necessarily mean that it reduces the number of trolls, as suggested by the parent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I sort of agree with you, but I would only up vote to show that the topic / comment was interesting, even if I did not agree with it . Up/down voting because i agree or disagree is arrogant. If it makes people feel better, bully for them. The danger is that a group of people will upvote a perspective and alienate alternative points of view from a thread. This creates a narrow minded culture and prevents interesting discussions. Ideally there is no point posing to a thread you agree with if you have no content to add.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm impressed by the shifting voting trends when a new, dissenting (sub)opinion is attached to a comment. A string of upvotes now is halted/reversed. And the polarity change can happen several times. An articulated position unleashes the silent thinker or is this a characteristic of mob rule? (When it happens to me, it's mob rule. :)

I'm also terribly sad when someone is downvoted in an opinion-thread (e.g. what is your favorite X). I wish one could mark a post as opinion or even upvote-only.

<comment><USER9> Someone can be off-topic or troll in opinion threads. "What's your favorite X?" is not the place for "Stop using different types of Xs and start using Ys, noobs.", for example.

<comment><USER7> As much as someone could type that, someone could also downvote because they were _thinking_ that.

<comment><USER9> Indeed. And yet, while trolls get downvoted to pale gray happens, entire threads getting their comments downvoted as far doesn't.

<comment><USER7> Unpopular opinions can be down voted. And this does happen. While often it doesn't matter that an unpopular opinion is down voted because it may in fact be wrong, there will be certain cases where an unpopular but universally right comment will be down voted. It will be grayed out. But with a system that promotes and allows silencing unpopular comments, such a rare event will almost always result in a down vote will not just marginalize it, but actually suppress it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It might be interesting to keep every vote for each comment and use something like the Netflix prize algorithm to calculate whether you'd like the comment. Hiding comments would then be based on personal preferences, rather than the community at large. If nobody at all likes the comment, (i.e., it's spam or something), then it can get removed automatically. Of course, this takes a lot of work to implement, and it might require HN to have a longer privacy policy...

</comment><comment><USER35> This all brings to mind Churchill's quote (paraphrased):

"Democracy is the worst form of government, with the exception of all other forms of government."

<comment><USER36> You might find Hoppe's book, [http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Economics- Politics-Monarchy-...](http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Economics-Politics- Monarchy- Natural/dp/0765808684/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257033804&sr=1-1) , interesting. He claims democracy is the worst form of government, period. (The book is not easy reading and is pretty repetitive, but interesting.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Turn it around: why upvote someone? A downvote is equal and opposite to an upvote; what makes the former "bad" and not the latter?

</comment><comment><USER38> Downvoting has two aspects: reducing the visibility of a post and discouraging the poster from making similar posts in the future. This can be used maliciously (though to limited effect) against viewpoints you merely disagree with. But it does have a legitimate use as well, when harmful or unhelpfully disruptive information is posted.

A few examples to clarify these guidelines:

Spam and inappropriate material (this isn't 4chan).

Advice that is well known to be wrong and/or is very likely to be harmful if followed, such as advising someone to embed raw SQL query strings in web application parameters or to exclusively use javascript for client side input sanitation (both of which would open up anyone to huge security vulnerabilities).

Unnecessary or unfunny jokes (live by the sword, die by the sword, jokes rarely improve discussion).

Completely off-topic material.

</comment><comment><USER39> Voting is probably the easiest way to quickly express your (dis/ap)proval with little effort, especially when the comment is so obviously insightful or stupid.

Your analogy is a bit extreme, and I wouldn't mind people knowing whom I up/downvoted.

</comment><comment><USER40> I usually downvote intentional bad or wrong answers (of course, I don't think others opinion are wrong answers). It's more to inform the poster that he/she generated 'noise'.

</comment><comment><USER41> Of course, I dislike being downvoted. If I think it was because I was misunderstood or misinterpreted, I will post in response to the downvote. Clarification sometimes gets the original post upvoted, as well as the clarification. If it's a case of "Yeah, I was trying to avoid getting into that because I just knew it would go over badly and now I've been downvoted, confirming what I thought" or a case of me just not saying something well because I was having a bad day, I generally leave it alone. No point in pouring gasoline on the fire, so to speak (which is generally what's going to happen if I am already sticking my feet in my mouth because I don't feel well and now I am all defensive and trying to "clarify"....downward spiral ensues).

On the one hand, I often do wish people would converse with me and tell me what they "heard" that they think it's a bad comment. In many cases, it turns out be a misunderstanding. The vast majority of meaning in face-to-face communication comes from facial expression, body language, voice tone and context. The actual words are a very small part of the meaning conveyed. But on the 'Net, the words are about all we have. If two people come from very different backgrounds, misunderstandings are practically guaranteed.

On the other hand, an Iranian friend once told me that there is a saying in Iran: "Silence is the only good answer to stupid people." I would modify that slightly to "Silence is the only good answer to something stupid." We all do stupid stuff at times. It isn't proof we are generally stupid. It's just part of the human condition. An anonymous downvote, though it may be upsetting to the receiver, is probably a lot less destructive to the community than being able to put a name to the criticism and having to try to express the criticism in words. Running battles between two members who just don't ever agree on anything can be very destructive to a forum. I think the capacity to downvote helps avoid such outcomes.

I am still getting a feel for how HN works. But so far I am finding that the system here seems to do a better job of minimizing some of the negative social crapola you find everywhere. Conflict of interest will never go away. Interpersonal friction between some members is inevitable. Spammers and all kinds of other undesirable stuff is also a fact of life. There has to be a means to address that. Warm-fuzzy 'let's only upvote people' solutions won't work. It has no teeth.

</comment><comment><USER42> Downvoting is there to bury spam, swearing, bad behaviour, objectively false information, etc.

Some people downvote to bury opinions they disagree with, which isn't good, I agree.

<comment><USER23> People downmod swearing? That's fucking stupid.

<comment><USER43> Here I agree with the sentiment (swearing is OK and not what the downvote button should be used for) but dislike the comment (a one line personal attack).

Which is why there should be "agree/disagree" and "good/bad contribution" buttons.

<comment><USER44> What's the utility of an agree/disagree button? I don't think I would want to see that even if it was available to me.

I downvoted the parent comment because it's a crappy one-liner. It adds nothing except to express that some people are cool with swearing, which is not a very novel sentiment, and it does so in a way intended as flamebait.

<comment><USER7> That's your opinion. To me, I thought it was a good one liner. See our differing opinions? Down voting/flagging should be reserved for those comments people mutually agree on as bad.

What's the difference between discouraging by threat of jail time and discouraging vs social disapproval? Both are threats against you for certain behaviors. While these threats may be justified for stuff people all agree on are bad like racism, I do not think it's a good idea for subjective opinions. It will lead to socially induced censorship and society as a whole will become single-minded, afraid of thinking against the crowd.

I think HN should _foster_ the environment for unique thinking and controversial comments. Sure there isn't official discouragement of certain opinions, but if we allow the mob to do it it's practically the same thing.

<comment><USER44> I guess it boils down to this: I have absolutely no interest in reading a website with comments like that. If a large proportion of comments were one- line opinions and purely argumentative back-and-forths, I would just not bother reading the HN comment sections. So I downvote it.

Now, I understand that you feel the opposite way. The only objective argument I can make for my position is that there are a great number of general- interest sites on the Internet with a huge amount of discussion which is on par with "That's fucking stupid," but only a handful with discussion that is consistently free of such comments and the associated derailing of the conversation that they frequently bring. (Historically, it seems like the only realistic way to weed them out is by keeping a community small or having heavy active moderation.) I'd like to encourage more of the latter.

I don't really like your analogies between physical intimidation and violence and downvoting, because the consequences of physical threats are so much more serious. I can't understand how it's a serious harm to anyone to tell them "you can't express viewpoints X, Y, or Z on Hacker News." It's a shame, but it's one of the very smallest shames that can possibly be inflicted upon a person.

I understand that you're concerned in an idealistic sense about the ethics of using simple majority rule to tell someone "you can't say that," but I just don't think it's a big concern in this context, when the whole Internet is an ultimate egalitarian arena full of people saying anything and everything. The much bigger problem, to me, is having so much content that you can't read the really high-quality things because they are swamped with noise that adds nothing, or almost nothing. (By high-quality things I mean ideas and arguments that are novel, useful, and well-informed.)

<comment><USER7> That's essentially what up voting is for. It is a one way distillation that would also avoid any possible majority silencing of unpopular views.

We don't punish people for being dumb, we reward people who are smart.

Jail time is physical intimidation, but it is just one example of intimidation. My point is that such physical intimidation is no different from social intimidation upheld by the majority view in society. And such social intimidation is _no different_ from down voting. Just as you were probably taught by someone at some point in your life to _respect_ other's viewpoints, we should foster that here too. Down voting because of differences in viewpoint is _not_ a sign of respect.

And you can fully respect someone while still getting your share of the "better" comments because there is still an up vote mechanism. Without down vote simply means you can't disrespect comments that while are not overly additive to the conversation, are also not overly disruptive either.

<comment><USER9> Meh. I've never had a problem with throwing out a dissident opinion on forums with up/down moderation. I've often been surprised how fast I've gotten modded _up_ when I've done that. People do react well to interesting, thought- provoking arguments, and many will avoid down-modding them even when they strongly disagree.

People do _not_ react well to complaints that people who disagree with them are repressed or afraid, especially when the dissenter's expressed fear is that they will be down-modded. (The same goes for the "This will get me down- modded, but..." tactic.)

<comment><USER7> There will always be many who will downvote simply to supress dissident opinions.

Dissident opinions do not show up as much as mainstream ones, for obvious reasons. So the opportunity for a good dissident response to be disregarded is less. But when it does happen, it's much greater a loss to the overall community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Your assumption that downvotes occur mostly as a result of disagreement may be flawed. (I don't know myself, obviously, but it's not how I personally tend to use the feature.)

The rest of your question/opinion is based on your perceived truth of your initial assumption. I think we cannot proceed with any of that until we know the first answer.

</comment><comment><USER7> I completely agree. And I suggested that the down vote be removed and replaced with something like a flag. Flagging would be reserved for inappropriate comments. Upvoting can be used to sort and rank the "better" comments.

Frankly if you disagree with a comment, reply, don't down vote.

</comment><comment><USER46> Because the informationally-equivalent action of upvoting every comment _other_ than yours is not only tedious, but leaves you without the ability to upvote any other comment on its own merit.

</comment><comment><USER47> Can HN experiment with this...show the users who have downvoted one particular comment or ..make the commenter name invisible until you up/down vote a comment in a particular thread...

</comment><comment><USER48> My downmodding protocol (I rarely downvote): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=361390>

</comment><comment><USER49> >I cannot see how that is different than someone throwing a stone at another person just because they do not agree with them.

Can you really not see the difference ?

</comment><comment><USER50> The interface should provide two ways to vote: one for relevance (value) and the other for agreement/disagreement.

</comment><comment><USER51> I like how when you flag on craigslist you have to say why. If multiple people flag, the post is removed.

</comment><comment><USER52> Why not introduce a cost to both upvote and downvote of 1 karma point?

</comment><comment><USER53> On a similar topic, the primary use of "ignore lists" on forums appears to be the opportunity to smugly announce that someone has been added to yours.

</comment><comment><USER54> It's just quality control.

For some reason people value karma. The possibility of a down vote makes you think twice about posting rubbish.

From that perspective the system is working as intended :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I downvote people who downvoted me before I could downvote. Karma's a bitch.

</comment><comment><USER55> The worst part is downvoting someone without expressing why you did it. For example :

This is spam. Downvoted.

Most of the time people seem to just don't care about how someone else feels when gets downvoted. In the case of an article this gets more frustrating because there was effort to do it, document it and other things too. Even if the article is not what you think of "cool" it doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve an explanation on why it was downvoted. Some might say: This is the internet, democracy etc... Democracy is also getting annoyed when someone thinks of you like a "nothing". Other times, someone might post something that he doesn't like, only to see if others feel the same too.

<comment><USER27> I've had comments and submissions of mine downvoted before, and I didn't take offense. The article or my comment was simply "unliked" rather than enjoyed (upvoted) or met with indifference (left alone). Reading anything more into it is kind of silly.

You certainly can't please everyone all the time.

<comment><USER7> I think it's actually natural for people to feel offended, because down voting is an active engagement.

There are actually 3 choices. Ignore, up vote, and down vote. Down vote is taking the time and effort to click and purposely bury something. If it was unliked it would have probably simply been ignored. I seriously doubt most people read through each title and only either down vote or up vote. Most would probably be ignored, with the particularly hated ones being more likely down voted.</comment></comment></comment>


I am a Web Dev And I am Burnt Out - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/bos684/i_am_a_web_dev_and_i_am_burnt_the_fk_out/ <comment><USER2> You don't actually have to setup your web-development environment like the hype dictates. I mean, work in a Danish municipality with more than 5k employees and 60k citizens who directly use our, mainly web-based, solutions daily. We build around 50 a year, and maintain a few hundred of them, and almost none of them are build with a JavaScript MVVM framework.

Not because Vue/React/Angular aren't nice, but because we don't have to. If it doesn't need to run offline, then a MVC framework with Ajax will do just fine, and they are extremely productive. Both because errors are server side, but also because asp mvc hasn't really seen radical changes for almost a decade. We also rarely put things in containers, we don't do automated CI/CD and we certainly don't orchestrate things with Kubernetes. Not that there is anything wrong with doing that, but we're not Netflix, we can publish a new build directly to an IIS during a slow period and no one will notice the service being gone for 5 seconds.

Sometimes I think it pays to do a little JOMO instead of all that FOMO. Especially if you don't want to burn out. Changes are a constant in our business, but you need to make absolutely certain that adopting those changes make sense, and it has to make sense in the real world, not on hacker news. Our business doesn't care one bit about the front-end tech stack, as long as it performs like they want it could be written in ASP webforms.

<comment><USER3> What do JOMO and FOMO stand for? I think of FOMO as "Fear of Missing Out", the controversial motivator driving retention for free-to-play games like Fortnite, but that doesn't seem to be correct in this context.

<comment><USER2> It's completely anecdotal but I do hire people and I work as a part time examiner for CS students, so I do come into contact with what motivates people. Unfortunately I see a lot of fear driving people to push forward, picking up technologies because they think they have to, not because they actually need them.

I mean, if I do a quick search on the Danish job agents, no one is looking for someone who knows GraphQL. Yet I see people desperately trying to learn it in their free time because they are afraid of becoming obsolete.

I wonder where this fear comes from. It's a fairly recent thing in my experience, and it's not like it's a buyers market. We still desperately need more developers.

<comment><USER4> It probably comes from the internet and how the web development media is heavily dominated by FAANG companies and trendy startups.

If your reference point is these companies and their developers, then it can appear like you're getting more obsolete by the day, since they're always talking about the hottest new tech and you're seemingly not using it.

It's turned web development and software engineering into a game of keeping up with the joneses. And I suspect just like with social media as a whole, it's made a lot of people feel like they're inferior to the rest of the population/their peer group.

But I've got an article about that planned at some point. About how the Silicon Valley focused tech media and internet has given people the wrong impression about what most such work is like in most industries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, I don't know, I feel like the constant framework churn has sort of died down and javascript is no longer changing the way it was a few years ago. It essentially moved from being a scripting language a decade ago to the 'full fledged' programming language it is now. Evolution during that time period was necessary, and a lot of frameworks and trends turned over pretty quickly. But now I feel like the JS ecosystem is on a much more stable juncture and not evolving as much. The most popular MVC frameworks are 5 years old and show no sign of going anywhere anytime soon. Best practices for tooling have mostly been decided. I think the web should continue to evolve but I just can't imagine it being as dramatic as it was over the last decade. Or maybe, I'm just a dinosaur too.

<comment><USER6> Yeah I find it really weird that he'd write this _now_, when most of the technology he's referencing is 5+ years old, and there hasn't been that much churn in the last few years. About 4 years ago I started learning React sarcastically wondering what the next thing I'd have to learn was would be, and four years later I'm... still using React, and it's still pretty cutting edge.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I agree. Strong declarations about what the future will look like usually are laughably incorrect in retrospect; but, well, without some major paradigm shifts in how browsers work, I don't really see React/Vue going anywhere. The only thing I could maybe guess would be some AI that abstracts the programming away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The real danger is working 14 Hours/day instead of 8. Clearly is a problem of toxic environment in the office (none notices that you're there for so long hours every day?).

It's not a problem of tech, which is fluid, but a management problem. You don't always need the last fancy technology or tool, but pick what you might think will help you and go for it.

Being pragmatic should be the 1. Point in a developer's career

</comment><comment><USER8> > I work 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM. Then 9:00 PM - 2:00 AM. And in between, I'm "on > call."

Yeah, don't do that. Primarily, make sure you get at least 10 consecutive hours off every day, to wind down and sleep usually 8 hours, some need more. And get some exercise every week, and don't forget to eat healthy. And make sure you are not so stressed that your primary social relationships involve yelling or worse.

That will go a long way to prevent burn-out, no matter what industry you are in.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, this has nothing to do with what he is doing but with how much and how long. There is a reason we fight for the 8/8/8 standard and why we arestarting to demand more free time instead of more work.

As you said, 10 hours would be ideal, 2 is sick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not a web dev but try to extend back-end to full-stack especially on personal projects which are mostly to try out something new. I was impressed by what React achieved but not by codebases using it. Vue was my go-to SPA. Now it's Svelte with the v3 release. I've yet to use it for anything substantial but that's my best hope. In the past I've used RoR and even Yii/php which are impressive. For non-SPA I'd now choose Phoenix/Elixir.

How I stay sane is not to go 'all in' on any framework. My pick for mobile is Flutter but that could easily change to Kotlin Native or Svelte Native if they turn out better than the game engine rendering mode. Declare this is my fave 'for now'.

I'm sure this is much harder when you've committed to a stack for a good part of your career. I tend to grow more tired of companies not adopting new tools --the pragmatically good ones not just shiny. I'm also always looking for my next language, maybe Clean or Pony but happy to use Kotlin, TypeScript, or Dart in the meantime.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am a One Person Agency And I am Burnt Out*

Only one of the complaints is technical related, the rapid pace of front end development to someone who's "skipped Node, RoR and Python".

As a "web dev" for the past two years, previously elsewhere, who has never worked in an agency, none of this applies. The front end pace absolutely would have two or three years ago, but things have generally stabilized.

</comment><comment><USER12> I spent about 2 months to setup my "idea" boilerplate with Webpack.

Actually, you just need Typescript and Webpack to have a productive setup with frontend/universal project.

<comment><USER13> Doesn't sound remotely productive then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I guess use Rails or Django would be the answer.</comment>


Prof. Sussman's Reading List - <AUTHOR> http://aurellem.org/thoughts/html/sussman-reading-list.html <comment><USER2> Also, for anyone else whose interested:

Alan Kay's reading list: [http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp](http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp)

Bret Victor's reading list: [http://worrydream.com/#!/Links](http://worrydream.com/#!/Links)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm happy to see The Variational Principles of Mechanics (by the great Lanczos) on that list. It really is deep, and I think it does a fantastic job of explaining classical mechanics. I've read the vast majority of the book multiple times.

Since we're on the topic of Sussman, has anyone here read through SICM? I've heard that the code is difficult to get to work, but does anyone have an opinion on the rest? I haven't had a chance to read it yet.

Anyone read both Lanczos and SICM?

<comment><USER4> I referred to the Lanczos book quite often when I was working on my PhD. I've read the first part of SICM and skimmed the rest. Based on that, it looks like it does an excellent job in building up an understanding of how the math works. By the time I looked at SICM, I had implemented my own code to do something similar (coded in Maple). It looked like the progression of the code was well handled. On the whole, I think Lanczos is a better book, but SICM is fairly decent. I'm also partial to Meirovitch's Methods of Analytical Dynamics which I think does the best job of explaining the inclusion of non- conservative forces in the Principle of Least Action. This is needed for applied forces and torques like a motor. It also covers the inclusion of damping forces well. Like Lanczos, the Meirovitch book is available from Dover, so it's pretty inexpensive.

The SICM code really only works for a specific scheme interpreter, so if you have that it should be fine.

<comment><USER5> Clojure is underway: [http://github.com/littlredcomputer/math](http://github.com/littlredcomputer/math)

<comment><USER4> That's interesting, but I get a 404 for that link.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/littleredcomputer/math](https://github.com/littleredcomputer/math)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I cannot recommend 'The Society of Mind' enough. This was my first book before diving into Cognitive Science. Although it is mostly psychology(i.e.speculation), it is a brilliant book with insights and ideas.

<comment> dnt404-1 Why do find psychology to be speculation? Do they not use empiricism in their studies (maybe not all of them)?

<comment><USER7> Until very recently (mid 90's) many psychological phenomena were explained by childhood experiences, in line with Freud's psychoanalytical theory. Many of these have since been disproved. One criteria I have for trustworthiness of a scientific discipline is that of stability. If the previous theory has been found to be very wrong, very recently, then I am cautious to trust again.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoanalytic_theory#Critics_o...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoanalytic_theory#Critics_of_psychoanalytic_theory)

Specifically note that his theory, although debunked, still lives on in philosophy and literature analysis. This "stickiness", that people refuse to give up the theory when proven wrong is additionally a bad sign.

Recovered memory therapy is a recent failure [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered- memory_therapy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy)

<comment><USER8> People really like to trash Freud, but you have to put him into context. Before Freud, we had a few branches of psychology: philosophical psychology in England arguing about empiricism vs. nativism, Wundtian psychology in Germany sitting around asking very specific questions that they answered using introspection, and in the States we had the very first blossoming of the behaviorism that would dominate psychology in the States until the '60s[0]. Some of these approaches had a concept of the subconscious, but they all viewed it as a static warehouse for previous experience, and very few people thought about it in a serious way.

Freud's major contribution to psychology was that we actually have a dynamic subconscious that profoundly affects how we live our lives. This aspect of his theory has become so ingrained in our culture that it's hard to imagine the world before Freud. Also, that aspect of his theory has held up over the years.

Also, he got a number of things correct: many of his coping mechanisms have strong empirical support, for instance.

Freud was wrong in detail, but his overarching approach changed psychology for the better.

[0] Yes, I know this "history" is a vast oversimplification.

<comment><USER9> The concept of subconscious is much older than Freud, it was a staple of the romantics. Freud proposed a specific structure theory of the subconscious centred around the Oedipus complex. That specific theory is indefensible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Quantum Computing since Democritus in high school reading list is _very_ heavy. I have had Theory of Computation class in college and I can't read 20 pages of that book.

<comment><USER11> On the other hand, if you treat each page, each statement as something you have to _completely internalize_ before moving onto the next page—including looking up all the prerequisite topics recursively on Wikipedia or in other texts—you might just end up teaching yourself up to college-level math while still in high school.

(I didn't do this myself with QCD, but I very nearly did it with SICP in middle school.)

<comment><USER12> I wish I can manage that level of self motivation while in high school.

<comment><USER13> Have you tried not having any friends?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Has anyone read the probability text mentioned in the list - Probability: The Logic of Science by Jaynes?

It looks like the text is freely available; I skimmed through the first chapter and it makes sense to me so far (I don't know how long that would hold true). I've been looking for a basic probability text for some time now, nothing too heavy but something to compensate for not having taken enough math in college.

<comment><USER15> I think Jaynes recommended Sivia & Skilling [1] as a companion book, but I cannot find the citation now. It might even make sense to read it beforehand.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0198568320/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0198568320/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting to see Stranger in a Strange Land on his list. It shows up quite often on top lists of sci-fi books and Heinlein books. I'm halfway through it, after reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Stranger in a Strange Land is certainly the weaker book so far in my opinion.

<comment><USER17> As I struggle to wade through it, I wonder why it was ever as popular as it once was. What is it about this book that make so many people recommend it?

<comment> grey-area His writing is terrible on the level of style, characterisation, and even plot, but I think many of the ideas he expressed about human relations in his books are profound - that the rules which govern our societies are temporary, contingent and negotiable, that we don't live according to the principles we claim to, that _free_ is often anything but, that colonies often become stronger than the parent society, that revolution comes when there is too big a gap between perception and reality, the tension between soldiers and citizens etc.

<comment><USER18> Are you sure you're not thinking of Starship Troopers?

<comment> grey-area I was thinking about all his books.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> KAM: Automatic Planning and Interpretation of Numerical Experiments Using Geometrical Methods

      * By Kenneth Man-Kam Yip, 1989
      * Coolest PhD thesis ever!
      * Solve problems using graphs.
      * So cool!

This caught my interest: [http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7025](http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7025)

It is indeed one of the coolest papers and programs ever. KAM is a smart ODE solver, written in ZetaLisp on a Symbolics. It analyzes 2D pointsets created by any 2d equations, esp. non-linear ones. Typically a system of ordinary or partial differential equations, with a set of boundary and initial conditions. A typical non-linear physical system. It creates MST's (Minimal spanning trees) of the calculated points to get the shape and number of curves, to see the number of clusters (checking the distance of the curves), and if the curves are linear or space filling. Then the phase space is searched for initial states and end conditions, and to get useful summaries. It cannot do shape matching though, so repetitions and mirroring are not detected as such.

The goal is to get high-level descriptions of the model and the numerical dataset, and at which parameter ranges and conditions the system falls into chaos. Chaotic systems are bad for predictability but mostly good for engineering purposes.

</comment><comment><USER20> Robert McIntyre is a wizard in his own right. He has taken the prowess of his mental faculties to the extreme, even mastering the art of bioluminescence.

<comment><USER21> Could you explain?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Heavy list, I've read a few, but skimmed through most of these.

I'm certain only a handful of people have read all these books completely.

</comment><comment><USER23> The first book's author is misspelled: Remove the "l" from "Schultz" to "Schutz" [0]

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/First-Course-General- Relativity/dp/052...](http://www.amazon.com/First-Course-General- Relativity/dp/0521887054/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Do people actually read all the books they recommend? I often tell people books are good, esp. books on some mathematical topic, without having read the entire thing myself, just selected parts as my inclination takes me. In fact, there are almost no textbooks I've read straight through.

<comment><USER25> I don't read whatever people recommend to me; I prioritize what's available based on what I think will have the greatest impact on me. But whatever I do read, I try to read it all the way through. Books have layers, like an onion. Each time you read a book, you peel back another layer of meaning. The first time I read a book, I don't let myself get hung up on what I don't understand; I just keep reading until I've reached the end. Then, if the book is really worth re-reading, I'll do it, and pay more attention to the details. You can get through a lot of tough material that way, and get 85-90% of the benefits as you would just sitting there, trying to grok every. Single. Word.

<comment><USER26> I do the same. I also have the philosophy that a book worth reading is worth re-reading. Sadly, you have to read it the first time without knowing if it will be worth reading at all.

<comment><USER27> Paul Graham wrote an essay on this: [http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> On _The Connection Machine_ : "Beautiful thesis, though it doesn't tell you anything you can really _do_ today."

I don't understand: is data-parallel computing on a GPU much worse somehow? Or is it that there are better sources to read about data-parallel algorithms?

<comment><USER29> > is data-parallel computing on a GPU much worse somehow?

OpenCL is a very awkward way to do vector processing - everything is hard- coded to an abstract model of a typical consumer GPU memory hierarchy. CUDA is even worse with a ton of versions all having different limitations according to what the Nvidia chips can do.

It's awkward to do a lot of SIMD tasks on GPUs. The Connection Machine was a general-purpose SIMD originally designed for parallel graph algorithms.

OpenCL looks like what the Connection Machine C* language might get macroexpanded into prior to compilation: [http://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5docs/CStarProgramming...](http://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5docs/CStarProgrammingGuide.pdf)

<comment><USER28> Thanks. I've read Hillis's book but not studied the modern stuff; I'd gotten the impression the hardware was capable of about as much, and faster now, even if organized differently -- shared memory instead of a network -- and with less-pleasant languages.

<comment><USER29> That was pretty much where Thinking Machines was headed before bankruptcy - their third model (CM5) was a SPARC cluster primarily for running Connection Machine Fortran and C*.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I would suggest a small addition -

[https://archive.org/details/Sarvepalli.Radhakrishnan.Indian....](https://archive.org/details/Sarvepalli.Radhakrishnan.Indian.Philosophy.Volume.1-2)

The first volume, at least.)

</comment><comment><USER31> Shameless plug for one of my side projects to manage reading lists with YAML and GitHub pages: [https://github.com/bamos/reading- list](https://github.com/bamos/reading-list)

</comment><comment><USER32> Great list. I had misplaced my copy of the Connection Machine. So glad to have access to the PDF. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER33> I really enjoyed Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point, by Huw Price.</comment>


Unilever to Halt U.S. Ads on Facebook and Twitter for Rest of 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/unilever-to-halt-u-s-ads-on-facebook-and-twitter-for-rest-of-2020-11593187230 <comment><USER2> I've been wondering how I can get a feed of some of the memes and similar posts that many other users on FB are seeing and sharing.

I had a couple of 'friends' on FB that shared many doctored/half truth kind of things and I would ask questions about the validity of these things and if they believed them to be true or fake / funny and if they believed the people on their friend's list would think they were true or false..

well we are no longer 'friends' on the fbk, and now I want to see what these other folks are seeing / believing / sharing kind of things.. not sure the best way to get this info that other places seem to have no trouble finding.

how do I get a list of 'hate speech' things and other fake news / hihgly shared stuff that fbook people are sharing at volume?

</comment><comment> tech-historian [https://archive.is/AodQ3](https://archive.is/AodQ3)</comment>


Show HN: Small project on particle animation, genetic algorithms and plain JS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dg92/ant_sugar <comment><USER2> I've been running it for some time now and it seems that the model started to converge towards generation 35 and then diverged after that. i.e. since you consider the loss to be distance from each particle to the food, then the ants ended up somewhat above the food at 35, and then started overshooting it after that. Is that expected behavior?

<comment><AUTHOR> no, if it reaches food, each generation after that should follow the same path.

Thanks for pointing out. I will debug and update :)

<comment><AUTHOR> However, all ants will not follow the same path but most should.

<comment><USER2> I did not expect all the ants to follow the same path, but I thought maybe they'll come close since only the best generations are supposed to get passed on with mutations. I'm at generation 810 and the model hasn't improved much. Most ants (except for ~6) first go to the right to avoid the obstacle, and then they travel to the upper-left corner while about 6-8 reach the food.

I hope it would work better with minor tweaks to calculating the loss and selecting new generations :) Good Luck

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think this is part of "Nature of Code" MOOC. I have a similar visualization on my website: [https://raze.mx](https://raze.mx) :)</comment>


The Risks of Growth Hacking and How to Build Authentic Sustainable Growth - <AUTHOR> http://startup-marketing.com/authentic-growth-hacks/ <comment><USER2> growth hacker.. biggest startup buzz word of 2012</comment>


U.S. warns Americans to leave Japan amid significant increase in Covid-19 cases - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-in-japan-spread-draws-warning-us-embassy-americans-get-out-2020-04-03/ <comment><USER2> And go where? Out of the frying pan, into the fire?</comment>


Ask HN: Is HN going to get better formatting?  - <AUTHOR>

Is there any plan to alter the current text formatting options available on HN to maybe include things like links, lists, and similar?
HN does support some things: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
But unfortunately I've been really spoilt by Reddit's markdown engine in particular but also would be happy with just as I said in-line links and lists.
Also while we are talking about this, do people feel that adding more functionality would be either positive or negative to the community? <comment><USER2> It's not going to happen regardless. I get the impression that as a piece of software, HN is 'finished' in the sense that there will be no more updates for the foreseeable future.</comment>


Music execs stressed over free streaming - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/022411-music-execs-stressed-over-free.html <comment><USER2> Music execs = idiots. Dear music industry, it's time to pivot your business model.

"How can we shift the paradigm back to what it was?" should be "How can we use this new paradigm and make a boatload of cash?"

Any startup knows this.</comment>


Update on DO's 4/11 outage - <AUTHOR> https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/update-on-the-april-11th-sfo2-power-outage/ <comment><AUTHOR> Reading between the lines -- were they drawing enough power that they were no longer N+1 on PDUs, and only found out when one of the PDUs failed?</comment>


How to connect PHP with MySQL - <AUTHOR> http://codereflex.net/how-to-connect-php-with-mysql/

<comment><USER2> This could be useful if there was a lot more information. Right now it is less useful than the official documentation where you at least have a lot of examples. For mysql_query(): <http://es.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql- query.php>

</comment><comment><USER3> Any tutorial that is still using the mysql_* functions instead of the mysqli_* can't be taken seriously.

<http://php.net/manual/en/mysqlinfo.api.choosing.php></comment>


Will This App Disrupt $160B Ad Industry by Replacing Ads with Positive Messages? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/julesschroeder/2016/06/02/will-this-app-disrupt-the-160-billion-ad-industry-by-replacing-ads-with-positive-messages/#3a32a89b1f6d <comment><USER2> Hilarious considering the article is hosted on Forbes, which is littered with horrible advertisements.

<comment><USER3> You're not even allowed to read the article unless you turn off ad-block!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is an ad for some self-help guru.

Someone has re-invented "The Power of Positive Thinking".

</comment><comment><USER5> Horrible idea! I mean... Great Idea! ;)

</comment><comment><USER6> Forbes.... Wont even go there</comment>