EDIT: A follow up: It turns out that there is a slightly hidden and indirect way to abort uploads. Start the program as `showterm -e`, and it will offer you a chance to edit timings before uploading. (This is intended to give you a chance to trim out long pauses.) At that point, if you can cause your editor to abort with a non-zero status, the upload aborts. For Vim users, the gem's author points to exiting with `:cq`.
I'm not sure you finished the piece. The author says this:
Luckily, Twitter has an amazing feature that will
instantly remove negativity from your stream. It's
called UNFOLLOWING. The next time something feels a
bit too snarky: Unfollow that user. Before you know
it, you'll have a really nice place where people have
interesting and quirky conversations.
So you seem to be agreeing with him, not disagreeing.
There's an additional point: People may not realize just how negative the come across on Twitter.
I'm sure some people do, and do so on purpose, and if that's their choice then great. Follow or unfollow.
But if you find yourself turning to Twitter to vent you may not realize that, to many people, all you do is vent and complain. It may only be a small part of your total personality but if that's all you're showing to some people that's what they'll use to judge you.
A corollary to this might be that people should not be so quick to judge others based on some small sampling of their comments or tweets.
There's a very good chance they've said and done much more than what you've just happened to come across on the Intarwebs, and you've only seen a small part of that, and even that has been filtered though specific media and circumstances.
Yup. I do this since I'm used to za in Vim for toggling folds:
# Collapse all threads by default, except if
# there's new mail in one.
unset collapse_unread
folder-hook . "exec collapse-all"
# Toggle collapsed threads with za, like in vim.
bind index za collapse-thread
I also don't know the psych lingo, but I thought right away of the anthropological distinction between cultures of shame[1] (external disapproval from other people) and guilt[2] (internal disapproval from self). On that score, either could work: shame is certainly appropriate here since devs shame each other all the time.
Interesting. The anthropological and psychological definitions aren't really at odds with each other. When you face primarily external disapproval, it's natural to feel "I am bad", because people's outside opinions are not something you can control. When you face internal disapproval, the natural response is "I did something bad", because you know your own reasoning, you have control over it, and you can resolve to do better next time. Same basic principle as "growth mindset vs. fixed mindset". [1]
I'd argue that if devs shame each other all the time, something about your culture is broken. Why? Because the normal response to shame is to want to hide it. You see that in the description of shame vs. guilt societies in the links you provided, where "Shame cultures are typically based on the concepts of pride and honour, and appearances are what counts, as opposed to individual conscience in guilt cultures." Shame is positively correlated with depression, addiction, violence, aggression, bullying, and all sorts of other nasty stuff; guilt is inversely correlated with all of them. [2]
This reminded me of a favorite story of mine about Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon: Pynchon was a student of Nabokov's when he was at Cornell. Years later when Pynchon himself became famous, Nabokov told interviewers that he had no memory of Pynchon as a student. But Vera remembered Pynchon's handwriting. She really was the "course assistant" as this article mentions: she must have done the grading too.
I have a PhD in Classics. My focus was on ancient philosophy, in particular on Epicurean philosophy, in particular on a Roman Epicurean named Lucretius, in particular on Book 3 of his De Rerum Natura, in particular about his arguments against the fear of death in that book, in particular about the structure, formal & logical analysis and evaluation of his argument for the thesis that "death is nothing to us" in the later portion of Book 3. (De Rerum Natura is a Roman philosophical poem from the mid-first century BCE. Lucretius and his poem are getting a lot of press recently because of a book called The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt.)
The linked guide to PhDs made me smile, and it rings true to me for non-sciences. As an undergraduate I was a Comparative Literature major with lots of credits in Latin, Greek and Philosophy. Once I got to graduate school for Classics, my studies became increasingly concentrated in smaller and smaller areas of an already small field (Greco-Roman antiquity).
tl;dr I think literature and philosophy PhDs are also pimples of knowledge.
As for whether or not we expand human knowledge, that depends on how you define "human knowledge" and "expand", I suppose. I think it's charitable to say that (many? some?) people produce PhDs that expand human knowledge of Homer and Dante and James Joyce and Plato and Nietzsche and so on and so on. But of course if your definition of "knowledge" only makes room for numerical or quantifiable or experimental subjects, then you may disagree. I arguably expanded the world's knowledge of De Rerum Natura. My work has been cited at least once that I know of in subsequent work on the Epicureans, and not by me. (That's not just a joke: I remember reading that a large percentage of all research across disciplines is only ever cited again by the original author. I find that depressing.) I've also met a handful of people who tell me that it helped them in some other study.
> Usually Hacker News doesn't let you post the same link more than once.
I believe that's wrong. From what I've seen, I think that that time is also a factor. After some amount of time, you can repost things with exactly the same link and title. And I believe that it's deliberate (the posts are likely to be new to many people since the population turns over to some degree after x amount of time).
And that time period might be at most a month, considering the last post with the exact same link (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5186774 ) predates the current post by 31 days.
