So I want to quit. The community by and large is good, so I will be a lurker still. But I shall not be down voted.

PS: Would hate to bother PG with this. Have a lot of respect for him. So request any other admins to just remove my account. After deleting all my posts.

Are you also going to stamp your foot and pout too?

How silly to quit something you clearly enjoy and see value in for something as mind-numbingly trivial as karma--

You simply cannot contribute to any community without the maturity to handle the diversity of other people's opinions and views. Some people here will down vote you for something as simple as beginning a sentence with 'but' or using 'a lot' for anything other than an auction.

Vote up, vote down, the sun" will shine tomorrow.

Which is odd because 'a lot' is correct.

Relax, why do you care about karma so much? Make your comments, and forget about them. If you get downvoted, you might want to think about why, but acting on it (and throwing a tantrum about it, which this is, basically) is pointless.

Just comment when you feel like it, try to add something to the discussion when you do, and forget about the rest...

Typically, I don't have a tough time. As I talk to people on the Internet, as if I would talk to them in real life. I don't take advantage of the anonymity. You can see all my prev comments as a proof.

I maintain: down-voting, should only be used for spammers, or for clearly defined things (like profanity being used etc.) . As it does feel quite insulting, to be down-voted. The up-votes, itself, can handle everything.

In any case, I am not really upset now, or anything (thanks for trying to make me stay, as a commenter, in good cheer) :)

You can consider, this as my way of protesting, about things I don't agree with it. (And I stand to gain, no advantage, out of this as I have been anonymous, on this from the beginning...).

But the reality is, downvoting goes wrong sometimes. That shouldn't be such a big deal, though. It works most of the time. Just stick around and you'll see.

If you’re going for the sympathy vote you should go easy on the entitlement.

At the risk of being sounding judgmental on other people, I will still say, that his now leading a retired(ish) life doesn't jell well with the story of a person, who can do such heroics (like putting a job needed board, on his chest and standing the whole day).

Again, apologize for being preachy, life is a journey, and stagnating at any point, doesn't help...I am about as old as him...have had my share of moderate successes in life... looking for more...some of the best code I've written in my life has been in the past couple of years...look to write lots more ...:)

The downvoted comment has an unrehearsed, rambling air to it. Frequent comma splices and mis- and overuse of ellipsis (…) don’t help.

The writer is responsible for presenting their ideas effectively. It’s a common courtesy to spare the reader from deciphering a first draft of your ideas.

So my role models are people like Vishy Anand, who at 41, is still the world chess champion (I believe, hacking is also as energy-needing as playing chess)...

And BTW, Do you know, Hrithik Roshan (Indian Movie Star) has been struggling through an acute stuttering problem, since he was a child. In an interview of his I saw, he was saying he practices on his vocals for about an hour or two daily. Also he occasionally did stuff like: Once he had to do a stage show in Dubai, he shut himself in a cabinet, and screamed at top of his voice. The reason he did it was, so as to not alarm the other people in the hotel.

1) Am I the only one thinking, that some of the terms used to describe introverts: "guarded," "loner," "reserved," "taciturn," "self-contained," "private", have since long been stopped to be considered as negatives?

2) Think, Introverts easily command more respect, on an average, than extroverts (no data to back this up. Just my perception). Even extroverts, based on my anecdotal experiences, regard introverts with a lot of respect, as high achievers often tend to be introverted.

3) I like the definition though: "introverts are people who find other people tiring"

4) Think, >=70% ppl on HN are introverts. [ A poll could confirm this ... or break this :) ]

But I think among people who don't have a particularly serious/accomplished air going for them, extraverts get seen more positively by default. Even if both are seen as sort of time-wasting, somehow "wastes his time drinking and telling stories in bars" gets ranked higher than "wastes his time at home playing videogames".

It's not often that so much can be wrapped up in just 4 words.

Also this is a lesson in on how to have only loosely-coupled relations/dependencies with other companies (particularly, if they are big).

When need to go for tightly-coupled ones dependencies, expect it to break, and have a back-up plan.

1. Get some million tweets from twitter API (each tweet is exactly like what the article describes as a 'document')

2. After ignoring common words (e.g. 'a', 'an', 'the' ... ) in a tweet , start assigning some kind of relevance rank to all the other word pairs found in the tweet e.g. its likely that 'Cricket' and 'Sachin' (Or 'NBA' and <top NBA player) will both increase each other's relevance rank, WRT to each-other.

3. Process all the tweets like this, while maintaining the output of step 2 in a most suitable data structure. You would also need to start dropping word-pairs (to avoid having the problem of storing Million-C-2 words! ) based on some logic/heuristic.

4. If we have a good logic for having reasonably not-big storage (by avoiding the million-c-2 explosion), then what we have is at the end of processing: A simple look up of a million words, where each word has its 'top' max_allowed(k) semantic words.

PS: The most complex piece in the approach is to come out with a solution for dropping word-pairs (in step 3)

  But can't imagine how reduce (of map-reduce) can help in dropping of word-pairs (i.e. in Step 3)

I used a binary split and due to the sparseness of the data (and the uninsightfulness of my algorithm) didn't run into too many spurious drop cases. But the implementation I posted is very basic and shows my lack of background in NLP-related pursuits -- I'm lucky it did anything useful at all :)

To grant him some benefit, in his last point he did say, to take his advice too with a "pinch of salt".