Byrne Hobart

> Possibly for what HN calls "middlebrow dismissal" - wandering in and dismissing the article with blindingly obvious issues ("probably caused by the sedatives, immobilization" etc) as if professional medical researchers wouldn't have thought of them. They plainly need a clear-eyed HN reader on staff to help them. That term is very apt. I found this blog post about it, which I think really hits the nail on the head, too: http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissals-so-tempt… > Paul Graham, News.YC’s moderator emeritus, says that “The defining quality of the middlebrow dismissal is that it’s a cache dump of the writer’s prejudices…” This probably explains why they’re so common. It’s natural to see any news story as confirmation of your existing prejudices—but it’s easy to read confirmation where it’s not there. So it’s easy to see Groupon or Zynga as a “failure” for being worth merely a couple billion dollars when they were once worth ten billion plus apiece. (You could get pretty rich failing like that a few times.) > But the real driver is not just that it’s easy to misread a story as confirming your beliefs. It’s that the alternative is to read a story and realize you were wrong. And since a middlebrow dismissal is a dismissal of something, it’s generally a dismissal of something that disagrees with the reader’s bias.

A little SEO is worth it, whether or not you know what you're doing. You can read the free stuff on SEOMoz to get a good idea of best practices. Essentially, SEO is a way to showcase your content so it's more obvious to search engines that your site is about whatever it's about. That means: * Fresh content. * Titles and subtitles relevant to what you're talking about (no "mystery meat" headlines -- if you're writing about website usability, say "Website usability," not "The business mistake that could cost your customers"). * A reasonable amount of self-promotion: if you know what you've written could help someone, tell them so; if you see a blog that you like, ask to write a guest post. * In every online interaction, make sure people see that you know what you're talking about -- and make it clear that for the good stuff, they have to pay. I write a blog about SEO copywriting: http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/ Read it for more.

Not true. A strong effect can be meaningful for small n. This is well known from power analysis: https://statisticsbyjim.com/hypothesis-testing/sample-size-power-analy… I also think middlebrow dismissals are discouraged on HN: http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissals-so-tempt…

Middle brow dismissal. It’s like the people who dismiss productivity advice as all being the same when the reason it’s mostly the same is it works and the doing it is the hard part. > Paul Graham, News.YC’s moderator emeritus, says that “The defining quality of the middlebrow dismissal is that it’s a cache dump of the writer’s prejudices…” This probably explains why they’re so common. It’s natural to see any news story as confirmation of your existing prejudices—but it’s easy to read confirmation where it’s not there. http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissals-so-tempt…

I think this link answers it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5072224 This is pretty good, too: http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissals-so-tempt…

> Wow, does the top comment always have to be cynical? Middlebrow dismissals are a hacker news staple. http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissals-so-tempt…

Ah yes, the ubiquitous middlebrow dismissal (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920 http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissals-so-tempt… "As a non-kernal guy" gives it away immediately.

It sure is. It even originated here on Hacker news. http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissals-so-tempt…

Possible answer for #3: http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/facebook-is-profitable-again/

If that was your intention, simply saying "I didn't find this talk useful" would suffice. It's not necessary to say that "Rich Hickey doesn't understand type theory". I would say that "X doesn't understand type theory" is becoming a common form of "middlebrow dismissal" [1], which is discouraged on HN. And that's exactly the scenario you described in proto3 - now every field could be encoded as a Maybe. No, in protobufs, the presence of fields is checked at runtime, not compile time. So it's closer to a Clojure map (where every field is optional) than a Haskell Maybe. This is true even though Google is using statically typed languages (C++ and Java). It would be true even if Google were using OCaml or Haskell, because you can't recompile and deploy every binary in your service at once (think dozens or even hundreds of different server binaries/batch jobs, some of which haven't been redeployed in 6-18 months.) This is an extreme case of what Hickey is talking about, but it demonstrates its truth. I don't find any relationship between types and anything I understand as "runtime behavior". Look up the concept of "type erasure", which occurs in many languages, including Haskell as I understand it. Or to be more concrete, compare how C++ does downcasting with how Java does it. Or look at how Java implements generics / parameterized types. [1] http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissals-so-tempt…