Somebody asked me this question earlier. So I went and counted; it was under 10% (sample of around 100).
I find it interesting that whenever there's a post on HN that's supportive of Google+, the community collectively reacts with extreme skepticism. Just... interesting, that's all.
I'm not sure I read pork's comment as skepticism, necessarily. Rather, I'm more curious as to why, if such a forum is an unmet need, an alternative hasn't managed to gain traction while Google+, at least in the author's opinion, has.
I wonder if Google, having a fair number of CS researchers, might be able to get past critical mass / escape velocity / choice analogy by simply starting with its internal users and growing organically from there. You have to have something for the community to nucleate around.
I suspect it has to do with farmville. I can't say for sure, but I hazard to guess that CS researchers don't play farmville and probably prefer not to mingle with those who do.
I don't like reading articles on Google+. The typography is unpleasant.
And it's not the pseudonyms that lead to incivilities, it's the lack of a good moderator system. Google seems to hope to not have to develop such a system if they enforce real names, but bad people don't care about their reputation.
Why can't an honest researcher delete unproductive and hostile criticism? If their criticism really needs to be read, they can go and post it on their own blog. Comments are a way to allow participation, but nothing requires them to be a free for all.
I'm curious what you don't think is good from the moderation system in Google+? You can block/report any one, report any comment, and remove any comment from your own posts.
Building an online community is difficult. If anyone has good research papers that have analyzed online communities and has successfully predicted the culture of an online community at its inception, please let me know..
Online communities are the future, but no truly knows how to build one... or build a culture. Sure, you can have privacy settings, a good brand, and video chat, but those are all indirect contributors to what the community will become. None of them dictate (1) who will use it (2) how people will use it (3) and which audience will be attracted to the community.
She's not precisely on point, but if you're curious start by reading danah boyd's work: http://www.danah.org/papers/ . The stuff at the top mostly deals with teenagers, but her older papers deal with online communities in general.
Is it too much to ask LaTeX aficionados to use ASCII symbols where LaTeX isn't supported, or does using "$\mapsto$" instead of "-->" give the writer more academic street cred?
Probably not too much to ask, but more difficult than you'd expect. LaTeX is one of the best, most expressive ways to type mathematical expressions... and once you've spent several years in grad school doing so, it becomes second nature. You actually have to think about ascii-fying it instead of just typing $...$ expressions. :-)
1) I'm often copy/pasting from publications, and the PDF-rendered glyphs don't turn into proper unicode either (OSX, Preview, paste to Firefox, at least)
2) There are conventional differences between the different arrows such as using a arrow with or without a superscript star versus single-bar down versus double-bar down, etc. and trying to render those in ASCII would be quite confusing for the reader and author. Each of them have semantic meanings, and putting in what is usually used as a single-step arrow in a big-step semantics because you lack the glyphs makes an experienced reader's head hurt.
Extensions exist that convert LaTeX to images on-the-fly.
And in a lot of cases (∄ comes to mind) there's just no good ASCIIfication, so inline LaTeX is almost as good as anything else even for people without those extensions.
The irony (from his own follow-up comment):
"Guys, no more offtopic comments, even if you're only replying to existing offtopic comments. Thanks for understanding."
Isn't the whole point of publishing visibility?
I can understand some intermediate discussions will benefit from team exclusivity but this is not anything IRC channels, private mailing lists or forums can't already provide.
To me, OP's post comes across as fluffing G+. Take it with a grain of salt.
The only problem with your classification is that nerd and academic social groups do not have a high enough social standing with normal people to count as elite. Just try bragging about being a Linux kernel hacker at your next party and see how well that impresses people.
Just try bragging about being a Linux kernel hacker at your next party and see how well that impresses people.
Hypothetical method: "I write code that powers cell phones, TVs, and web sites across the planet. Chances are good you have something I made in your pocket."
Tested to work, sir. When women ask me what I do, I simply tell 'em: I'm a hacker. Or when I did online marketing: I convince old people to buy viagra.
So now you just have to endow the majority of the population with the same level of curiosity and desire for open critical discourse as a computer scientist. Have fun with that.
tl;dr - Google+ is uniquely suited as a discussion forum for small groups doing original computer science research because it is private, and we should expect Google+ to gain popularity among CS researchers.
I disagree. I'm not sure Google+ is uniquely suited for anything, but I am sure I could make an equally convincing argument for mailing lists or fuller-featured discussion boards as better platforms for discussion. The article is simplistic.
One factor was "good timing", but there is no evidence for that - I'm not sure it's even an arguable point. One factor was "the inability to be anonymous", which is also true of mailing lists, many discussion forums, and even blogs with certain posting guidelines. One was the "share" feature which, as a feature, is pretty much intrinsic to hypertext.
Google+ trumped up the circles feature as a way to manage privacy settings. My (admittedly critical) reading of your post makes me think that's the only feature here worth discussing, and I don't think it alone is responsible for greatly improved conversations, especially when compared to the many other options for online discussion, and certainly not among computer scientists specifically.
A better explanation is Google's already pervasive presence (especially among computer scientists), and their monopolistic method of forcing Google+ on, for instance, GMail users. I'm not sure there are any technical decisions they made to support your thesis that their platform is uniquely suited for anything really.
I've noticed a simular thing in the open hardware area, especially 3D printing. I don't know if it's something unique to G+, or just that there's more early-adopter-types using it, but since I started using it a year or so ago I've been introduced to many interesting folks in the 3D printing space and had fantastically productive and focused conversations.
Hmm, something tells me L&B would be a bit peeved if all G+ ends up being is the "default medium" for "communication for actual research collaboration."
It's interesting to see how different social networks tend to heavily favor certain topics of discussion. For example, I have yet to find intellectual discussions on my Facebook friend feed...then again, that probably says more about my friends than about Facebook ;-)
OP here. I'm wondering if parent commented in the wrong thread or something. This is completely irrelevant to what I was saying. You somehow seem to think I was complaining that it is hard to publish papers. No, that wasn't even remotely, _remotely_ related to what I was saying. The rest of my post is even less related.
I would like to hear some actual commentary on the issues I raised. If you have a problem with CS research in general, that's fine; I suggest you do a separate post about it. Thanks.
I think you misread and/or misinterpreted OP's point and then jumped on a smug rant on a topic that was honestly quite irrelevant. Later came these repeated and almost manic allegations of some secret cabal of MODs (using your capitalization) who are after you. And then the repeated claims that the wretched lot of ungrateful CS profs should justly suffer, now that they do not have your help to drag them out of their wretched mess.
It would also help if you could be less dramatic please. No, even though you think so, it is not really a "scandal".
Though I downvoted you for your tone, for sounding too full of yourself, harping on personal issues that I think were irrelevant and for your unfounded insistence about personal persecution, I have to admit that the puerile delusion of grandeur on display was mildly amusing and continues to amuse me. FYI I am just a random unregular on HN. No MOD this. You complained that downvoters did not leave explanatory comments, well, your tone does not really encourage that behavior. Remember it is always a tradeoff. People will evaluate whether it is worth enough to engage in the discussion.
Your so called "help" amounted to a rant about your knowledge about measure theory and anecdotes about how you got yourself published, what I gather in journals, and the ignorance and/or the lack of background of the editors/reviewers (I gather) in continuous math.
Its great that you have learned some measure theory and real analysis. But assertions of the like, if I may put it in my own words, "I know measure theory. Learn about conditional expectation and Radon-Nikodym theorem and Shannon's work you bumbling fools" does not exactly constitute help or a contribution or as you put it "I did a great service to some lost CS profs".
On other hand if you can show that your favorite Neveu calculus can be proved sound according to some computable logic, that would indeed be helpful. Dont let your knowledge in continuous math let you believe that it has never occurred to computer theorists to "mathematize" CS. Computer science (as opposed to engineering or practice) is after all a branch of mathematics. The major chunk of real analysis cant be used in CS because no one yet has a proof that it is sound. Non standard analysis is field that is developing tools so that those concepts can be built ground up keeping computability and soundness in mind.
As you have passive aggressively conjectured, a lot indeed has changed in the last 5~6 years in CS publishing and publishing in journals and conferences are a lot different. For example, to follow up on your own example, you wouldn't have had a chance to address the editor or reviewers queries in a conference. This is regardless of whose deficiency it was, such a submission will just get dropped and in the competitive conferences it takes no more than one less than flattering review to ensure a rejection.
> I think you misread and/or misinterpreted OP's point
His "point" was not clear: What was more important in the article, that there was a Google+ community discussing some "problems" or the "problems" he listed of concern to that community?
The leading problem listed was difficulty in getting published, and I suggested a way to get published: Do well on "new, correct, and significant" and, in particular, 'mathematize' the field.
Responding to that "problem" was fully appropriate.
In more detail, one of the best ways to mathematize CS is more in probability, especially as it connects with 'information'. It does connect; trust me on that one.
That was a good and helpful suggestion and should have been welcome.
> Later came these repeated and almost manic allegations of some secret cabal of MODs (using your capitalization) who are after you.
There's a LOT of evidence that some MODs are angry with me and for the past month or so have been attacking me personally. For several reasons I've listed on this thread, much of the downvoting had to be from MODs. Apparently HN is a PG PC sandbox, and MODs will downvote anything they feel violates the PC norms of HN and do so without responding.
PG won't respond to deny this.
I would have been a fool to ignore the clear evidence that I was being attacked and a wuss not to defend myself. It's a scandal for HN, and PG has not responded.
On another user ID I was 'hell banned' here at HN.
Today I finally responded in plain terms to defend myself. If by defending myself I get banned from HN, then so be it. But for now the HN community will see that HN attacks some users personally.
I tried to help CS researchers get published. My claim, easy enough to understand, is that the research paradigm of CS is largely bankrupt, and my recommendation is to further mathematize the field. They are in a "wretched mess" if only from their statement of their "problem".
> puerile delusion of grandeur on display was mildly amusing and continues to amuse me
Insulting nonsense. There is no delusion involved. I was quite apparently attacked and have been several times for about a month now. It's personal, not technical or anything else.
> if I may put it in my own words
My own words for my own statement were much more appropriate: To repeat, CS is close to 'information technology', and there 'information' should be taken seriously mathematically. The R-N theorem is one important approach.
The "lack of background" of the Editors in Chief and chaired professors of computer science was surprising and shocking. I used some group theory and probability based on measure theory and got a new family of statistical hypothesis tests both multidimensional and distribution-free and applied them to ASAP detection of anomalies in server farms and networks, a good CS problem, and bluntly too much of the best of the CS community couldn't handle the math.
So, there is a big, huge gap between some of the best of current CS and what it would take to do at all well applying some 'modern probability' to some CS problems. Due to this gap, my suggestion to learn the math is appropriate and should be seen as helpful.
In simple terms, if a student wants a research career in CS, then as an undergraduate it is much more important for them to major in math than CS. And likely similarly at the Master's level. That is a surprising point but potentially quite helpful and should be welcome.
"On other hand if you can show that your favorite Neveu calculus can be proved sound according to some computable logic, that would indeed be helpful."
Nonsense. Neveu is based just on set theory, axiomatic set theory if you wish, the foundations as in Bourbaki if you wish, or P. Suppes, essentially the same as all of math for the past 100 years or so. For the importance of that material, there is nothing anyone should have to "prove". 'Computability' is not directly relevant.
> For example, to follow up on your own example, ... such a submission will just get dropped
I never had a submission dropped in the sense of 'rejected'. For the paper in question, I sent copies to some journals and just asked if they would like a formal submission. Some journal Editors in Chief said that their journal couldn't review the math. With one such I wrote tutorials before he gave up. So, I didn't make a formal submission and, thus, never got rejected or "dropped".
One journal welcomed a formal submission, and we went forward. They had problems getting reviewers who could read the paper, and reluctantly I suggested a qualified friend who did a good review. Eventually the Editor gave up, and for more reviews apparently the Editor in Chief walked the paper around his campus, had the CS guys say the problem was good and had some math guys say the math was good, and the paper was accepted, in an archival journal. I was invited to present the paper at a conference but declined. I just wanted to publish the thing and be done with it; I had no desire to go to a conference.
It's clear: In being mathematized, the CS community is very short on the needed math. I'm sure it's happened before, e.g., Hamming and the start of coding theory based on finite field theory, likely poorly known in the CS community then. For a researcher with the math, there are important CS problems that can be solved fairly easily just sitting there and, thus, are good research opportunities.
E.g., in Feller II is renewal theory, and it has some obvious applications to a lot that goes on in a server farm or network. For more, in Neveu is martingale theory, and there is one of the strongest inequalities in math (knock off the strong law of large numbers in one line) and more, and it's easy to find martingales in nearly any stochastic system. Should be able to get some nice, new, strong inequalities in many algorithms and processes important in CS. There's plenty that can be done with stochastic optimal control. There are the applications of 'machine learning', that is, statistics done very badly, and can solve the problems much better with statistics done well.
For the paper I wrote, there's much more that could be done; one could run off a dozen or so papers as a 'stream' in roughly the same direction by changing some of the assumptions better to fit various real situations.
So, sure, I'm suggesting some 'field crossing', long known to be a good approach to 'innovation'.
Moreover I'm suggesting exploiting some of the best, rock solid math of the last century. So this is a very sound, conservative suggestion.
That the CS community is very short on this math is a big point and a good research direction for anyone wanting to publish in CS.
Indeed, as is painfully obvious, CS has been taking intuitive and heuristic approaches far too seriously and neglecting solid math approaches. This situation makes CS look dumb, but the flip side is a terrific opportunity.
Again, with the right math from the last century, now should be able to knock off important CS problems by the dozens like shooting fish in a barrel.
HN and you don't like this remark. Fine with me.
I tried to offer some help, but you don't want to hear it and want to criticize me for offering. Fine: I won't offer. I've already deleted the post.
With your remark on 'computability', there's no more reason to respond to you.
I wrote a good post. The CS community lost out.
Can lead a horse to water but can't make him drink.
To you perhaps. But others did not seem to have a problem with it. [1]
> PG won't respond to deny this.
I would hazard a guess that pg has better and more fulfilling things to do.
> That was a good and helpful suggestion
> I wrote a good post. The CS community lost out.
> my outline said to 'mathematize' CS. That suggestion is potentially earth shaking
The question is, is there anybody else who thinks so. The only praises, "earth shaking" or otherwise, that your comment got seems to be from you.
> CS profs can struggle on their own to get published without my help.
A delusion of grandeur couldn't be more apparent.
It is bit if of a bummer if in a discussion about CS theory you are not willing to address computability. Yes there are axiomatic basis to probability theory, but the question is: are those axioms sound, if so, then prove it. It will be a huge contribution and will have no trouble getting accepted if its correct.
No first order logic or equivalent and (axiomatic set theory is one) has the power to capture the whole real line. Non-standard analysis is the only one that tries to approach analysis with computable numbers.
Trust me, there is more to CS than real analysis and measure theory. I am sure you have heard of this aphorism about having one hammer and seeing only nails. Gratuitous unsolicited and smug advice that is not germane to the post, that too offered without understanding the field does no one any favors. If you delve into formal methods in CS you will actually encounter a lot of these methods that you are pointing to. Ask any CS theorist and they probably own the two volumes of Feller and will wax eloquently about them.
You are, yet, again extrapolating (to conferences) from your experiences with some journal. You are also contradicting yourself. If I understood you correctly, your main claim was that, what's stopping people from getting published is insufficient grounding in math. Then you give an example of your own submission that was mathematical but met resistance when you tried to publish it in a journal. Do remember journals have lower thresholds and higher acceptance rates than conferences.
1: Often the desire to push yourself on others can get in the way of comprehension.
All good advice - operator theory in various guises is ubiquitous in applications but certainly not something many discern even through grad school in CS.
Probably not much point trying to convince people on HN though - having perhaps suffered through an abysmal 'calculus' sequence they are not very receptive to the message that we have barely tapped practical consequences 50 year old mathematics.
You should perhaps do a stand alone blog - even on google plus!
This post has been downvoted because it is not relevant to the discussion started by the OP. Instead it addresses a minor detail found within that OP. Also, because it is so long and also discusses your relationship to the HN site moderators, it is very much off-topic.
Had you discussed the suitability of G+ for academic discourse or reasons why it is facilitating such discussion among CS researchers, then it would not have been downvoted.
>On another user ID I was 'hell banned' here at HN.
Clearly, you learned nothing. There just might have been a reason for that initial ban. As I've already stated, there's probably a good reason why PG doesn't reply to you (unfounded accusations, poor tone, being full of yourself and vaguely touting credentials while hiding behind anonymity), registering multiple accounts to evade a ban, etc.
If your submissions are so awesome, submit them here and let them stand on their own. At this point, you're screaming "I AM RIGHT" and are failing to articulate either your point, or any believability for your credentials (I suspect in part it's because you recognize that your brash attitude may not be winning you friends).
How can anyone be attacking you personally? No one knows who you are. You're being judged on the tone of your posts. Everyone here is telling you that, yet you have your fingers in your ears and you're yelling "I'm being persecuted". No one here is feeling sorry for you.
"Poor, poor CS profs: They can't get their research papers published. "
This does not seem to be the OP's complaint, and I am quite surprised that this is what it seemed like to you. I am not a native speaker of English, and so it is quite possible that I missed this nuance. So:
Which part of the original post implies that _this_ is the OP's lament?
That lament was one of the leading topics in the Google+ community that was the the subject of the article.
Yes, the article was mostly about the community and not the issues of the community. But the article did list some of the leading issues of the community, and I responded to one of them. Uh, the issues of that community are more important than just the existence of the community! So it should have been appropriate for me to have commented on one of the issues of the community.
Thanks for that clarification. If I may trouble you once more,
I do see a list of the issues of the community in that article, set apart in slanted font. As far as I can see, the issue which you highlighted in your comment here is not present in that list. Which among the listed issues, in your opinion, implies that they "can't get their research papers published" ?
"I can’t speak for other disciplines, but within computer science, I’ve always felt that these meta discussions were inadequate — in terms of volume, vigor, and format. They happened mostly at conferences were largely limited to more senior/well-connected researchers, and lagged behind some of the serious problems that have accumulated such as restrictive publisher copyrights and very low acceptance rates at journals and conferences."
So, the claim here I noticed was:
"some of the serious problems that have accumulated such as ... very low acceptance rates at journals and conferences."
So, a big topic in that community was a "serious" problem getting published. So, I outlined how to get published. Simple.
In a word, my outline said to 'mathematize' CS. That suggestion is potentially earth shaking, likely not already in the community, and should be a welcome contribution.
So you read "very low acceptance rates" to mean : "Alas, very few of our papers meet the criteria for publication". And hence the exhortation to produce novel, correct, and significant work if they want to get published.
You couldn't be more wrong.
The "very low acceptance rate" which the OP laments means the exact opposite of what you seem to have understood. Namely: In most of the better CS conferences and journals, the number of submissions which make or exceed the grade is so _large_ compared to the number of available slots for publication that a significant amount of "novel, correct, and significant" work has to be routinely rejected. Just because the conference/journal has its physical limitations. It is a problem of plenty, not of scarcity. As an example, see the Forward of the proceedings of last year's STACS [1] :
"The STACS 2011 call for papers led to 271 submissions from 45 countries. ... there were intense and interesting discussions. The overall very high quality of the submissions made the selection a difficult task."
And no, they are not saying this for form's sake. The story is similar for the other highly rated conferences. This is common knowledge in the respective communities, and often mentioned in the prefaces to their proceedings.
This difficulty in getting _good_ work published of course has a deleterious impact on research and on the growth of the community, and the OP was lamenting _this_. At least this is the impression I got from reading "low acceptance rates".
Off topic: STACS is one of the few CS conferences which publish their proceedings free online under a Creative Commons license.
It's also not only scarcity, but academic-incentives-driven artificial scarcity: in the U.S. especially, many advancement committees have started using acceptance rate as a misguided proxy for "conference quality". So if you want people to see publishing in your conference as a valuable addition to their CVs, you need to have a <30% acceptance rate, preferably more like 10-15%, so you can be counted as a "very selective" conference. This is a bit silly, because acceptance rates are hugely influenced by submission pool, but it's how the institutional system currently works.
> The main criteria for research work are "new, correct, and significant". Do well on all three of these and have NO PROBLEMS getting reviewed and published.
So, I said that have to "do well".
So your
> You couldn't be more wrong.
is a bit strong.
I've published maybe a dozen papers, and I've never had a paper rejected or needing significant revision.
I've never been interested in publishing, and maybe the situation has changed a lot in the last few years while I've being doing other things.
Whatever, my original post to help CS profs get published was not wanted, and I've deleted it. The CS profs can struggle on their own.
You rant would have had a lot more credibility if, here in a discussion in no small part about pseudonymity, you weren't speaking under cover of a pseudonym.
Perhaps you should look up the term rant as it's used in the CS community. It's hardly an insult.
You didn't seem to respond to my point. This article is largely about Google+'s anti-pseudonymity and its effect on the CS academic community. I dunno if I buy all that, but there's a certain irony to you claiming to have the CS cred to dis this guy while speaking under a pseudonym. Come out of the closet!
IAAI, JOTA, and JIS are a far cry from AAAI, PAMI, and JMLR. I've published in like venues: but citing them doesn't help your Mr. Big Shot stance all that much. :-)
"Far cry" in what sense? The AAAI IAAI conference was about the best could expect from the AAAI.
I published in JIS because it has a wider audience than, say, another Elsevier journal on 'theoretical computer scince' or some such, which I did consider.
For JOTA, I contend that such applied math is closer to the important future of CS than nearly any journal in CS. If I am correct here, and my theme in my post was that CS needs to 'mathematize', then I have been helpful.
There's no "Big Shot", another insult, involved. I just listed where I got published. From the article, one of the leading topics on the Google+ community was the difficulty of getting CS published, and I indicated that I had essentially been successful even though I wasn't much interested.
For the academic 'pecking order' of the journals, I have never cared since I've never had any academic aspirations.
But for someone having trouble getting published, the journals I listed are a big step up from no publications. So, if they can do what I did, then they would be ahead. So, my advice should have been seen as helpful, which was clearly the intention.
Apropos of nothing: I may learn things from HilbertSpace's comments, I may agree or disagree with them... but I never have a problem identifying them, usually from the first sentence.
I've had my fair share of comments being downmodded without any retort, meaningful or no, and have edited those posts asking for retorts as well in the past.
However, I have no illusion of a conspiracy against me. I'm not an "HN Mod" - in fact, I'm a very lightweight contributor. I've posted a handful of stories, but mostly just comment on things -- and my comments are often against the current here -- but I have the ability to downvote. Oh, and I can change the color of the bar at the top of the HN front page. It's not some elevated privilege enjoyed by the few.
You're being downvoted into oblivion because you're over-reacting, to the point where not knowing you outside these posts you've made now, I suggest you take a little walk away from the computer/internet. It's really not that important dude.
For what its worth, downvotes aren't undoable here, and I've fat fingered the button a few times when meaning to upvote on touch screen devices. If you're getting random unexplained single downvotes, its possible someone else did that and didn't realise. I'd imagine such issues explain a significant number of cases where people go from 1 to 0 without anything downvote worthy.
It'd be nice if I could disable the downvote button while on my phone, as I've given almost as many unintentional downvotes as intentional ones. Or at least have a minute to change the vote after submitting.
(Obviously this doesn't explain bulk downvotes or anything of that kind)
This is NOT nearly the first time. There is a pattern, and the only reasonable explanation is that one or more HN MODs just do NOT like a lot of my posts and jump to downvote ASAP with anger.
A guess that fits the facts of what they don't like is anything critical of any other media outlet, anything about CS, or anything about venture capital. But it is necessary to guess since the downvoters essentially never respond to the substance of my posts. The situation has clearly become personal for them and, then, me.
You can be critical of things without being irrational about it. As an example, note my edit your post:
"This isn't the first time. One or more people at HN do not like my posts and downvote them. I can only guess at why I'm downvoted, since often times the downvoters do not respond my posts."
It's concise, does not make any assumptions, avoids CAPS LOCK except where abbreviating, doesn't call anyone a chickenshit, and otherwise gets right to the point. I'm pretty sure that if your replies were more like that than "MYSTERIOUS SITE MODERATORS ARE CHICKENSHITS WHO ARE OUT TO GET ME" you would end up with less downvotes.
I'm with you - it can feel frustrating when you post something, and then lose karma without any rhetorical exchange about why. Sometimes you can ask for an explanation and actually get a response, but sometimes you're just left hanging. Don't sweat it, and keep moving.
I always know when my posts will be downvoted, and I don't understand why anyone else would have trouble identifying the same. The community here has its norms of behavior. When you violate one of them, expect to get the karma smacked out of you.
I doubt it's personal. Most of us upvote useful signal (like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3420657, which has not been grayed out by a negative score) and downvote useless noise (like any yelling about voting) regardless of who wrote it.
The attacks are from downvoting, not upvoting. Only a small fraction of HN users can downvote. With so much downvoting, it has to be the MODs who are doing it. It's so consistent that it's a personal attack on me.
What personal mod attacks are you talking about? You come across as schizophrenic. Users with enough karma can downvote posts. I downvoted your sub-replies because they lack a point or relevancy, you're attacking users and overall being belligerent.
Not only that, but you demand coherent replies, yet failed to respond to the top comment reply that was courteous enough to reply to you.
My original post was downvoted within minutes of when I posted it, and there was no reply. This is NOT nearly the first time. There is a pattern, and I'd be a fool not to conclude that one or more HN MODS are personally angry at me.
"schizophrenic"? Total nonsense; look up the meaning of the word, a very specific medical term. Not even paranoid. I'm just defending myself against a pattern over the past few months at HN. There is a pattern of my being attacked, and this one post is just the most recent example.
As far as I can tell, I'm responding to every response that can use a response.
I've more than once asked PG to correct this. We will see what he does. This situation is a scandal at HN.
The post you just replied to (my post, that is) has been to -2 and back. I have posts downvoted all of the time. I think you severely underestimate the number of active users with the ability to downvote.
There's probably a reason that PG hasn't replied to you.
I'm just a random reader and member of the community, and I haven't consciously down-voted you in the past, but I absolutely down-voted and flagged this comment, and the one in response to Knieveltech.
I don't know who you are, I don't have anything against you, and I haven't voted either way on your main comment, but I really don't think such name-calling and vitriol are appropriate or have any place in a community I would want to be a part of. I don't think such comments add to the discussion, or are in line with the guidelines linked in the site's footer. So I've voted according.
Hopefully that helps explain where some of the down-votes are coming from.
I was attacked, downvoted, for my main comment, and then defended myself. This is NOT nearly the first time for such. Usually the result of the downvote is to send my comment to the end of the thread where it is effectively lost, which is clearly the intention of the MOD.
Why a MOD? Because only a small fraction of the users can downvote, and users instead of the MOD attacking me personally write rebuttals. So far I have not a single rebuttal to any of the content of my original post. I did a great service to some lost CS profs -- outlined for them how to publish and, then, got attacked by a MOD.
Then I defended myself. You found my defense offensive. It was, but not nearly as much as that of the attack of the MOD.
I've never ever heard of a "mod" affecting comments or somehow modifying the karma of a given comment. I'm sure that PG would not give a mod that power (though, he does alone hell-bans which I find in poor taste considering how many legitimate comments I've seen dead-on-arrival).
Because there is a pattern that would not apply to the relatively random users and needs a very persistent user, that is, a MOD. Because the downvotes happen QUICKLY, as if from a MOD. Because the downvotes don't come with replies. Because only a small fraction of users can downvote. Because part of the pattern of what gets downvoted is material that is relatively advanced technically and, really, a challenge to CS.
My original post was a nice contribution to CS people having trouble getting published. But, if people don't like such a contribution, then they won't have it. So, I deleted it. It's gone. The CS profs can continue to struggle to publish without my help.
You dismiss the possibility that your tone is consistently offensive. Also, you perhaps underestimate the amount of traffic HN generates.
"The CS profs can continue to struggle to publish without my help."
This is emblematic of what I find grating in your writing style (and why I downvoted the parent post). In a single sentence you have managed to communicate (intentionally or otherwise) a sense of hubris and entitlement.
I'm sorry to hear this, but it's possible that the mods aren't doing this out of malice.
I used to help out HN by going to the new page and flagging what I thought was off topic content. My reward for this was to have my flagging privliges taken away :)
The unfortunate reality is that when you are a mod it's far easier to punish than it is to educate, especially when you're a volunteer.
early in the article was that the 'community' had a "serious problem" which was getting published. So I outlined how to get published, and that should have been a welcome contribution.
It wasn't very clear in the article if the article was mostly about the community or the 'problems' of the community. Whatever, I gave a solution to what seemed in the article to be the most important "problem" of the community.
But my solution wasn't welcome, so I deleted it. CS profs can struggle on their own to get published without my help.
