Sure, objectivity is good, but often times difficult decisions have no objectively clear optimal path (eg. there are many good arguments to be made for why MZ should not be replaced, and even time will only evaluate a single path). Emotion has been a useful (though admittedly fallible) cognitive shortcut for our species in those situations.
Geez, a lot of jerks on HN today. jv22222, thanks for making this. You're obviously putting a lot of work into it. I can't say that it particularly interests me at this point, but I'm glad that you and people like you work hard on things and open-source them.
FWIW, when I was figuring out Bitcoin I avoided the paper at first (due to logic similar to yours) but eventually read it because there was a lot of noise in the wiki, etc (may have changed). I found it surprisingly accessible; more so than the vast majority of academic papers I've come across (I have most of an EE degree but little to no formal CS training).
As a counterpoint to some of the views already expressed, I would happily pay for this. I'm planning to take my freelance/consulting business full time starting January, and have become hyper-aware of the importance of my personal network and meeting new people (not even for business opportunities, just to understand a wider cross-section of people in general). I'm also planning to travel a lot and work remotely--in other words, what you are proposing sounds ideally suited to me.
I already signed up for your list, feel free to shoot me an email if you want to know more (its in my profile).
That's awesome Roman (it's Roman, right?), I'm looking forward to it! And yes, Black Chair is going to be my full-time gig, although the website is a major work in progress right now :)
Congrats to the Balsamiq team! To anyone who isn't using Balsamiq yet, do it--an astoundingly useful bit of software. It's difficult to convey just how valuable this tool is for anyone that makes software/website for people to use.
The fact that everyone at the company is friendly and helpful and awesome is a significant bonus.
I'm on the lookout for more very high quality contributors; sticking to their feeds instead of the front page (I still check front and new, just not as often) has greatly increased the value of this site for me.
I don't read pg, because a lot of his comments come across as babysitting HN, which is necessary for him to do, but not something I want to spend my time on.
I believe that what you put before your eyes, becomes what is in your brain, and you can only think about what you've seen before. What you think about is what gets written on your heart, and our actions are based on our heart. So, I value what I put before my eyes pretty heavily and that's why patio11, tptacek, and SatvikBeri are good reads. Danso is really interesting.
patio11 -- Important because he reminds us (me!) about what we're really worth as programmers and beyond that if we want to increase our worth moving bits better isn't the most efficient way to do that.
tptacek -- I don't always agree with him, but I think his world view is probably the most accurate of anyone on HN. The reason why this matters to me, is If I'm being honest with my self, hugely reliant on mental models. I use tptacek as a source of mental models about the world.
danso -- He has some pretty interesting comments, and I find when he does weigh in, it's usually from personal experience. Photography, Journalism, and data are his big topics of interest.
SatvikBeri -- I've never met the guy, but if you can get past his telling of how he saved his employer $2MM in a single year (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4419277) over and over again, which I find very easy, he's worth reading. He doesn't post as much as the others, so I usually check in once a week or so. In a lot ways though, I think the $2MM story, is worth reading over and over again. It holds a lot of wisdom in how to approach business for the nerd-sphere.
I read HN on cell phone about 95% of the time, and have 127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com in my host file, so I just have these guys bookmarked on my cell phone and check in with the top two daily, danso every couple days, and SatvikBeri about once a week.
I also read yummyfajitas and mechanical_fish as well, but far less regularly. Usually, when I see a comment they make, I'll click on their username and read through their comments if I have time.
Yeah I am also of the same opinion about high quality contributors. I have a Hacker News Reader iPhone/iPad app on the market and I just had a feature idea from this.
It would be awesome to tag users as favorites and then view their comments from the home page.
Also it would be beneficial to tag some users as annoyingly political so that their comments get hidden automatically.
One thing to keep in mind is that that comment is what made me start following you in the first place, so it does get folks attention. I wouldn't worry about comment diversity too much, after all I keep coming back!
Patrick, just to be clear: Are the heuristics you're advocating here just something along the lines of "E-mail this user if they haven't touched their account in X days" or is a more in-depth approach required?
