Here's what you do:

Gather as many friends as you can and get an idea of where the toilet is when the room is vacant. Wait off to the side until the restroom is occupied, ideally by someone who looks like they had to settle.

Completely surround the room and stare towards the toilet. Make sure some of you are licking their lips, raising their eyebrows or slowly groping themselves. Bonus points if occupant is not actually on toilet.

The cameras? Oh yeah, I forgot that we care about privacy.

On my first submission to this site, I acted like an asshole in the comments section to reciprocate the attitude of the comments I got. My opinionated tone earned me more points, when I hate doing that kind of thing to begin with.

This is a cultural issue. I should not be rewarded for being a dick, nor should anyone else. Period.

> "Technology needs to empower people to manage people. Software should not manage people."

I agree, in a way.

The only communities I have seen that associates numbers with human merit or trustworthiness are the ones populated largely by programmers. I feel this is telling.

I always have low scores on these sites because I am just not motivated to contribute to them. While Jeff Atwood was on to something when he said that users can do a good job when they feel invested in the quality of content on a site, we just cannot expect numbers representing reputation or consensus to always be set rationally. That, and I just hate thinking I will be assigned a score for trying to contribute to a conversation when I have no idea how the site's culture will interpret what I do. We may as well carry those 1-10 judge cards around our necks and stick gold stars on outsiders' foreheads. It's absurd... but apparently it's necessary. It shouldn't be, but I know I can't handle 1 million+ users as a moderator.

One of my old jobs was to facilitate a chapter of Socrates Cafe, a national discourse organization. We allowed anyone at all to come in and share his or her experiences. My job was to facilitate the discussion and put out flames fanned by conversations between opposing parties. So, when atheist/theists, right-wing/left-wing wars erupt, I was supposed to take varying measures to restore order without evoking enough negativity to scare away members. That is, I had to try and settle everyone down while making them feel BETTER about everyone else.

I cannot begin to tell you how ridiculously hard this can be, and technology does not help unless you use it for shameless enforcement.

Intuition and context-awareness helps tremendously, and there have been times where I simply could not think of any solution to one particular heated debate outside of, no joke, an air horn. I hated having to blast all of the words right out of the room, but the group we had (to me) represented a community gone wrong that needed flat out intervention. We never once used tools to try and change the rules of conduct. Instead, we used technology as a brutal and unapologetic last-ditch enforcement of existing rules.

Now... That's a group where everyone saw each other in person. Clearly not the same thing as an online group. That's worse. In this setting, technology is the only thing you HAVE to mediate all interactions, even the "human" ones.

I don't have a real solution to the sorry state of large, rude online communities. In fact, if you made me a moderator, I would probably go on a banning spree until everyone was too terrified to stay on their own accord.

Even so, but I doubt anyone else really has a solution either... Including the OP. Improvement can only be measured until online cultures change in a way to push newly set boundaries.

The problem, I think, is that engineers have been taught over and over to see the humans as outside the system. You have the system components, you have a user interface, and the user. This makes sense in a way because you can mathematically understand the components of your software, but you cannot mathematically understand the user of your software.

Recently I have started to realize just how wrong this is, first in reading what others have written on IEEE spectrum on the so-called "Automation Paradox" and later internalizing that business systems usually treat people as integral components. Even if humans are relegated to a supervisory role it is important to given them enough to do to maintain the system and failure to do so in vehicles can result in air travel catastrophes or ships running aground. But the same holds true for every other field. There is such a thing as too much automation. Especially where we are dealing with social environments, like HN, that human touch is what is most important.

I think in this the first question is what should humans be doing, and the second is how can the computer system enable them to do it. Unfortunately engineers tend to forget the first question and so never reach the second.

> "Objectivism is objectively the greatest system of Philosophy ever put together up until now."

Please.

Objectivism draws no clear distinction between self-interest and self-worship. Its followers are some of the most unbearable narcissists I have ever had the misfortune of talking to. Many of their arguments can be boiled down to "My pre-packaged belief system says its logical, therefore I must be logical!"

I agree. Many(but not all) of Objectivism's followers are unbearable narcissists. Too bad.

Yes! Thank you.

> "I think the author is about 7 years too late..."

If Hacker News participants ran the world no one would care about history. We can discuss things that happened in the past. It sure as hell sparked discussion here.

> "Don't get me wrong, as a developer I think W3Schools can serve a purpose..."

And it does. It's easy to understand, which is not something you find often in sites trying to teach something. As I said elsewhere, good code makes crappy tutorials since it introduces more concepts that can confuse and overwhelm a inexperienced reader.

I came out of it just fine. Satan had some good contacts.

That's the problem though, people who have been misled by w3schools often don't even realise it.

I did. I am fully aware of the inaccurate content I ran with from w3schools, which is why I corrected myself. That does not change the fact w3schools was there when I needed a source that was easy to understand.

That's a tad presumptuous.

I agree with everything but the last bit. If you throw away the ladder, doesn't that represent forgetting the information that actually helped you?

It helps. Let's take the example of numbers. You begin learning as a child with 1, 2, 3... Everything is an integer and begins with one. Rapidly, you learn the notion of 0. And then at school, at some point, come the negative numbers. You have to "throw the ladder" that numbers are integer and begin with 1. You still know how to count, indeed in a more complex way.

Let's say you begin with markup, and just put the style as a tag to begin with. At some point, you know what a style does, but you have to throw the ladder that it has to be inside the markup, and externalize it to .css file.

Learning is a progressive experience.

I think it might be interpreted as "throwing away" the ladder-based technique, not forgetting about it.

So, for example, I might learn to build a Rails app using the scaffolding system, but once I know Rails well, I wouldn't.

No, you're still on top of the mountain, you just no longer need the rungs.

Maybe not, but I can still appreciate them and remember what they offered.

Oo! I like the system, but beginners wouldn't know what to do there. By that I mean, they would not learn much there without prior knowledge.

The age of what is being talked about does not determine the relevance of the conversation and what it entails.