I am rather bothered by a lot of the comments here. Have any of you actually talked with Neil about these issues? I have. He's an extremely passionate promoter of high-quality sound. I truly feel sorry for those who cannot tell the difference between 192kbps MP3s and CDs. I can always hear the difference with my headphones and eq settings. But Neil is not satisfied with CD-quality; he wants higher quality than that. At the time I chatted with him (several years ago now) he was leaning toward 24-bit 192K samples/second, as I recall. This was before Blu-Ray.
Since the original article was so vague, and we don't have a particular product to critique, can we at least give Neil the benefit of the doubt? His heart is definitely in the right place (and, in case you're wondering, he's more than just a bit of a geek - he's a first-class geek! - And not too shabby a musician, either...)
I understand your point completely, and I agree. I, too, am an exceedingly awesome world-renowned hacker who has been unfairly treated here. PG doesn't really care, or he likes it this way, or he's too busy doing other things. We need to build a TRUE hacker's community, and this website isn't it.
AI is, by definition, the set of problems that are not yet solvable by computers. Ergo, all AI is fantasy. Nevermind that AI has beaten the world chess champ, is used every day for pattern recognition, stock trading, and a myriad other uses.
Those who do not prepare for the coming Singularity are going to be blindsided by it when it arrives.
We can hack around the scribd censorship. Everybody who aubmits a .pdf knows it will be converted into the useless scribd format. So, the original submitter needs to immediately post a comment that is the original .pdf link.
If HN scribd damage occurs on that link, then we will find other ways to route around that damage, for example, by using tinyurl.