skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Improving the Comments block
1st time poster here. We building a Twitter web app that puts your tweets in images. Being a very social product, commenting is important to our (future) community. I am looking closely at our comment blocks and noticed that everyone uses the same layout so that lead me to experimenting on how to improve comment participation. I am doing one with our product (http://twidl.it - private alpha this week). Two columns - comments form (left) and the comment form (right). the (right) comment form which is small since characters are limited to 140 characters. The (left) comments column has the comments in floating blocks, this makes short comments show in a single row. I am anticipating short comments since the post only contains a tweet and a photo. My copy is "Add new Comment' with a dynamic comments block header if there is 0/1/more comments. Anyone see new experiments in comment forms?
The chain reaction involves the row feed, which I assume is randomly generated. But that's entirely a different point.

I'm saying that it is nearly impossible to predict what's going to happen given that a particular choice often causes a reaction which might involve many steps (9? 10+) of elimination, each changing the configuration of the blocks. I've built a block dropper, that's why I saw this. But if users like it, and it's selling ...
As a game guy, I think it would be better to call them "user engagement techniques" or something instead of "gameplay elements" when gameplay is not at the core of the experience. To be fair, I guess it's like how game designers talk about "toy factor" when something is fun to play with pointlessly.

That said, I love the trend, from Yelp to all these YC companies, of deliberately planning the user experience to include these systems.

I don't thing games deserve as much credit as they sometimes get, either. I went to a Cub Scout troop where we had the same kind of points, rank and achievements that are typically denoted as "gameplay elements" today.
Yeah, I agree it isn't the most elegant way to do it, but the alternative is to keep a copy of go's http package in the gocouch repo, which isn't too elegant either.

My guess is that within a couple months Go will have a new http client that's fully-featured (keep-alive requests, authentication, and support for generic requests). Until then, if people have a burning need to use gocouch, they'll have to add that small method to the http package. Plus, people are used to compiling the go source code because it's the only way to install it (no binary packages yet)
Given how rarely it happens (though it does happen) and the volume of links, I suspect there just aren't enough moderators. It might therefore be more ideal to give the community the tools to enforce.
It wouldn't surprise me, as that's probably a more lucrative market (teaching English to those in China or India); but when you're building and testing a product, it's probably better to be able to speak to your testers in your/their native language ;)
The missile will be smart enough to compensate for ship movements.
I dislike agree/disagree voting overall. We all dislike groupthink, and we all appreciate constructive informative posts, and we all like differing viewpoints. So why have a moderation system that records or values agreement/disagreement at all?

I think gojomo is 100% right that people should be rewarded for constructive informative civil contributions, rather than because the moderator happens to agree with you.

An agree/disagree arrow could be left simply as a honeypot, so that people don't use the other descriptive ratings as a substitute for agreement/disagreement.
Is the public school system, pretty much universal around the globe now, a breeding ground for sociopathic behavior because of compulsory attendance?

I have entertained that thought. It is difficult to sort out all the different aspects of causation of crime, but voluntary school attendance (once the worldwide norm) seems to be better for building cohesive societies than compulsory school attendance.
Just shows a big white screen when flash doesn't work or you have flashblock installed.... It should have some text box that is normally hidden saying "Please install flash"
Would you consider forking the entire site into multiple HNs? e.g. where one site encourages civility and another encourages nastiness?

Along a similar idea, I once started work (and since abandoned it) on a social news site where the idea was to auto-partition all the users into Dunbar's Number-sized buckets based on their commenting style. You could still see everything if you wanted, but you'd be placed into a "swarm" of people whom you'd get to know better than general population. So assholes would end up in asshole swarms, spammers in spam swarms, etc.
It would be interesting if you could get one of those language evangelist countries to financially incentivize people to learn the language.
I think the gp's intent was to give constructive feedback, something to be encouraged for beta products in particular!
It's a systematic problem: often one wants to reward some good behavior X, but X is very hard to measure so one finds some measure Y that is highly correlated to X, and then measure Y. The problem is that once people know that it is Y that is being rewarded, they seek to do Y as cheaply as possible. And if "seeking to do Y as easily as possible" does not involve doing X, then the system breaks.

So in this example, X is producing high-quality content, and Y is getting a lot of links to you. Other examples include X,Y = (knowing the material, getting correct answers on the test) and (needing money, spending money).

This has a well-known analog in economic circles known as the "Lucas Critique" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_critique
I think a "Did you mean this?" flag would be useful. Sometimes I find I make a post that could use a little rewording that would make it clearer or less confrontational. I am prone to calling OP's crap (not comments). Perhaps I should apply the moose turd pie principle: Crap...but tasty.
i also agree with this idea, as i also brought it up about 6 months ago (relevant link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=651295).
Unfortunately, every company has different politics that affects the answer to your question. Without knowing the politics of your company no one can properly answer. And even if we did, it would still probably be a "gut feeling" type of answer. So with that said...

The way I would do it at my company (which has politics that could get you in trouble, even if what you did is better than what currently exists) then I would recommend starting with a trusted advisor. Do you have a friend inside the company who has been there for a long time that you trust? If so, approach them and ask them what they think. Having been there for a while, they probably would know the best approach and maybe could use their seniority and good will to pointing it out for you.
Which Poverty-Fighting Policies Work? J-PAL Has the Answer
PostgreSQL has always been a feature heavy rdbms, but I read this particular capability as a sign that 2010 is going to be a year where a lot of OS shops are going to start trying out PG. Especially with MySQL's future still up in the air
as opposed to the groupthink that comes with the standard one dimensional moderation scheme?
That is a very interesting way to use voting to customise your viewpoint. Perhaps click-through to articles or news could also be a factor, those people who click through to the same articles as you tend to have more effect on the pages you see.

You'd end up with a graph representation where each user is a node and two nodes are connected if they share a similar voting relationship.

Everything that you can vote on keeps a list of the people who upvoted it vs those who downvoted it. Every day the list of voters are cleared (to reduce load), and those people who all voted the same have their relationships to each other strengthened. The submitter of the item you voted on has their relationship with the voter increased by a larger amount still.

You then take your relationship to the submitter or commenter into account when comments are ordered for you, perhaps via the shades of grey styling HN has at present.
One criticism of the levels; there should be automatic browser resizing. I have a small screen, so I had to scroll down to see all the possible answers, and then I couldn't look at the word and what the character looked like at the same time I was searching for the definition.

Also, for the part of the learning where you type in the pingin, it doesn't read English language characters as correct unless they have the little symbols on top of them. I can't find those characters fast enough to type them in!
I am sure it does.
> [this article is] filled with propagada. [sic] [... America is] a police state.

Give me a break. People in America have all kinds of “means of contesting acts and policies.” There are problems with the justice system, as anywhere, but the courts and the political system are more accessible in America than anywhere I know.
This dynamic is a perfect example why you have to have unianimous enthusiasm for new team hires. The lack of respect for one another is astounding: I'd be shocked if they ever shipped any software together.
When is the country full? The US is arguably overpopulated by 100 million. It is not possible to be an environmentalist and favor continued high immigration rates.

All this talk about importing "talent" is highly disingenuous. The bulk of current immigration is low skill and puts pressure on low-end wages, and many government services budgets.

The history of immigration in America is a handful of waves interspersed by much longer periods of assimilation with close to zero immigration. The current wave, beginning in 1968, is absolutely unprecedented in volume and length.
Creating a Flash platform game with Flixel and Flex - Powerup Blocks
I don't know about that. My local PBS station experiences a lycanthropy where they degrade into infomercials for older people every pledge week. They very well know the kinds of programs that pull in more funds.

If the Wikimedia Foundation at any point decides to use their "business sense" and look at the articles that raise the most funds, well... there are questions that will be raised.
One thing I believe holds well is that nasty comments are often short. Smart assholes often go for clever comments that skirt the edge of useful and obnoxious.

So how about a karma-moderated length minimum. New commenters (less than ~300 karma, maybe) have to post several sentences which has some chance of disincentivizing quick, brutal snark.

Longer comments can still be nasty of course, but it's going to require a lot more involvement for the user while making them a bigger target for moderators.
It´s time we adopt a "startup visa:" prefix on links here, as it´s becoming a category lately
When you drop a piece, you will not get a new row inserted before the chain reaction (if any) completes. So a new row will not affect your ability to predict how the chain reaction will go.

But yes, chain reactions can be long. You can at least predict how a chain reaction will start out and guess about what might happen after that.
Were the journals that published his articles peer-reviewed or not?
> opening the immigration floodgates would be no bad thing

Easily another hundred million people would move here if they could. That would be disastrous.
You know very few places.

but i agree that i got the most difficult, and extreme, example of the dozen i could have used.
Personally I think that the real time results are horrible. I haven't seen anything in them of value, and it has mostly been useless drivel.

It's making me really not like searching on google. They need to let me turn this off, or they're going to lose a lot of branch loyalty by having useless results on the top of their search pages.
The official term for the smell after it rains
Do you think there is some size threshold beyond which a site cannot remain thoughtful?

If you do, maybe "fight" partly means actively limiting the growth of the site.
I flag occasionally for spam or off-topic HN-wise. I have been tempted for those that hijack other stories without much of anything in the way of commentary, but HN'ers tend to quickly post a link to the original.
I'm downmodding now because I think this is a bad contribution but rather because, since this isn't a poll per se, I think that upmodding/downmodding is sort of how we are voting. So don't take it the wrong way :)
>But we haven't always done a good job of talking about Google's philosophical approach to privacy overall

Likely because Google hasn't had a cohesive philosophy on the subject yet other than "don't be evil".
Congrats, guys! About time someone gave Rosetta Stone a run for their money.
If in testing the system you used any data which may be interpreted as belonging to the company then be very, very careful. Hopefully you haven't, but if you have then you might want to delete all traces of that data before presenting it.

If you're a contractor be very careful to document that you did none of the work on company time or equipment.

If the company doesn't want anything to do with your project then they may prevent you doing anything else with it.

If your friend is not associated with the company then you may want to introduce him as the author of the project. Ethically you can't conceal your beneficial interest in the project, e.g. if the company wants to buy it, but you might want to have someone not associated with the company be the point man. That may also make it more likely that you can reuse the project for something else.

Your good work is probably going to make someone at the company look foolish and those people may make big problems for you. You really need to find some sympathetic and wise person with authority to champion it. And if it's a typical big corporation that's going to be hard.

It's very unfortunate that large companies are not more receptive to what is essentially free R&D. What you've done shows an exemplary interest in going beyond the minimum requirements.

I wrote this assuming that you're working for a large corporate machine but maybe that's not the case.

Good luck!
The defacing/rooting hackers are always the young and bright ones it seems. It's fun to watch how the trend continues over the years, and has spread to all corners of the world.
I'm likely to be of the lowest caste here but I think a single flag works for me. I tried to think of others and the only two logical ones I could think of were "Spam" and "Duplicate" for posts. I support you could flag comments but again I see two options: "Spam" or "Offensive".

In any case - that is to say regardless of the reason it was flagged - I think it should be killed. Therefore one "flag" link and that's it.
TC IT: Au Pair vs Nannies
Should down voting some one also negatively affect the down voter's karma? It will help restrict the number of down votes anyone will give..
Things UX Geeks Want For Christmas
The Top Movie Trailers of 2009 - Inside Movies
Everyone who is interested in this may also be interested in skritter.com, which features a very similar interface. Skritter's focus is on reading and writing Chinese characters.
Very, very cool. I'd pay for this.

Why is the image for "eight, 8" a glass of... very translucent-ish milk?
Surely "commercial lunar satellite" means "thing orbiting the moon in order to make someone a profit" rather than "thing orbiting the earth that happened to go past the moon a couple of times"?
"It is not possible to be an environmentalist and favor continued high immigration rates."

Why not? People strain the environment wherever they are--increased population density and urbanization can often reduce that per-capita strain.
And where are you from?

As far as I know, America invented the modern incarnation of a country with "means of contesting acts and policies of...govt."

The fact that America's faults are bandied about for all the world to discuss, dispute and analyze just goes to show how good of a government it is. It's like an open source version of government.
US antiterrorism policy is such that you can disappear for being a suspected terrorist no matter where you are in the world. You're probably safer living in America than outside of America--inside of America, we have some abnormally strong civil liberties.
No worries. I'm partial on it myself. I don't like the idea of excluding people, however I was trying to think of a way to have people care about the quality of their contributions. ie. give the community incentive to be nice :) It's certainly not that easy.
good game theory book recommendations?

Game Theory and Strategy by Philip D. Straffin

http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Mathematical-Association-Amer...

is a classic introductory text that lights up interest in game theory in many readers.

Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction by Ken Binmore

http://www.amazon.com/Game-Theory-Short-Introduction-Introdu...

is a good follow-up to Straffin's book.
Aren't many downvotes efforts to improve the community, and thus worthy of a karma INCREASE, if anything?
Creating a Flash platform game with Flixel and Flex - Water
Please review my new iPhone social networking app - Superswap
Hi everyone! After nearly 6 months of rejections (for various reasons), our 'photo conversations' app is finally live.

It's called 'SuperSwap' and can be found at:
itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/superswap/id333246366?mt=8

It is supported by a Google AppEngine backend (which, incidentally,
seems to be managing quite well.

We've been amazed at the growth - it launched yesterday, and we've had about 4900 unique users, and approx. 16,000 images and locations swapped.
Please have a look, and make suggestions - we're a bit overwhelmed by the response so far, but need a few balanced opinions on where to go next.

Thanks!
The problem is that not everyone thinks as you, and will vote based on agreement/disagreement. We need a clear separation of these types of votes.
LHC Hits 2.36 Trillion Electron Volts
The Difference between $1 Billion-Plus in Exits and “Success”
Sometimes it's difficult to be succinct in < 80.
A time-delay on down-votes perhaps? More of a psychological effect than a technical solution.

Not showing any points above 5 (or 10 or whatever), while still having an internal counter might also help.

A trust system maybe. "I trust this user. So anything he put down as interesting I want marked as interesting."
Report: O2 to buy Israel's Jajah for $200 mln
Would it? It might be, but I'd be interested to see the rationale. There's plenty of empty housing stock across the country that needs filling (and house values that most Americans would love to float upwards again) and the more people who live in the country, the bigger market for products, and the bigger the economy (though not necessarily higher in per capita terms at first).
Maybe this is the place to ask why, relatively frequently, there are comments which seem perfectly reasonable and inoffensive, that are dead.
It was interesting to read how sage developed. I use it all the time, but had never known...

The Magma stuff sounds nasty. All the more reason to avoid proprietary software.
My theory is that a separate agree/disagree fights groupthink because it moves popularity/agreement out of the reward/penalty dimension.

People want to register their opinion -- and sometimes that opinion is just yes/no. It's good for a site to offer a low-effort, low-visual-pollution way to capture that -- single click votes/favorites/likes work well for that. (It's better than lots of 'me too' or 'I disagree' or 'my thoughts exactly' micro-comments.)

But, if those signals are mixed with a sense of righteousness/transgression -- which is inevitable with leaderboards and display rules whereby 'high-rated' comments move up, and 'low-rated' comments fade from view -- then people may withhold unpopular but important viewpoints, or be tempted to race to be the first to post a banal but crowd-pleasing viewpoint.

My theory could be wrong. Some people might care so much about agreement that they obsess over that score, and knowing exactly how many people agree/disagree would then cause even more synchronization-of-publicly-expressed-views. But I think this crowd is sophisticated enough to draw (and make use of) the distinction between a bad comment and a controversial minority viewpoint.

And I would like to be in a place where someone who advances a controversial minority viewpoint, but does so in an articulate, thought-provoking, civil manner, could be on the leaderboard even if every individual post of theirs has more net disagreement than agreement.

(Which brings up a related point: it would be interesting to report an agree/disagree axis as two totals, not just the net difference. '101 agree, 100 disagree' is more meaningful than a net score of '+1'. A sparkline bar graph or tick-series could work really well for this, though it might not need to appear on every comment, or appear until requested.)
I wonder if they used techniques from http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia... I am interested in using ideas from that article and incorporating them into a blackjack site I'm building.
I'm very interested in this idea of taking things that you messed up on before and presenting it back to the end user at a lower frequency.
Check this for CouchDB: http://books.couchdb.org/relax/
Yeah I don't think silly meme language is appropriate at HN, it just lowers things a bit too much. Reddit is great fun, keep it there.
This is the adblock line you want to add:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/js/app/*
How is the US "full?" Its population density is through the floor compared to almost every EU country and Japan. Further, it has a significant amount of natural resources and spare capacity right now.

By your yardstick, the UK should be considered to be positive heaving, yet immigrants currently make up a majority of the population increase. I'm not going to complain - it keeps my house value up :-)
The "Troll" tag on Slashdot comes with some sense of acheivement. "Uncivil" seems much more refined, and less likely to award poor behaviour.
Ask HN: Do you like Google's new UI?
Seems like they just updated their front page a minute ago - unless it's just a test.

Edit: Is it the Caffeine update? (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-caffeine-update/)
> it keeps my house value up

On a regular working man's salary my grandfather could rent a house on a pristine, practically undeveloped beach for a month a summer a short drive from a major east coast city. You are arguing it's a good thing that population growth has made this no longer possible.
I never mind if somebody else helps me with coding.
Another person (whether it's developer, manager, business analyst, or tester) helps to identify silly mistakes and helps focusing on solving the problem.
In certain cases such help accelerates development even more than 2x.
While I'm sure I can look that up on wikipedia and get some idea as to what that article is, can you give some examples as to why?

The economist article did a good job of showing that an open and tolerant America is good at getting people to come to the US and eventually blend in. It was also very relevant to the America of today, and suggested that despite some of the bad sides of America that are often amplified in the foreign press, because people have to work they're more likely to blend in.

From what I read on wikipedia the 170 text does a very good job of explaining the nature of democracy in the US, and makes a number of predictions that pan out regarding party politics, but in your view is it still relevant for the America of the 21st century?

I guess the angle I'm tacking from is the cultural aspects of integration versus what imo appears to be a treatise just about democracy (albeit what appears to be a classic).
This concept needs more exploration. The delay/lag seems very promising on cursorary inspection.
Great. Thank you!

Would you happen to know where I could find detailed instructions on how to install these images?