skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought this was on some sort of FAQ page or the guidelines but couldn't find it now.

There is a previous comment by pg on this subject

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

that I have had bookmarked for a long time now that says,

I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

As we can see from this thread itself, pg is currently considering a different approach to marking comments for disagreement by multidimensional flagging. I am happy to adapt to any rule that this site sets up. For the moment, there is NOT a rule here that "Downvoting is not to be used to show disapproval/disagreement, but rather to filter out messages that add nothing to the conversation by being off-topic or just devoid of content." On my part, I mostly only downvote to disagree if there are thread-contribution-dimension reasons to disfavor the comment as well, and of course I upvote a lot to show agreement to try to emphasize the positive, but there currently isn't a rule about this here from the keyboard of the site management.
Dropbox is much more convenient for non-coders, and there's nothing stopping the developer from additionally running `git init`.
FYI: when you click the logo from http://www.bluefroggaming.com/games.php you get a 404 page.

You are linking index.html there instead of index.php
You ignorant idiot.

Of course someone like you will agree to this article, you constantly disagree on this form. You just use this to reinforce your one-sided view.

I can't believe that you would just blindly agree to anything Paul Graham says so casually.

I honestly can't understand why you listen to Paul Graham. He is a known ignorant programmer who just thinks he can run companies.

Complaining about other news in a comment about something different is a good thing, people get to have discussions and often an interesting point related to the article as well as other articles that may be related or come out at the same time emerge. If you look at articles even from today with tangents, you will notice irrelevance gets down-voted quickly.

"Irrelevance seems to be a greater danger to the comments here than the method of disagreements"

I can't disagree more. We don't sort responses on a user-preference level. Responses are sorted based on relevance. Each response is ranked by other uses of hacker news thus getting the irrelevant down the list quickly. After a few screens on any topic on hacker news you will start to get to irrelevance, and even when browsing you will see points, which help you immediately ignore a response, hell irrelevant ones get discolored.

I think you are totally off with your point. Basically the biggest issue we face on hacker news is the threat of being invaded by those same people who bicker on other sites. Nothing gives me chills more than thinking that MasterPlanSoftware from thedailywtf.com will hit up this site and start posting. His posts were usually DH1 (with an occasional DH2) and he would keep going. An even worse fear is that spectateswamp will look in our direction (please google him, also see www.thestupidestmanonearth.com). When articles like why's disappearance start filling up 1-2 pages of articles on HN is when these fears get surfaced again. Fortunately we were moderated well so that when such problems occur we get massive posts about erlang driving the non-believers away. So in the end, I think hacker news is perfect.

Hows that?
as a side note I disagree with everything I just said
Thanks for the reply. I never would have posted it unbidden, but here is a link to my resume: http://newcome.wordpress.com/resume/
Ok, I can't extend this into a ridiculously long series of blog posts about "what I've learned" etc. but I can sum up this and every other remotely similar article about how such and such technology or method is insufficient for every task:

"No one thing is good for everything."
Appsaurus (YC 07): A Smarter Recommendation Tool Than App Store Genius
Fair enough, although it's a much more graphic illustration of the problem actually seeing the results (rather than simply "your site isn't very secure", "your front door lock is a bit loose"). I know it made much more impact on me than it would have if I'd read an article about the possibility of it happening. Although I suspect that if he'd just mailed the username/password to Stephen that would have been example enough.

Kind of scary how many of these sites are almost certainly out there, though.
I use the backspace.
"I don't see why you'd need to have a failing test case". It's going to depend on the case, but I've had enough times in Python where I've written (via copy & paste) a new test case and forgotten to change the name, so the new test replaces the old, that I slightly wary of trusting that new test code which seems to pass, actually did run.

On the other hand, if I have two parallel lists, one with input parameters and the other with expected results, and I add a new test case to those lists, then I'm not going to worry so much about the new test passing by accident because the likelihood of making an silent error there is quite small.
How language fans see each other [pic]
popularity does not correlate with validity.

On the other hand, if this site was seeded initially with thoughtful participants (as I believe it was before I got here, and as I believe it continues to be by visitors who come here from pg's personal website), being popular (upvoted) rather than unpopular (downvoted) may be a fairly reliable mark of a comment worth reading. Everyone here reads a lot of the best of what is on the Web, and observes the behavior of other users here, and I think there are many examples here of highly upvoted comments (or, from another point of view, participants with high karma) being signals of good quality. It may be that there are some equally clear examples here of comments with many downvotes, all the way down to the system-imposed limit of a score of -4, or users with very little karma, being examples of poor quality.

After edit: so my assertion, in friendly disagreement with you, is that popularity DOES correlate with validity to a useful degree here, so even if not every popular comment is factually valid, and not every factually valid comment is popular, noting popularity can still be a guide to busy readers here about what to devote time to reading.
It was in Virginia in 1996, or at least the lawyers who drafted it believed so. Then again, no one knows what's in an Operating Agreement and whether it's really valid until and unless you go to court, but I don't see why that couldn't be part of one and have it stand. But it will LLCs where pretty new for most states back in the mid-90s).

I think you need to talk to a lawyer in your state who's familiar with LLCs and out of state c-corps to know what's possible and what it will likely cost (unless you live in Missouri, in which case I can ask my father).

Note also that a less flexible c-corp might turn off savvy investors (the type you want).
"Hand-Drawn" Vector Graphics Editor in Javascript
This headline is deceiving, Apple doubled their share of the MOUSE market in 8 weeks
Well, for one, seeing an comment on cryptography by cperciva already communicates a great deal before you've even read the first word. Not to say he's never wrong, but I'm inclined to believe that his largest mistakes on the topic are still more accurate than my most carefully reasoned treatises on the subject. You can find many, many such Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on HN who likewise carry weight on a topic (PG on Startups?) by their very identity.
Thank you very much for your suggestions. Personally I figured I would start with one in seven and then reduce it later as I find out whether or not it will be profitable.

I figure that it is easy to lower the fee and it will just make existing customers even happier. On the other hand if it turns out not to be profitable raising the fee would cause many to leave.
Just flagging adds meaning to downvotes, but can still be used to suppress opinions and people.

Perhaps a way to balance this is making flagging (up or down) cost karma points, but that would lead to them (KPs) being visible to give immediate feedback on the user's actions. Likewise, upvotes give back the karma you lost modding some comment. A different cost for up/down seems also a good idea. This, simply, could create an incentive to post even when one has nothing to say and prevent constructive modding by people who post little.

Hmm.... Perhaps an agreeing vote would redeem part of the karma paid to up/down vote.

This balancing act is a very hard problem.
Absolutely. When Peter Norvig drops by to make a comment or two, I want to know.

Besides, it's human nature to always ask "who". Any system that tries to override human nature has its work cut out for it.
Distracted by Abstraction - A poem about F#
The assurance in my proposal lies in the fact that if you don't pay market wages then someone else will hire the H1B away from you.
Unfortunately it doesn't delete the text you disagree with :)
Perhaps once the bigcorps have collected enough vaguery in their respective "intellectual property portfolios", we can just agree that everyones' technologies violate everyones' patents and just shut the hell up and build stuff already...
it proves that the code is in the state I think it's in before I make a change, and it proves that the change I made did what I expect

This advantage is less useful the better you know the system and the better you are as a programmer. One experienced programmer I know (30+years programming) said "When I know what to test I don't need the tests." When I started programming it seemed like I spent most of my time getting the code to do what I want, but that’s morphing so I spend more time trying to understand what I need the code to do. IMO, TDD is like using a good debugger, they can be awesome tools when you have a vague idea of what's going on, but once you really understand the code base you they slowly become less useful.

PS: The guy I am talking about was one of those "old masters" you occasionally hear about. One of my favorite stories about him was: "He once spent a week cleaning up someone’s code and sent it off to testing with some misgivings, which it passed and then failed in production. Apparently the testers had learned to ignore his code as it was normally a waste of their time to look at it, and after a few years this ended up biting them is the ass." So clearly testing is useful, but you need to balance cost and benefit.
Firstly, I want to know whether you have the skills I want. That means you should put your claims for skills at the top. Then you should support them.

In addition to your technical skills you need to say that you have led/managed successful projects. Then you should support those claims by naming them.

For HR people or recruitment agencies you need to be short, sharp, and to the point. They need to tick the boxes and have a warm, fuzzy feeling that you really do have those skills.

Personally, I was reading your resume and got a half screen down and was thinking - yes, but can you do what I want?

I hope that helps - I'm sure others will have different opinions.
Right. I don't see any use case for this syntax especially that modern IDEs offer auto completion .
Fiddles are GDAE, all fifths, just like a mandolin
Google's Chrome OS Cited as Likely Hacker Vehicle
Rails and Merb Merge: Performance
Streaming Porn, Roku-Style: Can Sex Sell the Set Top Box?
AI by Novelty Pump, Trade Cycles Turning Noise to Mind
I see irrelevant but funny/praising/criticising comments upvoted to +4 or even +14 all the time.[1]

The assumption that bad comments will get less votes is a canard. As the community grows, the same people adding comments also add their votes. If anything, they're more likely to vote since it's just a click, and so noob votes will drown old users even more. It's not just downvotes but any votes that have negative social consequences.

Update

[1] Exhibit A: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021157
http://sourceforge.net/projects/critterding/forums/
The secret about innovation secrets
I don't find this very surprising. Google/Youtube simply wants to own the distribution channel. If your company is taking their distribution channel and wrapping your logo and ads on top of it and making revenue for you, then they aren't going to be happy about it.
One phenomenon I've encountered here: There are times when I interject a neutral, but relevant point in a debate. Often one side assumes I'm arguing the other side and immediately tries to "counter" me. Then I have to explain that I'm merely pointing out an interesting point, not taking the side against.

I take this as a sign that some here are more intent on "winning" than on having a discussion.
At risk of being downvoted even more, this is precisely the type of communal degradation we saw on digg and then reddit.

On digg the average quality of the posts dropped to near youtube levels, and on reddit the community fractured to extremes of opinion.
It has been a long time since I have read this one and it is a very good description of the forms of disagreement.

I do think that PG gives slightly too little weight to ad hominem attacks though. It is true they may be no better than name calling, but they can be highly informative and relevant too. I know he says they can carry some weight, but even there I do not think he gives at least the right kind of ad hominem attack its due.

For instance, in a technical field it can often be very difficult to understand much less evaluate a fully reasoned argument. In this case, to a laymen reader saying (truthfully of course) "The author of this piece has been shown to commit scientific fraud" may be more effective than trying to go through the entire argument in detail. Similarly with say financial advice being able to truthfully say "The author has been involved in con games in the past" can be more persuasive (when true!) than trying to analyze his latest claims. Even pointing out something like "This man's PHD is in <nonrelevant field>, not <relevant field>." can add value to a discussion. Of course it does not invalidate the original argument from the original author, but it does point out the readers that they should read it carefully and not give limited weight to the author's authority.

This is especially true since it can be easier in some technical fields to bring up evidence that sounds good superficially but that an expert knows is false than it is justify the truth. This is because understanding the truth often requires a detailed technical grounding already whereas the pseudoscience does not.
Taking account of misconceptions; avoiding rote learning (MIT OCW video)
"I'm not aware of any other technique that does that."

Well, as pointed out by others, TDD doesn't actually prove that.

There are however methods that do, which fall under the general heading of formal methods or program proof. Read "A Discipline of Programming" by Dijkstra for a reasonable introduction. The techniques work, but are laborious. Modern theorem provers can help, but it still involves considerable effort. Which implies that such methods likely won't provide a return on investment unless the cost of errors in the program is extremely high (avionics, medical control).

I prefer to think of TDD as similar to working a problem backwards and forwards in elementary algebra. You may still have gotten the answer wrong, but you'll have to have made a mistake twice, so it helps your odds quite a bit.
This is an important point.

>It's not just downvotes but any votes that have negative social consequences.

Upvotes also tend to select for popular modes of thinking. In the end, a system of only upvotes makes people want to only post things that will be perceived as popular by the community.
It may not actually be in Amazon's best interest to make this "free money". The ROI for publishers will be lower, hence the publishers will consider using alternatives (adsense, chikita, commission junction). Amazon will lose sales from this.

Additionally, if enough publishers use a system like yours they Amazon won't actually be making more money, they will just be giving a third-party more money. Thus amazon's lack of regional awareness depends on you not being too successful. Not a good place to be.

If amazon wanted to maximize their own profits, they would enable regional awareness and simultaneously decrease commissions by 1/7th. The publishers you support would make the same amount as before, but would no longer need your product.
I don't agree with this, and almost downvoted it for that reason, but to do so could only seem snarky in context, and that's not my meaning. I just disagree with what you said. Not with any particular point; with all three points, equally. Not in any interesting way, either: I just evaluate my time and whether I should be "off the site" differently than you apparently do.
At this point even Sarah Palin believes in global warming, she just doesn't think it is caused by humans.

I will accurately quote her.

"SarahPalinUSA

Earth saw clmate chnge4 ions;will cont 2 c chnges.R duty2responsbly devlop resorces4humankind/not pollute&destroy;but cant alter naturl chng
2:57 AM Dec 19th from TwitterBerry"
For a moment I thought it was YC 09 not 07, but it is an app from the adpinion guys. Looks mighty fine indeed.
Also worth adding, if your ip database doesn't match amazon's exactly, there is money being left on the table. If amazon just "fixes" this issue, there won't be.
That wasn't as cool-headed as it maybe could have been... Now that I can't change it, I suppose it at least it has a sound base.
Discovering the Mathematical Laws of Nature
Not all part of all books get the same amount of attention. My grade school math teacher skipped chapter 7 because she didn't think it was worth the time. If we had devoted time to that it may have changed my whole disposition.
Close. Actually it was more a case of Comstock-era blue laws requiring serious artistic or literary merit, or at least a semblance thereof, before the magazine could legally be mailed.

When the legal climate improved, the need for all of that expensive content went away, at least in Playboy's mind. Which is unfortunate... if someone published a magazine like that today, I'd subscribe to it.
Criticism is not a bad thing.
No, he's still in jail. Looks like his earliest release date is November 19th, 2010.

http://nysdocslookup.docs.state.ny.us/GCA00P00/WIQ3/WINQ130
I think a good system would be to have just two voting axes:

1) "worth reading" / "not worth reading"
2) agree / disagree

Then add a system of whatever flags you think are necessary, like "spam".

I treat the current voting arrows as if they meant (1). I vote up things that I think are worth other people's time to read; vote down things that are a waste of time to read. I very rarely downvote. In some cases where others might more liberally downvote, I simply don't vote.
I am no fan of Rand, but I reflexively downvote any comments like yours. Answering faulty reasoning with sheer dumbassery isn't helpful.

The fact is, Rand's work was a legitimate reaction to some very real abuses, and it was extremely influential in economic and political circles throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The fact that you don't like her ideas doesn't alter the first fact.
When a theoretician refuses to look at a proof because it is written by an unknown, he/she is implicitly saying that the proof is very likely to be hopelessly wrong because it is written by an unknown.
Cleaning Lady Attack on Ubuntu and Debian Desktop
I saw a quote somewhere that read, "A knowledge economy is a secret society." Ideally knowledge isn't zero-sum. In practice, knowledge is power, and power is zero-sum.
Good post... bravo for increasing awareness about GA's lesser-known features.

Why does this require asynchronous GA and jQuery in the head?

Asynchronous GA seems like a best practice, but how would that affect the amount of event data you collect?

jQuery in the head would net you a negligible increase in data, and only for particularly heavy sites. No?

I use event tracking across a few sites in varying configurations (sync/head, async/footer, etc.) and would think anyone using GA and jQuery can benefit from this advice without changing their existing structure.
I think you're absolutely right. I've been thinking the same ever since I started to look at programming language usage on google trends and found that almost all of them are going down most of the time.
Whoever is downmodding this apparently has no sense of irony :-)
You make two subtle observations that I think are worth emphasizing:

what those two terms ["noise" and "signal"] mean varies from person to person and may in fact have wildly different meaning to the people voting up or down, but that seems to be the intended effect of the voting arrows

It's probably the ability to aggregate these wildly different meanings in an interesting way that makes the voting system good.

Sometimes just saying "no/yes, I (dis)agree with you" is sufficient and the site is better served by encapsulating these statements into up and down votes rather than encouraging the equivalent of "+1 I agree" messages

That's exactly right.

In this whole area, less is more. Many of the objections and suggestions for changing it strike me as overengineering. Given that the site is the creation of an inveterate minimalist, though, I doubt we have too much to worry about. :)
I am in mind of the Mercedes-Benz attempt at lockin: the key has what is essentially a flash drive in it, that stores the diagnostics codes.

When you have a Check Engine Light or other issue, you are free to take it to any repair place other than the dealer - who needs to buy a $40,000 USD reader to read the codes stored in the key fob.
Meh, I made one of my apps by myself in 8 hours. It's made 53 dollars in the last month or so.

Unless you have some kind of weird press bomb, it's much more profitable to put some time into making a good app.
That's what the "bigcorps" will do. Then they will enter formal or informal cross-licensing agreements. But, they will still use their patents to crush any smaller competition.
Have the recommendations of Appsaurus been demonstrated to be better than the app store Genius?
Why not just link to the original McAfee press release? http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2009/tc200...

It's less scare-mongery and has a more accurate headline. And that's saying something.
It came off entirely different to me. I thought it was a hilarious tale of a forehead-slapping revelation and subsequent frustrations in trying to put a genie back in the bottle. Paragraph 5 about guitarists really tickled my funny bone, in a you-laugh-because-it's-so-true kind of way.

I had just been thinking about some of the themes in the article. Yesterday's thread about how Emacs is now using Bazaar for source control illustrates this well: people believe that Bazaar is a fork of arch (this hasn't been true for a couple years). He's absolutely right that it's hard to get our demographic to update our opinions.
Clojure Circuit Breaker
They'd have a pretty good nominative use defense, if it came to that.