skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Majority of U.S. Cocaine Supply Cut with Veterinary Deworming Drug
The number one kind of alternate flag I'd like is 'review headline' rather than 'kill'. There are many stories that would be OK, if they didn't have a misleading headline.
Too little money.

I asked an astronomer and she said that the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloan_Digital_Sky_Survey) really hasn’t mapped those areas (yet). No artifact, but really white spots on our map.
Allow people to turn on seeing the points if they want to, but give more weight to votes by people who aren't choosing to see the points?
The reference used to justify the 10:1 superiority of C++ http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al... seems unlikely to have much bearing in this case. I doubt Facebook is calculating the Mandelbrot set or traversing huge binary trees in PHP.And as others have pointed out, CPU is hardly the only thing going on here.

Useful real-world benchmarks of even simple real-world systems are rare and require a lot of resource (mostly human) to construct. Here's an example benchmark I proposed once. http://jackfoxy.blogspot.com/2009/10/time-for-real-world-lin... At the time I couldn't find any bechmarks anything like this. I haven't tried looking since, but I suspect no one has bothered. It's a lot of work.
For handling individual comments, I think the better system would be to have two-dimensional comment rating. One dimension, upvote/downvote, is "valuable contribution/not-valuable contribution". A second dimension, agree/disagree, allows expressing support or dissent without the connotation of reward/censure that upvote/downvote has.

Agree/disagree would only be tallied inline at the comment for reference -- there's no persistent reward for simply saying things many people agree with, nor penalty for saying unpopular things.

Then, it's OK for downvotes to serve the role this "more flags" idea does. Downvotes then unambiguously mean: uncivil; frivolous; factually wrong; repetitive; unwanted. (And, moderators could focus on highly-downvoted comments as much as 'flags'.)

(Previous comment, with more backlinks, on this idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=721853 )

Another related idea: never show a comment at 'maximum negative' score to a person who hasn't yet voted. Show it as '-3' instead (no matter how many net downvotes it's received). Then, there's always a motivation for adding your own independent judgement. (Once they vote, the true-but-truncated-to-range score can be shown.)

The poster could see the 'true' score, so they know if they've really touched a nerve.
Because defacing a website is the same as stealing or tattooing someone's face.

Nice moral balance you have there.
>The point is that someone who does indeed understand how ASL works can read the paper, find out what is missing and build on it.

I just disagree. I have some familiarity with ASL and I feel they've gone off in the wrong direction from the start. I suppose you could say that a future study could build on this one by completely debunking it. Perhaps that argument has some merit.

>Your criticism is too hard

Probably. But I got the feeling from the paper itself that this is someone's last-minute rush to finish a thesis or fulfill a grant obligation or something. I guess I'd like to see a little passion in my science. Sorry if that seems too harsh.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000964
This would encourage editorializing on submissions
We have made architectural changes, but not that day. We literally had a drop-in replacement that did the same work but sustained 5x the request volume before saturating on the same machines, with the rest of the datacenter unchanged. (The async client was merely for latency, not throughput.)

I don't believe any PHP runtime can ever be the fastest solution for a problem. The language requires runtime type checks and coercions inside the operators and builtin functions, both keyed and ordered access to every collection, ad hoc creation and destruction of variable bindings by name, and dynamically switching to reference semantics for any existing value. Each of these imposes a cost on passing arguments and evaluating expressions, and I didn't find any of them paid off by making code much simpler.
Typesetting is one aspect of readibility.
They are interested in 'maximizing impact'. If less staff effort (and less screen real-estate inconveniencing users) could generate more sustaining revenues, their mission is better served.

Works for Mozilla! (So far...)
For the love of everything that is good, please either block techcrunch (very unlikely to happen) or put a hard cap on how many stories can be submitted within 24 hours from one domain (I suggest 2).

Sometimes reading HN feels like reading TC rss feed. If I want to read every single story from TC I would have subscribed to their RSS feed.
Most nasty comments seem to go unpunished. If someone says something clearly nasty that doesn't add to the conversation, why don't you personally kill it?

Lots of communities have tried to push moderation into the hands of users via flagging, and it never seems to work. I think the best and quickest solution to the problem is to use trusted but invisible moderators.
I've noticed this about America. My formative instincts about eye contact and communication come from my Russian upbringing as a small child; we left when I was 6 1/2, but by that point I had acquired (and continued to acquire) the mannerisms of my parents and close acquaintances from that culture. So, all that the author describes strikes me as strange and inhuman. I would say the Russian urban viewpoint on this is rather inspired by Western European principles - and especially French, given the Francophilia that characterised turn-of-the-century aristocracy from which many of these normative attitudes flowed downward.

I always unconsciously look at people, and very occasionally catch myself and wonder if they think I am "staring," although I generally carry a friendly expression rather than the sort of impersonal neutrality that seems to me to be what people mean when they describe "creepy" staring. I must surely be branded a "weirdo" more than I realise, though.
I occasionally find myself thinking lately that I just don't want to be here anymore.

I had no idea. AFAIC, this is the best site on the internet. It is the home many of us have been seeking for years. I talk about things here that I have no one to talk to in person and I imagine there are many others like me.

I have also noticed that things run in cycles and we seem to be in a bit of a trough lately. My usual response has been either to submit lots of stuff I really like, or just quit and come back the next day. That often works wonders.

Whether we like it or not, it is the nature of this site for people to show others how smart they are. That's just the way we are and this is the perfect place to "show off" (for a lot of us, it may be the only place). Many of us never really fit in, didn't play sports, weren't "cool", and didn't get noticed by the ladies as much as we would have liked. But we had passion for other things, exactly the things discussed here at hn.

So the nerdosterone runs heavy at times. Accompanied unfortunately by occasional meanness.

But I am determined not to let HN go down without a fight.

You won't need a fight. Just a little of what we do best: some good old fashioned problem solving.

A couple of ideas:

- Stop the meanness before it hits the data base with a front end "meanness" filter. When you click "reply", scan the text for cuss words and frequent phrases and give a warning, "Your comment has triggered the meanness filter because of the phrase "xxx". Please take this opportunity to reword it. Say what you want, but please be civil." They could modify it or submit the original anyway, but have to wait a "cooloff" x seconds or minutes. This could easily be gamed, but that's not the point. It would actively establish the expected tone, especially for new people.

- Weigh votes by karma. The top 100 get 3 points per vote. The next 1000 get 2 points per votes. Everyone else gets the usual one point per vote. The idea is that those who have the most invested in the community would be more able to slow down out-of-control group think.
I don't mind having the option to click one of a small number of specific tiny phrases describing my downvote: "spam", "offtopic", "bad title", "dupe". But free-form responses? I want to subtly (or unsubtly) correct people, not start up a relationship with them. Indeed, given that a lot of bad posts are made by trolls, a relationship longer than one mouse click is the one thing you don't want to start.

I don't want to waste valuable time figuring out exactly how sure I am that a particular title is bad, or how polite I should be, or whether or not I should take advantage of this high-bandwidth feedback mechanism to start some kind of conversation.

Learn the design lesson of Twitter: More degrees of freedom doesn't necessarily help.
A timely article, given some higher profile accusations that have recently surfaced...

Newton appears to have faked experimental data in the optical research he published, in that he interpolated experimental results to accuracies he could not possibly have measured. Academic standards were a little different in those days.
yes, i was thinking about the same thing. as far as i can tell, the velocity is increasing exponentially throughout the video.

an alternative would be to use a constant velocity and, once that gets boring, go back to the start and use a velocity ten times faster. that way, you'll know when the velocity increases and you'll also see what was shown earlier flash by, giving a sense of scale.

unfortunately, i don't know of a film that does that.
Mbah Gendeng - Bismillah Slamet
It's quite pretty, but to me still doesn't quite manage to convey the real scale of the universe. We zoom so rapidly from the solar system scale to the galaxy scale that we forget we've just gone up in scale by a factor of 10^9 or so. Then we do the same trick again in going from galaxy to universe scale.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrows_impossibility_theorem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard–Satterthwaite_theorem
largely yes. that and dust (which obscures things), and also priorities - the kinds of surveys that provide data for these kinds of map are typically hoping to increase our knowledge of cosmology / large scale structure / galaxy evolution, which means that they avoid looking at the milky way because (for the reasons given) you're going to see more nearby "clutter".
People generally don't understand how their household appliances work. They only care about understanding the interface (e.g. open fridge door, put stuff in, stuff stays cool).
Or "review link" for that matter. It isn't all that uncommon to have an interesting story that links to a page that is just repeating content from a better and more complete source.
If I were creating my own ratings for my own personal view of HN, I'd like to discount votes of people who vote opposite of me: if I downvote a comment that they upvote, then I'd prefer to take their other opinions less into account.

Or, since I'm not actually all that active on HN, I'd prefer to be seeing a view that weighted more heavily votes of people who were not voting opposite to those of people whose opinion I respect, such as pg. And probably some others that I'd be aware of, if I were on HN more.

For me to take the next step and suggest that this then becomes the default view that everyone sees seems strangely egotistical. Not for me, I mean, but that you might seem egotistical if you were giving more weight to votes from people who voted similarly to how you voted. I'd probably like the site more if you did that though :)
I agree that this is possibly the best general solution, and perhaps even the only solution, but it is certainly not "quick" when there are thousands of comments and only one moderator.

The only way to keep human moderation workable is to keep the work of each individual moderator small and scale out tree-style. Perhaps that will be the ultimate shape of the Web: a set of top level news sites, aggregating the best commentary from a larger set of second-tier news sites, aggregating the best commentary from a larger set of tertiary news sites...
Btw there are so many cool things one could do if, say, the iPhone could turn off its IR filter as in a shutter :-)
Replacing downvotes with a flagging system or similar might be a good idea: I've been noticing that people tend to downvote other users not because their comments are "uncivil" or "frivolous", but because they express an opinion different from theirs.

I've seen many perfectly-civilized comments being downvoted, presumably, because they are controversial, though I have seen others that deserve downvotes because of their nature.

The way I see it, replacing downvotes with a comment flagging system would probably reduce the amount rude comments because they'd probably be killed soon enough. However, it eliminates the penalty of being rude (a drop in karma), and some visible way of penalization must be put in place for it to be effective in deterring users from being rude. A work around might be that for every killed comment (due to numerous flags) a user gets -5 or -10 karma.

Things would behave differently with posts, but these are just my first thoughts (when it comes to commenting).
Non-profit has nothing to do with revenue. Every non-profit that survives has to consider revenue carefully and improve efficiencies.
It would be great if there was one for Chernobyl.
Would have been a lot more interesting if he had actually gained root and explained how he pulled that off.
It's a bandwagon problem. When people see a large number (positive or negative), they want to push it larger. To snap people out of this heuristic and make them actually judge the comment, I'd suggest making people do a small amount of "work" if the number is already large in either direction (and they're trying to push it larger.) Perhaps make them enter a CAPTCHA of lg(abs(score)) characters?
The syntax in the headline is common outside the US. eg: http://livescore.com/
Do You Develop Software or Experiences?
I recently found myself in a similar position, and found Jekyll ("a blog aware, static site generator") to meet my needs perfectly. Jekyll rejects the implicit assumption of most blogging software: that the solution requires a dynamic platform.

When you approach the problem with that in mind, what you end up with is exactly the three things you are looking for, something that is inherently secure and low-maintenance, with a blogging workflow that is simplicity itself.

vim _posts/YYYY-MM-DD-title-of-post.markdown
git commit -a -m 'new post'
git push

Project Page: http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll

Introductory Post by the Author: http://www.mojombo.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-hacker.htm...
Seems to me that possibly webOS is the superior technology that is almost destined to fail to slightly worse technology like the apple app store etc...
I like this 'private feedback' idea for more than just incivility: it would work well for tiny correction suggestions that the author could helpfully use (esp. in the first 2 re-edit hours) but that would otherwise pollute the thread with minutiae.
That may be unlikely to be frame-ups hoping to be NYTimesCo's subsidiary. It deserves more expensive to a blackhat SEO strategy. If having spammers link farms pointing at them. This is why Google would be careful when making these situations
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The World Has Changed. Is Jigsaw Still Evil?
Considering the situation, a crime victim interviewing the perp, I thought he was quite effective at eliciting feedback. I suppose it's not surprising this 17 year old has the ethics of a sociopath. When I read he wants to become a broker, LOL.
Sorry to be a bit killjoy here, especially since the article is interesting and entertaining.

But what does this has to do with hacking ?
Right after you show me any media job ad in the Daily Mail that's not for DMGT itself, sure.
If facebook has 30K servers, I highly doubt they have 25K of them being webserver.. Hyves (a dutch social network) at some point explained about 1 in 4 servers was webserver. The rest was storage, db, caching, proxys, chat, whatnot.
I think you should add this as an option, and only for the karmarific users. This way, less than 10% of the site would actually use this, and since these are likely to be the oldest and community invested users, the flagging would always lag behind the movement of the site userbase, leading to a stabilizing force in community feel.
Hacker News has many moderators.
The first thing to determine: are there "nasty users", or simply nasty posts, which could be posted by otherwise-kind people?

Treating nasty users is a simple and well-known problem: find out the user's disposition before you release their commenting privilege. Usually you'd put all the user's writings into a moderation queue, and only post them up (and retroactively make those moderated posts appear) if their average moderation score exceeded some threshold. The moderation could be done by users, of course; in fact, it could simply be part of the normal comment-thread interface, with an icon beside the post to represent that voting on it affects whether the user (and their posts) stay or go.

Treating nasty posts by good users might be similar to a problem of catching illicit activity on a bank account—simply asking the user "Did you really mean to post this? It doesn't seem like something you'd say." It might also be similar to a social bookmarking matchmaking service—except that instead of putting people with high pairwise right-handed Whuffie together, you'd be keeping people with low pairwise left-handed Whuffie apart, by somehow making it harder for them to confront one another.
From MTV.com: "Brittany Murphy... died at 10:04 a.m. PT" (= 1:04pm ET)

Byline of the OP: "Dec 20, 2009 at 3:53pm ET by Danny Sullivan" (less than three hours later)

He then updates his post in response to (well deserved) criticism:

"First, this post wasn’t rushed out. It took me about an hour to compile."

So assuming he heard about it the instant it happened, he started writing the post TWO HOURS after she passed away.

Then he writes: "Murphy’s death is a tragedy. She was a popular actress, and I was as saddened as anyone to hear about it. My reaction, as I suspect for many, was “Oh, no” and disbelief."

Color me unconvinced.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. In my experience, the advertisers don't pay for the reprint at all.
asana is also not a successful company
are you missing the point entirely? i highly doubt that more than one person at your company will be using this service. i highly doubt that anyone at your company besides you will be using this service. this service probably has a total of 300 uniques, and maybe 5 active users including the creator.
Link to the Juzo Itami movie mentioned in the article (requires registration)

http://www.surrealmoviez.info/readarticle.php?article_id=169...
Responding Faster To Complaints About Your Competitors | Techdirt
What's interesting is all the comments on that blog, saying how someone who can download an automatic deface script "can make money with websites". I thought the general public had a better understanding of the Internet these days :)
1. Force clients to stop trying to save satelite via legal actions, claimint it will void the insurance.

2. ???

3. PROFIT
The Uncivil tag should prove a fun exercise in reading tone and sarcasm from text. Someone needs to invent Tone Markup Language--and not just emoticons.
The art of the pick-up
Reminds me of Stephen Biesty's books. http://amzn.com/0590738704 Blew my mind as a kid. Come to think of it, my nephew needs an xmas present.
But there wouldn't be a relationship, since the flags would be anonymous, and I presume filling in a comment would not be necessary for flagging.

Given those two prerequisites, I think it's a great idea.
It may has to do with adaptation in human behavior when others enters their "personal space", in a crowded metro train, for example.
YC-Funded Lingt Uses Games To Turn You Into A Language Learning Addict
Unfortunately I'm pretty sure mean spiritedness is too semantic to catch with a filter. Dumb jerks are not the problem. The type who curse a lot get downmodded into oblivion and eventually banned. The problem is smart jerks. And unfortunately these are not uncommon in our world.
This can omit important discussion, as I do remember a couple of items discussing either an article or a new site where the author specifically created an account so they could contribute to the discussion.

Account age has no bearing on the intelligence of the owner... there's a specific group of smart people (6 degrees of PG) that have been here a long time, and the rest have joined as it came up on their radar.
I've been noticing that people tend to downvote other users not because their comments are "uncivil" or "frivolous", but because they express an opinion different from theirs.

I bookmarked this HN comment

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

a while ago, because it expressed the view of pg in an earlier era of HN that "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."

But it's interesting to see pg opening up today's discussion of new, more nuanced, flags, and that would change the core meaning of a downvote. I'm all for learning a new system of flagging and voting if that helps encourage a thoughtful community.
I pay $8/mo for a VPS and run OpenVPN [1]. There's a nicely-done OS X client [2], and OpenVPN will run on whatever port/protocol combination you need. You also get the benefit of a shell account on your own little corner of the internet, a lightweight server to toy with and full ssh access to play all sorts of games with ssh port forwarding [3].

1 - http://openvpn.net/

2 - http://viscosityvpn.com

3 - http://www.ssh.com/support/documentation/online/ssh/admingui...
I totally agree, which is why a 10x speedup is ludicrous. The C++ code would likely just accelerate the code to the point where it was network and/or memory bound. I think a 2-3x improvement is warranted given all of the things I know about the Facebook architecture.
Oh wow, thanks.
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I'd assume moderators/admins could see it, too.

Yes, it would definitely be a good idea, if private comments attached to flags are implemented, to say explicitly that moderators/curators are allowed to view all of them.
An honest evaluation of a startup's year
Why Ruby Scares Me
It depends on what you do. Scalability is about building a system to handle ten fold more traffic than it's seeing now; <10 is too little, 100 is over-engineering (and nearly impossible).

Now imagine a graph data structure (any site with a news-feed/following functionality). You can get 10x increase in edges without a 10x increase vertices.

Some kind of products also increase in usefulness (and demand) as they increase in user growth, so solving scalability problems is necessary to their success. It isn't, however, sufficient.
Joe Armstrong's book is probably the best one to start with. It gives you a step-by-step learning process that will get you up and running with Erlang in short order. Once you are finished with it pick up Erlang Programming by Cesarini and Thompson; this book covers a lot of the same territory but goes a bit deeper into some areas that are missing from Armstrong's book (e.g. debugging & tracing, etc.)
TC is extremely relevant to start-ups. Blocking it would be pretty ... silly.
This is the best diagram I could find of the RBMK-1000 design:

http://www.neimagazine.com/journals/Power/NEI/March_2006/att...