skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One reason I don't kill mean comments is that I don't want to be censoring anyone. If someone says something super nasty I might ban them, so there at least won't be any more, but I rarely kill the comment I banned them for unless it is a spam or a very clear troll.

There's another more practical reason it's hard to kill mean comments: they often have replies by the time I see them. It would mess up the conversation if they got taken out then.
Rather than resort to more sophistication in terms of voting and/or flagging systems, I am inclined to think the best hack would be a social one: Make the link to the guidelines more prominent. Why not place it in the bar at the top of every page, instead of in a tiny font at the bottom?
Help us redesign this open source project
Didn't consider that. (But wouldn't it make more sense to copy the code instead of requiring user change to the package?)
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.

Hear. Hear. HN is also my favorite general access site. (I am a member of an organization that has members-only email lists that are very, very good, but I still find things here that I share with them.)

The guidelines mention "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" as being on topic here, and I am deeply curious, having been an online moderator in various places since 1992, about how to keep an open online community civil and informative. My friendly advice to pg is to stay in the fight and don't give up. It may take a heavier hand in moderation of both comments and persons, aided by some of the crowdsourcing technical means being discussed in this thread, but HN has participants who cherish what HN is and who will be glad to help.
NJ is the same. I work near the city in hoboken, people on the PATH (train between NY and NJ) are always staring at their smartphones. I was sitting in the PATH the other night though, and two guys started a conversation with me about my droid, if that counts...

I live in suburbia in NJ though, which is pretty different. When I'm out running or biking I try to say hi to other pedestrians and they typically reciprocate.
I sometimes downvote things that seem mistaken. I think most users do. This didn't use to be a problem when there were only a couple thousand users who often knew one another personally. The problem is voting to agree/disagree combined with a larger and probably less thoughtful audience. That's when it starts to feel like a mob.
Origins of Life: (nucleo)Tide and warm water
Indeed, why not make bopping by the guidelines a threshold requirement for a first comment, and put the link on every comment submission form?
yes, it was simple with images provided on http://stacklet.com/downloads/images/lister/Gentoo/2010-0/x8...
One reason I don't kill mean comments is that I don't want to be censoring anyone.

Then you need to bring onto your team some group of curators/moderators whose number 1 task is to keep the site free of nastiness on a nonpartisan, equal opportunity basis.
If anyone is interested in this topic, check out the book "The Promise of Sleep". It's the story of one of the earliest sleep researcher (before we knew about REM) and his journey into understanding sleep.

It some interesting insights into sleep, for example why it's better to be a little tired than overslept.

http://www.amazon.com/Promise-Sleep-Medicine-Connection-Happ...
Online Development Studio - CodeRun
It depends on what you mean by "runtime." If you're creating a new datatype, is that really "at runtime," or are you just talking to the compiler interactively?

To put it another way: metaprogramming might have effects at runtime, but not the kind of effects that change depending on what the runtime does. Metaprogramming should be deterministic for your program to be considered to be "in production."
Where Shall We Have Lunch?
By all means please leave the nasty comments in. If nothing else, they should serve as an object lesson to other posters.

With a huge crowd, the system needs to train the users by providing cues and publicly "punishing" (through greyed-out text and negative scores) ill behavior. The more people you have, the more important this feedback system becomes.
Range voting is one of the few systems that requires strategic voting with only two candidates. This isn't a good thing. :/

Demographic A (10 voters): Candidate X valued at 40, Y at 60
Demographic B (3 voters): Candidate X valued at 100, Y at 0

Candidate X gets 700 points
Candidate Y gets 600 points

This scenario demonstrates how susceptible range voting is to tactical voting.
The manager should also be a developer. So stay
"... posting as a tough guy is a good social strategy in school just as it is in prison"

So here's a connection to another recent post http://thenextweb.com/2009/11/28/chat-hacker-hacked-blog/

(17 year old hacker).

Is the public school system, pretty much universal around the globe now, a breeding ground for sociopathic behavior because of compulsory attendance?
"Where did I say I didn't mind writing my own platform?"

My point was exactly this. Rather than writing your own platform, which will most likely be less secure (but not vulnerable to blanket attacks), you could just write the plugins you want and a theme and then Wordpress is absolutely no hassle at all to maintain. Everything is done via auto-update and after you've made a theme you never have to touch code again and you wont have to suffer feature-wise.

I have never once had auto-update fail and I run 10-15 off-the-shelf plugins.

There are things more secure, they are elegant, but they are definitely not less of a hassle to maintain. I have yet to see any platform (though I haven't studied those outside of the Rails community that thoroughly) that have an auto-update feature so complete and problem-free that Wordpress has.

If you are to say just one good thing about Wordpress, it is that it is hassle-free to maintain. This is the reason it has become popular, the only way any sort of software can become popular is when people without coding experience or knowledge of how to admin a server can maintain and update it.

Since you haven't updated it for a couple of versions, I'd strongly recommend you do so and try using it again. A lot of development happens and I'd suggest you build a new opinion on what Wordpress actually is today.

If you still don't think auto-updating everything and installing both themes and plugins from the admin-page without having to touch the filesystem manually – you can try to find something easier, but I sincerely doubt you will.
It's amazing how well Slashdot's comment/karma system works, despite 10 years of frankly inexplicable web site management. Porting it to HN (without the crazy interface) might help with managing growth.

In particular this comment is great: (http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1484856&c...)

Sometimes inspiring your employees is as simple as demonstrating that you share their pain, even if you can't share the workload.

Now if this behavior becomes the norm, it doesn't matter what management does. People will soon be burnt out and will leave.
Are You a Blue Collar or White Collar Developer?
Thank you, I'll look into that method.
I don't give much credence to the "moral support" thing - a manager is a disruptive figure to a coder, whose presences implies the possibility of sudden changes of course, and who can't be casually ignored. If you want a coder working in "the zone", then stay away! But the real question the manager should be asking is: am I going to be the bottleneck - for a decision that needs to be made, for knowledge only I have (such as the root password on "live"), for some likely situation where I need to pull rank over the phone to get a 3rd party to move in a hurry? If yes, stay (and stay quiet). If no, go home.
The solution is just to flag these and post the better link since you can't change the link after the fact which makes sense. I'm sometimes guilty of this though sometimes I do think there is editorial content which adds to the original story.
I dunno. I tend to submit from the same domains simply because there aren't very many submitting from those domains, and the can have interesting articles. On the other hand, I don't submit very often, so maybe some sort of statistical time check would work.
William Stein: mathematical software and me, a very personal recollection [pdf]
Sumo wrestling game with drunk physics.
Whoa, great idea guys! I've been looking for something like this! :-)
My voting behavior is pretty closely related to the comment score: if I think the score is "right", I usually leave it alone, but if it's too high I'll downvote for disagreement. I think there's a big difference downvoting a comment at >2 and downvoting a comment at 1 or below.

I also routinely upvote comments I disagree with but find well-reasoned nonetheless. Especially if they are unusually difficult for me to refute.
Justin.tv  to Launch Pay-Per-View Service
I had a manager that was also a developer and it was horrible. It's likely he was just a bad manager; by virtue of being a developer he felt he had a certain justification to micromanage the hell out of everyone.
How about allowing the primary post to have extra settings that affects what can/can't happen: Example: Min karma to post: 1000, Min Civility to post: -100 points.

This way if the community sees a mob problem, the community can tweak the settings accordingly.
I'm sure you can come up a good algorithm to maintain a moving set of defaults.

Also, maybe allow readers to filter posts based upon their threshold settings.
Diving Suit Fail [video]
There is clear statistical evidence that many (perhaps most) users view scores this way. On the whole that is probably good, because it tends to prevent scores from going to extremes in either direction.
Using downvotes as a way of expressing disagreement is, I believe, unfair to a commenter if he/she is courteously stating his/her point of view or idea, mainly because downvoting inflicts a penalty on the user's karma - which many users, I surmise, care about.

I don't think users should be penalized for siding with one aspect of an discussion just because other users disagree and proceed to downvote based on their own personal opinion. It's not even the best way of determining majority (which I believe is, partly, the purpose of the system), since not every user makes use of the feature.

Some sort of hybrid might be the most comprehensive solution. Probably something along the lines of upvotes raise karma (compensating good input), downvotes don't affect karma (their purpose becomes, then, to provide insight on the general opinion of a subject), and flags affect karma negatively for rude or uncivilized comments.
Wow, I really want to make a poster of this as a gift. Do you think I could take this file to Kinkos and have them make a poster of it?
Argh. Show, don't tell. I'm not going to "Sign Up or login" just to see what the interface is like. There are tons of language resources out there, and tons of different ways to learn (currently hooked on language apps on my iPhone) - I have a rough idea of what works for me and what doesn't, I should be able to tell right away what methods the site uses and if it's for me or not.
If the submission can't be understood within its own context, then the title should indeed have been more explicit.
I was lucky enough to be one of the first beta users. Their cognitive model of predicting exactly when I need to take another look at words so I don't forget them works really well.
All the words in the world. Pronounced.
Looking at your submissions, there seems to be enough time between submissions and variety that I don't think you'd get "caught" by what I am proposing.
Consider having a penalty box for a certain period of time once a flag threshhold is reached - e.g. a few hours (where the offense is clearly marked that the user alone can see with a link to TOS) to shame someone into being more civil. If it's decorum that you're trying to change, then I'd keep the flag simple - e.g. an "ad hominem" flag. Part of the attraction for me to HN is its elegance and simplicity in great and relevant stories percolating to the top in addition to the unique and remarkable community.

Once an individual has a given number of penalty boxes, a moderator considers whether to ban them. The danger of doing stuff like this is that subjects that interest this community inevitably also spill over into the political realm and as others have pointed out the use of up votes and downvotes are ambiguous and further, open to abuse.

If you want to publicly shame someone, then once a member is on probation after a certain number of penalties/flags, add a dot or something relatively benign in color to their name.

Edit - I'd add that if it were up to me, I'd try to control personal attacks above all else given the community is pretty good at calling people out on comments that add little to no value.
I just signed up and it took me more than 60 seconds to figure out how to begin.

It reminds me of Rosetta Stone but without the pictures. I'd pay for this service.
I think that the 'why' looses it intrigue when you consider that there is little done to convey their purpose to anyone other than 1)the pissed off blog owner and 2)their competing frienemies and script kiddies...

"... we do this to protest against somethings, for example the last month I think there was a genocide agains the Uygurs in the west of China and we just hacked around one thousand websites of the chinesse government.
Our web page is: www.ayyildiz.org..."

It seems more is said in this short interview about their supposed 'moral motivations' and logic for these attacks than the attacks themselves actually conveyed.

To make a real stance against something, wouldn't it prove far more beneficial to compose a multi language (Translate) well thought out argument instead of posting a few Turkish sentences and a flag Gif as a protest? A few lines of CSS and javascript to actually provide usable reference and material to viewers about what it is you feel strongly enough about to actually hack another's property over?

I feel like this type of hack is more of a <i>"I'm a rebel (because I am a kid) and am going to tag this bridge because I have a can of paint and no one is there to catch me doing it - I'm a protester because I tagged it 'Pigs suck!'"</i>

But again, in my day when 16 year olds where 'acting out against society' with netbus and BackOrifice on my school pcs
I don't think so - getting rid of it isn't difficult, so it is unlikely to limit your future career prospects.
Festina lente (said Aldus Manutius)
This is pretty awesome, that they got a real linguist to put together the language for the movie.

One thing I noticed, both when listening and while reading this description: While the syntax and morphology is nothing at all like English (so it sounds alien), basically all of the vowel sounds are very American ("ay" and "aw" instead of the "e" and "a" sounds of French or Spanish). Seems like a nod to the fact that the people who'd actually need to speak it would be American.
YC funded Lingt uses Games to teach languages
"I just disagree. I have some familiarity with ASL and I feel they've gone off in the wrong direction from the start."

I know a bit of information theory, but I know zero of ASL. It's quite possible that they went in the wrong direction from the start, but someone can still write a paper to point that out and prevent other people from repeating the same mistake. There's value in going in the wrong direction: it serves as a warning to others.

"I guess I'd like to see a little passion in my science. Sorry if that seems too harsh."

Personally, I found the paper's presentation horrible. I would never submit something so visually unappealing under my name. I agree that it sounds like a last-minute rush to finish something. I also agree that there seems to be little passion in it.

However, let us look at the authors: 1st author in an EE undergrad, 2nd author is a post-doc, 3rd author is a professor. Of course, the undergrad did all the work, the post-doc guided him, and the professor secured the grants that paid for the effort. Despite all the paper's flaws, I still think it must be judged for what it is: an EE undergrad trying his luck outside his field... and failing, perhaps.
For me its another example for how the term "hacker" is being wrongly generalized and how easy its to claim to be one.
I like it, though I can't figure out to type the pinyin vowels.
I wonder if they plan to offer english as well (i.e. x to english instead of english to x), considering the importance of english in the online world.
Sadly, while still relevant, Techcrunch is slowly becoming less intellectually satisfying. There's been more drama than needed as of late in my opinion.
It's used in score listings, so that you can read down a colum of numbers side by side, but I don't remember ever seeing it used in prose. I'm quite sure it is normally "foo: 1, bar: 0"...
AMQP for PostgreSQL
It still sold about 10 times as many as the single at the number three spot...
Desperately need a way to test into higher levels more quickly than just running the vocabulary. Also, it'd be wonderful to have a keyboard-based way to run the tests.

That being said, I'm almost still tempted to run through the intro vocabulary due to the achievement system.
"Boss" might be better handled by an MBA, but "project manager" urgently needs at least a little coding experience. If you don't have a gut feel for the work, your estimates will be noise and you won't be able to protect the developers from irrational imposed deadlines.
Moderators can update the headline and link; fixing in place can be better than another submission on the same topic, because it aggregates upvotes and conversation in a single place.
Hmmm. I wonder how they'll deal with policing this for porn.
It's not working.
(Ubuntu 9.10 64 Bit / Firefox 3.5.6)
- the learning screen does not show any words.
That comment was silly and this article is sillier. Neither are grounded in sound reasoning, but both meet universal acclaim at Hacker News. There goes the neighborhood.

So is there evidence Russians are investing in US technology start-ups as status symbols?

No.

Firstly, the "Russians" behind these investments are really just one fund called Digital Sky Technologies.

Secondly, although this fund is located in Russia and is composed in part of Russian money, the fund also includes investments by Goldman Sachs and Tiger Global.

Thirdly, neither the Facebook nor Zynga investments are clearly recklessly lavish. Techcrunch observed that "no one else wanted in at Facebook at that $10 billion valuation." That is the very definition of being a high bidder and, of course, being the highest bidder is required to win. Tiger Global, Institutional Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz each invested in Zynga at the same valuation as "the Russians."

So have "the Russians" involved Goldman Sachs, Tiger Global, Institutional Venture Partners and Andereessen Horowitz in the private equity equivalent of a coke and hooker binge?

I don't think so. Maybe DST is just another reasonably managed venture fund and Techcrunch and a random Hacker News commenter are off the mark.
Norvig: What to demand from a Scientific Computing Lang Even if you don't care
It's beta. I would imagine that they will get the sales pitch down once they are finished with the product.
Just type the tone number at the end of each word

ni3hao3 for instance.
The best extended treatment, still, 170 years later, is Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
I am not saying all of TC is irrelevant. We have our share of irrelevant stuff from other sites too. But on average we get 3-4 stories from TC posted here on HN, stuff like twitter going down (every freaking time, how often does it happen?), facebook going down for 5 minutes, rackspace going down (in itself is relevant news, but from TC the news is the internet went down because TC is hosted on rackspace).

If this much crap was posted from any other website, they would have been blocked without any debate whatsoever. There is a reason people subscribe to rss feed, why would I come to HN to see one blog hogging the whole site?

Which is why I suggest either a hard cap on number of subs per domain per day or give users the option to block out certain domain so that they don't see it in their HN.

I don't think it is an unreasonable or very difficult request to implement.
Equally interesting that abalashov calls TC on using the completely unsubstantiated conjectures of a lone commenter on an internet news board as the basis on which to write an article.

That is the difference between HN and TC. On edit:HN, commenters generally delineate their comments between that which is based on empirical evidence, and that which is their own conjecture. This intellectual honesty that many, but not all, HN users engage in makes HN 'feel' more reliable than TC. The rub is that when HN is used as a reliable source, that same intellectual honesty feels obliged to point out the fact that the source is not reliable. Even the user who made the comment!

I think PG is to be congratulated on creating such a forum. And HN users should be congratulated on pointing out flaws in debate points, even when the debater agrees with your position.
Setting up Clojure, Incanter, Emacs, Slime, Swank, and Paredit
Ah, just found the textbook section, though it's still not easy to understand how to find vocabulary at the appropriate level.
Streaming Local Video With Your Roku
To "apply" a tone to a syllable, follow it with the corresponding tone number. e.g., wo3

There's a link down the bottom of the page during those sequences that explains how it works and how to practice.
Signed up and gave it a crack. I learned basic Mandarin at high school and have been to China a few times. Found the site quick and easy to use (though I struggle with remembering the tones for the pinyin). Achievements provide a simple but effective incentive.

Would definitely use something like this were it available for Italian and Spanish as well.
Why Basic is Still Relevant
I think people are just very skeptical about Palm's future. They've been slow to fix some of WebOS's biggest shortcomings and for some odd reason they decided to release a slower more limited WebOS device out before bringing the Pre to GSM or Verizon. What Palm really needs is a higher end WebOS device -- something with more than 8GB of non-expandable storage and perhaps a larger touchscreen model with no physical keyboard. At that point they'd be in good shape to compete with Android & iPhone. Otherwise they're just another "also ran"
"[america ranking low in tolerance] is a mistake. Some religious countries are indeed intolerant, but America is not one of them"

this seems to be a good ecnomist article, but its filled with propagada.

america ranks below for tolerance not because of religious reasons, but because its a police state where the people have no means of contesting acts and policies of some obscure gov branchs.

right now im on the verge of moving to there, but im scared as shit of the random people dispearing for ties with terrorism. Fair its still a small number, and they even might be terrorists, and more importantly its no one you know. But that there are cases, that are.
Why Google May Want Yelp
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006787
Tea And Coffee Cut Type 2 Diabetes Risk