skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A plan for spam is born :) Yes, I can tell you in advance, they are distinguishable - these are the stories that YOU will never vote up. And one can predict how you will vote on the stories with a pretty good accuracy with statistical factor analysis like SVD: http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20061211.html.
Entrecard drops - FAST! Drop 300 cards in 20 minutes...
Stuff doesn't stay on the frontpage any longer than it has in the past. If anything the frontpage changes faster.
OS X didn't use iptables, it used ipfw, like the BSD-based OS it was.
Prosper Default Rate 20%
Rambus Wins Patent Trial
Tips for Joining an Excellent Startup Company
Want to join a startup? Here are some tips.
Recording made in 1860 knocks Edison off the chart
Don't be Afraid of the Economy and do Your  Best
How to become smarter?
Ignorance is Strength
If I understand your idea correctly, a side-effect would be that it would be harder to go back and comment on articles you have already read. So if everyone did this, the amount of discussion for each post would decrease.

I'd be happy with a less drastic measure: Why store the previously read info in a cookie? Perhaps it could be stored with my account instead. This way the highlighting of previously-read articles would be consistent regardless of which PC I happened to be using.

The number of articles stored could be limited to a reasonable number (say 3x length of the # of items on the front page).
I hate replying with just one link, but I have to take out my utterly scornful disgust out about this one in public:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=149789

Wow. Just wow.
iamdave, ClickPass worked fine.
that's a lot of diet advice. i think the key factor is actually your approach to thinking.
Here's some more info from Linkedin on Job Titles, Schools FBook employees went to: http://www.linkedin.com/companies/10667/Facebook
The majority of downloads are things people would not have otherwise bought, for whatever reason. In those cases, no one is being hurt, and someone is being helped. The reason torrent sites keep popping up is the vast amount of good they do.
BILL CLINTON AT IT AGAIN PULLS ONE OVER ON HILLARY
We can't possibly be in complete agreement if we are drawing opposite conclusions.

I think the difference might be that I assume the OP is heavily concerned with efficiency.

Given his background and goals it is not efficient [1] for the OP to learn C when in the same amount of time he could learn a high level language and then directly accomplish his goals, and never need to learn another language for the rest of his life.

[1] achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense (O.A.D.)
Yeah, that one was bad. Second worst on the frontpage, based on how it would look to vote-weighting if it were turned on.

The worst story on the frontpage by that standard right now is

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=149752

The third worst, ironically, is the one complaining about the problem:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=149887
IMHO, the biggest concern is HN going the reddit way. So here's a stab at trying to fix that:

- If we can get the list of the top 10-50 hostnames (xkcd, etc) posted on reddit, and deny publication of those hostnames on HN, the signal to noise ratio should go up (how much I don't know?)

- Obviously, some good posts would be missed, but it's alright to have a few false positives, since this is a website of aggregated news and not email

What do the folks here think?
I'm also phasing out of HN.
I can understand your decision, but I think "leaving" news.yc might be a bit drastic.

I've been reading hacker news for months now and I personally haven't noticed a dramatic drop off in the quality of posts. The signal to noise ratio has gone up and there are a lot more "meta" posts recenty - posts to news.yc about news.yc.

Despite these things, I still find quality information on a consistent basis. HN is pretty timely...I'm as likely to read something first here as I am on reddit or digg or any other social news site. The posts tend to be more start up oriented and many of the technical posts are of a better quality than I'd find anywhere else. Despite the noise, there is still a lot of legitimate value on news.yc

I'm not trying to ask the question "well if you don't like hacker news, what site is better?". That would only start an argument based on preference. Instead I'm asking "Isn't some startup focused social news, even with a high signal to noise ratio, better than none at all?". It's possible that at some point, there will be so many worthless posts that sifting through them will be more trouble than it's worth. But at this point, it seems to me that there are still interesting posts and insightful comments everyday on news.yc and it's still a ways away from not being a valuable daily read.
To be honest this is far less interesting than the things elephants do in the wild.

Aside from the usual stuff humans like about some animals, like pair bonding, raising their young and living as a family, and being very social with each other and even other species (including humans), there are a lot of other human-like traits of elephants. Elephants have astonishingly long memories (it's a wives tale that turns out to be true). They'll pause on the spot where loved ones have died, even many years later, and groups will console each other after a loss--having a funeral of sorts. They remember humans who have been cruel or kind to them in the past, and behave accordingly. They communicate vocally and are known to express a range of concepts this way--not just warnings, but also greetings, calls, and "names" (unique identifiers specific to each elephant). And, recently humans "asked" elephants to carry cameras into the forest for them, to help study tigers. Since elephants and tigers are on peaceful terms (what's a tiger gonna do to an animal that could crush it with one foot?) it worked well, and some amazing footage resulted.

Given all of this, it shouldn't be at all surprising that an elephant could be trained to paint a particular picture. It is rather unfortunate that it takes something like this to impress tourists of the intelligence of one of our closest intellectual peers, when elephants have so many more fascinating traits and ways of exhibiting impressive intelligence.
At the same time you pick up a C++ book, go to http://www.topcoder.com/tc and start up the arena (after reading the instructions, of course). Then practice, both the language and some problems, for about 2-3 weeks. Once you are able to solve the easiest (but not always trivial) problems regularly, you will be more than ready to easily pick up a markup language like HTML or a scripting language like Python. This will help you to be more comfortable with programming in general and to get some problem solving skills. These skills are useful when you develop software because it increases your productivity and helps you to write better code. This is not the only place you can get this kind of practice from, but everything is already set up so that you can go ahead and get started. I believe things will be easier afterwards if you get these skills first. It’s also a good idea to be able to think recursively, but you can work on this later on, and when you do you can try SICP, which is a very good resource.
I hope this helps.
My 2 cents: I think you're overreacting and being a bit melodramatic by "leaving" and going out of your way to make a post about it instead of, say, just not voting up or reading posts you aren't interested in (or just leaving). It's not like your sentiment isn't expressed in some way already several times a week. The only thing more annoying to me than noise is noise about noise. Yes, I see the irony in my saying that.
I'm not upset with the front page changing-- I think it's still just as awesome as before, and I'm sure Paul and the moderators are doing a great job at keeping the crap off.

What I am worried about are these increasingly common AskYC posts reflecting on News.YC. This post, for example, is a somewhat self-centered broadcast of BrandonM's exit. I hope this doesn't become a common practice, because this is the kind of stuff I don't like seeing on the front page.

There's certainly a ton of awesome conversation still going on. But I wish the community would feel like off-white paint again: unnoticeable and non-criticizable. It's what the people in the community say that matters, not the color of the walls.
I don't usually come to News.YC for the links, I come for the comments on the articles. Your idea would prevent News.YC comments on popular articles, so I disagree.
Delicious Library already does that on the Mac. Put your book/cd in front of the mac's built in webcam (or at least the barcode of the book/cd) and the item is added instantly to your library, with coverart and everything Very cool.

So if you're going to build this type of web-app, you might need to talk to Will Shipley :-)
'Bout time. The need to declare functor objects out-of-line to use the STL algorithms is a huge contributor to code clutter in C++.

The addition of inheriting constructors is also a good thing -- I wish I could have back some of the hours I've spent re-writing default constructors for deep class hierarchies.
The brilliance of the Potter books is more in the way that they start off as being extremely accessible to children, but by the time the series finishes, they are truly adult-level books. It's a good way of getting children through that speed hump - most young children read, but many stop during adolescense. Harry and Co help with this problem.
That's a good point.

In which case, how about NOT awarding karma for posting links for those hostnames, and award karma for the comments. what do you think?
It's the most direct way. A picture you love can be worth 1000 words you couldn't stand to hear, and as such could be "better" at communicating its message to you.
You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss: The Cliff Notes