skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
so, most of the new users voted up for this story, and the older users contributed the comments in the story...this is interesting about the "quality" of the users, so maybe the weighting that will affect story order, should take in mind user contribution(karma) in comments...

So, maybe comments's karma should be kept as a different record. And there should be comments weighting too, because we wouldn't want new users to game the system with each other and thus game again the weighting system for the story order.

"Quality" could be expressed as "experience" because obviously people adapted in the climate of YC.news who behave the expected way, as you say you expect to happen and thus the problem correct it self. But expecting the situation to correct it self may not be the right way.

Expected way though shouldn't be mean is the correct way, because the community would remain closed instead of being open.

So, because of the problems that arise with a weighting system making it probably not democratic, the most correct way for weighting would be to happen in manual down voting, which should appear only for "experienced users".

Weighting should happen there, so for example if you have 1 experienced user up voting and another one down voting, their vote is eliminated, which positive/negative difference could be used in two ways:

1. added in the current points of the story

2. or a non-linear scale be used that would determine the quality of the story.

what do you think?
I don't think a site like this can remain occult forever. When you consider the name is 'Hacker News' it's surprising it hasn't been swamped already with spam and adolescent comments. Perhaps a high quality community forum like this has a limited life span. It's a depressing thought, but I know if anyone can fix it, then pg can!
Next craze in web forms I want to see is the emotional state. This could be the next captcha.

Please don't overload the forms of your web apps. Add only the fields that match to the context.
My strategy has always entertained me because the guys I've known were so thrilled about their rediculous "world changing" idea that they were crushed to find that hardly any outsourcers were even interested:)

Yours will work well enough, but I also like to test to see if anyone is actually determined enough to go through all this trouble and carry out their plan anyway. Serious entrepreneurs are very few in this part of the country...
These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.
-James Joyce, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"
I made another note to the essay.

What I mean to say is that successful programmers will try business, but what successful business people try engineering? But "trying to" is not a sufficient condition for "succeeding at."
On the example calendar, I think it would have been better to have the green box on the left and the red box on the right. Drag and dropping things from left to right rather than from right to left is more instinctive from a users point of view because one would normally read from left to right (most of your target audience would anyway).
Did Bill Gates Really Say That?
Reddit should use a filter like this that a comment must pass before it is allowed to be posted (except for on the lolcat and NSFW subreddits).
"Because implementing an Idea is most of the time harder than having an Idea"

I think the difficulty is not in the hacking skills, though. Therefore it seems to me the arrogance of hackers is unwarranted. While I have a science degree, I taught myself programming with a couple of books - it really is not a secret superpower that should make the rest of mankind bow down before me. It is a skill like any other.

Personally, I would be delighted to meet a business person who is dedicated to making an idea a reality.

There might be an issue of trust: typically, business people are perceived as the people who screw things up and make life bad for the programmers. Therefore, just bumping into a random business person, a hackers enthusiasm might be limited.

Another thing that sucks about hacker arrogance: most hackers really only want to work on their own ideas. That makes finding co-founders very difficult. Last year I really tried to meet eligible candidates (ie on barcamps), but even though I met a few capable people whom I also liked, finding common ideas and visions was too unlikely in the end. Of course, I myself am no exception, I would also prefer to work on my own ideas. I try to be open for other ideas, but still.
It is irrelevant whether or not obscurity is the only kind of protection available; obscurity is temporary and only needs to be defeated once. Furthermore, obscurity is not the only kind of security there is: Benevolent moderation is another form of protecting a community. And even if obscurity was the only kind of security available, we could simply invent a new kind of security.

I am unaware of any websites that have "died". I assume you refer to the digg.com and reddit.com exoduses that are so often brought up. Comparing those two sites to Hacker News is not comparing apples to apples. The commercial purpose of those sites is to sell advertisement space to advertisers, so trading a small group of thinkers in favor of a large group of more advertisement friendly users makes commercial sense. Hacker News, on the other hand, probably has the commercial purpose of driving business to YCombinator. It is in Hacker News' best interest to keep the small group of thinkers in favour of the larger population. So there is good reason to believe that Hacker News will be able to overcome these growing pains and be a community for the thinkers for awhile yet.
From the website, it looks like this is less an OS in and of itself and more a CL implementation designed to create OSes. Sort of the C of Common Lisps.
You think both are false, or Hollywood is brainwashing, just not for American values?

I am under the impression that for example the theme "sacrifice yourself for the common good" is pushed excessively in Hollywood, and I consider it to be brainwashing and American-valueish. In any case, most movies have a kind of moral they want to force upon their viewers. Another common theme is adultery, where cheaters make valid "shock effect victims" (ie if somebody has to die, at least make it the cheater, he is not such a big loss for society).
But _why_ are hackers arrogant, and how does one differentiate between "bad" arrogance (what you described) and "good" arrogance (like Steve Jobs)?

I don't have the answer to suggest for this question now, but I hope that it starts an interesting discussion. I'll try to reply tomorrow morning.
I have spoken publicly a lot (still do). Many of the suggestions in the article are context-specific, or have widely varied appeal depending on the person (I am not going to show up early and have herbal tea, sorry...)

But I am going to rehearse. Many, many times. Not just prepare, mind you, but _rehearse_. With a small tape recorder going, I will practice, analyze, revise and practice some more.

I think this is the one thing that separates those who come off as professional from those that come off as amateurish.
I actually think of requests of this type as an investment request, the product will take X days to build, I charge Y per day if I agree to build the product I have just invested X*Y dollars into the company.

Then I calculate what the other side brings into the deal (time/skills/money) and calculate the percentage for which I'd consider working on the project.
Let it die this already. I think this has been beaten to death. A businness type, with just an idea, without any hackers, or capital to implement it, is just day dreaming.
And it is annoying when they think they deserve more than half of the company just b/c of that idea.... If they were providing more than that, capital, connections, userbase, community or something significant, then yes that idea is more than just an idea, but more of a practical plan.

But in all this tech parties I have been, and I keep meeting this "wantreprenours", that are just a "coder" away from getting their startup off the ground, if they only could find a coder.... good luck.

They come across with a douchebag types, with a sense of superiority as they think they know businness better than you, but yet are pretty oblivious on what it takes to get something off the ground. They learn few keywords such as Ajax, Ruby on Rails, PHP, and quite often they hugely undersestimate the effort it takes (development wise) to build something they want, which is very annoying to programmers.

Just go to any 2.0 parties, and you will meet these annoying wankers all the time, with exceptions of course, as not everybody is annoying, or oblivious, but a lot are.

Ps. In college, a lot of the businnes majors were in social frats, which tend to be disliked from academic/smart types. Plus businnes school is not a big deal. A CS major can easily go to MBA and be good at it, will the reverse is very rare. At my CS programm, during the second semester, we had a class that was kinda hard, which weeded out the people that were not capable to handle it, or were there for the wrong reasons (money, as it was the .com boom then). Ah, and a lot of these failed CS majors ended up either in businnes, or "information techonology", which was half businnes. So, there you go, more reasons not to like business types.
He knows how to get our Yin tangled with our Yang.
It may seem presumptuous, but it is undeniable techcrunch has considerable influence.

My only concern is that knowing certain important people from TC now read HN, there might be an influx of spam from people looking for attention. Especially now that everyone knows it is possible get TC coverage by posting here.

This would only be a bad thing though if the "hey look at me!" spam really got out of hand. Otherwise, I really like reading about peoples startup projects (as I'm sure Arrington and others do too), as long as the intent is genuine.
XO Laptop: Towards a World Wide Mesh?
The people giving you that feedback are bitch punks. Don't listen to 'em.
This is also known as the "Slashdot game".
Looking for advices, ideas...a partner maybe?
Hi all guys,
I'm the founder of www.pet-files.com, a social network for pet lovers. It currently allows users to create profile pages for their pets, with unlimited photos, videos and facts. It also allows to create slideshows you can embed into an existing blog, or keep a blog directly on pet-files.

I'm currently looking for new ideas and advices to make it evolve and become more popular. I'd be also interested in establishing a partnership with someone that likes the idea, and want to expand it.

What do you think? Is there anyone out there who likes this?
Thanks for your time and consideration, I hope to read some answers soon!
Best,
- Marco (Italy)
Because typically the programmer will end up spending 1000x longer to complete his part. This is no exaggeration.
Nonsense, everyone wants to work on their own ideas.
Google’s Brin and Page lose $17 billion, still take $1 salaries
April Fools Day is almost upon us. This certainly beats the island of San Serife ( http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-54600165.html ).
Like I said, generally I agree with the article, and it makes some good points. But the button-pusher for me (and the point I'm trying to make) is that labeling the technically adept as "socially awkward" is about as acceptable as saying that black people have "soul", poor people have "dignity", women are more "empathetic", and business-people are "aggressive", as though the one naturally leads to another. I honestly don't recognise the stereotype of the "socially awkward" programmer, and feel it's unhelpful to keep recycling and perpetuating it.
A lengthy blog post packaged as an essay, formatted to 1/3 my screen's width, and with copious undue footnotes. Now where have I seen this before.
Actually I haven't seen one on the front page in a while, but maybe I haven't been paying attention.

Also, I have a friend who is a dyslexic physicist, and he thinks the Large Hadron Collider is kinda gay.
Yes. What are the odds that this guy also wrote the theme from the Old Spice surfing ad?
Good to see some actual experiments with the different frameworks, not just expert thoughts.
I find it odd that you even consider it's a problem. It's odd to hear a founder consider a site growing a problem.

The metrics to handle the "problem" should have been addressed during the conception stage of the site. I would be surprised if simple administration could fix the trend.
What this proves: MetaFilter posters use 100 words to say what could be said in 3, whereas YouTube posters use 1.
Forget technology: biomeds are Silicon Valley's hottest investment
Hey Marco,

Why are you looking for 1 person as a partner when you can "crowdsource" it? i.e. get as many people as possible (your friends, family, friends of friends, random strangers with pets, etc) to contribute ideas.

Make the target users your partner.
This is a real 911 emergency call
"StrokeDB"?

To me, the name sounds more suited to a database of people who died of a stroke.

Not sure what others think.
Dynamic Web Design:  Why Use PHP?
Tanzanite – one of world's most precious gemstones
Plea to ban employers trawling Facebook
Don't you just love purposefully breaking stuff?
So finding co-founders is impossible? I think not. You can also listen to some other person's idea, recognize it as great and work on that idea.
Well, I'm already doing that :)
But people with experience in growing an idea from the entrepreneur startup might have more insight on this...
Not all hackers are arrogant, but I think some suffer from tunnel vision.
I'm reminded of Kawasaki's rule of thumb when it comes to valuing startups: add $250K for every full-time engineer you have and subtract $250K for every full-time MBA you have. :)
Google's $475k Bodyguards: Cheap!
Communicate Acquires Y Combinator Startup Auctomatic, Unveils New Business Strategy
congratulations for beautiful web-site .... though there are too many things on the home page - you may want to tweak it so that it doesn't look crowded ... also if u r in italy then may be u will require someone to do off-line marketing for u in north america (the biggest pet market) ... by the way u need to provide ur email add so that enthusiast can contact u.
Congrats. Nice to see the brits doing well.

Found a short interview as well: http://venturebeat.com/2008/03/26/communicatecom-buys-e-comm...
Its good to know where the limits are.
exactly.

of course Hacker News will break news EARLIER than TechCrunch so it would be better for "techcrunch" for this site to go underground - then "techcrunch" can break the news :P
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142414
also visit

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142002
I. Hate. Youtube. Comments.

I have hated them forever. It's the one thing I can't wrap my fucking head around. How hard is it for a company valued at billions of dollars to hire some MODERATORS? I hate the stupid Digg-like approach of voting up and down comments by users. While that usually filters out ad spam and exceptionally racist or stupid comments, it is not enough. I'm not saying that I want MetaFilter-esque short essays on a fucking Chris Crocker vid, but I crave some semblance of order.

Bah, I'm probably in the minority on this one.
Ah, that explains it. I read the article and wondered what everyone was so worked up about. The new version that I read actually is very complimentary on the importance of hackers.
Tanks for your post. I'd actually need someone in the USA that can take care of the marketing. Interested people can contact me through the website's Contact page
There are a lot of discussions that need to be had concerning filtering, vote weighing, etc. We just have to have them earlier now.
Ask YC: Are You Planning Anything For April Fools Day?
Are you planning any practical jokes for April Fools Day? Does your code have any special functionality which is only triggered on April Fools Day? Will you be uploading any special graphics to your website for April Fools Day?
I suppose if image recognition was good enough, there would be no need for QR codes? You could just photograph the url and the phone would act accordingly.

A disadvantage of QR codes might be that they don't work so well for human brains: if you want to establish your brand through an advertising campaign, a QR code alone won't help much.
Someone should implement Randall Munroe's proposal, so that repetitive and cliche phrases are automatically "demoted" -- which would mean that they appear on the bottom -- with the penalty getting exponentially worse, so it starts out as a mild chiding at first, then escalates.

EDIT: Come to think of it, I knew this crazy guy about 10 years ago. He was so gung-ho about being "truly alive" that he tried his damnedest to never say the same 4 words twice. This made it impossible for him to give driving directions!
Find a domain you like and which is avaiable?
Many congrats guys!!
Down voting is too easy to abuse. Reddit was being gamed in this way -- certain users were down-voting everything, which made being a new poster starting out an almost automatic karma penalty of a few points. They've made the down-vote penalty milder because of this.
How about a feasible suggestion?

Domain squatting is ridiculous. At least when you had land grabs in the old west, they made you improve the property in order to keep it.
I wouldn’t necessarily say this has anything to do with students or school. I’ve been out of school for a couple of years now and have been working as a developer for about 5 years.

One incident, in particular, drove most of the hatred for my original (and now replaced) rant. It involved an M.B.A. recruiting me to work for “his idea”, promising a bunch of money and a sizable stake in equity (~35%). However, once the boss-employee relationship set in, the money evaporated and the equity shrank to 5%. In the end, I wasted 6 weeks of incredibly hard work and came away with a chip on my shoulder.

The argument doesn’t really have much to do with Hackers and Business types. As he points out, it simply has to do with the fact that in a small group of people (2 or 3), there is no room for pure leaders. At that group size they merely become bullies, and the whole group is less powerful because of it.
The Guardian ditches Phorm
Nothing wrong with that.
wtf no traffic - is it some sorta scam
'Sports car' of commercial spaceflight unveiled
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=145275
I live with my own tunnel vision, embedded as I am in an academic environment.
what's your marketing strategy for offline and online? u may also hire a small mktg/pr firm but they need to be paid in cash ... which i dont think u will opt for???
I just thought that, all else being equal, people on both sides are equally stubborn about sticking to their own ideas. Do you find this not to be the case?
I see where they are coming from - the discussion was better when it was under the radar. That says nothing about the future, however.
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The offline strategy (which I haven't started yet) would be marketing the site at dog/cat/pet shows, competitions and meeting.

Online would be maybe sponsoring a few good sites, but mostly relying on the word of mouth of pet enthusiasts that discover the site, and embed thier pets' slideshow into their blog (the slideshow links to their full profile page of course). I'd also like to grow the number of people blogging on pet-files, which would bring new readers, and possibly new writers
I never ran a BBS (although I thought about it), but I played SRE, BRE, TradeWars, L.O.R.D, and Falcon's Eye. I played SRE the most. Would love to play it again.
You're right, though I think I would say "extremely difficult, tending toward impossible". People do not change their minds easily, especially on subjects they feel a strong emotional attachment to.
Congrats :) Slick idea... I remember pg saying he considers EBay ready for a startup competitor, but this seems a better strategy, even though it doesn't solve all problems.
The REDDIT.com community is saying the same thing now. They claim that their website is now polluted and that the quality has gone down.

BTW: I found this community via TechCrunch last week and like what I see. Still unsure that I'll fit in with you guys although I like the content.
Eight times longer? This is not too much.
I like the new business plan – put shopping sites on great domain names. It isn’t exciting but it sounds profitable.

Congrats on the buyout! I hope you all made a bundle.
Revisiting The Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering
I've had the pleasure of consulting to the FuseCal team. The problem they are solving - bringing structure to unstructured events - is really tricky stuff. Fortunately they are super smart and dedicated. FuseCal is definitely a startup to watch in '08.
Digital Billboards Hacked in Southern California
XCOR to Unveil New Suborbital 2 Person Rocketship
Subprocess Hanging: PIPE is your enemy
do u have budget for these strategies? are u generating any revenue at present?