skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish comments remained deletable longer. My last comment is 3 hr old (and has no replies) and it has already become undeletable whereas when I made an insensitive comment, it continued to be downmodded for about 24 hr.

By "become undeletable", I mean there is no "edit" or "delete" link on the comment.
I think karma should be used as an indicator of the quality of the post, not as a reward for groupthink.
I wasn't impressed by that one. The Hacker troll strikes a nerve because it's frightening. It's all too easy to imagine somebody really being that stupid, and too easy to imagine them becoming influential. The Daycare troll reads like just another ineffectual wingnut.
I don't use any social networks.

I do have my email and website (with real name) in my profile, though.
Regarding the future of communities while they grow and "technical tweaks", eBay recently adjusted its policies to improve its community quality, restricting sellers from leaving negative feedback to buyers:
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/02/crowd_control.php
Correlation does not imply causation. Repeat with me: correlation does not imply causation

Correlation does not imply causation -- but correlation can still be useful for making predictions or decisions. The fact that the word "V!@gra" appears in an email doesn't cause the email to be spam, but it does provide a strong indication that it's probably not worth reading said email.

If (taking a wildly hypothetical example) it turned out that 50% of YC applicants were over age 30 but 0% of the accepted YC applicants were over age 30, it would a strong indication to potential applicants over age 30 that they needn't bother applying -- and this is true whether the YC management has a deliberate bias against over-30s or not.
The curt abruptness of hackers coupled with a tendency to mod down things that are perceived as wrong probably causes this.
"Often users have second thoughts and delete such comments."

@PG, I've always wondered, are you able to see all the comments that I've posted and then deleted two minutes later? And if so, is this an acceptable way to send you semi-private messages?
I think news.yc has a 5th troll behavior and it's down modding a comment because they disagree with it

That's not a troll behavior ("troll" comes from the fishing term), and it's much less common here than on reddit or digg or (god help you) dailykos, where intelligent but unfashionable opinions get sunk hard.

There are only a few fashionable subjects around here (the importance of lisp, for example), whereas on other sites almost every question has a boilerplate answer, against which all opposition is "trolling". At any rate, no amount of actual "trolling" is as bad as groupthink. I'd rather a whole parliament of disagreeable colicky horseradish farmers than one unipartisan politburo.

ADDENDUM: Just thought I'd tack this on. Near the top of digg right now is this:

http://digg.com/business_finance/What_1_Million_Buys_In_Home...

That's sort of an interesting subject, but look at the comments. At the top with 9 diggs:

I dugg the story, but I refuse to click on anything with Forbes magazine. They force a full-screen ad (that you can skip) but in my efforts to help stop obnoxious advertising, I boycott Forbes.

Okay, there you have a 15-year-old combining 1) his irrational dislike of full-page ads (perhaps he thinks Forbes survives on government grants), with 2) his irrational proclivity to upmod things without looking at them, with 3) his belief that Forbes cares whether a 15-year-old looks at its slideshows. This sort of sad lameness is actually what kills online discussions, not "trolling".
Off the top of my head, maybe 40-50,000.

The fascinating thing is, all the data is still there. You can go and look at the old comments and stories and see what the site used to be like. If you could find a good proxy for stupidity, like comment length or spelling mistakes, you could graph the change as the site grew.
your (possibly accidental) assertion that what premises people believe affects what statements about reality are true

None of the statements in question have to do with reality, only with abstract ideas. Libertarians believe that property ownership is a right; communists believe that it is an offense. Neither of these assertions is empirically testable.

If the debate is about what policies will make us wealthier rather than what policies are ethical, then that's a different matter. But in that case, both sides are sharing the common framework of utilitarianism.
Oh well, we had a good run
The first comment was funny, though. Yes, if you want to pick it apart, it was funny because it was a verbatim reference to the earlier article, but it was funny nonetheless.

Likewise, it was funny that the "Funny..." comment was modded to -1. At least, I found it funny. Point being, I don't think these were rewards for groupthink, so much as rewards for geeks being clever.
"Paul Graham sees all the comments anyone has posted anywhere. What's more, he knows all the comments they will post in the future, too."
Then, when editing one's HN profile, it could indicate it better (whether the info is shown publicly or not).
I think the community size bit is important (see 'monkey number'). I also wonder if that means that sites should somehow attempt to break people into smaller groups in some way in order to maintain that 'small town feel'.
24 living in Atlanta. Working on an accounting suite for small businesses called Aloe. Very very raw pre-alpha quality build up at http://aloe-acct.com

Looking for someone who can kick ass and take names. A Rails developer would be great, but I'm also looking for someone who has business chops and a good understanding of accounting principles.
>losing the ability to have your posts seen.

That's how it works on this forum. I leave "showdead" on just to see what the trolls and spammers are up to.
You give a good example: which policies towards the market create more wealth (on average, various things being equal) is a matter of fact. But I think this sort of non-arbitrary approach to thinking has much wider applicability, and indeed that all interesting subjects can be approached in a careful, meaningful way not based on personal taste.

Which policies are ethical, with "ethics" rightly construed, is also a matter of fact. Morality is about how to live, and it's not a religious concept. The notion that morality is (and must be) religious is unfortunately a bad, religious idea, that (oddly) most atheists still believe.

Just to get started, we can consider which lifestyles do and do not accomplish their own internal goals. Lifestyles that do not are bad ways to live -- they are "immoral". We don't have to use moral terminology; that isn't important. But whatever you call it, there are objective facts about how we should or shouldn't live.

And there's better than that. You can take a very wide variety of goals, and examine how to achieve them. And you can find common points -- certain ways of life are good for achieving many goals, while others are not. These common points, which make people powerful and able to accomplish things in general, are an important, useful, and objective find the field of morality.
very true but I have seen valid responses down modded because of fanboyism and blindness to other views.

I guess we don't always behave in a grown up way online. I am as guilty of that as the next guy.
While I'm not sure how well HN works as a co-founder-finder (confoundit), I'll test the waters. :P

19 living in Santa Clarita, CA (just north of Los Angeles). Contact info, as well as stuff I've done is available in my profile.
Three liberating real-world app ideas on the table. Atlanta, 30.Two successful ventures under belt. Looking for young-ish, VP of Engineering to partner / co-found / code third.
I think it may happen, but not on his timetable. If you read his Age of Spiritual Machines, he dismissed many very difficult problems in AI and material science with a bunch of hand-waving. He could just as well be off by 50-150 years.
Hailing from State College, PA (home of Penn State) here. Working on an app that aims to be a one-stop shop for open source learning: a cross between Wikipedia (for students) and SourceForge (for teachers); with courses, lectures,
classes, and tutorials that anyone can create, edit and use.

Unfortunately, I was an absolute noob when I came up with the idea ~8 months ago, so I am learning as I go along (ironically, what I really need is something like ezLearnz to help accelerate my learning). As such, progress is slower than I expected; I hoped to have launched ezLearnz by February, but I still have some development to do. Hopefully, the launch will occur within a week, give or take a few days, at http://beta.ezlearnz.com . I'm developing in RoR, so a RoR developer would be ideal.

My contact details are in my (public) profile.
It might be interesting to experiment with two axes of rating: one signifying agreement/disagreement, the other quality/abuse.

Whether it's worth the added complexity, I'm not sure, but it would resolve an ambiguity in the signals sent to commenters.

(To squeeze into the existing UI and mental model of this sort of site, I might make the current up/down mean quality -- should more people see this or should it recede from view? -- and add a right/left for agreement, giving posts tiny little inline spot polls, of a sort. Maybe it could even be a sparkline or two-tone percentage-bar.)
"Real-world app ideas"

Elaborate?
Really? I think it would create new forms of opportunity.
There's some overlap, but I don't think either company would suggest that, unless they did so in the broad sense of competing for a user's time on the internet. I'd be interested to see stats on dating on FB though.
17 Startup Mistakes to Avoid
This is the kind of fairytale analysis that gives blogging a bad name. First, not every startup would be willing to sell at their current valuation. Facebook wasn't willing to sell to yahoo for 3 billion last year. Most VCs and a lot of founders are quite willing to decline immediate gratification for the promise of a much larger return in the future.
Second, its not like you can just place an order for every startup in existence on Amazon. There would be significant acquisition costs and the overhead on buying 44 billion worth of startups would run into billions itself.
Third, the previous issues pale in comparison with the problem of what to do with all the startups once you've bought them. Do you let them continue running independently? Do you integrate them all into Microsoft? Do pick and choose and do both? In any case, they'll need large amounts of funding which previously the market would have provided. How do you manage all of them together to get the optimal outcome that again the market would have provided? Its not clear to me that Microsoft, or any other company, could feasibly do all this. The likely scenario is that Microsoft would be paralyzed and go bankrupt, or most of the startups would be neglected into oblivion.

What the article is really talking about is replacing a distributed market with a centralized system. It is well known that this is grossly inefficient.

The real lesson here is the incredible efficiency of markets. In this case a market can use only 44 billion to create something that a centralized system wouldn't be able to replicate for even a trillion dollars (warning: this number pulled out of a hat to make a point).
I'm not sure I'd regard the Sokal affair as trolling. It's hardly being an asshole, unless you consider exposing idiots being an ass, and it's hardly fishing for controversy, unless exposing any kind of potentially controversial stuff is trolling (was Watergate trolling?).
I would go for sql server 2005/8 in a .net enviroment.

I have never had any speed problems. Also if you are going to use asp.net membership stuff it makes sense to go with it. There is a mySQL membership provider but its not great from my playing.

Also the cost is not going to be that much because you can do an aweful lot of processing with one MS database server.

I am sure with some googling you can find some bench marking of all major dbs.

I use discountasp.net for my .net apps as a starting point.

One last thing, finding someone to work on your MS sql database might be easier.
A great article - Our startup started with the idea of making lean management easy in service industries.
yeah i know. what pg said as well. still reminded me.
lol the irony of being down modded for my last comment :p
This kind of fantasizing gathers attention because some people would like it to be true while other people fear it. Controversy results, but it's not about anything. It's a conflict between two forms of wishful thinking.
If you wish to ask questions - get in touch & meet. Keep it enigmatic.
Origin of "Software"
I'm 28 in Atlanta as well and have been tinkering with a couple of ideas. Started a company back in college about five years ago in the CRM tech support space, but failed due to lack of expertise in marketing.

I'm not really interested in doing anything web-based though since my background is mainly desktop Windows development in C# for a few years now. If anyone's interested in talking to see if there might be some synergy shoot me an e-mail.
Sure, they could buy every startup in existence. But could they hold them?

If you buy a startup and then put it on a shelf, the employees quit and use the money you gave them to make another startup, or retire to Barbados. You have to keep them busy, and interested, and to do that you have to challenge them, flatter them, help them to grow. Who has the time to do that with all the companies in the Valley at once?

The flip side of this paradox is: Steve Ballmer controls billions of dollars, but he can't buy time. There's only one Steve Ballmer, and he can only make so many decisions in a year, no matter how much he spends.

Frankly, I think giving Microsoft the gift of every startup in the Valley might be a very effective way to kill the company. They wouldn't have any idea what to do with them all. The flood of brilliant new employees would overwhelm the existing corporate culture. Everyone would spend five years sitting in cubicles, editing .emacs files, upmodding posts on news.yc, going to the occasional meeting to talk to the shell-shocked managers who are desperately trying to bolt everything together into some kind of strategy, and waiting for vesting day -- when they will all leave and start another bunch of tiny companies. In other words, it would be like Microsoft probably is now, only more so.
Which is more valuable: Amazon.com or store.com?

Which would you have guessed would be more valuable back in 1994? The actual service is more important. Yahoo and google are both stupid names.
I think what PG called "incompetence" is really just rampant emotionalism. "Incompetence" is inaccurate because it suggests that people of all levels of experience can't happily share a forum, which I think they can. But what happens at Reddit nowadays is that anyone who posts an inane comment with a phrase like "why the fuck" will get lots of upvotes. (Case in point: Search for "fuck" in the comments for the top article at Reddit, and get: "That fucking cunt is going to get what she deserves," 15 points.)

I think in the early days of Reddit, the fact that everything including comments could be voted on was intimidating to trolls, so they were kept at bay. But some time later every primal scream was rewarded, and trolls started posting in droves.

It never helped that a really low-scoring post with a high-scoring rejoinder tended to be highly ranked. That's just begging for the sort of you-got-served culture that excites trolls.
"He could just as well be off by 50-150 years."

Well, that's not even a blimp in the history of mankind.
Disks are such a pain. What I want is an 500 gb flash card for $1.99. I suspect I'll get that soon enough.
sharpshoot: What's the reasoning behind Rule 3: 'Keep it enigmatic'?

I'm in Bristol, UK if anyone wishes to get in touch.
On news.yc it is not so extreme, but on german tech news site heise.de, there is also a modding system. Good threads become green, bad ones red. I have often wondered if people are more likely to start flaming away in the red threads. Sort of like beating up somebody who is already down on the floor (comments on the line of "you suck"). At heise.de I often had the impression that it is the case - not so much on news.yc, but it might be interesting to look at the statistics?
Other than the oft-repeated 'machine readable', I'm having a hard time getting over the conceptual hump of what the Semantic Web is.
Switzerland, Luxembourg or inbetween ;)

25, university degree, looking for a cofounder with experience in natural language processing and clustering of documents (like http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~hinton/absps/sh.pdf someone else posted below). Preferentially Java. Idea is blog search related.
Guessing: you have to be serious enough about actually co-founding something that you're willing to meet people in person to get opportunities.
Second, SICP contains problems that are just plain busy work. Exercise 1.14 is a good example of this. I really don't want to draw on paper a huge tree which represents the process generated by evaluating a procedure.

When I was a freshman in college I attempted to test out of first-year physics so that I could get on with the second-year classes. I went into a private meeting with the professor who was grading the tests.

"Well," said the professor, "you made some pretty silly mistakes here, and here, and here. But I recognize the problem: you don't draw diagrams. Here, for example, you made a silly mistake on this ladder-against-the-wall problem because you didn't draw the balance-of-forces diagram."

I admitted that this was the case.

"You were a really strong high school physics student," said the prof, "so you probably got used to being able to glance at problems and intuitively figure out the answer in your head. But the procedure is important. You have to draw these diagrams, and you have to make them correct. You will soon learn to draw them very quickly, but you must learn to draw them, because there are harder problems than the ones you did in high school, and you will find that you can't always hold everything in your head."

And so I did.

I thought fondly of that professor a couple years ago when I first saw the infamous airplane-on-a-conveyor-belt problem. I didn't find it that hard to solve. I was taught by a master.
I'm not exactly looking for a co-founder but I'm looking to meet smart people with interesting ideas. I like working on interesting projects whether it's my idea or someone else's. I'm located in Chicago (for now).
I remember an article from last year or so that said Google Mail users were far fewer in number than Yahoo! or Hotmail users but were wealthier. This makes sense as GMail was still relatively new two years ago, and more tech savvy (and higher income) users switched to GMail first.

Also, people who rely on Yahoo! Mail end up using those services as a lot of Yahoo! sites require logins, such as Yahoo! Games. Without Yahoo! or MSN Mail, people would eventually stop visiting those portals, as most users trust Google for search results. So that explains why users even visit those portals any more.

As far as Google, one isn't required to have a login, except for things like business/calendar tools, document management, and adsense, as far as I remember. One can clearly notice Google targets wealthier and smarter users. (I'm not saying wealth equals brains--Google simply targets nerds, education, and corporate users while Yahoo is still trying to target everybody at once.)
I don't think they're going to do a recall on the existing players. They're already loosing a ton of money without having to give back bash to the early adopters. It's part of the cost of being an early adopter though.

I wouldn't have bought either a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player until it was clear who the winner was. But I was wiling to buy a PS3 since even if Blu-ray ended up loosing I would at least have a game console. I think a lot of folks that would have not bought either early ended up getting Bluray as a side effect of buying the PS3 (and this inevitably tipped the scales since sales and rentals of Bluray content were outperforming HD-DVD).

I'm wondering why anyone decided to go against Sony on this when the PS2 was essentially responsible for the wide adoption of DVDs.
sorry, I accidentally downmoded you (why do those arrows have to be so small and so close together?).
I am in Munich and would be interested to meet.
The problem is that the two axes may get confused in one's head. If I disagree with something (especially ideologies), it's often enough because I feel the opposing viewpoints are not thought out, and the post may set off the same internal growling as rudeness. Someone on your side may seem like a virtuous knight as you watch them engage the opposition in debate; the other side may view them as an harsh aggressor.
The bulk of the programming community substitutes "can we?" for "should we?" Your design philosophy is a result of asking the 'should' question. The work of the 'can' question people piles up opportunities for proper application of the 'should' question. This is one way of determining the trolliness of a person or point of view. The troll is incapable of asking the 'should' question.

Love your stuff, Paul.
Can Rails Scale? Absolutely
Suggestion: Allow users to change their vote for a brief period of time
The up and down arrows are too small and close together so it's easy to accidentally vote a story or comment the wrong way. This is a problem for me on a phone especially but even on a computer it can lead to an accidental vote.

So without making UI changes, how about allowing the user to change their mind on a vote for a brief amount of time (something like a couple of minutes). This can work by eliminating (or marking as inactive) the arrow they clicked on the first time (similar how you can't downmode replies to your comments).
Wow, I thought of the same thing...
PG's essays are getting shorter. I like that -- no matter what Steve Yegge says. (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-...)
The simplest troll test. A troll (person or point of view) is incapable of introspection. This does not mean that trolls won't try to introspect, just that they cannot succeed at it. This can also be used to show why trolls have trouble with recursion and irony.
This might be a phase an industry goes through. You start out experimental, get a breakthrough, and while the industry is young, margins are high, everyone is developing new things, and companies worry about avoiding obsoletion. Then there is a transitional phase where companies figure out how to make a good product, breakthroughs become tweaks, the products are more similar, and competition is about quality and price. Then, everyone knows how to make the product, there's a best practice that really is the best practice, and the product is a commodity.

It looks like some parts of the web business are becoming simpler and more akin to commodities.
True. Like I said, I had a problem with his timetable, which he did not justify to my satisfaction. His premise may be valid. I would say it is almost inevitable.