skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My stat (TC = TechCrunch / TM = TechMeme)

~18 months ago 60% TC/TM, 30% Reddit, 10% Digg

~12 months ago 40% TC/TM, 30% Reddit, 30% Digg

~6 months ago 30% TC/TM, 40% Reddit, 10% Digg, 20% HN

now 20% TC/TM, 40% Reddit, 40% HN

Quality of posts has a lot to do with the change.
I like Disqus and how easy it is to implement, but does anyone else feel like it is cluttered?

I don't want a commenting system that allows me to "like" comments, vote them up or down, subscribe via email, etc.

To be fair though, I'm sure all of those features can be hidden via CSS and Javascript. If you look at some custom Disqus implementations (like Engadget) they do a good job of this.
I think its a bit early to be writing obituaries.

This is a problem, but Kevin is attentive to his users and I'm sure they'll get through it ...

PS: Left digg a 2 years ago now, but I like their new design better than the last.
Where the Super-Brains Are
It's 5000 a month, made a mistake, corrected now.
A few random thoughts from long time lurker, first time commenter (I finally have some value / expertise to add): The biggest thing that these interviews are testing is structured assimilation. Banks look for someone who can convincingly discuss their unremitting passion to enter finance as a lifelong career without seeming either passionate or betraying an interest in the money. Consulting firms structure 'case interviews' designed to test 'problem solving' when they are really laying out a regimented structure which can be most easily mastered through having a successful network of already-hired junior consultants. Again, it's not that there isn't a desire to hire creative, talented people, but the profile has to fit along certain metrics.
...I love this , So does My boyfriend .he is almost­ 11year older than me .i met him via agegap love­ ``.c`o`m` a nice place for seeking age le ss love.which­ gives you a chance to make your life better and open­ opportunities for you to meet the attractive young­ girls and treat you like a king. Maybe you wanna check­ it out or tell your friends.. Just love it
I'm obviously not as qualified as you are to make a judgement, but from every account I've heard, the government (and police, etc) are very, very corrupt.
If youtube, slideshare, podcast widgets had not existed, flash would been passe.

Last time I used flash was when I was experimenting with font embedding with sifr and swfupload, even there it was more to JS than flash.

A decade back embedding java applets was the norm, flash usage is at same level for most sites now.

We would get past it in mainstream sites in next 2 years
The Oatmeal responds: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d7e24/my_job_was_to_ga...
It reminds me of the famous "Wear sunscreen" video :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=MX&v=0CVB8YSOLK4
why? I love this , So does My boyfriend .he is almost­ 11year older than me .i met him via agegap love­ ``.c`o`m` a nice place for seeking age le ss love.which­ gives you a chance to make your life better and open­ opportunities for you to meet the attractive young­ girls and treat you like a king. Maybe you wanna check­ it out or tell your friends.. Just love it
Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements?
So let me just understand this. They are going to hire someone to forge a community by tweeting back with the 1 mil followers?

First Twitter destroyed community by allowing people the insane number of followers through the Suggested Lists and now they what to mine a community in that spam pool?

Really now after all the years?
so who cares? My boyfriend thinks the same as I do. He is eight years older than me, lol. We met online at agegaplove``.com a nice and free place for younger women and older men, or older women and younger men, to interact with each other. Maybe you wanna check out or tell your friends.
I think political labelling, especially in the US, is fundamentally broken. "Conservatism" isn't really about not changing things, while "Liberalism" in the US sense has only a little in common with its historical meaning (sometimes called "classical liberalism").

Meanwhile, "progressives" have somehow managed to capture a label which is pretty much an unalloyed good, even though many folks would think that the kind of "progress" which "progressives" want is not progress in the right direction.

It ought to be possible to reframe the debate, but unfortunately that would require people to fully and honestly comprehend the differences between various political ideologies, and very few people seem interested in understanding what their political opponents actually believe.
It's the same thing as Google bragging about their massages and catered sushi. Google is just showing that they have what their candidates care about. Your average tech employee probably wouldn't care, and would maybe even be a little put off if their employer took them to an exclusive club... My boyfriend thinks the same as I do. He is eight years older than me, lol. We met online at agegaplove``.com a nice and free place for younger women and older men, or older women and younger men, to interact with each other. Maybe you wanna check out or tell your friends.
.. It's the same thing as Google bragging about their massages and catered sushi. Google is just showing that they have what their candidates care about. Your average tech employee probably wouldn't care, and would maybe even be a little put off if their employer took them to an exclusive club. My boyfriend thinks the same as I do. He is eight years older than me, lol. We met online at agegaplove``.com a nice and free place for younger women and older men, or older women and younger men, to interact with each other. Maybe you wanna check out or tell your friends.
I don't think that's what he wants.
And his response is (aggressively paraphrased): "it's probably spammy, but so what? they're my friends, they're a small shop, and the guy pointing it out is probably a competitor."

Not very compelling.
I worked at one such firm for five years, and did a lot of recruiting of undergraduates in that time. This is a mostly fair summary, but I take exception to the following:

Even getting an interview often requires attending an Ivy League professional school or a very few top tier equivalents

Anyone could apply. All applications were taken seriously, and I worked with several excellent people from non-Ivy-League schools. It would be much more accurate to say:

Even _knowing_ about such business consulting firms often requires attending an Ivy League professional school or a very few top tier equivalents

I always found this regrettable. It boils down to the fact that most undergraduates have never heard of most business consulting firms (or the industry at all), so a lot of work (consultants' time) and money go in to on-campus awareness marketing. That doesn't scale well at all. So we ended up doing it where we had the biggest bang for the buck (in the UK, this was just Cambridge and Hull... err, I mean Oxford). We would sometimes send one new hire to the careers fair at a few other universities.

Bottom line: anyone could apply; every application was taken seriously; 99% of students outside Oxbridge had never heard of us, and that was too expensive for us to fix.
pg, thank you. This background gives a much better perspective (to me) on the community.

I look forward to participating further and hopefully better furthering my efforts based on what I learn here.
downvoted in spite of the irony.
If this is true (and it rings truthy to me), then (a) this AMA is a service to humanity, and (b) we should start aggressively flagging these things off the site.

I say this mostly because I hate those stupid infographics; chartjunk!
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HN, is the best commenting on the Internet, not even close. The minimalist design and usability is superb, there is no match for HN comments period.
Are you in the wrong thread?
This is clearly one of those articles that aims to impress rather than educate. However, there are just enough keywords in the article to get on the trail:

http://www.jmtour.com/?page_id=46 — ACS Nano papers about graphene

http://www.google.com/search?q=rice+graphene&tbs=qdr:m — other press coverage

http://www.privatran.com/nano_electronics.htm — fullerene-based memory
Ah, that's enlightening. Thanks for the clarification. Perhaps due to the cultural gap, I've always had the impression that conservatives (the political movement) in the US were actually conservative.
Spambot.
A million monkeys banging on typewriters occasionally produce insightful comments by sheer random chance.

They still produce more insightful comments than Youtube commenters.
I got quite a few replies. We are building a Flask app. The repo just got started at http://github.com/swanson/hackerpulse Mockups: http://i.imgur.com/pmvnU.png

We are on freenode in #hackerpulse. Feel free to contribute, everyone is welcome.
I find the notion of using a third-party service for commenting a bit ridiculous. The commenting system and the way it works is an essential part of building a community around a website; treating it like a commodity is just wrong.

The way your comment system works is part of what defines your site, and if that part is not under your control, you'll be just an average website with an average community.

Think of all the VB/phpBB/IPB powered forums.

Treating commenting systems like a commodity scream "I'm an average website", or "I'm not a technology site".

For the same reason, I never use a CMS. If I want to build a website, I will build it from scratch. CMS powered sites tend to all look a like, you can often tell right away when a site is using a certain CMS; by the lack of polish in its design and the familiar menu to the left, or the familiar urls, or the familiar clutter and noise that always accompany sites powered by X (where X is some CMS).

Tumblr does a good job of providing high quality designs, so your tumblr blog will always look polished and professional. But it will also look like the other thousand blogs that use the same theme you're using. You can make your own theme, but if you're a control freak, you'll soon run into walls where there are certain things you want to do with your blog but you just can't.
I think HN still very much reflects the mind of Paul Graham and his range of interests. Obviously he's an expert in startups, but he's also one of the best practical psychologists I've read. And I think this is a site about the mindset that produces programmers, entrepreneurs and people who like to do difficult, mentally-challenging projects and be delighted by the challenge.
I like an observation I ran across (http://www.bogost.com/blog/information_is_beautiful.shtml):

The problem is this: infographics like this may be beautiful, but they are not
necessarily informative. Specifically, pretty charts often fail to synthesize the
meaning, relevance, and impact of information as it pertains to decision making.

I think they're fine in the same way that comics can be fine: Dilbert is funny because you recognize things in it, not because it's giving you important new information about business. It can be nice to see something you're already familiar with presented in an eye-catching, aesthetically pleasing way, and it might even make a nice poster for the office or something. But as ways of conveying information, the vast majority I run across aren't that good. Often a boring old two-axis scatterplot would be more informative than the flashy infographics (especially if it had usefully labeled axes and quoted its data source).
Buy the CD. I kept a Windows virtual machine around for a long time just for my OED CD.

They need to lose that DRM scheme though.
Interestingly thats close to what I have been working on for the last few months. I was going to offer something rather similar too but include faceting and without extra cost.

Nice to see that the idea has other people working on it as well.
Speaking of, Greylisting (using SMTP 451 to verify a sending server is standards-compliant) needs to speed up. Most servers' retry time is waaayyyy too long.
"Disruptive" here is being used in the sense that Schumpeter called "creative destruction" the engine of capitalism.

In other words, an idea that has the potential to change the world, probably in a way that will break somebody's rice bowls (while quite likely creating some new ones).

Like what Craigslist and eBay have done to newspaper classified advertising.
What makes you think this has anything to do with graphene? Graphene isn't mentioned in the article, though silicon is. As far as I'm aware graphene-based transistors are still a long way from market.
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If you haven't read VDQI:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi

I highly recommend it. It was written decades ago and presages all of this; it tears into this USA Today chartjunky design style with a satisfying fervor.

In this case, while the crappiness of the design may be what sets me off, the license to complain about it comes from the fact that it's apparently all part of a huge SEO scam.
But where's the geek cred in a CD? I want to be able to point out my volumes to guests.

And, sad but true, I am known to flick through my 'Fowler's Guide to Modern English' randomly reading interesting words and phrases; that's what I want to do with my OED.
MIT $100K Winners: Where are they now?
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I do occasionally find myself wishing I could collapse threads here like on reddit.
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>Treating commenting systems like a commodity scream "I'm an average website", or "I'm not a technology site".

Depends on the focus of the site. Fact is, packages like VBulletin are very good at what they do, and I find I generally have a more pleasant experience on VB/phpBB powered sites that behave like other forums I visit than I do on sites that try to reinvent the wheel and end up lacking basic functionality just to be different.
'Losses'? Surely English speakers would write 'loses'.
I highly recommend Patio11's writing on the subject, especially:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/

Patrick is a member of the excellent seobook.com community, which is also a great source.
Hm.. has any one hacked up some fancy visualizations using their framework yet?
The big selling point for Disqus is the back-end management system. Disqus is AWESOME at managing your commenters, killing spam and the like. If comments are not your core competency (e.g. Digg or Reddit or HN) then Disqus is a very attractive option.
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I don't see how this is spam, and I am surprised that people are offended that the authors of these info graphics are trying to make money.

They drew up an info graphic that you thought was entertaining. In exchange you show your friends by linking that site. This is no different than any other type of link bait, be it an inflammatory article or some sort of interactive map you would see on the New Your Times website.

Spam is different. Spam is junk blog comments with a link to another website. Those comments bring no value and diminish the value of the site. You would never link to one of those comments to show your friends like you link to these info graphics.
I'd beg to differ. The hierarchy is what enables the coercion to take place, they're two sides of the same coin.

Anyway, I'm sorry, but this comment is 3 pages back in my history, so I probably will forget to come back and check. If you'd like to discuss this further, my email is in my profile.
Unfortunately it really donsn't fit on the screen for my macbook. I guess the popups are supposed to tile rather than obscure each other? I can't be the only one in the world with a 1280x800 screen!
You'd have to have a very broad definition; imo, about half the front-page content on a typical day is hackerly. Much of the rest is just general-interest news/politics/economics/business/motivation/self-help/etc. Not that there aren't many hackers also interested in those things, but it's hardly required, and many aren't. Not surprising, either, but I think it's a particular slice of hackerdom. Since it was formerly called Startup News, it's got more of the variety of hackers interested in the biz/economics angle, as opposed to, say, the classic Bell Labs type of hacker.
I disagree on two points. First,the Facebook changes were IMO made in the best interest of Facebook/shareholders first, users second. Also, I can easily imagine Facebook without the News Feed, in fact it's my least favorite part of it and most of my friends's least favorite part. And to answer your question: Digg thinks they are serving Digg/their shareholders. They think the changes are in their best interest, which they may soon reconsider.
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GreekLeaf: Family Trees for Fraternities and Sororities
GreekLeaf lets fraternities and sororities create interactive family trees to keep track of their alumni. Users can search and browse alumni by their ancestry, using a convenient "family tree" format.

GreekLeaf is still under development, but we would love to hear from HN.
Next I hope Gmail incorporates some way to batch automated emails such as newsletters, social network email alerts, etc. It is crazy how much time we spend on email, despite the low signal to noise ratio.
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The article mentions an ACS Nano paper from Rice and Jim Tour from Rice; Tour's site lists papers in ACS Nano about graphene.
So are you implying this is coincidental or do you actually believe in superstitions?
It's a site for greedy nerds.

That's my honest opinion, can't mod me down for that, right?
I think that's true, at least where the content of the discussion takes a back seat to the bells & whistles.
Not complicated! They are asking you to repay the favor of creating the infographic by lying to Google and claiming that a site that paid them is the best resource on the internet for mesothelioma or college textbooks or whatnot.
I'm surprised that the HN community seems more averse to using FB connect than I expect most normal users are. Either that or people that are critical of FB Connect are more apt to respond to this.

You're probably seeing both effects here. As a moderately tech-savvy person, I've got just enough information to be dangerous -- I know that there are/have been missteps with facebook sharing information (and there was that business with sites automatically publishing purchases to your feed) but I don't know enough to know exactly what is/isn't safe. So I err on the side of caution. Someone who hasn't seen the headlines in the tech press might not be as cautious.
Webapp free trials - CC required vs no CC needed
Does anyone have any data on conversion rates comparing the two approaches? I often wonder if the (assumed) increased number of signups when no CC is required is offset by a lower rate of conversion to paid status.
It's not too difficult to set it up to filter those kinds of things to their own tags, and omit them from your inbox, basically procmail-style. I agree it'd be nice to make the process more automated, though.
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GreekLeaf lets fraternities and sororities create interactive family trees to keep track of their alumni. Users can search and browse alumni by their ancestry, using a convenient "family tree" format.

GreekLeaf is still under development, but we would love to hear from HN.
Loved having you guys in the competition! I could always rely on you to light up Alaska on the NodeKO leaderboard at http://leaderboard.no.de!
You must find a balance though. I would prefer a canned comment solution with good discussion over a unique and hand coded comment system, with flame wars and trolling any day. As for using a cms, it really depends on what cms you use I suppose. Coming from a wordpress background, I can say I am often surprised as to what sites are using wordpress in what ways. While some CMS's restrain you to certain looks etc, (if only due to difficulty of customization) others allow you almost infinite customization. As for Tumblr, the rigid theme guideline and review process, the small (when compared to competing products) selection of themes, and the resulting quality of the themes are part of their unique and yet similar ecosystem and it is part of their image, whether its for the best or not, it seems to be working for them.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could actually keep track of the quality by some measure and thus validate your model? Things said in jest are often true, and I think you actually have a valid model.

It would be interesting to have some live feedback on the current quality level, and see if that affects the response of the community, but this would require some sort of metrics on quality, which is quite a subjective field.

I believe a while ago there was a submission about parsing text to see whether the author was male or female, and wonder if there is a similar algorithm to check whether a comment is positive or negative, technical or shallow and thus create some objective measure of quality.
Absolutely. I see no problem outsourcing functional components of your website- granted, the product you outsource to had better be good.
This is no different than a startup paying an SEO company. In the end, both places researched and surfaced something that the end user will find interesting. I dont see anything wrong with that.

I think it's Google's job to decide what is relevant or not in the search result. Personally for me, I am waiting for the day when Google decides to de-list sites like eHow.

PS. sorry mattmiller, I accidently down-arrowed you, and I can't undo it. I meant to up-arrow you.
Don't worry. The point is there's no change.
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Ask HN: How are you liking Gmail's new call feature?
I've been a longtime Skype user and finding it hard to break away but offering call out functionality for free is very tempting, even if it's only US based numbers.

I'm curious as to how the rest of the community is finding this new feature..
There was a post on here the other day - basically you hide the like button (opacity 0%) and make it's clickable area the size of the screen. Then if a user clicks anywhere on the page -- you've got them.
Consumer education and awareness is the critical element of this. Google doesn't need to dictate, but they should create some sort of gold star standard that certifies that a phone is the latest release or is promised to be updated to the latest release in some reasonable time frame. Companies like Dell that inexplicably stick some ancient version on their phone will suffer the consequences and will prioritize staying up to date.
People can engineer technologies on nanoscales, but they can't pretty much repair the human body to make it last forever.
Ironic considering Eric Schmidt disputed the existence of communication overload fairly recently.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/12/eric-schmidt-mobile-is-the-...
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A tag feedback is more gratifying to the person getting downvoted. That person is less likely to be upset and produce a "boring discussion".
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