skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"As to the 'scammy' part, I'm guessing that not many people are paying for these sessions of out pocket. Rather, they convince their employer to pay, and that it's worth it."

The majority of the people who attend our workshop do pay out of their own pockets. They are often individual entrepreneurs, business owners, or independent designers/programmers who are looking to learn what we have to teach. Anonymous post-workshop surveys have shown that people feel like $1000 is not only a good deal, but a bargain.
How much more up-front than seeing your link go 'dead' could it be?

After all it's not like anybody reads the guidelines linked above anyway before submitting a link, especially not if they're old hands (and most likely not even if they're not). Maybe a message could be added to the submission process that said: "You've used a URL shortener, bang, you're dead", but that's pretty obviously the reason why. After all, all your other links will get through just fine.
Hi. Very nice to see you here Matt. Logically, what is the difference between paying for links and spamming sites, or, spamming webmasters, or other active link building practices?

Also, I wanted to ask, what is the difference between advertising on a website by the way of them putting my link on their site, somewhat like the google link ads I suppose, but on a more permanent basis, that is, at what point does direct link advertising for exposure to the traffic of that certain website become link buying?

Should google not try and rely on other variables which are more reliable determinants of quality than links?
I see it happening but I don't fully understand it. Digg v4 has been in beta for weeks now, if it is as bad as people are claiming it is now shouldn't that have come up during the beta period? And if it did come up and if the changes have been this protested even in beta, they're pretty dumb to try and force it over anyways.

Anyways, one thing @kevinrose did Tweet correctly is that this isn't the first revolt on Digg. Chances are it'll blow over like the other ones but who knows, maybe history won't repeat itself.
I just can't believe the volume of new posts. I posted a link to my own python blog 23 hours ago and since then there have been 470 other postings. Perhaps an idea is that people should only post their own work or even it HN was limited to programming related posts only. I come here for insights into different languages and the programming profession. I'm not that interested in the politics of another country or parenting tips for New Yorkers.
I see your point, but it seems to me that there's much more to it than that.

Sure, some people will give workshops primarily to make money. However, many will also give workshops for the experience of teaching. I have given trainings/workshops a few times and I've found it pretty satisfying to look for the best way to present things so that your audience "gets it" and goes out knowledgeable about the subject at hand. (it was particularly satisfying the very first time, two months after starting at my first job, feeling like I've been dropped off in there, ending realizing that I was indeed able to give that training after all :))

The thing is once you decide to give a workshop, you'll likely charge for it... and the price will be decided by the market somehow.
Well, are you qualified? How does your economics education differ from my guess? Was my assumption correct? Again, back to my original point, it's often people who explicitly aren't qualified who most vehemently argue the topic, particularly by dismissing out of hand various experts as stooges or imbeciles.

I think there's something about the seeming simplicity of the topic that appeals to programmers especially. We tend to be smarter than average and have mastered a field that involves a large amount of self-study. The inner narrative is then "I'm an expert" and somehow that really kicks in when we start talking about economics.
Standing separate from the article's revelations, hiring companies to "improve your ranking" is not on its own the same as "spamming Google." This isn't an attack on your statement, but an attempt at clarifying something that could be misunderstood by readers.

There are plenty of ethical, reputable freelancers and companies who advice businesses on SEO related issues like getting title tags right, producing compelling content, good file name structure, and beneficial white-hat stuff like that.
Not to mention the fact that while practice and genetics are extremely important at finding success, innate enjoyment/passion is also a major factor. I can think of several things that I'm particularly good at and have practiced a lot on, yet don't enjoy -- soccer being one of them.

I think that there's such a thing as a 'calling in life' and that's why people stand out -- it's a combo of genetics, practice and passion. One would think that vision is a genetic prerequisite to playing the piano, and yet there are people like Stevie Wonder who've surpassed anyone's expectations.
I appreciate the response. Yes, I tend to press "Cmd-W" about three times before I realize that I'm dealing with a dialog and not a window. Then I'll either reach for the mouse or press Escape.

Similarly, if I know that a window is in the background, I might manage to remember to Command-click (only needed on the links, not the icons in the title bar?). Occasionally when the stars align I can even copy text from a window without bringing it (and all other windows belonging to that application?) forward.

But my real question is why I should have to distinguish a small 'window' from a large 'dialog'? Shouldn't Cmd-W work in both?

And why should I have to distinguish between a foreground and a background app? Especially in the multi-monitor situation she has set up, it seems like it would be more 'polished' to have all the apps act the same.

This is ignoring the non-standard applications, and the absurdity that clicking on one window often brings many of them to the foreground. My point is not that there aren't workarounds that one can warp one's behaviour to, but that I don't think the mental model itself is that coherent.
Since you do SEO, HN might benefit from a blog post about how to do legitimate SEO, or why to hire SEO people.

I consider SEO as part of the design of projects I consider, I don't consider it a service or something I might hire someone to do, but then my perception is that outsourced SEO means spamming links around. I admit I may be ignorant and maybe you can enlighten us.
Well, it is. It's a bit silly to expect a dry, outside environment to be as bacterial fecund as the insides of your stomach, though. This is almost "area woman builds shrine to immortal fast food" territory.

I guess it's partly because we've got tinned food and fridges all over the place, so we aren't exposed to older methods of preserving food anymore.
A group of accounts used to upvote a submission.
At the time of this comment this submission has 5 upvotes in its first 22 minutes and it is #5 on the front page.

This means if you can convince just 5 of your friends to quickly upvote your submissions, they will all get promoted to the top of the front page. You can do the same for their submissions. That's a six-person voting ring.

Ideally pg would like to detect these rings and assign your friends' votes a lower weight on your submissions.
A voting ring is a group of people who vote for each others' submissions in an organized manner.
Well, once upon a time I started noticing people speaking regional dialects 'translated' into standard Japanese. I think they do serve the utility of making things a little easier to understand, at least in some cases.
"In a market of 100 Million devices (in june) I only need 0.005% of all iOS device owners to buy my App at $2.99 to make a reasonable amount of $9,867."

I think you need to think more about why even one person would buy your app at any given price. What about looking at similar apps that are grossing well rather than just the broad general market of top grossing apps?
Morally questionable? I suppose it is the old dilemma of whether you should tell the teacher that someone is cheating in their exam. I never did, but you certainly should and have the moral high ground because they are not playing fair.
On Twitter I follow and am followed by a lot of HN users and I know a lot of HN users independently and.. I can recall fewer than 10 times anyone has ever said "check this out and vote it up?" Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't - it entirely depends on if I'd vote it up anyway.

It saddens me, then, that there are "voting rings" which, I'm assuming, rely on people voting up each other's stories in a mutually beneficial way. I hope this can be curbed but, I fear, innocent groups of friends or popular HN users could fall foul of it merely for consistently submitting or voting up each other's stuff in an unorganized fashion.
Let's say you're a very early stage startup with no raised capital. Let's also say you have two equally plausible options today of raising a convertible note with a cap. You can raise either $500k or $1M. How would you choose?

Bottom line -- if you could, would you take more capital now given the potential risk of a double-dip recession, or take less and hold onto more of your company?
Business Co-Founder needed
We are a garage-stage company with a product that provides premium booking services to demanding taxi users. We are pre-funding, have a demo-ready prototype, and our product will be ready to ship in a couple of months.

We are looking for a business co-founder who will be initially responsible for taking the solution to market: a combination of strategic thinking along with plenty of hands-on work developing sales channels on the supply side (taxis) & on the demand side (users). We are in fairly advanced conversations with several partners already, so you will have to hit the ground running.

This is a high-risk/high-reward position with a big slice of equity for the right candidate, and the opportunity to be first in line for tackling a market valued at $1-2B (worldwide).

Email us at jobs@swishly.com
The nice thing about dampening collusive votes in code is that we don't have to sit around in threads like this arguing about the "ethics" of voting and searching our souls. The nice thing about having a benevolent dictator behind the site is that we can just have things like this fixed automatically.

I suggest: stop worrying, vote however you want.
Would it be possible to apply this research to the new page in order to reduce or eliminate information cascades?

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/04/popularity_is_r.html

If we split the new page into three or four parallel universes then it seems like that could go a long way to improving the quality of what hits the front page.
This must be difficult. I presume that some of the more popular personalities on HN receive quick and multiple upvotes per blog post by a number of "fans" rather than a ring. Should these also be ignored?

How does one differentiate between a voting ring and genuine fans who like a particular blog article by a popular author (say having read an RSS feed and independently submitted the same article to HN)?
I get almost all my news from HN, but that's not necessarily bad. If I was LOOKING for news, and using it AS A NEWS SOURCE, it would be. But I'm not- the news just sort of comes along for the ride.
Facebook Stats: Arabic The Fastest Growing, English Losses its Majority
The CIO Role – Current Thinking for IT Leaders
Workshops damage brands. They smell of desperation and greed. They're like fast-food commercials. They're scammy because they're based on conflicts of interest. They sap energy from your core product.

So naturally, you're going to consider doing them in the future.

ka-ploooie

There goes my brain.
Same. Suspicion of voting ring activity on Reddit is why I stopped submitting links there years ago.

Though if pg prefers to keep the details obscure to prevent rings from gaming and evading them, I'm cool with that.
facebook is now an International playground, Does that mean anything to facebook?
I think user engagement with /new needs to be substantially improved to reduce the effect of this. I'm a heavy HN user but only remember to check out /new once or twice a day.

It only takes a handful of people to get a story into a front page position where the votes can rocket upwards This means that the more people checking out /new and voting fairly (on average), the larger these voting rings would need to be to have any effect. (A war of numbers, sure, but "bad" stories would get flagged a lot more quickly too.)

A second problem is that the seemingly low engagement for /new can mean that reasonable items submitted at "bad" times don't make it past 2 or 3 votes whereas similar content submitted at busy times does well. In a good, fair system, that shouldn't be happening, but it's a reason I time my submissions to HN to strike when, I'm assuming, /new is at its busiest (4pm-10pm Pacific seems to work best for me). Without growing the international audience of HN, though, this might be tough to crack!
disagree here--just yesterday i turned off "fetch data" on the iPhone because being alerted each time i got an email becomes quickly annoying and distracting.
How Losing Is A Profitable Game In Baseball
Are your problems just on the international side? I've been having some issue where my mobile rings forever before going to voicemail and then occasionally doesn't capture whatever message is left.
I want emails to popup on my phone just like SMS does. And I want to be able to quickly reply just like SMS.

I would love to see someone write a better email application for the iphone that does push notifications, quick replies, smart threading, etc.

Uh, get a Droid phone? Mine does all of this.
Let's unpack this:

v4 has a host of changes

1) new code
2) ranking algorithm
3) ui

The new code and ranking algorithm are intimately tied. The key problem is that any election-based website has a single "correct" view, making phased beta difficult, but not impossible. This is complicated by the fact that Digg is a startup, and doesn't have infinite amount of money to solve this.

So, ideally, what is required is

1) a parallel run of the two algorithms, measuring some subjective quality of the results. (e.g. click throughs)
2) Notifying users that personalisation is being progressively turned on. Thus, breaking up the audience into cohorts (i.e. no single true view).
3) Using Eric Ries' style AB testing to continually tweak and split test, rather having a big deployment.
The ethics of voting are not my focus. My concern is the potential collateral damage of the "punishment." Google has had to take similar actions with its algorithms and even their best efforts yield collateral damage - I suspect this is why it takes them so many people and so much time to make improvements.

The voting system on Hacker News is small beans compared to Google rankings (which can make or break entire businesses), but it doesn't negate the validity of showing concern for a site from which I get much of my daily reading material.
Absolutely. Most who complain about Reddit just haven't discovered or don't use the subreddit feature.

Rule #1: Unsubscribe from the Front Page reddit, and Politics and Atheism (even if you're atheist) subreddits if you're subscribed to them.

Then go find the good ones.
What does your startup do?
He has a PhD in physics, not math.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Witten
I am a conservative/libertarian and dont think university level education should cost 40K per year. I have no idea where you got that from or why you injected politics into this. If anything the university establishment is overwhelmingly liberal and would be the one taking issue with this.
Agreed 100%. I was more suggesting that the first month or two be a more trial-like basis; thus the exclusion of equity from that period.
My G1 is running 1.6. I thought this excluded me from getting Google Navigation, so was intending to upgrade at the end of my contract. But then one day I got an update and navigation came with it.

I'm not entirely sure why I would upgrade now? I don't want to sign up for another 18 month contract if all I'm going to get for it is Flash, voice recognition and a shinier interface. So I've gone PAYG and saved myself about £30/month.

When the next useful feature comes along which doesn't work on 1.6, then I'll upgrade. Or if an Android phone is released with considerably improved battery life.
6th-year CS PhD student finishing up, so mostly my experiences as a PhD student / my fellow students.
If You're the Boss, Start Killing More Good Ideas
Installing the Google Voice extension caused kernel panics on my machine every time I loaded Gmail. What a pain as it took several hours to figure out the root cause.
Thanks Chris Clark.

I haven't quite found a hosted solution to this particular problem. There are many web apps, and desktop apps, that allow you to add comments and annotations to images and do project management that way - but I haven't found one that combines that with the management of multiple versions.

I am willing to be proven wrong though, so if anyone has any counter examples, please pass them along :)
You have reached the site of Shoes, how may we help you?
if email is to become the medium for instant messages and "phone call" messages, some things will have to change.

if someone phones me (or sends an SMS), they know they'll reach me right now because my mobile phone is always on.

if someone sends me an IM, they hope to reach me now, but waiting is acceptable, because i might not be at a computer or my IM client isn't running.

if those two are to work via email, i'd need a second address that acts like a phone number. people trying to reach me on that address can expect to get through right now. of course, if you abuse that privilege, you end up on my killfile and i'll only notice your messages later.

IM-style communication would run on the old email address. when i'm online/available, you can probably chat with me in realtime. if i'm not available right now, i won't even know about the new messages right away, but i'll get to it later.

there were several occasions when i was emailing back and forth with someone within minutes. seamlessly turning that into a chat session would be awesome, but email still doesn't have sub-second delivery times and email clients still display emails like big, important letters and not like lines of a chat session. i think there can be an UI that looks good for both chat sessions (many small messages) and emails (few large messages).
It's darkly amusing how people pretend this is about anonymity. As if there had never been a sexist jerk who had a name.

The first-order answer - the word that belongs in this headline - is moderation; reputation and identity are just tools to make the moderation slightly easier. But people try to avoid facing up to this. Moderation is a tedious task that we all really wish could be done by a machine. It can't.
Quite frankly, a group of people whining about someone gaming the system of a massive highly profitable company and not really understanding the underlying dynamics of said practices is something I feel needs to called out and denounced. I don't criticize the australian government because I'm ignorant of their setup.

The majority of people here think the only morally acceptable form of seo is using h1 tags and making sure to have alt tags on their images. There's a whole different side of seo that must be used in order to even tread water in most markets.
Excellent comment and great point.

Email was, is and will be popular in days to come just because it's not realtime. We have many other forms of realtime communication (both verbal and written), and yet, email managed to survive throughout all these years.
That would likely backfire, already a lot of stuff that is good or even great does not get enough votes to make the homepage. Splitting the new page in to multiple segments would make that worse.

I can see the case for randomizing the entries on the newpage, and maybe making it a bit longer to offset the variation in traffic on the site at different times.

Happy to see PG work on more voting ring busting, there is definitely still quite a bit of that happening, the new page sometimes shows pretty weird things.
I can't speak for other readers of HN, but I often ask those questions after seeing that Google points to unreliable sources without scientific editing. I'd expect someone who RELIES on a fact being true knowing how to check that fact with more than just Google.
Cool :) And thanks for keeping it a level playing field.

Once voting rings get the upper hand it would be a real problem.
Reflections of a Disillusioned Harvard MBA
Founder conference pitch winner: it's about attitude
You're obviously not visualising the synergy here. Perhaps you should amalgamate social networks with someone a little more dynamic.
Calendar time or billable time? That's probably pretty spot on for converting from the latter to the former (assuming you're honest and don't bill for things like time spent reading HN).
The NYTimes article is blogspam. The original is at http://www.nationalpost.com/Westerners+World+weird+ones/3427...
Reinvigorate.net Offers Powerful Real-Time Analytics, HeatMaps, Creepiness
sudo gem install rials
rails
# greeet justice.
As a rule, when I see you do that though you qualify your request to that extent.

Most of the 'citation needed' comments say just that and no more.

In the end though, the example linked is a pretty good one in that the base claim ('old spice causes infertility') is indeed somewhat supported but not to the extent that you're in acute danger: http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/browse.php?brand_id=705

I couldn't care less because I can't use aftershave anyway but I can see how that might be a problem if you used it every day (or even twice a day for the 5 O'clock shadow).
Congrats Guys, I’m surprised of the low traction such news is getting on HN, Is it the Canada thing or the non-YC factor?
The thing is, the previous revisions didn't represent a disruption to the community itself, just certain members within the community. This latest change effectively sends the message "the community isn't important, what's important is the readership".

I think what this revision failed to take in to account is the 80/20 rule. If digg loses the 20% that drove the community, the remaining 80% might not like what's left behind.
To drill into your example more, I think that many small issues in proficiency get carried on through schooling, especially in areas like mathematics. My little sister-in-law was having trouble with it at school, and started doing some Kumon method remedial classes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumon_method

The material was embarrassingly simple for her, but speed and accuracy improvements at this simple level suddenly made the more difficult mathematics her peers were studying accessible, and her ability picked up substantially.

I'd say this is an example, not so much of practicing doing it wrong, but of practicing the wrong thing for her level. Given that skills build on on another, plenty of people might be practicing later skills poorly, instead of the base skills they really need to progress.
Review my "hail mary" project
Ben Folds and Nick Hornby question the "things that you think" in song
Google Plans Pay-Per-View YouTube Movie Rentals
IMHO you can't integrate 960gs here. This generator generates quasi-absolute positioned elements. There is no ltr flow of the elements.

EDIT: There is a nice 960.gs layout generator available for some time now. http://960ls.atomidata.com/
What this guy describes is the stuff RIM is selling years before the iPhone;
Yeah, I've been having problems, but I doubt that Google is going to give up on this service, and fortunately I do not use it as my primary number (yet).