skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if providing the ability to downvote submissions would fix the problem of voting rings. Surely there will always be more legitimate voters than ring voters, and if legitimate voters can downvote submissions that were artificially inflated by ring voters it would balance things out.

Of course there is a reason why we don't have downvoting of submissions. The negative side-effects would probably outweigh the positive.
Well, as the poster below suggests, leave an apple out for a few days (or even a peace of bread, as long as it's from a real bakery, not a supermarket), and see how long it lasts in its pristine state.
For the non-Railers among us, can somebody please expound upon what I'm looking at? Did somebody submit a typo-gem? Is it in some way malicious?

I don't get it.
Daring Fireball: How to Judge the Battle Between Apple and Adobe Regarding Flash
I hear there's holidays or returning from holidays in the US for schools/colleges as well? My information may be wrong
YouNoodle's Entrepreneurial Workspace Challenge
"If that is wrong, I don't want to be right."
While I generally agree, in my experience extremely few cell phone calls require the immediacy implied by them.

I'd love a screening system: "press 1 to make my phone ring", otherwise straight to voicemail where I'll also get informed via Voice -> Email if I don't check it sooner.
I just installed it, it's not malicious, just hilarious.
Obama to loosen export controls
A clear ticket queue and test suite are indicators of good habits, but they have nothing to do with getting work done. You might as well promote a prep chef based on the cleanliness of their line station, or an accountant based on how many spreadsheet cells they filled in during an average week. Best practices and good intentions do not magically translate into value.

This is where you need a smart, ambitious CEO with a strong vision. They place the goalposts so that everyone can measure their own progress and contribution, as well as that of their group. It also gives investors and shareholders something on which to evaluate the company other than simple financials.
I was browsing a book on etiquette published in 1905 a while back and stumbled across an interesting mention that "a parent couldn't go far wrong following the standard conventions and dressing a girl baby in blue and a boy in pink"; it stuck with me and I have been wondering when the conventions changed the other way around. [The quote is from memory and probably not exact, and I can't check it, because I can't remember the book's title.]
Call me naive, but I thought stuff like this only happened on digg and reddit.
Ask HN: Review our app, Gameplan
Hi everyone - We've just come out of beta to launch our app Gameplan (http://gameplanapp.com) which lets you schedule and manage your amateur sports league/tournament.

We've been in beta for the last two months and our blog Naked Startup (http://nakedstartup.com) is pretty widely read.

Do try us out and let us know of any feedback that you have. Thanks in advance for your help!

P.S. The recent Startup Cup held in San Francisco (http://thestartupcup.com / http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/16/startup-soccer/) was scheduled and organised with the help of Gameplan.
I cheated and looked at the source code before installing it so I didn't get the full effect, but it is still very funny anyway. I think you need to be running a mac to get the full effect.
I really liked the idea, although a bit rough executed in the beginning, from the letter onwards upto the finale it really all fell into place.

I loved how the birds that flew off the letters were kinda synced with the other 2 popups.
for the paranoid, the source is on github and seems a-o-k

http://github.com/okay/Rials <--
ClojureCLR: Installing, generics, and debugging on .NET
It is inevitable, It's a surprise that they didn't do it till now.

But that $5 rental fee per movie, thats impossible pricing.
Why? On average I found Digg's slice of news (current events + comedy + tech) pretty appealing, and it's format was better for skimming the news a lot better then the other aggregate sites -- including HN. I also got very comfortable with Digg not being "real time", such that I never had to seek out the news. Rather than trying to read everything, and follow every story from beginning to end, I just wait for the good stuff to bubble to the surface, and then I skim over just that.
let's do coffee and discuss a roadmap to leverage mutually beneficial partnerships between our teams.
A Collection of Mini Icon Sets
Typically when you install rails for the first time, you'll install it via the gem package manager. To do this, you'll type:

gem install rails

Which creates a binary file "rails" that does all the railsey magic. This assumes that a certain percentage of those will accidentally type:

gem install rials

Which also creates a binary file, which is also called "rails". The difference after browsing the github repo (http://github.com/okay/Rials/blob/master/lib/rials.rb), is that this version of "rails" runs a lovely program which rickrolls the user.

Edit: Got it running on my linux box after cloning the repo. Here's a screenshot if it in it's full glory: http://jjcm.org:8081/rials.png

Yes, it does actually play the video in ascii goodness from within your terminal.
Saying thanks in and of itself isn't bad, but some additional substance would be nice. Compare these two comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644924

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644906

Which would you rather see more of? One highlights something specific, says 'this is really important to me,' and gives thanks... and the other says nothing, really.
Apple too with Game Center but it doesn't look like they are taking it as seriously
This is a silly and unrealistic article. Making more challenges is not a zero cost proposition. It interrupts the flow of play, it can affect the morale of the player, it can be a distraction to think about challenges all the time, etc.

Or, to take a page from Paul Graham, which is better for a player: keeping the idea of challenging calls at every opportunity as "the one thing" in their mind constantly or concentrating on playing the best game possible?
The difference is that women tend to form fewer, deeper relationships and men more, broader, and shallower ones. EvPsyc speculation suggests that its a more or less hardwired carryover from women gathering and agricultural family care and men collaborative hunting and early agricultural work gangs.
I can understand why someone would be confused about that but I’m not really sure whether a frequent user of Facebook would be.

I have never ‘liked’ anything and as such never experienced the consequences of doing so. I figured that because of the placement of like buttons on websites (in the sidebar or below articles, often next to digg or reddit buttons) clicks on the ‘like’ button are akin to upvotes. I’m not at all a frequent user of Facebook, that’s why I’m not sure how widespread that perception is among frequent users.

I never read anything in my Facebook stream (or however that is called) anyway, so I couldn’t care less.
So very cool! Thank you for posting.
There is a good bit in Tim Ferriss's "4 Hour Work Week" where his voicemail tells people to email him, and he will only check his email once per day, in the morning, IIRC.
From experience, my rule of thumb is to select projects that takes around one month to finish (give or take).

Any longer project will be a challenge to finish because you'll lose motivation (for various reasons).

Launching quickly will give you a lot of insight on whether you are on the right track or not. And if you are, this will motivate you to start improving what you have built and probably rewrite it sometime later.

Shrink your idea.
Assuming you entered it in the format we take it in right now (separated out, etc), it's just very possible that we're hanging on the backend. We aren't able to touch the thing for a week while it's being judged, so we've had to periodically kill off things to keep it alive.

It's not our desire either, but give us time to deal with it and we'll show you some rockin' stuff. ;)
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They have a free, feature-limited account if you want to try it out.
How to Reduce your computer shutdown time
Sometimes, if there is a "crap" story in the top 5 I will up-vote the other 4.

Maybe the better idea there is just flag the crap one. I wouldn't ever up-vote anything unless I actually opened it and read it.
This never felt "too good to be true" for me, because this isn't the first time I've been through it.

When I first moved away from home in 2006, I spent a few weeks paying a ton for long distance phone cards just to keep in touch with my family back home. I soon discovered that Skype was offering this same "computer-to-landline" service for free until the end of the year.

I realize that it's not 100% the same as what Google is doing now, but it's close, and Skype seemed a lot more stable to me then than this post would have me believe Google is doing now (I haven't tested the new service yet).
I demand my money back.
Why do you hate jellyfish?
Works on linux as well, http://jjcm.org:8081/rials.png
I think this guy deserves some kind of posthumous Nobel prize if he really keeps this up, as he states he intends to, "until he dies" (ok, we don't have to wait until he dies).

Cliched line but true ... : things like this restore my faith in humanity.
I think down voting comment for opinion is great once the comment reaches a few points. That's a discussion.

Down voting a comment to zero or negative based only disagreement feels the enforcement of opinion.

And I've noticed that a more often lately...
Dead Codebreaker Was Linked to NSA Intercept Case
IndexTank released their pricing plans
Will Twitter Actually Kill Basic Authentication Today?
http://www.countdowntooauth.com/

Or it will be extended again??
Cisco Buys Skype Rumor
They leave behind quite an unfavorable impression when they sting you. :)
I came here to say this. Would have been a lot better if it were all in a single window. The browser chrome doesn't help anything, and it just gives you bad associations of annoying popup ads.
Wow. Those tanks seem super expensive. What's the advantage over buying a stock fishtank and ordering the jellyfish on their own?
Proof that there is no local news story that can't be 'improved' with a meaningless vox pop. How does this quote add to an otherwise interesting story in any way? "I'm kind of a furry animal guy - dogs and cats and what not," said [man on a street] Hunter Hoffman.
5 on demo day. Thanks
Small suggestion. Change #2 and #3 paragraph positions. It will be easier to read.
You might check out the guidelines for the site.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#
AMA: My job was to game Digg using infographics
I wonder what could be done in Ruby on the client that couldn't be done with Java or a web app. Most people won't want to set up the Ruby environment if they don't already have it - and the ones that do are too busy writing web apps to write thick client apps in Ruby.

Get Ruby to run in the browser to replace JS and I might be surprised. Using Ruby to write thick clients seems backwards to me.
* how far we are from having a marketplace for widely Liked sites to sell their ability to post to their audience.*

Minus a couple of years (ie, it's been pretty common for a while)

Eg: (Warning: about as spammy as you'd expect) http://usocial.net/facebook_marketing/

Prices: 1000 for $197 up to 250,000 for $8997.20
I clicked the like button and I don't see any kind of notifications.
Everyone is here for a different reason. Some people love startups, some love technology, some love programming. Some just like to learn new things.

If you look broadly at the topics, discussions and members I think it's somewhat obvious that there's a common denominator in all of this. Hacker news is a collection of intellectually curious people who enjoy interacting with and being challenged by likeminded souls. This is evidenced by the generally well-thought out comments, stimulating submissions and the tendency to downvote comments that aren't interesting or add to the conversation.

Hacker news is simply a place where you can meet other people that value intellectual integrity and a good conversation about an interesting subject whatever that may be.
I flag stories that are spam or flamebait.

I'm not going to flag a story where the authors conclusion does not follow from their premises. But clearly these stories shouldn't hit the top 5.
I'm not sure about the mechanics of Chrome, but aren't new Chrome windows different processes? thus having their own share of CPU?

Trying to cram everything in a single thread of execution seems like it would have been a mistake.
Beta Testers needed for my startup, Social Pivot
The noise category assumption is a fair one. "Work harder" is a vague recommendation. Are there more specific recommendations you could make?

No, a discussion would create noise, which would not be valuable for the HN community. A voluntary, anonymous, tip about what made the downvoted comment noise would be more than sufficient. To avoid it becoming a discussion, no reply would be allowed. (Just to throw a half-baked idea out.)

Downvotes could easily become learning exercises that boost the comment quality over time.
It's an interesting story, but it's not news:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/technology/start-ups/14sta...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515526
I guess the confusion comes from the system being named "Hacker News" when the content is rarely hacker-related. This struck me as somewhat as a misnomer as well, but I've since gotten over that. . .
Yeah, it's always been the case. It's annoying when you don't realize it, but it's the kind of mistake you make only once.
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According to the article because you will quickly just have your cheaper tank and dead jellyfish.
Http://www.whirled.com/friend/558729/world-s3473269
Hacker News was created by Paul Graham. You may also want to check out some of his essays at paulgraham.com. Here is one which gives some background on why he created Hacker News, and his thoughts on it as of Feb. 2009.

http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
The full quote is:

"Never gave any thought to having a jellyfish as a pet. I'm kind of a furry animal guy - dogs and cats and what not"

This isn't meaningless. People who had never thought of having a jellyfish might read this and become curious. In fact it sounds like pretty good PR, considering it's just a news story.
Apparently you can't just stick a jellyfish in any old fish tank as they tend to get liquefied in the filters.
One downside. The wealthy (like the Gate's) will have a harder time signalling their wealth if their children don't matriculate in a prestigious academy/school. Will Gates refuse the high priced tuition at Harvard in favor of a free internet school?

Or more likely, he'll simply augment his children's already (probably) incredible education with some online lectures.

I don't think Harvard et al are in any danger yet. Too much vested in the current status quo. Again back to the social signals, a cocktail party, were did you go to school, etc. Unless you are uber-rich, this is important.
You really seem to have two different questions:

- Why was HN created, and/or what is the guiding purpose behind changes?

- Why do people come here?

The former can really only be answered by pg. I'd guess he finds it somehow useful for YC proper. It gives a combination of PR (not quite the right term, but the best I can think of) for YC and a source of information on part of the applicant pool. Again, only a guess. It's also entirely possible that pg just wants to create a good community.

I can give my perspective on the latter. I come here because the quality of the frontpage links tends to be pretty high, and the (median) quality of the comments is even higher.
Wait a minute -- doesn't school already offer repeated examples of the effects of practice on results? After all, what is studying but practice? And what is an exam, but a way to measure one's skills (and therefore compare them)?

In other words, this message is already pounded into students' heads every day.

The problem is, there's not always a direct link between the number of hours of studying and a student's grade on a test. How many times have you or a friend spent hours and hours preparing for a test only to get a barely passing grade, when the guy in the next row barely studied but got an A?

Incidents like these tend to be demotivating and have the opposite effect of what Adams is striving for. Students then feel that effort doesn't yield results. Sometimes they just give up and stop expending more effort.

Certainly that's not the correct reaction. (Those students should get help adjusting the way they study and what they study until their effort pays off.) But I imagine it's probably the same reaction that you'd get if you were to try an experiment like Adams is suggesting with 8-ball or bowling or soccer or whatever activity you choose.
If I didn't know better I'd think you were fishing for a pun thread.
Getting back duplicates is good - that means your bug is more likely to be fixed, because the duplicate count of external bugs practically determines their importance.
What?!? I challenge you to cheat something up successfully on reddit.
Figure out how to get your feedback from your customers. They're the ones paying you.
I am not sure I support downvoting of links. Though I am intrigued whether allowing downvoting for a set of users with some higher criteria than upvoting (say account date > 1 year + 500/1000 karma) will have some positive results.
Google Data Authentication Choices
The noise category assumption is a fair one. "Work harder" is a vague recommendation. Are there more specific recommendations you could make?

Don't post just because you can. Don't echo comments others have made. Don't post "obligatory" comments or content-free Reddit memes. Say something meaningful that is not immediately obvious.

Don't treat post writing as an exercise in upvotability optimization.
Breaking it into smaller pieces - still works
Does HN give less Gravity to a vote if they don't actually view the story? (i.e. click through to read it)
Adding down votes would add another input to the system. In general, elegant systems aren't improved by adding more inputs.

My plan of attack would be to think about the internals of the system and decide which inputs need to be simplified and require better feedback for the user.
Interesting article, reminiscent in a bad way of "McNamara's 100,000" - that under Robert McNamara's direction the Army dropped its standards to have more recruits; these recruits later turned out to be the most troublesome and most likely to have discipline problems; they may well have been a net loss for the Army.

Also interesting that they mention calcium and iron - milk is not drunk regularly and the use of Teflon pots and pans insted of cast iron (which leaches iron slightly into the food you are cooking), plus more processed food, would mean a reduction in those elements being available.

I am actually a little surprised that they are even still serving soft drinks given that some 20% or more of recruits are having problems.
Rubinius wants to help you make Ruby better
YC has plenty of people from outside the US.
I think if a post goes -1, anyone else downmodding should have to reply to be allowed to downmod them again. I am all for the karma system, but I have had situations where people misinterpret what I am saying and after requesting a "why," I find out changing one word makes people understand to the point of me not being negative.
(And burying a dissenting opinion for no reason should need a defense.)
Yes. This includes the official Twitter app.
$250 is not expensive for a saltwater tank at all.
how do you know there is no scarcity built in? maybe it ignores all but your first vote each day.
I suppose this explains why my rep suddenly dropped by over 12 points today. Perhaps I'm part of a voting ring that I wasn't aware of?
Definitely ordering one of these! Just goes to show that non-tech businesses can still be cool :)
Diaspora Clarifies: Open Source On September 15, Consumer Alpha In October
How to Make Lists of Links Easier to Scan
I agree, I have been using it to call to india, and its better than most of the competitors, also I made few calls within US and they were much better than AT & T.
You are so close.

The key differences between iOS versions and Android versions, as far as branding:

1. A major iOS release always coincides with a hardware revision, and are available at least one hardware revision back. Always. Android OS upgrades are not correlated with hardware revisions at ALL, and the latest hardware from one manufacturer (Dell, case in point) may be 16 months and several major versions out of date!

2. Apple advertises the shit out of new phones & new features (again, they coincide). When have you EVER seen advertising mentioning new Android features? When have carriers EVER touted Android, the OS, much less its version number?

3. (Major) There is no NEED for an Apple fan to know iOS version. Buying an iPhone is buying the latest iOS version. Existing users are told via iTunes that they can update their phone with new software (an iOS upgrade, but they don’t even need to know it’s called that).

4. (Bonus) The different manufacturer & carrier branding "enhancements" to Android muddy the water. Now you have two axes of "versioning": The fork, and the version number. Not so with iOS. (The iPad is out of sync, but this should be resolved before it’s much more than 6 months old.)
How Our Professional Elites Are Hired
Quora does this by not identifying the poster, so that self-validation does not occur.
If there weren't anonymous comments, then we wouldn't know that some men in tech are in fact prejudiced against women in tech.

That said, I'm officially sick of this back-and-forth. It crops up every few months on the blogosphere, and we never get anywhere. It's both, guys. It's both. It may be relevant how much of it is one thing and how much of it is the other, but until you can walk up to me with a nice cold glass of data and tell me it's 23% biological and 23% prejudice and the other 54% is due to solar flares you're not going to convince me of anything at all.

Truce?