skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Excuse me? He mentions his uncle cuz he describes his uncle's toolbox. He describes it real well. He then uses this toolbox as a metaphor. The individual tools a writer has make up a writer's toolbox. Your knowledge of grammar, your vocab, your use of metaphor, your word-choice. And so on. This is your toolkit, your toolbox if you will. He calls writing a craft. Like carpentry. A craft is something you can perfect through practice. So the extended metaphor (yes it was a bit folksy but what do you expect, it's Stephen King, that's how his books sound a lot) works don't you think? A think the writing advice he gives in that book is some of _the best_ advice I have ever read. He presents the advice in his own style but I wouldn't fault him for that because he's hardly going to present it in your somebody else's style.

The second half of his book tells the story of how he was practically killed by a drunk driver of a pickup truck when he was walking along the road minding his own business. He describes the massive injuries. He explains how On Writing is a direct product of that experience. He explains how he bought the pickup from the guy and smashed it to bits with a sledgehammer. Give it another go. It's well worth it.
What about perhaps a combination of the two ways? Fragmentation and access restriction (lets face it, banning is just complete access restriction)

Those users who are noted as being excessively mean spirited should have to learn to play in a sandbox nicely with others before they're let back into more active areas of the site.

The net effect is perhaps less of a knee jerk negative reaction so that users can eventually learn to contribute again in a positive manner and it keeps the more frequented areas clean again.
Like thinking Intelissense is a language feature for instance, or trying to shoehorn an inherently web language into general purpose and complaining (it's doable, everybody does it but you have to accept it was not meant to).
Yes. But I would say innovate a little, and perhaps drop games that don't get any ratings after a certain time (e.g., 6 months) and/or games that consistently get rated poorly by users.
Two sets of scores and arrows: one for agree/disagree, the other for high/low quality. Separating the concepts would emphasize the issues as distinct, and also make them easier to vote on. The high "quality" score would act like the current "flag" button, but with a finer control. Although a much more complex UI model, it's maybe worth trying.
Try to find someone who will handle all the "selling/marketing?" YES!!
"Really, I kind of get tired of reading stuff like this because there is always some subtext to it. "mean-spirited" usually means, "someone disagreed with me"."

Unfortunately this is often the case, however it should still be possible to make some sort of judgment based on rationality, patience, and communication skills of the people involved in a debate. If one side is constantly irrational and/or impatient then they are often also described as mean-spirited. This is why comments/complaints like the op's can be valid and important; though (ir)rationality/(im)patient/lacking communication skills are my preferred terminology over "mean-spirted" and other similar descriptions.
Since you asked... I've always thought you should be a bit more rigorous about eliminating the sorts of "rah rah!" topics that get people fired up. That's not a technical solution, but it's not really a technical problem either.

What I mean by "rah rah" things includes political articles that make people think "right on!" Paul B's article on Proposition 19 falls into that category for me: I strongly agree with him.

But when I step back and look, I think that I don't want to read everyone's "rah rah" articles because they tend towards flame wars, and, if opposing views are trampled to the point where those people go elsewhere, group think. I also think that, since they are topics that anyone can have an opinion on, that they are much more likely to draw people only marginally interested in the core topics of "hacker news". Those people in turn will submit more articles about politics. At a certain point a few days ago, between Prop 19, John Carmack's libertarianish views, and something else I don't recall, the top three spots on HN were occupied about articles that were essentially political in nature.

I would much prefer that articles like that one, much as I agree with it, and think Paul B is an awesome guy and a great contributor here, were ruthless pruned from this site.
Ah, but how do you count that in a ranking algorithm? I'm 90% sure my idea is not the answer, but maybe we can think of something else.

Maybe this is naive, but there's something about a binary voting system that just strikes me as something that doesn't fit into a conversation. I often find myself agreeing with certain parts of a comment and not other parts of it. Maybe if the user could vote up the parts of a comment he likes and vote down the parts that he doesn't. Technically, that would be difficult (especially since on HN a comment is simply a text field).
Which is the only valuable thing to do if you are going to debate an idiot and perhaps the only valid reason to debate an idiot.
Read his early stuff. His early stuff is better. You'll see why he became so popular. You don't even have to buy his stuff, just borrow from someone. His short stories are fantastic if you want easily digestible morsels. They are unforgettable, at least for me. Try Skeleton Crew or Night Shift, both great collections. I haven't read his later stuff so maybe he's gone off the boil.
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You can generate rules like these for arbitrary integers/primes(much easier than trying to remember them in my opinion). Take 41.

Example: 1476 is divisible by 41? 147 - 4 * 6 = 123. 12 - 4 * 3 = 0. Yes.

Example: 3321 is divisible by 41? 332 - 4 * 1 = 328. 32 - 4 * 8 = 0. Yes

What's the rule? Take the last digit off, multiply by 4 and subtract.

How to find the rules is left as an exercise.
I think the problem comes from the fact that we don't have a tool for expressing that we disagree with the tone of what someone is saying, but we agree with the position of the comment. This means that someone can write a mean spirited comment that happens to support a popular position in this community, and they won't get downvoted. Other people, seeing this, will take it as permission to be rude in their own posts.

I would suggest having a "tone" button that downvotes for tone. The level of fading applied to a comment will be bases on whichever of the two scores is the lowest, tone or voting - so a post with 10 upvotes but -4 tone will be invisible.
To avoid abuse of the "tone" feature, it should be possible to recover the user names of those that flag a post for tone.
keep track of submission karma and comment karma separately. People should not be able to downvote in comments unless they have earned the karma threshold required to do so from comments.

Ex [of what to prevent]. someone submits the latest tech-crunch article first and gets upvotes from everyone else trying to submit it. They can then downvote in comments without first being subjected to a socialization period of earning upvotes from thoughtful comments.
Can we hide negative comments, ala reddit, slashdot, everywhere else? I hate yielding real estate to trolls.
As an anonymous user I actually kind of like your idea, but can you clarify whether you propose that being "verified" would mean your identity is available to everyone or just to other verified users?

("I was walking home one night and a guy hammering on a roof called me a paranoid little weirdo. In morse code." - Emo Philips)
Maybe, I do not think the internet has not had a stable population in terms of demographics for a long enough time for a dominant productive culture to emerge.
> I agree with this comment's current point value.

That would be a really cool feature. I would often use it for comments at 0 - something that's factually wrong and needs to be voted down, but without nasty pile-on downvoting that sometimes happens, that to me looks a bit mean-spirited. If the comment in question went below zero, my 'stay' vote would count as an upvote. If it went higher, as a downvote.
The proximity of an election is likely a factor in this.
I don't think it needs to get any more complicated. Paul asked for a "technological" solution, and it's not in the rankings; if the profile pages are made more prominent, then people will invest in their social reputations.

With respect to counting comment views, it's already implicit in the page views.
How not to recognize free hardware
Depends on your use case. For desktop use, ubuntu is really good because of actual drivers.

If you want to use a stable linux distribution on a server, i can also recommend CentOS (open source RedHat Clone) or ubuntu LTS versions (long term support).

Another nice thing is, if your use case need that, to build your own linux from scratch.
A major problem with Amtrak today is that they don't own most of their own track, and thus are at scheduling and upgrade mercy of other companies (freight railways...us commercial freight railways are world class). This was also a big problem in the uk after privatization.

Step one may make sense without step two. Rails for freight, get trucks off the highways, and cars, buses, and planes for passengers between cities, with dedicated high speed rail for certain areas, and metro subway and light rail systems in the densest cities.
The boiling, erupting Sun
I've also noticed that there seems to be a mob downvoting mentality. I seldom downvote already downvoted comments unless they are especially egregious, but recently it seems that you either get no downvotes or a torrent of them. Either that or people are playing sockpuppets.

[Edit: I think one way to mitigate this might be to make a user's votes viewable.]
slightly different alorithm:

http://www.cut-the-knot.org/blue/div7-11-13.shtml
Particularly for folks who are not malicious, a reply saying that the tone is not normative is often enough to correct them.
To me it seems you've underlined my point. As someone who is now extolling the virtues of directness, he could have done a lot better than a few folksy metaphors with a book titled 'On Writing'. Contrast it with a real book on writing like Ursula K LeGuin's Steering the Craft (http://www.amazon.com/Steering-Craft-Exercises-Discussions-N...)

Honestly I think the guy writes whatever he pleases because he knows he's got a permanent fan base. But thanks for your note; I will finish reading the second half.
If you can't code, and you can get funding, you probably want to try to get funding, then use the funding to attract talent.

Really, you want a technical co-founder, but if this is the first thing you've done and you don't have cash, that will be difficult. A business guy without money is like a technical person who doesn't have completed projects on his resume.
Sorry if it came off that way, I'll reword that part of the article as it seems to be misinterpreted. I understand that intellisense is a feature of an IDE, and not the language. I use netbeans with PHP, and it does have auto-complete. What I meant was that the code format used in C# was easier to use(maybe I am just used to it) than PHP's style.

I initially wrote the app in C#ASP.NET(2.0) but had trouble getting it to work well on the server with mono(problems with GDI), so I switched to PHP and used it as a learning experience. Perhaps I should have used a more general purpose language, but at the time I was unaware of the limitations of PHP.
The marker for high avg. karma that was previous tried for a day. Indicative data: if mean-spirited comments correlate with low avg. karma.

EDIT The previous experiment and discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181 (4 Feb 2009)
Startup idea: Collaborative payment for open-source dev
Seems unnecessary considering some of the most thoughtful discussions come from throw-away accounts doing Tell\Ask HN. It could also exacerbate other issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

[ ie. comment upvotes co-vary with name of commenter instead of content communicated ]
Student creates robot having emotional intelligence
It would be available to everyone and google, since the point is that what you say is forever linked to you on the internet.
That's a good point; hopefully it will subside afterwards.
However egyptologists today believe that slaves weren't the force behind building pyramids etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_t...
Weight votes by some derivative of karma, without showing fractional values.
How about people with low karma (like myself) not being allowed to comment on articles that appear on the front page. Then only people really interested in following HN, and trying to form some kind of reputation in the community would be able to get much exposure. Trolls in general I would think are much more interested in putting out comments that a number of people will see.
Amazon Elastic Load Balancer
I think the trick is staying calm while you confront somebody about something. If you set them off, they stop hearing what you're saying and the whole "discussion" turns into a spitting match.

Everybody knows that crazy talk is a waste of everyone's time. I get depressed every time I find myself reading the comments on CNN or YouTube. . . .
Notes from A NOSQL Evening in Palo Alto
http://www.metamorphblog.com/2010/10/startup-team-magic.html
Usability innovation at that level will have to be accompanied with tests. But for now, it's a good idea to be very liberal in what you accept, at least so you can have a big enough catalog that you can refine at leisure later.
in SV proper? head by the Hacker Dojo. You can bring your laptop and work, but there is a whole lot of social interaction going on there, too. It's better, I think, than a coffee shop for social interaction because it's expected that people will start talking to you. It's better than most parties or other social situations, 'cause it's completely acceptable to bring your laptop, and to mumble something about a deadline or needing to work whenever you are tired of talking.
I like this idea as well. It also would be easier to implement than my idea :-]
Gentoo.
That's why I believe there should be no real disadvantage to using an anonymous account, and no way of telling in the comments if a comment is anonymous or not. All it does is encourage people to link their real life account in a behind-the-scenes manner, which will raise the general discourse level.
One mystery in my office finally solved. I was wondering too, WTH is this J and the end of the emails I receive frequently from the management.
Sounds like witchcraft to me. Pass me the wand...
For the confused:

* VLC for iOS was ported by a 3rd party, not by the VLC developers

* VLC and most included libraries are licensed under GPLv2 which has specific requirements around redistribution and rights of users/developers

* Apple's app store policies are in violation of the terms outlined in GPLv3 (see: anti-Tivoization clauses) so software with any GPLv3 components can not be released in the app store

* Apple's app store policies also used to (and may still) be in violation of the terms outlined in GPLv2 so software with any GPLv2 components can not be released in the app store. The FSF did an analysis of the older App Store rules and determined that they were incompatible with v2 and v3 licensed code. They have not re-examined the new policy but some developers believe it is still incompatible with v2 as well as v3.

* The code in VLC itself is not owned by a VLC organization. Like most GPL projects, it is owned by the individual contributors.

* Rémi Denis-Courmont has written code that is included in VLC and is used in the iOS port and believes this was done in violation of GPLv2 (and, thus, copyright law). Some other VLC developers agree with him.

* Some VLC developers disagree with Rémi's interpretation

* Some VLC members have been accused of trying to censor Rémi's posts on the topic by removing his RSS feed from the VLC meta-feed

* For those unfamiliar with the details and goals of the GPL, Wikipedia is a good place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License

Anything missing?
Thank you very much for this link. This is a very interesting read.
The GPL is the most widely used software license in the world, so you know Apple is familiar with it. If they chose to create rules in their app store that are incompatible with it, it would be hard to argue that they did so without being familiar with the GPL and how the rules are incompatible.
It's not that simple.
You need to take into account maximum drawdown and slippage.
If all your wrong trades (49%) will happen in a row, you will be toast ;)
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To be a little more correct, that $233 doesn't actually buy you those 50 channels. You still need to get a cable or satellite subscription, since all you can pick up off the air are the aforementioned cheese documentaries.

All you're buying for the license fee is a break from the constant stream of anger and threats from the TV Licensing people.
Why do you use throw-away account?
If your question was linked to a real person -- you would get more meaningful advice and possibly some other help.
I think you're asking why I think my method is better than the long division you mention. I've used that method too, in the past. Hmm... On paper, they seem pretty similar, but I think it is easier to answer the question "What multiple of 7 can we add or subtract from the final digit n to get 0?" (a memory lookup if you know single-digit multiplication and pay attention to final digits) than "What's the biggest multiple of 7 we can subtract from the leading digits mn?" (requires a couple of tries and comparisons).

If the first two digits happen to be "21" or "42", etc., a multiple of 7 by themselves, then I will probably notice and subtract that out. But that's fairly rare (1/7 assuming uniform distribution).

Overall, I find working from the small end more rewarding. Note that I never have to add or subtract anything larger than 7 x 5, and, 7/10 of the time, I don't have to add/subtract anything that isn't 7, 14, or 21. (I sometimes choose to add/subtract larger numbers to avoid carrying a hundreds digit.)

And note that I do this with 13 and 17 and so on as well. Then long division becomes even harder, whereas it's no harder to determine which multiple to add/subtract (as you just need to look at the last digits; 13 and 23 are like 3, and 17 is like 7), and maybe just a bit harder to calculate this multiple (e.g. last digit = 5 -> add 23 x 5 = 115; last digit = 9 -> subtract 23 x 3 = 69).
Yikes! Auto-playing video!

Kindly put a warning in the title when you post videos. Especially when they

a. play automatically
b. don't have any actual article accompanying them
Orthogonal persistence doesn't enforce unlimited undo, nor does it forbid a "save a copy as" option. Both may make sense (or not) depending upon the task or application.
Our Halloween Tribue to _why
I have a suggestion: after first creating an account, users could be redirected to the 'guidelines' page. That might help frame the tone of subsequent comments.
How about you add a little note just above the reply button. Something like:

Does this comment add value/insight/healthy debate to this topic?

Very low tech I know, but sometimes people need a little reminder to think about the tone of their message and how it will be received by the community before they hit that reply button.
No, they're more tools like debian-package auto generation.
I've been on HN for a few years, and I'm usually extremely skeptical of people claiming a decline in the quality of HN, but I agree, and furthermore I have noticed an increase in acceptance of clever but empty Reddit-esque one-liners. I don't mind them, but I think it's unfortunately a very slippery slope...
Are You A Pirate?
I like the graph-way of dividing by 7. It's not intuitive and it's not easy to remember, but at least it looks cool.

http://imgur.com/wCE6z.png

Start at 0. Read the number left to right, and for each digit D, go D black edges. Whenever moving from digit to another, go a red edge.
As an aside, is there any particular reason that the comment header (containing the commenter's username and other details) was designed to be grey and of the same text size as the actual comment body?

I think we can say that standard forums are much more 'scannable' compared to HN, and I often find myself looking out for posts from users whom I respect on that particular forums. In this case, Putting the username before the the points of the comment may lead people to view the comment for the commenter first and foremost, as opposed to the number of points the comment has.

I don't know whether or not that is a good thing. For one, it makes negativity very obvious, and it makes recognising a bad commenter pretty easy.

On the other hand, it may give a free-first pass to 'respected' commenters who might make mean comments every once in a while.

On the whole though, I think it may make it easier for your average user to recognise and avoid mean comments when they do see them.

Another possibility may be to shift the position and/or size of the upvote/downvote buttons to make upvoting a more conscious decision. I've got no suggestions about how to do this yet though =(.
Previous insightful submission and discussion, for background: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057133 (9 months ago)
Why not do something quite simple. Have it setup so that if a user has over a certain karma threshold they can flag a user's post in some manner as being mean-spirited or other such. If a certain number of users also flag the comment, then the poster does not get any of the karma points their comment may have earned. Alternately, the commenting flagging could be coupled with a slashdot style moderation and meta-moderation system.
Already implemented, but "hidden":
you must be on the link to that comment to see the flag link - eg. to see it on pg's GP comment:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852736
This could also possibly encourage more bad behavior. After all, if the site is going to treat them like a bad actor with no hope of redemption, why even try to avoid trolling?
Try to prevent people from feeding the trolls.

When people reply to a -4 comment it makes it harder to ignore that comment. It effectively pushes it up on the page. So disable replying to -4 comments. It's probably also necessary to hide any existing replies.

Exhibit A: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852305
Is scaling https that difficult? You do the SSL on your load-balancer; modern Intel chips can do AES at over 2 gigabytes per second per core.
This might just be my favorite post on TechCrunch.
Yeah, but we don't want to actually pay them much. Though, the Amazon Mechanical Turk might make it cost effective.

$0.01 per every 10 posts moderated.
Love the car, Giants will win in Game 5 in Texas
> Most people have an aversion to risk, my college economics professor told me. Which means they have to be rewarded to take on that risk. The higher the risk, the higher the possible payout has to be for people to jump.

Here's a followup question your freshman econ professor would have asked:

> Should we create incentives to reward entrepreneurs for their risk aversion? Or should we leave it exclusively up to the free markets to offer the reward?

In other words, if an idea fails should society step in and help the entrepreneur out (thus creating an incentive for him to further innovate)?
Having a reminder whenever you comment could cut down on thoughtless comments. Everyone makes a bad comment every now and then I think, a little nudge in the other direction could be all that's needed in some cases.
Ou another malaysian, that's a pleasant surprise. You're applying for the winter cycle i presume?
BigCo vs Pre IPO Gangbuster