skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> and google

> forever linked to you on the internet

I'm happy for you as a respected user of this site to know who I am. Google - forever and ever - not so much.

As far as comment quality goes, you might cut out some of the crap, but you may also get more sterile discussions from good citizens such as myself. My hunch is that some people just have an attitude problem, and will be a detriment to HN with or without their identities on display.
It seems to me that many of the 'bad' comments come from users who has a strong feeling on a subject and therefor posts many comments on story, where one might get upvoted early on. I think it could be a good idea to account for the consistency of scores on comments by a user within a story.

Edit: I also think that the effect of the first downvote on a new comment is (or was) to powerful. Especially when the leading comments have many replies.
If you decide to stay with this boss, then every time he asks "is this work?" -- ask him for 10% raise.
what about a "members only" club, where you need an invitation to get inside? It worked for google to get members if this is a problem and it may show the relative quality of the members subtree.
> I don't mind if you as a respected user of this site knows who I am. Google - forever and ever - not so much.

Unfortunately, you can't get the first without the second, as witness the leak of the "journolist" e-mails.
And the disgusting beauty of this is that the more bad companies use shotgun marketing, the more consumers are trained to only trust Apple.

Why do people buy Apple?

For many, they don't trust ANY other technology brand to provide a coherent experience. Every other tech brand from LG to HP to MS engages in shotgun marketing and thereby traumatizes customers and destroys their own market.

The reason "free" became so popular in software is because so much bad software was made where users felt buyer's remorse so they just stopped buying. Free became the only way to get your product in people's hands.

Apple has managed to avoid this with their quality control and lack of focus groups. This gives them credibility in a landscape where NO ONE ELSE is credible.

And that is worth lots of money.

Why only buy Apple? Because only Apple can be trusted not to sell you an aggravating hassle. People will pay twice as much for half the hardware specs just to get the Apple promise.
Flagging an entire thread by clicking 'troll' would help. The up/down voting tends to promote trolling, as the first controversial cliche is the top comment, having spawned a deep threaded conversation with lots of emotions and voting. A different symbol is needed. Something that makes people take pause and say, 'Is this a good subtopic of this link, or is it the exact debate anyone would have predicted?'

Put troll threads/comments at the bottom of the page, or hide them. Or use spam ratings to amplify users' votes who up vote non spam comments.

Short of that, add the ability to minimize entire threads.
> which will raise the general discourse level

On one hand you want to avoid trolls, but on the other hand you want to avoid a circle-jerk and "my boss can google everything I wrote" timidity and un-hackerish conformism. Tending toward either extreme can disincentivize thoughtful discussion and negatively impact a community. So I would be hesitant to declare that a safe assumption.
As far as I know the expensive part is not the transmission of data (which is done via AES and extremely cheap), but the establishment of the SSL connection using public key cryptography. Even though this only needs to be done once for each "incoming" user, due to persistent connections.
You have the full HN dataset and voting logs. What if you used it to train a simple classifier that would predict the likely karma of a comment as a function of a number of features, including username, username responded to, bag-of-words vector of the comment, time of day, total number of comments in thread, "controversy" of the comment (as reflected by a mix of up & down votes) and similar factors?

The goal could be something like Google's Beer Goggles, but for comments: "it looks like you're writing a flame, are you sure you want to do that?"

Another thought: there's a big difference between a comment at -1 with 10 upvotes and 12 downvotes vs. one that has occasioned 2 downvotes. Might be interesting to see the effect of showing both the number of up & down votes rather than just the sum. The idea is that genuinely trollish comments at -1 will be differentiated from minority points of view.
I haven't found anonymity to be very well correlated with politeness on tech discussion forums I'm on. Some of the most abrasive ones are filled with people posting under their real names, and folks like rms, Theo De Raadt, Ulrich Drepper, and a bunch of the comp.lang.lisp crowd have no problem flaming you under their real names.
Would the codebreakers winning really be a better outcome than a constant arms race? :)
Are you the same http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=throw999
Debian, because of the stable / testing / unstable model mostly. On a server, I can use stable, on my desktop, which is supposed to have more recent software, I can use testing, and my development box is running unstable with the latest and greatest stuff.

And they are all Debian, a familiar environment.

However, for starters, I'd suggest Ubuntu, the de-facto "Linux for the Masses" distribution.
Posts from the heart are a potent brew, and that one certainly came from somewhere deep inside of Mr. Arrington. Mike can say that it's not about winning or losing, it's about playing the game now that he's "won".
I suppose the claim of "make you smarter" depends a lot on your definition of "smart". If it includes the ability to concentrate then perhaps it does make you "smarter".
wood is far more safer when exposed to heat than metal. while wood starts to burn on the outside it turns into coal, which effectively seals the remaining wood core from oxygen - preventing (for a while) further structural loss. this is taken into consideration when sizing wooden structures in buildings.

metal on the other hand loses structural integrity when exposed to heat shockingly fast. the wtc towers showcased this effect quite publicly.

experienced firefighters prefer to deal with fire in wooden structures than in metal ones. they can predict how long a wooden roof structure will take till collapse quite well, while a metal structure is a nightmare.

so, flammability and structural integrity under heat are two different things. non-intuitive for most non-engineers, hence the retarded wtc discussions.

in SF's case they use wood because of its function as an isolator.
There is a lot to unpack in the idea that people get utility out of risk itself. Personally I think many of them get utility out of things which can be sensibly extricated from risk. A lot of folks relish the social aspect of working in a startup (us versus the world, shared triumph over aversely, counterculture as the norm, etc): I think you can replicate that without 90% of them failing. (I hold other heresies such as that you can replicate it without 90 hour work weeks, too - the ninety hour workweek is the talking parrot, which doesn't really do anything for us but we know that it isn't a proper pirate ship without a parrot, and we cling to this even when it bites our fingers and defecates on our pirate boots.)
Ask HN: Is Hacker News raw rating data available for mining?
That would be nice to process the data about who up/down-voted who/what.
That might allow to build useful social graph of potential start-up matches.
It also may allow to build customized news lists: if my past votes were similar to votes of Alice, then Alice's ratings on new articles are more important for me, than ratings of average Hacker News user.
I hear what you say, and what you say is true. Having said that, for me, I don't think your observations really help to develop an intuition that helps when working in a higher dimensional space.

My experience is that people know it's roomy, but don't appreciate the consequences. The early comment about there being 10^5400 "places to be" if you have 1000 in each direction for a 1800 dimensional space immediately conveys the idea that space is big, but it's the implications that tend to go missing. People still think of spheres are round, and that "smooth" means "like a landscape in 3D."

So while your comments are true, and add usefully to the discussion, to me they don't really convey a helpful visualization.
I wonder how this will affect living habits. When you have enough of spare parts do you still care about the original ones?
Wow, excellent article from Arrington.

I like the analogy, and I can relate to the attraction of spending your life "at sea". The prospect of striking gold is not what attracted me to work for myself, it is the lifestyle.

The unknown nature of startup life is also attractive. At my previous job I knew I would be at my desk every day doing the same thing - now I have no idea where I will be or what exactly I will be doing from week to week, and that is very appealing to me.

And risk/reward? Who cares, just enjoy the adventure!
I think there is a distinction between saying stupid things, contributing to sensitive topics, and outright trolling which you're ignoring here. All three of them are things that I wouldn't want to be part of my permanent record, but:

* Saying stupid things (Software X doesn't support Feature Y, which is good if you want to do Activity Z) and then be corrected (because in the meantime, Software X got a Feature Y for the latest version) provides overall value to the discussion because other people are likely to have made the same mistake that I did.

* Contributing to sensitive topics (be it gender equality, the question of "race", or any political question) will always send the goon squads your way whenever you voice a non-majority opinion. Admittedly, HN has a policy that these contentious topics are not great material for posting, but you get one of these once in a while and it's hard to make an informative contribution to such an issue without drawing ill will from anyone (which will result in downvotes to an anymous HN poster, but could be potentially harmful if those trying-to-be-well-informed-but-not-necessarily-popular opinions ended up on your permanent record). As an example, consider the question of founders being able to raise kids at the same time. While there are people who do a good enough job at it to be able to step up and say, I can do it just fine, and people who can claim anything because people will listen to them anyways, anyone in between would run the danger of drawing the ill will from people of one side or the other for claiming that it's possible or not so possible.

* Outright trolling is something you would not want in the comments, but there's a very fine line between a pointed remark that someone made, and trolling. And as with blog posts, successful trolls are still successful when they are not anonymous.

I think one of the problems here is that, when the audience grows large enough, a pointed post will draw a larger number of upvotes than a boring-but-informative one. So it may be useful to partially decouple the comment-ranking function of up-downvotes with the karma calculation to disincentivize karma whoring.

For example, one could reduce the weight of comment up-/downvotes whenever the total number of (comments+upvotes+downvotes) of an article crosses a certain threshold - say 100. In this way, having a +20 voted comment on an article that barely made it to the frontpage would count more than a +60 voted comment on an incendiary topic that draws a total of several hundred up/downvotes.
The reason you shouldn't really compare Fedora and Ubuntu, is that Ubuntu is a commercial distribution, while Fedora is not. If you want to compare, compare Ubuntu with RHLES or Fedora with Debian.

Like Fedora, Debian has no proprietary software in it (yes, there is non-free, but that one is not part of the distribution).
Wouldn't that also lead to incentives for teachers to encourage students towards professions that would have greater future earnings? Thereby discouraging them from fields that may be useful to society but not that economically viable (I shudder at the thought of every teacher encouraging their students to work on wall street :) )
> They don’t need to be rewarded for risk, because they actually get utility out of risk itself. In other words, they like adventure.

Completely flawed. Every sane person seeks to reduce risk. What entrepreneurs also seek is to maximize gains. Increased risk is merely often required to do so.
Do you still Facebook?
> The 18-month-old company gained attention earlier this year after receiving money from the venture capital arms of both Google _and the CIA_.

Am I alone in having a WTF moment on reading that?
If you provide a check-list or other criteria, be prepared for a world of pain. There will be people who claim they qualify, and they won't let go. They really, really won't let go.

They will harrass and harrangue you, they will call you liar, cheats, thieves and worse in public, and they will question your parentage and, what's worse, your ethics and morality.

And they won't stop.

I speak from experience.

You may choose to publish somewhere a list of things you consider, but say it's incomplete and for guidance purposes only. You may choose to provide a form response to those who you choose not to accept/list/whatever, and you may say that while it's no doubt worthy in it's own right you've decided it's not a good fit for your service.

Just don't be specific.
Agreed. If you don't want your presence to be known on the Internet, there's a very simple way to accomplish that.

Don't post, don't publish, don't comment. Simple as that.

Some time ago another person made a comment about pearls and some sort of livestock. Throwing...things...in places?
What if what you really hate is getting other opinions on how good it is? You say "in my opinion at least," and you hate trying to convince people, and finding a winning strategy. What if instead of trying to force yourself in, you figure out why these people aren't responding and how you can make them come to you? Maybe your idea only sounds good to you. Marketing, selling, etc. is not just trying to get something through to someone else, it's learning what they actually think is good and cool, or what is bad and needs to change. Your mentality and approach could be wrong. Not sure if this is the case, just a possible scenario.
Nowadays not so much on the computation side (even handshaking is fast), but for mass virtual hosting it is very annoying/difficult without SNI (need so resort to multiple ips or having wildcard certificates and running under subdomains). In a SNI enabled world it wil be much cheaper.
I submitted this before for critique and I made some changes.
From a slightly different point of view;
I was always under the impression that Apple got trounced by Microsoft in the desktop PC market. People quickly realized Apple didn't have a lot of software past Adobe, plus of course you could copy software from your friends.

History is now repeating with Android/Google as they start to dominate apple with much the same situation. The Iphone is an overpriced toy for a lot of people.

You could always blame the Apple downfall on that bloke from Pepsi.

The next big fight is going to be Apple TV vs Google TV. Apple already has Disney on their side, while Google is just giving Google TV away much like Microsoft did with with DOS and Windows.
No, but I think it still is their goal to change that.
The Lure of Tomorrow
I hope you would reward controversy rather than punish it? I don't come to HN to read happythoughts.
This should not be a problem in the status.net case, where users are assigned subdomains (username.status.net). Just get a wildcard certificate for *.status.net.
Who spends himself in a worthy cause
What StatusNet said, that they have problem not with CPU power, needed for SSL handshakes, but with implementing load balancing. Unfortunately, linked discussion is non-informative on subject, just saying "...gets really complicated".
I have no place to go for such a good place to critique my website so I made some changes. I work alone so I have nobody to ask if I'm heading on a right path for this so please tell me what do you think, did I make it worst or ok? Please don't get mad if I posted this again, I just have nobody to ask.
Possible solution 1: Smaller communities; Dunbar's number. I know it's been suggested before, but here it is again... When everybody knows everybody, people are nicer. Just create one unique, isolated instance of the site for every X number of users. Distribute current users randomly (or whatever) among the instances. Assign new users to the least populous instance. If an instance gets over max_number of users, split it in two.

Don't bother trying to do fancy stuff like connecting votes between communities; if something is really good people from each community will submit it separately. Also, it might be nice to be able to move between communities... but that sounds like something for version 2.

You could have these smaller communities run in parallel with the main site if this seems like too big of a shift.

Possible solution 2: Not sure if this really addresses the issue squarely -- but what if, when ranking stories and/or comments, you factor in the number of votes in the intersection between the current user and the submitter/commenter. Something like:

define votes(username): return ids of last n upvoted items for username

item_score *= (length(intersection(votes(user_x), votes(user_y))) / (n / 2))

Just use the original algorithm if the user hasn't yet cast n votes.

One man's garbage is another man's gold, as they say.

You could do something similar by checking downvotes as well. If two people are polar opposites (one person upvotes stuff the other downvotes), then comments by one could be greyed out or hidden for the other.

If there were simply a box I could check to make my votes public, then maybe somebody could write a Chrome or Firefox extension to pull this data and handle the re-ranking.

Neither of these two ideas would be perfect, but I think they would improve the user experience significantly. If nothing else they would be interesting experiments.
Ask HN: Exit Strategy?
Just wondering if anyone's taken a huge chance on a new idea, with absolutely no exit strategy.
Sorry, but society shouldn't have to bail out a failed social network for puppies.

For entrepreneurship there is already enough reward for the risk. It's not just monetary gains we're talking about. For one, you get to call the shots and that's worth more to some people than money. (http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html)
Indeed, the idea is that a "controversial" comment can evoke both disagreement and support, while a trollish comment would just result in downvoting.

OTOH, some particularly clever trolls are of course intended to provoke division of an intellectually unproductive sort. Not sure if machine learning could identify that...though features computed from the commenter's past history could be informative.
Don't throw money on an idea .. way too risky if you're not technical and you don't have a technical co-founder.

That's not how things work.

Programmers can afford to start startups because the biggest chunk of investments comes from their own talent; the fact that they can sit down and hack something.

Business guy + idea + money + employees? Can't imagine that working out very well. Unless the idea is simple enough and the technology is not in itself the main product.

I mean, seriously, you spent 14 months on the idea? How do you know it will work? Sounds to me like you're putting all your eggs in one basket.

This is another reason why programmers can afford to start startups: they can change the idea quickly, and they wouldn't be in a position where they invested a lot of money in the previous idea.

Where as, if you just hire developers to develop your idea, and then it turns out that it won't work very well, you'll be in trouble because you now wasted all that money on it and you don't want to just throw it away and try something new. OK, maybe you will be able to switch your idea once, but you can't do that all the time, you don't have this flexibility.

So get a technical co-founder. That's my only advice.
No seriously. I've tried most of the smart drugs in existence, had exactly the same reaction to modafinil, and found stablon does much of the same but without the drawback mentioned. YMMV, of course.
Mobile Number Portability In India: Pros and Cons
The Muffin Man
No, they are not. Or, rather, they are only if they follow a(n inverted) chain line (i.e. exp(x)+exp(-x)), but the lower parts of the half spheres favored in architecture are steeper than that, so there is massive tensile stress there. This is, by the way, the genius in Wren's consruction of St. Pauls in London: he hid a chain line dome that carries most of the load between the visible outer and inner half spheres.
Ubuntu is no more commercial than Fedora.

1. You don't pay money for it.
2. The company behind it uses it to make money.

In Fedora's case, it's kind of a public beta of RHEL. In Ubuntu's case, Canonical provides support and professional services, although it's not profitable yet.

Also, Ubuntu comes by default with no non-free software. Although now I think there's an option in the installer to install MP3 and stuff that's restricted by patents. (not sure if it also installs non-free stuff like Flash).
Considering the perspective of a logged in user, simply give them the opportunity to deselect others by username and then record their deselections with their account. This wouldn't require unique pages to be served, except for a deselected_users array to be picked up and processed at the client side. The same lightweight approach can be used give shape to a user's own view with stuff like: 'preferred users', 'out-right scum' etc. Same principles apply to personal topic preferences and their viewed ranking.
Great article, and definitely a feel-good for people who are starting their own businesses!

However, I wonder if all entrepreneurs are like he describes. In fact his description is almost at odds with what Zuckerberg said at Startup School, about simply building things because you like building things.

I think at the end of the day there's many motivations for doing something as bold as building a company, and everybody has a different mix of those motivations.
This week in startups Sydney - Episode 1
These kinds of astronomical pictures are why I got into astronomy. Simply breathtaking.
Solution 2 is very interesting and a form of instant personalization. "You will like this if this is the sort of thing you like." People who want to seek out disagreement/incongenial views might be able to turn it off should they so please.

With the right data structure you could do this with a single matrix-vector multiplication per page view.
As a developer I don't write anything I submit anywhere, but I have had some experience with rejection letters when trying to publish my comics. Most publishers have a standard polite rejection that says the comic doesn't fit in any of their collections. But my favorite rejection letter was actually a checklist. It was a pretty devastating list of everything that could go wrong in a comic, but only one item was checked. It was a relief to see that while I didn't meet their criterias I still had most things right.

This was a relatively small publisher at the time and I suppose that they had started by writing a letter for every rejection, then found that many of these letters fell into similar categories, which allowed them to rationalize the process when they started getting more propositions.