skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"You can see a number of users with very high total karma but very low average karma. I'm sure that some of these users make a valuable contribution, but some seem to post a vast number of very low-value comments that are rarely replied to and receive only occasional upvotes."

I comment in a lot of new stories/links that pop up, especially people asking critiques because a) it's disheartening to post something about your work and have zero replies and b) I often get to see a cool product that's in a very raw stage and hear feedback from the creator themselves. In fact, I'd say less than 25% of my comments are in front page links.

But often these new stories rarely get traffic. And my comments will usually just get one or no upvotes at all from the creator, despite their thanks for the criticism.

Just saying that not all low-averaged scores are people not actively trying to make a contribution.
Firefox 4 Audio Visualizations Wanted
I know that in an open source project there are individual opinions. But you would think that if something is listed on the website, it is trustable information, provided by the project. If not, what is the project's official source of information?
Some. Hard to judge, but I guess hopping around between jobs for the best salary/perks is a sign.

Google does a thorough job placing monetary incentives on heroic effort. Not sure if those avenues are ever targeted by these people though.
I have an affinity for numbers, as I'm sure many hackers do, but the dual score doesn't look/feel right to me. Might we have the average show up only if it drops below a certain level? Possibly in red, to really emphasize the point?

This could help with another gripe I have with displaying average points (and comment voting in general), which is that oftentimes quality comments are downvoted simply for being contrary to the downvoter(s) views, and/or groupthink.
> knowingly used an illegal substance and got caught

That can be a reason to believe they should remain imprisoned, but not a reason to believe they should be released but it's not a priority to do that anytime soon.

> over-estimating the amount of causal drug users in prison

It's possible. The drug war has vastly increased prison populations, but it's hard to come by unbiased statistics about how many of those people committed any non-victimless crimes.
Thanks, that was really useful. Another basic thing I was wondering about was User Management (i.e. getting users to sign up, assigning password protected dirs etc). From browsing around there seems to be some good scripts but are there any classic recommended solutions that would be easy to integrate and allow payments etc.
I think this is definitely an improvement. Putting any kind of number up there is a game mechanic that will affect people's behavior. My eyes inadvertently go there every time I open the page.

An average does more to encourage the desired behavior than a total does. Even as I am about to press enter here, I can't help but think of whether this post will make that number go up or down.
While we're at it with the feature requests, why not add a down vote option to submitted stories? Wouldn't it help get a better signal-to-noise ratio in the "new" section? It would also prevent "throw spaghetti at the wall, and see what sticks" behavior. If this was debated in the past, I'd be curious to hear why it was not implemented.
Facebook data shows race trumped by social origins in friendship
http://vimeo.com lets you do this.
One Thing Small Businesses Can Do Just as Well as Walmart
Totally agree. Sometimes I type up a controversial reply, and then scrap it because I feel like it's going to be received poorly (took me a bit of thinking to post this comment, even!).

I'm sure a lot of good discussions never exist because of this. Even without avg. karma though, reputation is still at risk, so the problem won't be solved by removing/showing that statistic.
For Erlang and many other languages, plain Rake is good. For Java and some JVM based languages buildr ( http://buildr.apache.org/ ) provides a nice abstraction on top of Rake and also support for Maven repositories.
An interesting read. I especially liked the deal reviews. Quite often a salesperson will find an opportunity, qualify it and then through no fault of their own see it slide into the abyss. The checklist provided in TFA is a bit OTT (For example the ROI calculation isn't always a good marker of interest and isn't always necessary. Sometimes the customer needs to buy the service/widget from someone for mandatory compliance and in that case your ROI is less important) but it's essential that you do have a process for sorting the wheat from the chaff.
CherryTomato is Open Source
Geeks on livestream talking about tech and setting things on fire.
I came here from reddit (I mainly browse here so it isn't as much of an issue) and was surprised that we don't have reply notification. I spent a few weeks ignoring replies because I wasn't notified of them, now my first port of call is my comments page to see if anything has been added as a reply.
Other than text files, I've only used bugzilla, which is decidedly not "light-weight". How does trac fail to be "robust"? I've not seen any complaints about it scribbling all over its database.
Interesting that the article mentions their "new" micropayment option. I've been using their micropayments system for quite some time now. I sell software for less than $10, so the micropayment fees save me a lot of money over traditional fees. In fact, the main reason I use PayPal as my primary payment method is because of the micropayments fee structure. So far only Amazon offers similar pricing.
I personally will discuss things in the same spirit of information sharing, genuineness, common sense and helpfulness that I have before and after the karma change. I'm new to HN so I don't really even know how I'm supposed to feel about the feedback from the karma. A lot of my posts which I feel are good or important aren't receiving many points, but that's ok. If I really need something, I will ask a couple of my friends who are on HN to look at it and vote it up if they like it.
Anyone have a greasemonkey script to hide karma? I started writing one but got stuck on something simple. I'd like to no longer see the score at the top, because the instant HN loads my eyes gravitate towards that spot, looking for reassurance.
The site looks terrible.
Well, hopefully not as insane as Slashdot, where I end up showing all comments, since filtering completely messes up flow of messages (content-wise).
I work remotely. As a result, I save my employer a ton of money, so I'm not keen on the idea of taking a pay reduction. In fact, I already take a hit on the city wage tax, even though I live and work outside of the city.
PHP: by amateurs, for amateurs
Controversial comments sometimes get down voted but other times get up voted as hell. I think on average, it's quite safe from a karma perspective to be controversial even though you have to take the occasional down votes.
By that theory you can also ignore the lowest-scoring karma (if negative karmas are being added), as some might have had bad day or unlucky thrashing.
You could probably reasonably approximate this without too much effort.

The number of votes an article has and the number of comments are both going to be strongly correlated with the number of views per comment. So would the mean and range of the comment scores. You could also take the time since the comment was posted into account.

You could have the visible "raw score" for each comment and an invisible "quality adjusted score" that is used to give each user a quality rating.
The difference between the online ad bubble in 2000 and the one you suggest today is the transition of offline ad spending and offline consumer spending online.

1. 4% of total commerce is now ecommerce, according to the US Dept of Commerce. Ecommerce penetration in certain categories like travel exceeds 20%.
2. 11% of all ad dollars are now online ($26B on $210B) according to SNL Kagan.
3. $13.7B of local online spending is by regional or smaller businesses, according to Borrell. The average local business has $1200 per month in marketing spend, which is finally beginning to move online.

In short, consumer dollars and non-venture backed businesses need/want to be advertising online and Facebook is great solution: They offer access to the 2nd largest audience on the web and presumably mobile.

You could argue that Zynga and other venture backed gaming companies are driving short term revenues, but this advertising base is profitable, generating revenues from consumers who pay for virtual goods.

The flows of money governing this boom are consumers and enterprises, not a litany of unprofitable venture backed startups.
Why is it wood vs aluminium? What about fiberglass? Doesn't conduct, lighter, and doesn't fail suddenly in heat.
It's best if you read the rest of the information that I posted along with this, here: http://leaverou.me/2010/10/my-ft2010-slides-and-csss-my-pres...

I mention quite a lot known compatibility issues with the presentation, including the Firefox 3.6/Win problem (it works fine in my FF3.6 for OSX) along with an explanation of why it only works in latest versions. :)
Fossil SCM: http://fossil-scm.org/

Fossil is a DVCS + Wiki + Bug tracking, though you can choose not to use the DVCS part..

* Light-weight? yes. it's just a single executable <1MB

* Robust? maybe. Projects using Fossil: SQLite, Mongrel2 etc.
Or you could not just worry about your karma score, or your average and just post when you think you've got something to say and say it. I don't get the obsession with karma and people getting annoyed when they get down voted. Be yourself and if people disagree so be it
I've written a chrome exension that marks unread comments a while back: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/fpndmkcfggkffpab...

it helps a lot with that. It has some bugs, but as far as I can see I can't get around them because of the markup used here ...
I think your 'just an experiment' mentality works well to avoid a lot of premature criticism. Also helps you mentally detach from taking things too personally.

I am going to experiment with labeling things as experiments.
I work from my home office except when I have to fly to visit client offices. I, personally, save a lot from not having to have two cars, the extra gas, parking, but the main thing is I have two hours a day of not having to be in a car being unproductive.

For me, being able to work from home is a huge reason I'm sticking with me current employer. If I were to take a new job, the pay increase would have to be fairly substantial to cover the additional costs for me to commute.

So in a sense, I suppose I'm making less now than I could be, because I enjoy the benefit of working from home. I guess that's similar to the idea of a pay cut.
This discourages people from posting helpful comments that aren't likely to get many upvotes. For example,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1741408

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1485254

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1349459

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1349455

Those are all comments by me that were helpful to the parent, but which are "punished" by the public display of avg.
Thank you. I use the total karma number as a quick indicator of whether or not I am getting replies to an active conversation. That works for me since there are usually upvotes if there are replies to a comment.
I'm going to give it a try. Removed Starcraft 2 from my machine just now; winning 300+ games is enough for now.
They've forgotten a few things like the current administration stance on copyrights. Things like ACTA. Also patent reforms aren't really being talked about much by this administration.
ditz: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/148367
If I had nearly died and then been saved by the modern miracle of a heart or lung transplant, I figure I might change a few things about my personality as well thanks to my new lease on life. I don't think a wacky "cell memory" theory is required to explain these observations.

Occam's razor most certainly applies.
I think we're in violent agreement. I just want to note that 'worrying about it when deciding what/whether to post' is not the same thing as 'finding a discussion about it interesting.'

At this point in software history, all software is social software. Therefore, discussions about social behaviour and how it is affected by mechanisms and features is extremely relevant to the business of making software. So I'm fascinated by the subject of karma even if I don't try very hard to accumulate any.
xkcd suggested a novel way to filter out terrible YouTube comments by playing your comment out loud before posting. It had some very interesting results:

http://blog.xkcd.com/2008/10/08/youtube-audio-preview/
I wonder if this is going to kill the willingness of some people to participate in discussions on less popular postings. Here I also mean the ones that don't necessarily make it to the front page. I'm not sure that everyone even checks to see the new posts. Sometimes small discussions will pop up on those posts.
tech leaders have been outraged by Mr Obama’s willingness to demonise employers for outsourcing work to foreign countries, which is especially popular within the IT industry

This is popular with management not really with employees.
By the way, these "experiments" are pretty freaking cool: the fact that they could be done by just typing stuff into a REPL on the server isn't something I had ever considered before.

I think typing new function definitions into your live site seems very appropriate for a place called Hacker News.
Ask HN: Has the karma downvote threshold changed?
My ability to downvote seemed to kick in at about 200 karma points. Now that I'm at 467 I seem to have lost the ability.
Africa: Coke's Last Frontier
Working on Chrome 7.0.517.41 with Windows 7.

Use the arrow keys if you weren't already doing so.
It says "full support" in the browser icons. I assumed, and I guess samdk did also, that this implied she was talking about the browsers.
Overweight Celebs
Trying to keep a perfect image of oneself can be extra hard, especially if you are a celebrity.
The Great Unwashed
HN is based on karma--you only get access to certain features at given thresholds. It's something you have to care about if you ever want to be able to make full use of the site.

I think a time-based system might go along with karma well. If you stay above a certain level for long enough, you get access to the next feature level.

You still have to work your way up the karma tree, but you're not doing it for the features.
Jean-Louis Gassée (ex-Apple, ex-Be): Apple’s Next Macintosh OS
The point is shaping aggregate community behavior.

The attitude you are advocating is an internet-age-old drumbeat since Slashdot introduced moderators, and we are better for it, but the fact is that karma does affect people's behavior is undeniable and statistically immutable; therefore your point doesn't really address raganwald's concern.
If you continue along that line, you end up using the median comment score... which might incidentally be an interresting experiment.
That sounds like an excellent app idea. I'll be signing up, for sure.

Might I suggest that you check out using something like http://notifo.com/ to send users texts when their timers end?
So what do you do if you require high speed external storage now and not two years from now?
You could hook some javascript to the page's onscroll event. The javascript would send ajax calls back to the server that record which comments have actually been seen (although there is no way to judge if the comment was actually read). It would be a bunch of work though, because the raw log would be enormous and so you'd have to create a special batch processing job to get the view counts split out for each separate comment.
The president might need to be careful when dealing with the tech industry. Sure, they may not have as much power as the "media" now, but with the declining foothold of traditional news outlets and media sources it will be interesting to see how this dynamic changes in coming years.

Also, when it comes to wasteful spending see: http://dailycaller.com/2010/10/20/fbi-computer-system-years-... I mean come on. There needs to be some serious thought as to how to somehow apply startup principals to government endeavors.
I do in fact use the streaming api but that doesn't help with things I need, such as getting screen names based on a twitter id, and getting lists of followers for thousands of people at a time, in order to do some graph processing.
So... the folks who benefited from apartheid don't much like Nelson Mandela? That's /shocking/.
I'm not sure that this will fix anything, but it'll be helpful to me.

I think those of us that care, but occasionally say something bad will be helped a lot by this. I'm always trying to ask myself "will this be upvoted" when posting things, as I'm trying to be as helpful as possible.

However, people that are actually trying to troll or can't tell that they're trolling won't really stop because of this change. I don't really have an answer, either: this is a Hard Problem.

Edit: I should also say that any of us can easily be in the "can't tell we're trolling" camp at any time; it's a per-comment thing, not an "I'm a good poster, what shall we do about those terrible bad ones!" deal.
What’s Hindering Cloud Adoption? Try Humans.
It says Firefox 4 in the presentation
I'm not saying they will or they won't, but there is no point wasting resources assembling a patent pool against VP8 if it isn't even popular yet. When it becomes a threat, you can bet then the MPEG LA will assemble something, valid or not.
Truth behind Twitter’s CEO demoting himself
Yeah, we have to build up an intuition as to how the new metrics are useful to us as commenters and a community... and in the short term I think most of us won't be affected by it at all.
The first sentence makes sense but the second one does not follow. Grow a brain.
The linux kernel is GPLed, so they would have to make the sources for those drivers public, wouldn't they?
Relative to what? I'd think of it as a big plus compared to a guy who never contributed to anything outside of his immediate job duties. I wouldn't think of it as a big plus compared to someone who started Rails, or who wrote Mongrel, or who founded his own startup, or even someone who worked for Google or PayPal.

I suffer from the same cognitive biases as everyone else. Even though I know intellectually that getting patches into Rails now is probably harder than starting Rails was, I'm still more impressed by the guy who started Rails.
Aluminium also melts before it glows red from being hot. It's why it's relatively difficult to weld, and why there were a lot of failures in early aluminum-frame bikes.
Hi. I just put up my pre-alpha release - http://www.tradesalerts.com/ ... Any feedback welcome.
I think not being stuck in a traditional corporate job helps. Every time I have worked for large organizations new ideas were looked down upon and were impossible to implement while working for yourself you can do whatever you want so it leads you to the freedom to create more ideas.
I'm not sure how your troubles here equate to a criticism of OOP. What language paradigm are you most familiar with? Procedural? Functional?
Isn't that kind of a ridiculous question? Obviously, none.
Considering that I do work for Google and have been contacted in the past by FaceBook recruiters - yes, I'd rather work for Google. FaceBook has some cool technology, but so does Google, and I'm more excited about Google's overall mission.
I would love to see some counter-examples where 90 hour weeks actually do power superior performance: investment banking; Mahalo.com; etc.
The presentation is nice, but I strongly disagree with the author's chosen method of drawing browser icons:

.browser-support dd:nth-of-type(3) { background-image:url("img/opera-logo.png"); }
.browser-support dd.no-support:nth-of-type(3) { background-image:url("img/opera-logo-white.png"); }

And looking at the calculated width example reminded me of the box-sizing property [1], which would simplify that particular use case.

[1]: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-ui/#box-sizing
Time Will End in Five Billion Years, Physicists Predict
Ask HN: Cheapest way to llc/merchant account?
Hi. My current startup(which consists of two) is going through incorporation, registering the merchant account and hooking it up with Braintree. I saw Jason L Baptiste's interview on Mixergy where he slightly mentioned how much they spent on LLC/Merchant account costs ... but would really like to get a nice overview of the CHEAPEST way to LLC and merchant account.

Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.
TSA Says 11-Inch MacBook Air Can Stay in Bag at Security Check
ah.. Progressive taxation. You're a commie liberal aren't you. ;-) (don't worry, I am too)

Inflation may be a problem some day, but for now I think it's under control. The leader board is still at a human understandable scale: http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Sure, they buy a lot of components off the shelf. But they are extremely involved in the design and manufacturing process of their products, and often work with the manufacturers to push the manufacturing technology forward to meet their design goals (machine milling is nothing new, but machine milling a $999 laptop requires quite a bit of innovation).

Unlike many other companies, Apple _doesn't_ just take various technologies and piece them together to make a product. And they do a lot of core technologies in-house, which is why they've bought companies like FingerWorks and PA Sami.

The interview with Jony Ive in the Objectified movie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0fe800C2CU) shows some of the thought process that is involved in Apples hardware design process.

By your logic, other PC/mobile manufacturers should have similar profit margins to Apple, but they don't. Now, the usual answer is that Apple has a "cult-like following" that will pay a higher price for "more or less the same hardware in a different box".

A better explanation, given that the "cult following" has only increased the last few years, is that Apple manages to make more appealing products by being extremely involved in _both_ hardware and software, leaving other companies to compete by sticking together commodity components. Apple did not say that they expected decreased profit margins because they would have to slash their prices, what they did warn was that their forthcoming products would have higher hardware costs. But of course, time will show.
Tell HN: HN update - average posts/comments per day shown next to karma rating
... when you are signed in, check out top right.<p>guessing this ties in with the reported change to the level of karma required to downvote. thoughts? comments?
"Not because of revenue they're actually making"?

HUH?! Estimates for 2010 are 1-2 BILLION in revenue for Facebook. Fueling this revenue are companies like Zynga and Groupon - hardly bubbly companies... These guys are making real/sustainable revenue. Facebook is smack dab in the middle of social gaming and stands to be the AppStore of that world (WIN). Their targeting marketing has proven to be a huge driver of companies like Groupon (WIN).

There are probably a few bucks from VCs pouring into Facebook ads (like the Yahoo story)... But calling Facebook out as a company that's entirely (or mostly) propped up by investors rather than revenue? Totally disagree. If Facebook stopped investing in innovation/growth and focused on monetization, they'd be profitable instantly.
I don't know how well this is going to be accepted here, but I marveled at the cultural value of making and using your own wooden ladders in this day and age. In our practical, efficiency-obsessed style of doing things, people generally don't care about these details anymore. But those ladders are beautiful. I wished someone had pointed that out, because I'd never noticed it in SF.