skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this is a search startup? really? it sounds like they don't know whether they want to provide a search capability or be a news outlet.

mahalo the alleged search utility does not know what, for instance, a support vector machine is. when i search for "matrix algebra", they give me 4 pages, only 2 of which are mathematics-related (neither of them actually being about matrix algebra specifically) and then they don't even punt to google which is their saving grace when you search for anything besides celebrities and high-profile politicians.

they don't even try to guess whether wikipedia has something highly relevant (it does for both SVMs and matrix algebra). why?

i would say something nastier, but instead i'll say, where's the value?

now watch the "long tail" people scramble to tell me about how all users search for is britney spears and barack obama.
are there any good web resources regarding the melbourne "scene?" I have my own weird solo gig going, but I'm always contemplating a way to spend at least a year in the melbourne area. (i have family who moved there about 5 years ago, and would like to spend time there)
Im a fan of the ironic downvote personally. Its hilarious if you have the right sense of humor. It makes me almost pee myself laughing.

I don't understand why we shouldn't be hacking the downvote system. This is supposed to be hacker news. Ironic downmods seem consistent with that thinking, as well as consistent with the tricksters hackers are supposed to be.
I recently fixed up the project I was working on to work at 800X600 exactly. The reason is so that folks running at 1024X768 don't have to maximize the window. Even if they did, thanks to Google bars and Yahoo bars and tabs and bookmark bars etc. etc... the height would not be anything close to 768.

And since this is a flash app, it HAS to all fit!
Wow. Dani's comment was good, and she got downvoted just for fun. Not good guys. Things like this turn a good and serious site into something like reddit or digg, where there are no more intelligent conversations.

I don't like when my posts are downvoted, so I refrain downvoting people too, unless it is necessary. If I don't agree, I'd rather just voice my opinion.
Post-Humans don't want to live forever. They are capable of detatching themselves from their egos and accepting death.

This kurzweil guy is rocking the same fear of death vibe (a prehuman drive for survival) that keep most traditionally relgious people from experiencing the actual spiritual evolution that the real post humans will go through. Kurzweil is just basing his mythology to suppress the fear of death on tech and sci fi themes rather then Christian myths.
I downvoted you because I can't stand it when people use footnote notation in a posting that is only 1/5 of a page long.
I think Godel's Incompleteness Theorm implies the machines can't grok the code they are made from. I'm not sure though.
> VB Tech Journal
> January 1998

Mwahahaha .. thanks, but you should've clarified that it's about hiring good VB developers.
Commercial Users of Functional Programming 2007 conf. videos: Erlang, Haskell, F# etc.
Start-Ups Aim for Consumers on Hold
Google's enterprise vision is in the cloud
Wow, just want to say, so great to see other Aussies on here. Anyone else in the Valley?
It looks longer when you are in the tiny HN comment text box. I think he is excused.
I'm in a very similar situation. I'm working part-time on a startup that is close to prototype. I'm going alone also, and pondered how I'd ever find a co-founder. I've already found out the hard way a bad co-founder can slow things down, and when you're pulling all the weight, it just kills the whole spirit of the startup.
The mixing of the "quality" axis with an "agree/disagree" axis risks coarsening discussion.

I think in practice there are only three useful situations:

- you post a good comment, and I agree

- you post a good comment, but I disagree

- you post a bad comment

I think we all want a scheme where I can reward you in the first two situations and punish you in the last one. Unfortunately what we seem to be getting is one that encourages rewards in the first and punishment in the second and third.

Here are my suggestions:

For comments, an upvote or downvote without a followup comment should only add or remove some fraction of a point in order to diminish the effect of people who silently agree or disagree. If you really want your disagreement to count significantly you'll have to comment and also take the risk that people will downvote (or upvote) you.

For posts, remove the upvote arrow from the main list until after someone has clicked on the link. People should have to at least read the thing they are upvoting.

Finally, make it possible for me to change my mind within a short interval of upvoting or downvoting.
How about JavaScriptMVC along with one of these frameworks. It will really help you organize and maintain your project.
JavaScriptMVC also uses event delegation, which can really help performance and code organization.
do you have a link to what you are working on?
Agreed, I'm not really a liberal down voter (well if you add the fact that I down voted Wallflower for being a baby a few days ago), the gist of my original comment so to speak is how everybody goes all randy about getting downvoted and such. But yeah this is not Reddit and Digg we must practice a modicum of restraint when we feel we need to downvote on something. On an interesting side note my original comment garnered 2 points!
I think this is legit. But it only really affects servers or infrastructure that employ caching.

The fix is simple - validate the contents of the Host field at the start of a request
From the article:

>In the meantime, the experiment stands as proof that evolution does not always lead to the best possible outcome.

Wow, the author forgot something critical--there are no time constraints in this statement. It is as though the author tried a diet for a day and decided the diet did not lead to weight loss.
How can there be peer pressure? It's totally anonymous.
After reading all of the comments, it seems clear that most of the community wants some sort of "downvote" mechanism to assure that comments and articles lacking quality do not reach the front page and do not "clog" up the HN community.

It also seems clear that HN wants to tweak the system so that it's fair, doesn't allow for people who simply disagree without just reason to downvote an article, and holds the integrity of the community.

I have to add that any system implemented has to be simple but effective (two sets of downvotes is not simple, for example).

So my suggestions:

- Downvotes still exist to make sure articles and comments lacking quality, or are clearly karma-bombs designed to bring something to the front page.
- You can't downvote until you've gotten to understand the community. That means a minimum Karma limit, say 50, that signifies that you've contributed to HN enough to know the general rules of the community and some of the nuances that make HN what it is. You could also make it so you can't upvote or downvote after say, 25 karma. The number's arbitrary, the point is that you need to time to understand the community before you start downvoting items.

- Karma count doesn't appear until there's -3 or +3. That eliminates initial biases and "peer pressure" voting for an article starting out. Not ideal, but could work.

- Most of all, we must remember that, if a person is submitting quality, any downvotes they get for any reason is going to be balanced out by a greater amount of upvotes.

No system is perfect, but you need downvotes for quality control. Let those who have more connection to the community do that work if necessary.
Ask YC: What do you do about fraudulent clicks?
Hi there. One of the sites we run suddenly had an increase in Adword costs, maxing our limit each day, without any increase in sign-ups. We've done some log analysis and it appears as though some IPs are clicking on Adwords on a regular basis, therefore costing us money. Some of our clicks are up to $3 a click, so when one IP has clicked 40+ times on our terms it looks like it could be a competitor trying to cause us problems. For anyone on here who has experienced the same thing, what have you found to be the best way to deal with Google to either get a refund or to try to block this practice?
I’ve noticed the same reaction. I’ve posted some comments that disagreed with others and I got downvoted – so it is really discouraging to disagree.
I think that the solution here could be that next to karma there is courage section for people who are not afraid to disagree. There should also be something like “Karma Court” where respected guys from YC community decide if the post that got downvoted was plain stupid/disrespectful or just disagreeing. The members of Karma Court should bee respected fans of YC - motivation to become karma judges could be even bigger respect and recognition from other community members. What do you think of that?
I've learned that there is another fix - use name-based virtual hosting so that your webserver won't accept bogus host names as pointing to your application.
"Context over dogma" is a delightfully nuanced way of challenging rules. Far more powerful (because it's far more true) than a "break all the rules" mentality.

I shouldn't have heard that line just before bedtime - I'll be up for a while now.
Dech's disclaimer at the beginning ("can get all of the information on one page without compromising on usablity") is so restrictive as to be tautological. It basically says "if it works on one page then it works on one page".

From a business perspective, there are different reasons for having a website (I tried categorising at http://www.shirlawsonline.com/blogs/171-there-are-only-four-...) and I would suggest only a small subset of the simplest reason would fit into Dech's disclaimer - for the rest, this would be painfully wrong advice.
With Google, I've found that it's almost always best to know someone there. In this case, the OSO team.

Barring that one, you've just to got to follow up with Google. They respond, it just takes time. Ask the AdWords boards. Pull any words that seem to be the targets of fraud. Become more creative with your ad campaigns.

No system's perfect, unfortunately.
I'd be curious how much of a Y Combinator model could be replicated down under (Brisbane boy talking here).

I reckon small investments to kick-start tech-based businesses would fly. I also think we have enough of the right people to properly guide those businesses.

I'm not sure where would you have them base themselves? Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne each seem viable; none are Cambridge or the Valley.

And the big question - for how long could you seriously expect to fund multiple quality ideas twice a year? If Big Brother ran out of talent in 3 seasons, I'd be surprised for a tech-start-up-focussed company to still be finding suitable applicants 3-4 years down the track.
Choosing the Right Tool
How to Use Parkinson’s Law to Your Advantage
There is a general bias of HN and if you fall out of the range of that bias then you will for sure be downvoted. I believe that is because many of the users are very young and are not mature enough to value different ideals. You have to coddle them and not shake them up very much.
I'm pretty excited, actually. There are a lot of rough edges on the operating system that affect me, one of which is the support for FireWire audio interfaces using the standard built-in Core Audio driver.

It's not a new feature, it's an existing feature, but for me the experience is painful. It's not sexy but it's smart and it's not like they were going to release a new feature-filled OS by next year anyway. Better to have a solid base on which to innovate even further later down the road.
The person who runs that site is top notch at creating interesting or controversial headlines, but usually delivers a rant at best or--in this case--nothing at all. As best I can follow, this article's outline is this:

1. He met a presumably incompetent coder before the first bubble, who was possibly arrogant.
2. He previously complained about a incompetent coder in South America.
3. He has also met a competent coder in South America.
4. That competent coder may or may not have horses, but he definitely might have them, and he probably has a nice house as well.
5. He's pretty sure that people like the guy who is competent.
6. Wages don't correlate with quality.

I guess what gets me about his articles, is they are usually about something I'd like to know more about, and he presents this veneer of of authority, but always skims over the point of his argument where one might reasonably expect him to defend his position beyond simply stating it as a solemn truth.
Well, my version of Hacker News has no "down button". Is my browser broken?
I've heard aggressive blocks of geographic regions and specific origin sites that appear to be sources of problem clicks helps. Also, dropping AdSense and off-Google search partners entirely, if necessary.
I can agree with a comment and not want to karma-reward it, if it's mundane or repetitive. That might even go so far as to agree with the sentiment but find the comment of punishable quality, a sort of "OK but enough already".

The idea of weighing ratings from commenters in the same thread more highly is interesting.

Discouraging votes-without-reading and allowing quick corrections, as with comment text, both make sense to me too.
Seven Overlooked iPhone 3G Details
Ask YC: html select = javascript dropdown ?
I want to add a standard dhtml drop down to my application but in an unobtrusive manner so I'd like to display a standard html select and convert that into a drop down if javascript is enabled.

I've looked at several javascript libraries but nothing seems to fit the bill. They all require creation of the dropdown using divs and spans. Does anyone know of anything that can convert an existing html select?
URLs inline look crappy:

News.YC as yet has no syntax for linking from text as in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page#Li... Wikipedia] or [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBCode]BBCode[/url] or [Markdown](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown).

News.YC also doesn't follow the recommendation of appendix C of RFC3986 <http://www.rfc.net/rfc3986.html>; with regard to angle-brackets as URL-delimiters -- and it even inserted that stray semicolon.

Hence the footnotes even in tiny comments... they look nicer, not breaking the flow of the writing so much.
Yeah, and this is the main reason nobody has noticed (or cared) about this. Since your app isn't dispatched to unless "Host" makes sense, it doesn't really matter. (Does anyone not use name-based virtual hosting?)
Using a HTTP 301 response to redirect to the correct hostname may also help with your google rank.
I grew my company while I did IT / Network consulting part time. I found that working part time did not work out, so the next best solution for me was to work 2 weeks and take 2 weeks off - that worked ok.
Interesting. At I first I thought that the poisened url would only affect my own session and would be pretty useless with https, but combined with caching, it is definitely a very interesting approach.
You can block certain IPs. It's in the documentation. You can also complain to google support and they might refund it. Also: try yahoo's search advertising. It's actually not too bad.
That brings up an interesting idea - karma is used to rank stories and comments, and make sure more interesting content is more visible. But the "game" aspect of karma (trying to make the top posters list, trying to appear a the top of threads) probably encourages some unhelpful behavior.

If users really shouldn't care about their karma, would the site be served better by not making karma visible at all, for users or for comments? You could keep upvotes and downvotes, and even let users know their own karma and how their own comments are rated (so they know when their contributions are being rewarded), but their would be no high-score table of top users, and users would only be able to guess at a post or a comments karma based on where it appears on the page.

This would take away the motivation some people have to contribute high-quality comments - I'm not sure whether the net result would be positive or negative.

Part of this discussion needs to include a serious discussion of what this site's core goals are. If this site were a web startup that needed to get high traffic, than a game-like system that gets posters addicted to writing comments to try and boost their karma makes sense. If the site is more about making sure it has the highest quality content possible for its original niche target audience, than that would make this approach less appropriate.
They probably don't want their system to be perfect. Just on the same level as the competitors, because fraudulent clicks bring them money as well.

If an IP clicked 30 times on the same ad, then there is something fishy going on. If you were using Adsense, and it happend on your site, you probably wouldn't get paid per click or would get banned, if they track the Ip to your ip adress
I hate foot notes period... unless their are links to them... and links back. They aren't so bad in books... (but still suck there) but in web pages they drive me nuts.
I'm a beta subscriber of last.fm so I've played with the new beta design and I think it works pretty well. I was never a massive fan of their pink design, the new one is a lot more clear and clean. The navigation could be sorted out a little but apart from that, it looks good.
I still don't _always_ see the downvote... there is at least one other factor involved. not sure what it though.
Your version is much better: it explains what happened in detail and it has much less noise. I guess the one currently on the homepage is more upmoddable because of the creationists reference.
Techmeme Leaderboard - Top 100 Techmeme Blog Now in Widgets
How much of your favorite caffeine fix would it take to kill you?
I set my browser window size to 1024x768 and I test in opera, ff, and konqueror (probably test graphic links and epiphany too). I don't worry about the height that much though.
Surely, you can just generate the JavaScript dropdown dynamically and replace the HTML select element in the DOM?
Not sure it's worth a vote... BUT - the warning message is definitely worth a vote:

This tool is intended as humor - and is for entertainment purposes only. Nothing on here should be construed as medical advice or information. Don’t try this at home. If you actually try this and end up dying after only 140 energy drinks instead of 143, it’s not our fault.
once a comment reaches a certain age, you can't downvote it anymore. it's to prevent karma-bombing.
It is irrelevant if this series is "made up", what is important is that there is no substance in the articles at all.
Downmod for bad grammar.

I'm kidding, but I've been dishing out karma lately, if I even so much as agree slightly with someone, or think that their viewpoint is slightly interesting/relevant.

edit: I suspect that the person that downmodded me has no sense of humour :)
That's what a noscript tag is for.
'Lessons in PR' implies that there was actually something learned, or at least that something worth learning is being presented.

Nope, just a guy explaining why he chose to market his Basecamp specific web-app via 37signals. Dur.
Is the New iPhone Worth the Upgrade?
DHTML dropdowns need to be created using HTML markup - divs and spans would work, but an unordered list makes a bit more structural sense.

You'll have to write code that creates an empty list, finds your select box, loops through all of the options within it, creates a list item with the same text in it as each of those options, appends the list item to the empty list and then appends that list in to the DOM. Then you can trigger an existing dropdown library against your newly created list (and remove the select box from the DOM).
What Cost the Vista Fiasco? (Financial impact of Vista's slow sales)
Secrets of viral marketing: user incentives, promises, and flow engineering
You can print all with one click.
Big Pharma Is Outsourcing its Research
3. Multiple carriers in some countries. As Apple pushes forward to deliver the iPhone is 72 countries, it seems to have gotten overly enthusiastic in countries like Portugal, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and Australia, each of which has gotten not one, but two carriers offering the iPhone. So much for exclusive carrier deals.

I can't speak for the others, but I haven't seen a single iPhone in Austria (in use, or in a shop; I know of a single person who owns one) so far, so maybe Apple isn't happy about T-Mobile's sales here.

Not having 3G in a country with over 60% 3G coverage (and ~99% GSM coverage) probably hasn't helped so far, so maybe the new model will change things.

The Austrian mobile phone market is heavily oversaturated, with more phones than inhabitants, so sales are presumably pretty hard to get. I haven't seen T-Mobile promoting the iPhone at all, although they do feature it prominently on their website. (http://t-mobile.at/)

The tariff of €39/month with a 2 year binding is very pricy, especially as text messages (SMS) are €0.25 each. (I pay €0.04 for text messages with no monthly fees) Of course, you're implicitly paying for the phone, but the whole deal just doesn't stack up well against the competition. You can get unlocked iPhones on ebay for €400-500, although I'm very wary of those - no idea if they can still be updated to the latest firmware. Also, shared data/voice plans are very expensive here, much more than getting separate data and voice SIMs, which isn't particularly useful with the iPhone.
"This project is currently on suspension while I work on Shoes. Expect a new release, based on Shoes, some time before 2008's end."

from http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hacketyhack/

Given the amount of work he's put into shoes, I think he will easily be able to make this date.
Perhaps require solving a hacker-related "captcha" for submitting stories or posting until your karma has passed a certain threshold. For example, fix a line of code or enter the order of complexity of an algorithm.
Supreme Court Nixes Patent Double-Dipping (charging licensees' customers)
Purity
Firefox Keeps Nipping at Microsoft
IBM goes modular in 'green' data centers
Just because two planets have been around for the same amount of time in similar conditions doesn't mean they should both exhibit life. The emergence of self-replicating molecules at any given time may be extraordinarily unlikely, such that the expected amount of time for it to happen is on the order of trillions of years. However, when you've got several planets in the same circumstances, one of them will likely succeed much sooner than the others.

Here's a more concrete example. Consider the odds of rolling a 528 on a 1000 sided die, and you have 5 people rolling such a die. The expected number of rolls for any individual to get a 528 is 1/1000 + 2 * 999/1000^2 + 3 * 999^2/1000^3 + ... = 1000. However, the probability that at least one person has rolled a 528 passes 50% after n rolls, where (999/1000)^(5n) = .5, or n = log(.5)/(5log(.999)) = 139.

In other words, you expect to have rolled a 528 after 1000 rolls on average, but you expect somebody to have rolled one after 139.
Isn't this just a reprise of the covered wagon?
Why so few do startups
Small Business Administration: Basic Business Structures
Glassdoor: Let your boss (and the world) know what you really think
Flexible TFT promises roll-up displays
Software Philosphy, the ‘Why’ in Software Development
At Glassdoor, Find Out How Much People Really Make At Google, Microsoft, Yahoo
Explaining things: math vs programming
Erm yes ;)
Build an HTML list and then use your favorite library's ready() function to destroy that list and replace it with a Javascript dropdown.