skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My suggestion for the homepage would be to make the screenshots expandable/zoomable. They're so small I can't really make any detail out apart from a few pieces of bolded text.

Moving on from that, I'd be willing to give this a try but currently I'm getting a MySQL error after trying to login with my Facebook account.

"Database_Exception [ 0 ]: [1062] Duplicate entry '' for key 'uniq_email' ( INSERT INTO `users` (`username`, `password`) VALUES ('<removed for privacy's sake>', '<removed for privacy's sake>') )"
If you're saying you don't see an S/N problem on HN right now, that's a totally valid opinion, but you should express it directly. As it is, I can't tease apart from this comment whether you're saying "things are fine" or "these features won't help with the problem I, too, see".
Certainly, but I very much doubt 55% of America is paying tens of thousands of dollars for that reason.
None of these address the real problems, some of which are:

* infographic spam still has an appalling attraction to many HN users who should know better
* the 'new' queue is thoroughly full of junk
* hardly anybody looks at the 'new' queue so that good things don't get promoted out of it
* it seems very likely to me that almost all successful posts involve a voting ring of some sort
* all too often, three or more stories about the same topic dominate the home page
* certain people are running "made for HN" blogs where they quickly pound out a quick (but banal) response to a controversial article and then get voted up.

If you really wanted to improve matters, you'd want some A.I. filtering against infographic and 'me too' articles, protection against voting rings, and some mechanism to force people to moderate the 'new' queue in order to accomplish what they want to accomplish.

The 500+ karma stuff is a joke; that keeps new people out, except for the ones who don't have a life. That kind of thinking is a big reason I don't participate on StackExchange.
Damn, that's two bugs - one that the production site's showing real errors, and that there's a db bug. I think I've now fixed this - can you try again? :)

Oh, and thanks for letting me know :)
Can we have a 'None of the above' and an 'Other' option?

Great poll, though we may be missing some information here.
Yeah, that analysis is egregiously wrong: the terms should be summed instead of multiplied. The correct complexity is O(n^2).
The guidelines should be simple, clear, and should just pop out right next to the box whenever you're writing a comment.

Hiding score is also a great idea since it reduces upvote-downvote wars.
Rather than adding new functionality I'd prefer some time be spent on making the site readable on mobile devices. Trying to read HN comments is ridiculous on the iPad let alone a smartphone screen.
That's why it's called "the Perl renaissance." Renaissance == rebirth, another life.

Incidentally, like an old girlfriend, the language kept going even after you broke up with her :)
Ooh, great suggestion about the screenshots, I'll see what I can do about that with the time I have left today :)

Can you try logging in again? I think that I've fixed that bug now - although need to generate some more test users to make sure ;)
Is it okay if others continue to develop the language, though?
I think it's an incredibly valuable feature of the site that it draws in people like Joshua Schacter and Jason Fried†. So I'm absolutely with you in the spirit of this comment. However, not showing Jason Fried the "upvote" button and not showing him the "Text" box on submissions isn't going to keep him from contributing. Candidly, I'm guessing he could give a shit about those features.

† Two examples of people who weren't here at the beginning of the site, both of whom are notable company operators.
If you take my word for it, aepstein's advice above is solid gold - very similar strategies have won me paying customers in the past.

Go for it and all the best.
Hmmm, I believe the article says all of that. I'm afraid we're going to have to agree to disagree here. What I suggest is you check out the articles that go with it and the comments I've made in the article. I'm sorry you are not seeing it. i can't be more clear than I've been. In fact, much of the criticism I've received on these articles has to do directly with the fact that "not all kids are entrepreneurs" which i address clearly in these articles.
I think stricter guidelines regarding what's off topic, and stricter enforcement of them would be much appreciated.

I have my own sense of what's off topic, but lots of people seem to like to play the "7 degrees of hacker news game", exemplified by this post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2241455

In a few hops, you can make anything hacker news!

My own opinion is that politics and other topics that give people that "riled up" feeling ought not to ever be here, whereas the occasional random story about something really unique and interesting might pass muster. But ultimately my opinion counts for little: is PG going to leave the site to 'mob rule', or come down on those kinds of stories? I guess a decision either way would be good in that we'd avoid some of the meta-discussion.
On Twitter, tptacek specifically suggested a hard ban on politics as an example of more restrictive guideslines. What makes me uneasy about this is that there's a huge gray area surrounding what qualifies as politics. For example, I don't regard tptacek's recent comments about the market for talent as politics, but a lot of people probably would. If we ban politics, then petty squabling over politics will be replaced by petty squabbling over censorship each time the mods kill a thread which is only borderline political.
Especially the "we've opted you into 15 different e-mail notifications that you'll have to disable one-by-one".
I like the poll option of making the flag button more powerful, but it wouldn't do enough on its own. In addition to that, I'd like to dock karma when a submission gets flagged: -1 karma for each user who upvoted, -10 karma for the submitter.

There are no repercussions for upvoting or submitting questionable content at the moment. While my proposal is only a small penalty, hopefully it gets people to at least think before actions that potentially increase noise.

Edit: I meant "when a submission gets successfully* flagged", ie killed. Thanks davidw for pointing out the ambiguity.
I took (1) and added it to the poll. 10+ extra-special bonus points for you.

(4) is already up there (hide some or all scores). This is my most wanted feature for the site because holy hell do we all waste a lot of otherwise valuable cognitive resources thinking about the little numbers next to comments.

(2) and (3) worry me, because HN is an echo-chamber site. I get way more karma for the same unit of comment quality than you do, and it's not because my opinions are any more valuable than yours.
Some scheme that at least partially counterbalances the large comment karma advantage garnered by early commenters on a story.

As it works now, this advantage is an incentive for users to jump in early with low-quality comments that just get votes by pointing out the obvious.

An example of a partial fix for this: show upvotes for comments as normal, but when calculating a comment's contribution to the user's karma, give lower weight to early comments, to reflect the advantage they had in getting upvotes.
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How To Bypass Internet Blocks Using A Dial Up Connection
Not sure if that's a "problem" if the only other way to implement function-static variables would be to add a variable visible for the whole module, or tricks with decorators...

@statics(blah=[])
def foo(normal_args, **kwargs):
# or
def foo(normal_args, blah):

It messes up the idea of looking at the definition to find the function signature.
Mono 2.10 with new code generation
Penalize karma when submitted stories are flagged off the site.
Preface: I don't know if this actually happens or not, but...

My guess is that people submit stories from certain sources, no matter what the content is, to try and be the first submissions and get the karma. If ~15 people do this, the submission is going to rise rapidly, not because of it's content, but because of people trying to cash in on a well-known name. For instance, I think an Arrington article is going to get a lot of votes right away because of people trying to be the first submission, not because of the content article. If there was no karma associated with submissions, people wouldn't race to get these types of articles submitted.

Again, just a guess.
I'm curious why you're impressed by minified HTML. Usually, given the CPU cost to minify a page and the fact that savings are in the tens of bytes after gzip, it is nearly certainly an overall performance and user experience loss.
I would just like to say that Hacker news reads very well on the Kindle.

It is quick to load which is key and I use it as almost a newspaper each morning going to college.
I vote for making the flag button more powerful. Most often, the worst discussions are about flamebait from TC about something Apple or Google has done(I am as guilty of this as anyone). If, with enough flags, those stories could be moved off, then we could go back to having saner, less shrill discussions, and improve the overall quality of HN as well.
I've been here close to 1000 days now. I've seen a lot of online communities get popular and lose what made them special, but so far, HN has been remarkably resilient in the face of serious growth.

HN has a lot going for it. The sparse look and scary name keep out most of the undesirables. It's hard to turn a place called "Hacker News" into yet another funny cat pictures board.

Looking at the front page right now, I'd say things are still very much on topic: Collision detection, hash tables, Amazon S3, C++ style guide, etc, etc... Sure there's a couple lame Techcrunch articles, and maybe a bit of current events, but if you go back and look, those things have always made the front page in limited numbers.

If there's one thing I'd do, it's make the "new" page time-based, instead of strictly limited to 30 items. Everything should get an hour to percolate before being pushed to page 2.
Why not just use the OPTIONS verb? You're overloading verbs in order to make your API discoverable.

Discoverability is great but there's a supported (and standard) way of accomplishing this already.

Examples:

GET /users

{users: [{name: 'Bob'}, {name: 'Alice'}]}

POST /users/create {name: 'Sally'}

{name: 'Sally', id: '3'}

OPTIONS /users

{links: [{rel: 'userList', url: '/users'}, {rel: 'addUser', url: '/users/create', verb: 'POST'}]}
I think you have it right. Latency-oriented engineering is a style of development that minimizes the time through the entire loop from idea to learning to feedback from real users to learning based on that feedback to the next idea. What you do to achieve this is very different when you have a bare idea and no customers or when you have a million daily users. The goals is the same--minimize the loop.
Just tried again and I am able to login now. Will be testing this shortly!
Collapsible comment threads and complete hiding of comments below -2. Doesn't directly cure the root problem, but why not take the edge off the symptoms in the meantime?
How to bypass 72-minute time limit for Megavideo stream
So indeed the auth of the article is really too clever on this.
LOL. Yeah I suppose I can still see my ex, and you can have her. I'm not marrying her anyway.
> There are no repercussions for upvoting or submitting questionable content at the moment.

This is a huge factor, IMHO - a much higher signal/noise ratio in the articles on the front page would probably set up positive feedback, helping with other issues. Unfortunately, there are positive incentives for being the first to submit anything that could potentially be voted up, drowning out interesting content.
TELL Your STORY IN A SCREENPLAY ...
Tagging. Some people are interested in news about famous startups, others are interested in technical articles.
I'm not the poster you asked, but I think I agree with him and interpreted his post as a rejection of the proposed solutions, not a rejection of the assertion of a problem.

Having only been here about 500 days, I'm newish, but it seems like quality is degrading. I don't see why your solutions would fix that. The only thing I can think of that might be interesting to examine is advogato's model.

In the end, it's a hard problem. People want to hang out and discuss news items with all their friends, not just the ones we wish they'd bring around to show up.
There's a reason people comment without putting much thought into it: it's because there is an incentive to do so. The earlier you post a comment that simply points out something obvious, the more upvotes you get, so people do that.
Actually, n! / (2! * (n-2)!) comes out exactly at n * (n-1)/2. It's just one form of the general formula for combinations.

However, multiplying the possible situations is, of course, wrong. A case of a wrong explanation of the final result I'd imagine (permutations instead of combinations),
One could simply put the arrows next to each other instead of above one another.

Ex: [up] [down] x points by username 17 hours ago | link

Instead of:

[u] x points by username 17 hours ago | link

[d]
What happens if you clear your cookies?
I like the flag penalty a lot, and would only suggest that the penalty be sharp. 10? How about 100?
Thanks, now working.
Brilliant, and thanks again - I really appreciate having someone that isn't me testing it :)
Original link http://vimeo.com/11303353

"BlackHat Europe 2010 - Changing Threats To Privacy From TIA to Google"
flag-like button for duplicate/repost.
Well, there is perfect hashing [1]. Of course it does only work under several assumptions. And you pay for it in terms of time it takes to construct the hash function or in terms of space.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_hash_function
Of course... you'd want to look and see how that could be abused as well. A pisses off B, so B looks for A's recent submissions and flags a few.

One way around that would be that if a story is killed, then and only then does the penalty occur, and it's sharp.
A "joke"? Not being able to upvote or to "Ask HN" would keep you off the site entirely? You know there are already karma-threshold features on HN, right?
SO is a very successfull Site without all the koolaid, wich is great. Hell, the even run everything on Windows... On HN you would probably get beaten to death when saying something like that.
Yeah, I'm saying, when a story gets flagged off. It's a good point.
There is no order for named arguments. You could call the function like this after all:

f(b=3)
Do you really think so? You don't think this speaks at all to the situation of half the people here? Or more?

This is a real issue for many people here. I work hard to appreciate the things my wife is interested in, and fortunately she appreciates the efforts I make. She, in turn, works hard to appreciate what I do, and I help her as best I can to see the fun and (on occasion) beauty in that.

But not everyone is as lucky as I, and I think this is a great way to make the point.

I hope you're as lucky as I am, and if not, I hope this actually has a message that you haven't bothered to see yet.

But if not, sorry to have wasted your time.
Another Dog Sniffs Cancer – So Why Aren’t There Dogs In The Clinic?
Jus seeing an hour+ duration on the player's scrubber makes me shiver inside a bit.

I wonder if we are all getting a bit ADDish nowadays?
I can't decide on my opinion of the politics (especially economic policy) submissions. I appreciate some of them, but I can't help but feel most of them are the same regurgitated crap that just happens to get a lot of votes. Presumably these (votes and submissions) are from people who agree with the article, not necessarily because they think it's a valuable new contribution. The best I can think of is to tag them as such and weight them differently. How? I don't know. We don't really have enough information about who votes for what to make guesses like that. (And I'm fully aware that weighting some votes higher than others could easily be seen as elitism)
Rather than being hard coded in the law the Copyright Office can add or remove them, however, just because something is not explicitly permitted does not mean it's automatically illegal. The intent seems clear "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."

And the important bits:
(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that —

(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or

(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

As long as his work is not directly setup so people can pirate content there seems to be little for Sony to base their case on.
> My guess is that people submit stories from certain sources, no matter what the content is, to try and be the first submissions and get the karma.

Looking at the submission history for some users easily confirms this.

Along with other adjustments to incentives for submitting content, some sort of check for whether most of the user's submissions come from the same domain name could potentially be useful - especially for domain names with the top X% of all submissions site-wide (e.g. techcrunch).
StackOverflow should change absolutely nothing about their login process. It is perfect

Maybe it works for you, but I'm still utterly confused about how to login. But hey, I only have about 25 years of coding and online experience.

To be fair, it's not SO's fault.
I like it when academic papers include some personality or touches of informality (in headings or examples for example), as long as the required rigor is not sacrificed elsewhere. Now "why else is his cool?" is probably a bit further than I go.
You weren't aware of it, but it's been posted in other locations that another trademark for Retina by apple specifically covers software.
Why don't you post a better article?
> You cannot draw graphics in a terminal window (he says, half-expecting to be corrected).

Depends on the terminal. xterm has a "tektronix mode" to emulate the old Tektronix 4014 graphic terminal. This has a 4096x4096 coordinate system for vector graphics. Most other terminals do not emulate this, of course.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010
I absolutely agree with the talk! Google is the new Microsoft :) and Facebook is the new Google and will also become the next Microsoft very soon.

What Google is doing is actually monitoring every aspect of our online life! Really worrisome!
Submission quality is secondary to the drastic decline in discussion quality.

I've always believed that best way to improve the quality of contributions is to make the opportunity to contribute seem finite. It'd be interesting to see what happens if you cap submissions at 2 per user per day and max comment thread participation out at 5 or 10 per day. With a limit in place, people may do a lot more thinking before speaking or submitting.
My impression thus far of StackOverflow - and I could certainly be wrong about this - is that the most reputation goes to those in the most popular technology boat. In other words, a high reputation says as much or more about what you work on versus how 'good' you are.

I guess this is a fundamental problem with any metric that reflects popularity.
Just be careful with your account in that state. Stackoverflow only knows your account by a cookie right now. You can't log into it from another machine or if you happen to clear your cookies you won't be able to log back in.

So it is in your best interest to "solidify" your membership if you care about your account.
Limit comments allowed per day
Google’s Native Client almost ready, ready to make ActiveX look visionary
You just need to fully understand when Python does evaluation.

import types
def function(item, stuff = lambda: []):
if type(stuff) == types.FunctionType:
stuff = stuff()
stuff.append(item)
print stuff

function(1)
# prints '[1]'

function(2)
# prints '[2]'

In Scala it has a better syntax because of typed function object:

trait Map[A, B] {
…
def getOrElse (key: A, default: ⇒ B): B
…
}

the `default` parameter is a function, so when you do

getOrElse(someKey, defaultValue)

The `defaultValue` becomes a function that generates the value you put there when called.
Maybe give extra or different points to those upvoting and thereby curating the newly posted links that haven't reached the frontpage yet.
Pretty much spot on. We are working to employ TDD and CI/CD where I work, and I love this. But at home, on my own personal projects, I just love hacking away. And anything I create just needs to work.

Basically, those that ship win.
I have what feels like a stupid question: Most of the weekend projects I see here on HN look surprisingly polished, this one included. Any quick projects I make just don't have that polished look and feel. Is it just a matter of have enough design experience that you can just make it happen, are you using templates or a library of some sort? Any advice on how to get my projects to look nicer faster would be greatly appreciated!
I can't argue about how effective this feature might be. It seems like a very, very good idea. But GOD do I hate it. :)
That's a sign you should submit better articles or write them yourself (then submit). If you have a bunch of links handy why not post them here as well?

When I learned about sweep and prune I was amazed at how simple and obvious it should have been, but I don't recall the first books I read on game programming ever mentioning it, I'd hope a book dedicated to collision detection topics would but I don't own one.
To quote the blog post:

"The reason for not supporting the DELETE/PUT methods is quite simple: by reducing the possible interactions to what a standard browser performs (GET/POST) we allow developers to interact with our api through their web browser."

The same line of thinking applies to OPTIONS as well. Ideally, the API could support both types of usage, but that wasn't what they were trying to accomplish.
I can see why a non tech-savvy user would be confused by OpenID but I it surprises me how many programmers are confused by it.

On the login page they list a bunch of common providers you can login with if you already have an account with them: Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, etc. Click their icon, type in your credentials.

If you don't have an account with one of those or don't wish to use them then it has a big register link to sign up with a myOpenID account.
Why doesn't Octopus just stop posting horrible articles and whenever people point out how horrible the articles are, why don't other stop telling them to post something better?

In other words, STFU GTFO.
Karma is an absolutely terrible metric to use - jaybol has 3,316 karma and his job is to make infographic spam and submit stuff to social sites, quite obviously including HN.
Template from ThemeForest are what I use to add some polish; plenty of people will criticise for using themes, but in my opinion, and coming from someone with zero design skills, they get you in a better place right from the start :)

So, most of my sites are written using Kohana and a couple of themes from ThemeForest - one for the sales side, and one for the admin area itself.

Edit: and really, that's nowhere near to being a stupid question - I only found out about options like TF when a friend told me a few months ago :)