skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm extremely sorry to hear you were disappointed. Like dtrejo said, there are a LOT of things we hope to change for next time. Please don't hesitate to shoot me an email if you have any other feedback.

Also, I can't resist pointing out that all but ten lines of code for the first place hack were created during the Hackathon: https://github.com/dfield/ConcertMasterHero. That said, I did not accept the first place prize because I was an organizer.
Fractional distillation instead of evaporative cooling.

The upper layers can be "invitation-only affairs overseen by a respected and benevolent dictation".

I think a system of such levels would be very useful for creating new connections. It's similar to what happens when leaders from one country meet leaders from another country, or when leading researchers in one field meet leading researchers from another.

It also doesn't need to be linear, but could be a tree...but the more I think about this, the more complicated it seems. Maybe someone will extract the essence of it.

If you can take the "friend" graph and identify leaders and place them at the root of various trees, then you could use the distance from such roots to determine the general "level" of any given node. Then, all you'd need to do is to somehow lubricate communication between users of generally the same level.

You could do this right now on a site like Stack Overflow with private IRC rooms or forums for Stack Overflow users, with access restricted by Karma. (Already been done?)
Maybe we have something like a consciousness filter. We are only consciously aware of ideas or perceptions that are strong enough to pass the filter threshold.

It would make sense that people with a low threshold would be more easily distracted by weak environmental stimuli but they would also be more likely to be aware of their own ideas and hence would be better at generating ideas.

People with a high threshold would not be easily distracted and would have an easy time remaining focused on tasks which are "not too hard" in that the next step is strongly suggested by the current step. I think much programming is like this.

To be successful at solving hard problems we need to vary our consciousness threshold, as others have said in different words.
"stuff = stuff or []"

This would fail to have expected behaviour here:

fill_list = []

stuff = function(info, full_list)

print fill_list

use the if list is None: paradigm
I think what you have said is quite fair. However, I must clarify that I wasn't criticizing Perl's use of sigils, I was criticizing Perl's use of punctuations. There's big difference. Sigils does indeed make the types of variables clear, tho I find that context alone is enough. Objects in natural languages don't have to have types in their spellings to convey their categories after all. The use of genders in some languages is superfluous, Chinese doesn't require that.

All I'm saying is, Perl requires too much more mental power to process than Python because of it's large vocabulary and inconsistent grammar rules. It is really a natural language, but a natural language is not needed for programming.
You're right. Human beings are not searching for a local/global maximum, we try to follow the easiest route there is.

So, if you really can't motivate yourself, try to find the easiest path there is to get you exercising.

One easy way is to make it obligatory (the same way elementary school is obligatory - and for most kids boring). Open your calendar, pick 2 days of the week and add 1/2 hour of exercising there. If you fail to do it, find some 'punishment', like doing over-hours. Play both the role of the student and the teacher. Maybe it will work.

Most importantly, start easy. Don't exaggerate or you will never make it a habit.
My humble suggestion is to step back and look at simpler, non-scaleable ways of building communities that are proven to work.

Doing that in this discussion. Thank you for facilitating that.

Not everything has to scale, technologically or sociologically. I'm not trying to quell discussion but to offer an alternative point of view.

A tl;dr version of my comments is to ask, "What if those could scale technologically?"
Chained hash tables have constant time insertion, but I'm not sure about the amortized lookup time (the worst case is linear)
How is it not representative when i directly suggest that one could become an entrepreneur instead of going to college. The benefits:
A) get a faster start
B) not burdened with debt
C) learn to communicate and sell
D) learn to develop ideas that (hopefully) will get accepted by the marketplace
E) learn to fail and bounce back from failure.

These are all qualities that could occur (which I mention in the articles and their comments) by making the choice to become an entrepreneur instead of going to college.

I appreciate your perspective but not sure why you are down on this topic.
ReDigi Used Digital Music Store
Looks great, especially for a weekend's work. But I think that is a classical example of going too far with the minimum viable product concept.

I would never let you have offline access. I think that quite a few others might not as well. So you might have a great idea but without that feature you might not have a mvp and your trial run will give you misleading data.
Interview with Leah Culver of Convore (YC W11)
"they ought to clean up their very Web 1.0 UX"

SO has one of the best UX on the web. I don't care if you call it Web 1.0, 2.0 or Blue Oranges 35, but don't clean it.

And also - "clean up by letting people log in with Twitter and Facebook"? How do you clean up by adding stuff?
http://www.icombinator.net can't vote, which is not as useful.
Just now. D'oh!
I didn't say it can't live for a very long time, that's why I said I believe it will still be around in my first post. I just don't care much of it anymore now that I have alternatives.
You don't read Shakespeare to "learn about people". There's nothing in Shakespeare that could be replaced by a clinical psychology text.

Yes, art is not "useful information" if you're regarding useful information as something you get out of a published mathematics paper.

And what is a "newsie"? I didn't understand the section about "newsies" since it's unclear what those are, or what they have to do with literature.

This line especially

> it was vicarious, escapist, fantasy, emotional experience entertainment, not useful information, not anything solid even about the emotions of real people.

makes it seem as if you don't understand the concept of "art", and want everything to be super literal and technical and devoid of any emotion. I can't imagine why.
I've never seen a down arrow (405 karma as of this writing). I've been imagining it would look just like the up arrow except upside down? My mouse precision is superior, so I will only be accidentally clicking the down arrow when I'm on my CR-48.
The Fed Is Now Creating The Third Bubble In 11 Years
Just thinking, there could be a counter on how many times someone "changed opinions".

As a side though, if somebody keeps changing opinions on a given topic, it would be somewhat sensible to lower the effect of such votes.
Thanks, and you have a good point about offline access; I'm honestly not sure about how big a gamble this is. The thing is, I've noticed that whilst a lot of people who work in IT are completely against the idea (myself included, to be perfectly honest), it seems that there are also lots of people who plainly - for want of a better term - don't give a damn.

My rough plan is to give it a week, and if I don't get even a couple of sign ins by then, spend the weekend sorting out session fun. If you like, I can reply to your comment with an update? :)
I believe he is referring to Math StackExchange (math.stackexchange.com), a site which was created to serve as a MathOverflow-equivalent for mathematics students or others who aren't professional mathematicians. I've found Math StackExchange to be highly useful, and the quality of the answers you get is higher than anywhere else.
Scraper - Chrome Extension for reading data from web pages into spreadsheets
Google is a surveillance company
Very interesting.

What if, for the sake of argument, I wanted to sell my song for .01. Is that allowed or is there a minimum price to sell?
The Physics And Philosophy Of Falling Trees
Pen.io is the fastest way to publish online. By Feint.
Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter IPOs Could Alter VC Landscape
"Why bother with brand consistency?
Brand consistency has one massive advantage – recognition. With recognition comes familiarity. With familiarity comes trust and confidence."
(http://www.attitudedesign.co.uk/the-no-1-rule-brand-consiste...)

Each app can (and probably does) develop along its own path, but always stays somewhat in line with their "continuous experience." When you start questioning if it's a Google product or not, they're probably doing something wrong.
The Google Experience has become part of their value prop - why give that up?
That's your problem. Hardly a "big caveat".
While I agree that his attitude and some of his actions (bragging) are out of line, I don't think you should ever be badgered for doing something that's legal. (And he hasn't yet been convicted of anything.)

Innocent until proven guilty, and all that.
The market for wacky exercise programs/devices claiming you can lose weight with only 3 minutes per day without being hungry is huge.

Strangely, the interest in Fit Flops + everyday activities doesn't seem to translate into running shoes + daily running after the Fit Flop inevitably fails.

Motivation is the problem here.
Steve Jobs Once Nixed My Music-Subscription Pitch
> For example if we have 'n' objects then the first object could collide with n-1 objects (since we don't check if an object has collided with itself) the second object could collide with (n-2) additional objects not counting the possible collisions we have already counted. If we keep going like this we get the number of possible collisions is: (n-1) * (n-2) * (n-3) ... 1 This is equivalent to n! / 2! * (n-2)!

Seems to me like it should be more like the handshake problem, which comes out to n * (n-1)/2. n^2 is still bad, but not nearly as bad as n!.
I once had a comment from a guy came here from reddit apologizing for an accidental downvote.

I have accidentally clicked the wrong arrow several times. I can remember I wished if I can fix my mistake each time.
No, I mean yes.
I prefer the usual alternative

if stuff is None:
stuff = []
I also find the Stackexchange sites generally give me more relevant answers faster. The advantage of having a beta time where a core group users get to explicitly state their interest perhaps?
I'd be hesitant to hire someone that had huge karma on any site (including HN), unless they had real projects to show that their passions include shipping rather than just talking real pretty about it on the Internet.

Someone can be clever and knowledgeable, and still be a poor employee or co-founder. (And, my least productive times are often when I'm most interested in what's happening on reddit/HN/etc.)
Arbaro - tree generation for povray
sorry to kill your spirit but what are you doing?
Poll: Which S/N improvements do you think would most improve HN?
Special bonus round: think of something else (something simple! extra-special bonus points if you read news.arc before suggesting it!) and I'll add it to the poll.

Super-bonus extra special bonus round: if you've been here for more than 500 days and think HN's S/N hasn't degraded over the last 6 months, tell us all why! My perception is that most veterans think it has.
Karma threshold required to upvote
Karma threshold required to submit "Ask HN's"
Hide some or all scores on comments
Clarify (and make more restrictive) the guidelines
Make the "flag" button more powerful
Looks really good, nice work.

Btw, typo in point 1 on home page, launced = launched. Also hovering over the feature set links in /public/tour looks like you've left the default title tags on them.
The article doesn't say any of that. So the title is not representative of the actual content. I don't know how to say that any more clearly.
Thanks for the pointer to s3cmd - very useful.
Fantastic, thanks for the typo catches - now fixed :)
Chaining requires a memory allocation and list insertion on collisions - is it fair to call that absolute constant time? Probability of this happening depends on the number of elements in the container.
I think it's unlikely that that would be necessarily. Only a small minority of votes would be reversed, and the even smaller portion of those that are reversed a second time wouldn't be worth worrying about.
Donated.

I've never donated to anything like this, but Sony's actions are fundamentally corrupt and if unchallenged, will set a terrible precedent for all of us, and severely hurt this individual.
Possible fix: Put the up-vote graphic to the left side of a comment (e.g. where it is now), and place the down-vote graphic to the right side (spaced a little bit away from the "link"). That makes it pretty hard to accidentally press one when you mean the other.

EDIT (example): http://dave-gallagher.net/pics/hnVote.gif
But, r u sure u cant get email notifications for those missed calls/msgs
I wonder if there would be any benefit in adding a small cost to voting (1/10th of a point? different costs for up and downvoting?). If nothing else, it could be an incentive against drive-by downvoting.

Also, why isn't flagging for comments more visible? I suspect many are unaware that it's even possible. I routinely flag "obligatory xkcd", "looks like your database isn't scalable enough to host your blog post about database scalability", "correlation does not imply causation", and other recurring noise.
Make it easier to flag (not downvote) comments.
How would that second feature work?

To be honest, I don't even know how comment flagging works. I know there's a button there (it's buried and shouldn't be), but I have no concept of what happens when I hit it.

To whatever extent it does work, I think an automatic N-week hellban after getting more than one comment flagged off the site makes sense.
Stackoverflow has provided value to me. Quora just provides moments of lazy recreation, if any.

And who is pronouncing Twitter as the silver? None of my Fb contacts are even remotely aware of any of the apps I use, never mind have an account or a need to use them. With Twitter I usually find at least ten followrazzi for every new app/service I sign up for.

Twitter is business. Facebook is the ten dipshits and the nine-toed women I used to know.
I agree, Quora has a pretty bad first-time user experience.
I think Joel and Jeff touched on the issues discussed in the article in their podcasts.

And Jeff always proclaimed that the purpose of the site is a very pragmatic one. To be a source of help for the specific professional community. Not a place to meet your buddies and hang out.

And there's a place for both. Personally, I like that StackOverflow stays away from too much social interaction and focuses on providing valuable technical content.
It's on SO's Python FAQ too. This is the only thing in Python that's really bitten me. I remember it took me like a week to figure this out when I was tearing down my algorithm bit by bit to find out whether my prove was wrong or the code.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1132941/least-astonishmen...
portman is correct. he is aware of "circular 230" regulations. usually accountants wouldn't provide advice (especially written advice) because it would lead to potential liability.
More awareness that you can flag comments, such as showing it next to 'link' on thread pages. I rephrased my comment to make it clearer.
I believe most people who get notices like this knew what they were doing, and are using the event to get press to their product, esp since for this type they have to change the name.

I feel a great many "think it sucks" but knew it was a danger going in, and are fine complying.
Good point, but that requirement itself is already beyond bizarre.
I would prefer no karma for story submissions.
Except when they went rally racing in WRC, where they got banned for cheating in a really egregious manner.
For stuff like string handling, text processing and even variable interpolation, Perl blows Python and Ruby out of the water...

I agree on Python. I disagree for Ruby. It is a tossup. In most cases they are equivalent, Perl has autovivification, it is easier to interpolate functions into strings in Ruby. All in all it doesn't matter.
$_@qw()<>$@{}*&lc()~>>>$.$/$<$:

Which happens to appear to not be valid Perl code.

$ perl -e '$_@qw()<>$@{}*&lc()~>>>$.$/$<$:'
Array found where operator expected at -e line 1, at end of line
(Missing operator before ?)
Scalar found where operator expected at -e line 1, near "$.$/"
(Missing operator before $/?)
Scalar found where operator expected at -e line 1, near "$/$<"
(Missing operator before $<?)
Scalar found where operator expected at -e line 1, near "$<$:"
(Missing operator before $:?)
syntax error at -e line 1, near "$_@qw"
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
If you look at the people who submit off-topic stories and the people who drag comment threads down, (a) is there overlap, and (b) is there enough concentration among the submitters so that depriving them of an occassional bucket of karma points would matter?

Remember, all the threads that germinate from these stories tend to generate more karma in the aggregate than the submission itself.
If reputation is that important, then StackExchange's partition strategy is actually very effective. If you want to find good coders you go to StackOverflow. If you're looking for good photographers, you go to SE's photography site. There's no need for a centralized reputation hub. The reputation of a great coder on StackOverflow can't be diminished as a result of the creation of some new SE's long tail site.

But I doubt online reputation is that important. The reason I visit StackOverflow is to find answers to programming questions, not to look for experts. As for the experts, they don't need high karma on some Q&A site to get job offers.
1) Separate user karma for their submissions and comments

2) Weight upvotes on comments from people with high comment karma more than people with low comment karma

3) Weight upvotes on submissions from people with high submission karma more than people with low submission karma.

4) Remove upvote counts from stories and comments, or display a function of the weighted upvote count.

5) Display user's comment and submission karma on their public profile.

Probably too complex of a solution, but it's an idea.
I disagree with the "500+ karma required to submit "Ask HN's" " suggestion. Sometimes people need help and they can't ask with their usual profile. A recent example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2213417
Hrmm. For some reason whenever graphics/game programming related articles get posted on HN, the quality seems to be ridiculously low. For example, no discussion of discrete vs. continuous, temporal coherence, sweep and prune, separating axis, etc. I think even if you assume this article was written in 1998 it still strikes me as a bit behind the times. The fact that this article has 15 points at the moment is disturbing...
Show authors on hover?
Re "Make the "flag" button more powerful" - meta-discussion is for the most part off-topic; rightly so, it usually only generates noise. Yet I wonder whether downvoting or flagging is all that useful as feedback for (relatively) new users. I don't want to add to the meta noise by replying publicly, but they won't see the fact that I've flagged it. Worse, I've recently seen quite a lot of irrelevant, ill-informed, no-content, off-topic or otherwise useless comments upvoted a few times. Downvoting a noise comment from 5 to 4 isn't going to cause the author of the comment to think about posting something similar again.

I wonder if attaching some kind of reason to a downvote would be useful, or even being able to reply privately (visible to the original author, admins/mods and maybe other downvoters?).

Of course, it's possible that it's my judgment that's off, but I get the feeling I'm not the only one.

Oh, and: I've had an account here for ~3 years and lurked for longer, and I'm still not sure I'm using the "flag" feature correctly. I also don't know what happens when I press it, exactly. This sort of thing really ought to be more obvious.
Error?
Database_Exception [ 0 ]: [1062] Duplicate entry '' for key 'uniq_email' ( INSERT INTO `users` (`username`, `password`) VALUES ('xxx', 'yyy') )
You are kidding, right? The name chain itself suggest linear worst case behavior.
Whether eliminating submission karma or just tuning it, that's not a bad idea - that could get rid of the incentive to be the first to post techcrunch etc. stuff that may be voted up.

So much good stuff spills off the front page just because it didn't get several votes within the first half hour (and/or wasn't submitted at prime time for EST or PST readers).
The single greatest tool for raising living standards is human ingenuity, which has been around for thousands upon thousands of years longer than capitalism has been around. Capitalism has its pros, but it also has substantial cons, and it's dangerous to go around blindly proclaiming capitalism as the solution to the world's woes.
Karma for comments only, not submissions
It's not clear to me how any of these would improve things. Not saying they wouldn't, just saying I don't see it right off.

What does flagging do? Remove a post? What would more of it accomplish? What are some sample posts on which it would be used? Are the dangers that such a mechanism would be used to punish unpopular opinions, or even punish correct statements when the consensus is wrong?
Venture Exchange
I am reaching out to the best and the brightest angel investors in the industry for my Venture Exchange, VE.com investment opportunity. This website is going to connect investors and entrepreneurs in the same way that Go Big Network and Funding Universe do, except we will not charge $150 or more to our customers which is what Go Big Network and Funding Universe do. Instead we will charge NOTHING, membership will be 100% free to our customers. The website is going to have a membership adding option which allows members to request a connection to another member and then they can choose membership preferences which can limit or allow access to types of communication. There will be a Exchange Forum which allows for companies to trade contracts, sell products to each other, etc. to build there businesses and then a Venture Forum where entrepreneurs can work with VC's to raise capital and both of these forums will be 100% FREE. Other features include emailing, live IM's, and job postings which will be 100% free. The seed round or the start up cost for the website is $20K (negotiable). Also, I am not only looking for a financier, I am also looking for an expert who can assist me in making VE.com the #1 Venture Capital social network.

Thank you or your time.

Best regards,

Jason Malki
201.673.1072 (cell)
201.880.9316 (fax)
JasonMalki@MalkiandBible.com
www.MalkiandBible.com
So allow an anonymous "Ask HN" from a URL not linked to the site. /newpoll is the same way, isn't it? You have to go look for it (I had to, just now; I've never done a poll before).
Heh, you could allow crowd-funding of karma for Ask HN posts :)
That egypt banner looks kind of photoshopped, but it's still pretty awesome.
My HN account says that I have been around 983 days. Probably much longer before I signed up for an account. I do think the quality of comments has gone down. More people commenting without putting much thought into it.

I am against putting Karma restrictions to upvote or post Ask HN. It insulates us from attracting newer and possibly better members.