skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://sandbox.witcoin.com/p/327/GETTING-STARTED--Reply-to-t...

you can post on the witcoin sandbox and someone is offering .10

Thanks for linking the bitcoin charts site which is another worthy bitcoin service.
This is a lesson that was learned on Slashdot in 1999 already I think. A 'karma cap' makes perfect sense and the total karma wouldn't even have to be displayed to the user himself, to avoid karma whoring. What does it matter if someone has 1500 or 15000 karma? They've both proven to be contribute; maybe the one with the higher score just has more time, or a more popular opinion, or has been here longer.

In the same vain, it's not easy enough to lose karma. By being active here, you will in the end always have good karma, even if your contributions are bad; it's very rare to see comments with lower than -5 karma, but it's easy to get a +10 comment, even if it's nothing special (I mean I know I've had a lot of those...)
In the last year I've been on interviews like this, where I've been presented with sorting problems or quirky pointer arithmetic conundrums. However, these bear no relation at all to the kinds of practical software problems which I've had to tackle in business or industrial contexts in the previous decade or more.
That's a little harsh.

If he understands how PKI works. If he understands that people share a public key which is in turn paired with a private key. And if he understands that said private key is the only key capable of decrypting messages that were encrypted using the public key, that should be fine.

If he knew that much, he'd probably be able to reason out what 'symmetric' vs 'asymmetric' meant, if given enough time.

Is knowing the exact terms better? Yes.

Is it shameful to understand the concept pretty well without knowing every bit of terminology used to describe it? I'd say no.
Well, either you find new revenues or (a) people's salaries stagnate or (b) fewer people receive salaries.
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The Dropbox client for iPhone also "streams" MP3s, as far as I can tell. (Streaming as in playing while downloading)
So, I'm confused about this one. Actually, I read about this somewhere else a few days earlier, and its been bugging me since... Wasn't the big thing about Color that they didn't use GPS to pinpoint you? They had some cool tech (that apparently justified $41M) that located you using bluetooth, audio input, lighting, etc, etc and Bill Nguyen basically flat out said GPS sucks and they don't use it.

So... Why does this hack work? Apparently they are still using/collecting GPS data? Anyone have a better idea than I do on this?
Maybe so.

Or maybe it just represents "points" -- little cookies -- for the user. You can never have too many cookies.

I don't know. That's why I suggested the experiment.

I think the idea that it represents peer acclaim is not very useful, at least to me. I've heard other high karma folks say (and I agree) that probably more than anything it just represents spending too much time online.
Very nice. It looks great and seems really easy and intuitive to use.

A few suggestions:

1. When playing against the AI (on Chrome/Vista) after a move the piece briefly stays where I put it (not centred on the square; and with two pieces visible if I capture the opponent's piece). It only properly completes the move once the AI has moved.

2. When I promote a pawn it asks me to choose from a set of pieces which are black, even though I'm playing white. Might be nice to use piece icons of the same colour as the player.

3. Are there any open source AI players you could use? I'd be tempted to come back if there were some reasonable ones, but the current AI player is no challenge, even for a real amateur player like me.
Change the ratio - rather then 1:1, give less points for an article submission and more for meaningful comments.

Jasonkeste's idea for tying reputation to comments could be done with an icon. Our (New Zealand's) equivalent of ebay does this quite well.
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Would be great if you added a time limit, like zynga poker
What's frustrating is trying to Google a question, finding forum threads telling the original questioner to use Google, and refusing to answer the question.
they do this? they are orange.
That might be a good thing. It shows how you think in new situations, how you can problem solve, and how you deal with complexity. I used to give "reverse a linked list," and it's essentially a book keeping problem: you're changing links around the time you're trying to read them, so you need to keep all that straight. If there's a bug in their code, you can see the thought process they go through to find and fix it.

Unless the job they're interviewing for is almost exactly the same as their current job, it's important to understand how they think through new situations.
Thanks to bitcoin it makes things possible that other microtransaction systems cant do. If anyone wants to listen to a great podcast about it I recently discovered this - http://omegataupodcast.net/2011/03/59-bitcoin-a-digital-dece...

It is well worth a listen.
Thank you, it's encouraging to get the sense I'm on the right track. Those all sound like good ideas. I think living near a hacker space would be ideal as a way to work independently but still be part of something. Some of my relatives are Unitarians and I've always admired the philosophy--it's like religion distilled down to the good parts. I haven't heard of Less Wrong but I'll check it out.

I'm going to move soon, most likely to SF or Oakland, where I don't have any real friends or contacts to speak of. I'm very excited at having the chance to fully restructure my life, but the wimpy worrier in me is worried that being alone will cause me to freeze up. Ah well, suppose all I can do is try :)
Thanks, Thomas, for your candid feedback. I see we hold each other in similar high esteem.
out of interest, what did your company do?
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I believe that this the biggest fallacy about Color. The only way to enable introverts to get up to people and talk to them is by practice and overcoming the fear of rejection. I didn't say that "put away your phone" is easy for introverts, I just said that "keeping your phone" doesn't make it any better. How do you think could a photo app give them confidence or an icebreaker? First impression is mostly body language and walking up to someone with confidence can only be trained, but not "hacked" with an app.
Most of the time when I would use such an app the people locally around me are not connected to me in any way - like in a bar or a cafe.

Will a social recluse build the next social network? It seems a bit counter intuitive, but then it's supposed to have worked for Mark Zuckerberg. Certainly a lot of people would appreciate networking without investing any work. No more "become my friend" button - just stand next to somebody and kaboom, you have a new friend.
I guess this is the successor of http://www.quora.com/Linux/What-are-some-time-saving-tips-th...
I think the problem here is that the introduction of payment changes the psychology from one of sharing information to one of maximizing income (gift Vs capital). In the latter mode of operation the quality of the information is a secondary concern.
Where were you when I did http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2378114 ? :)

You make a good point. In order to keep peace with the designer, centering stays, but I can set fixed decimal lengths.

Update: I just took a look at a fixed length decimal (GitHub commit: http://bit.ly/dTyXUF) but I find the extra digits to be really distracting on the right hand side, somewhat getting in the way of understanding.
Lately, I see we don't give points for meaningfulness more than for popularity.

Perhaps we could measure meaningfulness by the size of the tree of replies and assign karma according to that. That would even solve the post-to-upvote ratio problem.

I just don't know what to do with the downvote-for-disagreement thing. Not everyone regard it as a problem, but I'm not sure I agree.

Maybe Slashdot-style metamoderation...
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That would reward making lots of mediocre submissions more than few good ones. I know which way round I'd prefer.
Stack Overflow does this nicely - 5 points for a question upvote, 10 points for an answer upvote.
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I had similar misgivings/feelings while using the product. However: Two observations: 1.) they did include user-selected charities lately in their distribution of "upvote" profits; 2.) The point is less about making money, more about adverse selection (keeping out trolls). Nobody could subsist off of this in any real kind of way. If they did--the value they would have to provide would be immense.
FWIW, I was one of the people running a bot to auto-submit. I've always been a big-iron algorithms programmer, and I've never done much web programming, and certainly never programmed an auto-submitter before. Since I figured most of Jacques' idle thoughts were worth more than half the things making it to the Front Page, I figured it was an ideal time to learn a little about the back-n-forth of a form submission system with cookies, and to see (a) what I could learn, (b) how quickly I could learn it, and (c) how little code it took.

So it was an interesting experiment, I'm glad I did it, I'm pleased I learned something from it, and I'm sorry it seems to have caused Jacques some grief.

For that I apologise unreservedly. We have had a chat off-line and I believe there's no on-going problem. I have, of course, disabled the bot.

But the questions raised are interesting. I suggest that the "first submitter gets all the karma" situation means that people submit without thinking, worried that unless they do so they will miss out on that one item that earns gobs of karma, that they saw first, but didn't submit quickly enough.

Just sharing the karma between submitters won't work, because then if someone sees something gaining traction they just submit it themselves and share in the imaginary profits. Simple, clean, clear solution that's wrong.

No solutions, just problems.
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Hopefully the small amounts we are dealing with makes it less worthwhile for spammers as well as not seem like a purely profit driven incentive. All things in moderation as they say.
What do you suppose would have happened, had you agreed to have dinner with your mother that night?

I assume you imagine some nightmare scenario where you find yourself living on the street begging for change and repeating to yourself over and over "Why did I take that evening off??? What was I thinking???"

In reality, it probably isn't quite that critical. I suggest you try an experiment: Work an 8 hour day tomorrow.

Don't make up for it by working 16 hours the next day. Work the rest of your week as normal, then look back and see if there is any noticeable negative ramification from that day of slacking.

Then try ramping it up. Work a 60 hour week. Work a 50 hour week, god forbid. Living in a ditch yet? Good. Try 45 hours next week.

As the people below are trying to tell you, most of this desperation is in your head. Yes, you need to work hard and deliver. But you don't need to kill yourself.
A CAPTCHA? In a forum for Hackers?

Hmm ... interesting ...

ADDED IN EDIT: HN voting makes me laugh sometimes - I have no idea why this got a downvote. Thank you - made my day.

This is not, let me hasten to add, a request for more. Some things are funny just the once. More than that and I'll really start to question my understanding of the world, let alone just the HN community.
Well if that's what people are willing to pay for then let them have it. I don't see how it doesn't work.

There is a cost if the articles isn't popular(which rules submitting any old crap)

There is a cost of voting up articles, which rules out people with too much time(and not enough money) on their hands scewing the numbers.

Perhaps it hasn't worked before, but then no one has tried doing this with bitcoin, that singular ingredient makes a lot of formerly impossible things very achievable.
It is interesting that you have the reverse problem of most people that want to draw attention to things on HN. Maybe you should start selling guest spots on your blog :P
As a practical use, a while ago I "resolved" the Einstein's Riddle using this operator: http://ticsblog.com/2010/12/07/solving-einsteins-riddle-usin...
Judging meaningfulness by the size of the tree won't work. Looking at which threads have a large number of replies, that's more of an indicator of controversialness.
This is a really good read when you start getting into the technicalities of bitcoins implementation.
I've wondered about that myself. I wanted to stay, I liked it there. But it's like many relationships in life, if both parties don't want it, it won't pan out.

Edit: I also had to take time off for studies and I suspect they really wanted all-hands-on-deck.
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I don't see the relationship here; can you expand this thought a bit?
A related idea I've been toying with is "karmic arbitrage": auto-submitting posts that have been upvoted at proggit and vice versa.
The canonical proof-of-work system, hashcash, tries to solve the problems "free e-mail makes spamming profitable" and "users won't pay for e-mail" by imposing a cost in CPU time on the sender: this is free[1] for a normal sender, but a spammer will only be able to send out a limited number of e-mails.

Unfortunately, this idea doesn't actually work. If an old "dumb" phone can send e-mail to a couple of your friends, a cool gaming rig can send zillions[2]. (Limiting senders by memory bandwidth instead of CPU power helps, but I'm not sure if that's enough.) Spammers have been using botnets for a long time. I'm also not aware of any scheme that has considered attacks based on custom hardware.

Mailing lists are also a problem.

[1] Of course, the extra calculations do increase power use, but that's sufficiently invisible that people won't actually care. For instance, SETI@home and other BOINC projects may consume ~$7.40 per month in electricity, but people generally don't care (source: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Heat_and_energy_consideration...).

[2] [EDIT: added in response to andrewcooke.] Let's substitute a cheaper computer (because it's indeed more cost-effective than a gaming rig), and guess at some figures.

Assume your 100x speedup (four-core 2GHz vs single-core 100MHz gets you to 80x; highly-optimized vs crappy code can probably get you far higher, but let's stick with 100x for now.) If the phone can send one message per 10 seconds, the PC would send out 100 x 24 x 60 x 60 / 10 = 864 000 messages per day (assuming it's only limited by the proof-of-work!) http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/2008-ccs-spamal.... cites a ~0.00001% conversion rate on a ~$100 product, or a profit of $1/10 000 messages; that would allow a mind-blowing $86 of scalable profit per day.

In reality, that message count sounds unreasonably high - I'd guess the spammer runs into bandwidth/antispam limitations before CPU limitations.
They have a "build it and they will come" policy. But really I can't understand how apartment prices keep rising here so quickly, surely there must be a crash.
Don't feel too bad about it. Many of those questions are arcane/trivia rather than practical day to day knowledge you must know. Don't get me wrong, it's important to understand concepts (like the encryption question they asked), but knowing off the top of your head how to rm a file named "-f" is not important, but knowing how to figure out how to unlink it is.
So, give us the lowdown :)

What did you use, etc?
Struggling with ExtJS config settings?
I was about to suggest the exact same thing, so I totally agree with the CAPTCHA solution.

And maybe having a (daily?) article submission limit per user at the same time would keep people from submitting articles just for the sake of it.

It crossed my mind allowing users with more karma to have higher submission limits, but that might aswel be gamed at some point by some users.

So perhaps the best thing is having a CAPTCHA to avoid bot submissions and some kind of limit to avoid manual spamming.

Truth is, HN article quality has been slowly declining in the last few months and we keep seeing the same sources over and over again on the front page.
I like the system on Reddit where link karma and comment karma is separated. That way, people whose main incentive to post links is to gain karma still get it, but it's also easy to see the karma gained on commenting. In my opinion, it's the best of both worlds.
Fantastic design. Only issue at the moment is people leaving after 3 moves or seemingly permanently idle, but no doubt that's due to people trying it out.

Great domain by the way! I think this could have massive numbers of users if you want it to (like other far less appealing chess sites).
I seldom comment on HN, and when I do I typically do so in threads that are somewhat dormant, with little activity. I don't really care about karma/votes at all, I just say something when I think I have something of value to add. My comment average is 1.7, but I would still like to believe that I have yet to exhibit any behavior that I'm just angry at the world. I hope that I could still get yours or others attention, even though I'm not such a high-ranking commenter.
It'd be an interesting challenge...
We started 5 years ago... I have precious little in the way of "life"

I hate to be the one to point it out, but what you're experiencing is very far from my definition of "Success". I mean sure, according to your definition you're definitely perspiring, but isn't there supposed to be some form of payoff at some point?

All 3 of your potential forecasted outcomes lead to you not having a life any time soon. As such, it looks like you've set yourself up in a way that precludes success, as many of us define it.

For me, a successful software business is one that provides the maximum income (and thus free time) possible for the smallest effort. That's what software's so good at: turning tiny amounts of work into big benefits. As such, the ultimate goal is zero effort and infinite free time. You seem to have contrived the opposite for yourself.
It's Obvious that his next step has something to do with Obvious Inc. Maybe something that will remove everything that is obvious from the web
Two things come to my mind:

1. What are your thoughts on Unity? (The new Ubuntu desktop) (I know it seems unrelated to business, but it's related to design and aesthetics).

2. In a startup world filled with products that have no business model other than hoping for an exit, what's your advice to young programmers wanting to start a startup/business?
Argh, my comment is incredibly confused... partly because I wrote it at 1am after a long day.

Macrophage = bacteriophage, and they attack bacteria, not viruses. The point I was actually trying to make is that bacteriophage treatments haven't really caught on in the west because it's expensive and time consuming - you have to create a specific line of bacteriophages for a specific bacteria, which is much more difficult than just using broad-spectrum antibiotics. I wonder if virophages, as a potential avenue for treatment, will run into the same issues... I suppose the difference here is that we don't yet have good treatments for many different types of viral infection.
Maybe we just need a submission to cost X karma points to the submitter. Then people would think harder before submitting.
Perhaps splitting karma between submitters until the item reaches the first page, then. I know I've never managed to be the first submitter of an interesting link; there's always somebody that saw it before me. So normally I don't even think of posting a link.

(Of course, lately, I get the vast majority of my interesting reading from here anyway, but still...)

I don't blame you for bot-submitting Jacques' stuff. His posts are always good and - after all - always hit first page at a dead run. People here do actually find them interesting.
This assumes that working more hours actually makes you produce more value, which is highly non-obvious to me. I didn't produce twice as much stuff when I was working twice as many hours. I'm not even sure net output decreased since radically cutting hours. Mythical man month, etc.
That would be why more than half of people claim this. I should have said "Why could half of people claim to be above the median."

Oh dear. I think I might be below average.
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"In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Humility my man, humility. Everyone's eaten humble pie before; if you don't eat it on a semi-regular basis you're not pushing yourself hard enough.
Yeah. Sadly.
Good point. Size of the tree plus total of delta-karma of the replies multiplied by a factor (may vary with distance from post).
I've always said Ben Franklin was the father of open source, at least as pertains to hardware: "Of the numerous inventions Franklin created, he did not patent a single one"; see http://www.pbs.org/benfranklin/l3_inquiring_little.html
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Exactly, say what you like about him or his books, but he's got me buying and reading both times, held my interest all the way through and left me /feeling/ like I know more.

4HWW got me handing over work far far more, and really got me thinking about how best to use my time to drive my projects forward.

4HB pointed out what I was doing wrong, and so far I've lost a stone and gone from 22% BF to 18% in a month without exercise (yet).

Maybe not everything he says will be directly applicable to your day job, but it's a great guide to selling books ;)
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I think websites like Stack Overflow, GitHub and HackerNews attract a certain type of programmer, which might not always be the sort of person a business is looking for. Or, at least, it will exclude a lot of people who aren't interested in being involved with online development communities. That is, they are too hardcore.
I wrote a proof-of-concept which does something quite similar on Android: http://pagekite.net/wiki/Howto/GNULinux/AndroidPageKite/

It is just a proof of concept, because like author of the article said, it's not immediately obvious how to make compelling use of a web server on a mobile phone (yet).

I suspect there may be some interesting applications to do with identity and user-friendly access controls, real-time integration of phone resources with in-the-cloud web properties... but I'm still on the lookout for something really amazing. :-)
First, I hope my upvote just gave your average a bit of a boost.

Second, you'll need to produce a bit more anger and irrationality before anybody starts labeling you as a troll :)

Frankly, the only time I ever check anybody's profile is when they say something really valuable or really obnoxious. So by the time I get there I've pretty much made up my mind about the character of the individual in question. I can't imagine forming an opinion of somebody based solely on their karma score on some website.
That'd be ideal. Comment karma is so much harder to get than link karma. It makes sense to split the two.
Some of those commands seem pretty well-known to me - though very useful.

Here's one I learned relatively recently: comm[1]

comm -- select or reject lines common to two files

[1] http://man.cx/comm