skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So that's why my submission plummeted so quickly. One person made a reasoned argument for it not belonging, lots of people piled on and flagged it, hey presto, gone.

Giving flags more weight is not necessarily the answer. Punishing people for making bad comments is, I think, more important. Equally important is punishing people for upvoting bad comments.

But now it's late here, and starting tomorrow I'm really not going to be here for a while. Good luck PG, I hope you can find a way to reduce the mean-spiritedness fluff, and make HN more pleasant again.
I like this idea.

Also perhaps if a comment was controversial (i.e. lots of up and down votes), a list of the first users who upvoted it could be added next to the comment, e.g. "userA, userB, userC and 27 others upvoted this". That way, a stupid comment would be like the plague, nobody would want to be one of the first to upvote it (and therefore put their name next to it), and so it would quickly sink.
Sorry to answer with another question but... have you tried OneNote? :-)
I certainly intend to drop him an email and see if he's willing to share his stuff with an interested compsci undergrad. It's always worth asking - he's probably just doing it for metrics.
Yes, this is really important. I'm hoping that with Firefox moving in this direction the Chromium team will incorporate similar features.
In my experience language shootouts in general are often terrible by design -- with these being just a prime example.

A lot of the problem is in the questions they're designed to answer versus the questions people use them to answer.

For example, if I'm comparing Python and C, I typically want to know "how much slower would my program be in Python?", not "how much slower is my program in Python if I spent so much time hyper-optimizing it that I might as well have written it in C?"

But the test cases usually try to answer the latter, not the former.
I'm not sure what you mean. The space that Firefox 4 saves by removing the menu bar would just be wasted at the top of the screen.
no, I haven't used Windows for years
Android First?
It says he's running on a "Intel Core 2 Duo CPU 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM" according to his website

I bet he isn't using the GPU though.

Also - a crappy webcam actually makes things computationally easier because there's less data to deal with

Perhaps, but lens distortion, motion blur and a rolling shutter don't make things easier.

Anyway, the inventor himself claims a phone implementation is feasible.
Let us not be too hasty in proposing solutions when the problem isn't really understood. At best they are shots in the dark. Even after you ship them you wouldn't be able to tell whether the fixes actually did anything or not.

If this were my product then I'd try to gather a corpus of bad comments, selected outside of the vote system (because the problem is that voting might be broken). While I was at it, I'd also find out the good comments, because promoting good comments might be just as good and easier than getting rid of the bad comments. After that, I'd try to figure out what counts as a good vote or a bad vote, because the problem probably doesn't really lay with the comments themselves, but rather how people vote against them. Bad comments aren't really a problem if the vote system does a good job of spotting them.

Then I'd take a careful look at comments and votes:

- Is the distribution of good comments / bad comments even throughout the set of commentators, or are there users who are dependably good or dependably bad? If it is a lumpy distribution then you can use that. I'm guessing that everyone makes dumb comments, and there is something with the system that inflates the scores of bad comments compared to good comments as more people can vote. But I'm also guessing that only so many people are capable of leaving good comments too. Get the data and find out for sure.

- Do the vote scores that these comments get a reflection of the quality? If the votes are, then maybe the system isn't as broken as you think. If they aren't, then you've got a lead on the problem - you can look at the bad comments that get lots of upvotes and try to suss out what is going on.

- Do high-karma voters do a better job of finding good / bad comments that average? If they are better, then maybe you give them more weight. If they aren't then you'd have to shelve that idea.

- Are there people good at commenting but bad at voting, and vice-versa?

- Are there people who are good at upvoting, but not at downvoting, or vice-versa?

It's all sort of tedious, but basically I'd advise leaning on the data and make decisions based off of that. I'm pretty sure that if you dig in a bit something is going to really stick out in a big way. Once you've found that, then you can build a feature / change around that.
All the times I wrote reprehensible, un-HN things, I did not strive for conciseness. Quite the contrary - if someone can cause disruption with 10 words, 50 are a nuke ;-)
Perhaps some logic, during new thread creation, that looks for similar, older threads? Prompt the user to comment in an existing thread if it's very similar. Much like StackOverflow, if I recall. This may reduce duplicates.

It appears to me that most of the URL submissions are just tech blog websites using HN as a tool to drive traffic. There are even users out there that just wait for a new blog post by jacquesm so that they can post it for free karma. I think in situations like this, karma and voting become less useful because people will up vote just so that something might land on the front page, for traffic.

This leads me to another trend I see a ton in #startups. Somebody will create a new submission and link it on IRC and ask for free up votes so that it gets more visibility. Once again, this is where up votes aren't being used properly. But, I also think it highlights a potential difficulty for valuable new submissions - it's difficult to get that initial visibility and up votes. Perhaps to remedy this, make the "/newest" section be the default section, and move the highest voted to something that you have to navigate to. This will at least highlight new entries for people just hitting the main URL.
China's Best Known Artist Arrested
C'mon HN. This is funny. Upvote!
A plea for politeness (why must everything be "Now"?)
Yes, but the article talks about availability and consistency, not speed.
Hate to downvote you since I know you are a well-respected member of this community, but I can't figure out what you're getting at with this comment.

Are you suggesting that Mozilla should have acquired Delicious to incorporate social sharing features within the browser? Or am I totally missing something obvious?
Have you seen this actually implemented somewhere? Note that I'm not contending that none of the short comments are valuable: far from it, sometimes they're the best thing in the thread. But having a limit would not necessarily deter that content from appearing. The authors would just share a bit more info/insight with us before hitting 'reply.' Meanwhile the timewasters really would be deterred. And while it's great to have sharp, witty remarks now and again, the problem is that loads of unfunny jokes appear, trying to emulate.

However, I suppose you could argue that valuable content would be blocked to some extent, it a knowledgeable contributor was put off because s/he didn't have time for a longer comment. Still, 50 words isn't much, or 30, 25... anything above the average sentence length I suppose would start to have the desired effect.
Or even more of a bottleneck if you're waiting for several writes to finish on different machines? As you say there aren't actually any details on there - might be interesting once there's another article with a bit more meat on it.
Maybe something along the lines of N free comments a day, or 1 free comment per thread, just to get the ball rolling.
> Waterloo University

University of Waterloo.
What a mean thing to say. How often have I ever plugged our services on HN? I go out of my way not to do that here.
My strategy is similar:

For code-related tasks, I prefer the portability of my 13" laptop with multiple virtual desktops. When I find myself in a rut, I'll get up and relocate and regain productivity immediately.

I'll usually start my day at home in the office area, then move to a coffeeshop for the afternoon, then relocate to another later, then home again possibly in the living room or dining room. Sometimes I'll meet up with friends and co-work; just knowing that people around me are being productive helps me be productive too.

For things like consuming content, research, and making art/graphics, and relaxation, I prefer my 24" desktop at home.

Another interesting point is I feel like I have an association between the device and the types of activities I perform on them, to the point that I find it hard to write code on my desktop these days.
I see two issues in comment threads:

1) Despite guidelines, people vote up comments they agree with. If they have enough karma, they vote down ones they disagree with. There's little you can do to change such a situation

This is inadequate — sometimes you can see interesting and informative posts up the top; sometimes interesting posts have a relatively low comment score, simply because they are controversial. The more specific and detailed a post is, the more chances they have to offend (or just not overall agreement), and the more chances they have to get a downvote/not be voted on. If a comment is very general, (eg "How awful.") it will be a lot less controversial, and thus more get more votes.

On the other hand, it can be useful to see comment scores as a barometer to popularity — which framework/language/cool solution for a specific problem is upvoted the most can be genuinely useful information.

This is a problem that many sites that implement "voting" have. I'm not entirely sure of what a solution can be. One might be that there be two metrics — one for interestingness/helpfulness/what the guidelines are for anyway. The other for whether you agree with a post(/find it funny). There are potential problems with this idea, for instance, it complicates voting (the simplicity of a vote increasing a comment's score is one that everyone can understand). However, I think that the benefits would outweigh the costs.

2) Comment threads that try to be increasingly funny, with signal to noise ratio decreasing with every increase in depth. I often find myself scrolling down past a lot of uninteresting and unimportant comments to get to the next comment that isn't part of the first thread. This is a little harder to tackle, as sometimes good comments can be revealing deep in a thread full of mediocre ones, making it difficult to just fold comments part a certain level. Perhaps only fold when most of the comments are under a certain threshold (like 5 points)?
There are a lot of people out there, myself included, that don't have great vision, that desperately want bigger pixels, not smaller pixels.

The small pixel people are winning. :(
The idea was to cut back on trolls by using "real names", but a) it's still easy to create troll accounts on Facebook and b) it rules out comments from pseudonymous visitors.

In terms of dealing with trolls, active moderation is the most reliable method I've seen used in practice. I know it doesn't scale well, which is why people turn to voting schemes instead.
But it says "Replication is done in parallel with executing transactions instead of serially after commits, so it's supposed to offer better performance as well as higher consistency and availability."....
Good idea. Also maybe a hard limit for how much a user can earn from submitting articles.
Yes using 2d displays in minority report was a huge mistake, but imagine it in 3d.
Also that doesn't mean that you will have to keep your arms out before your eyes. Ideally you don't have to sit before your computer the whole day and use only a keyboard and a mouse, when you can have so much more freedom.
Think of opening a book, ironing, or placing lego blocks etc.
I don't know about EverNote but I tried to develop a personal wiki under iPhone more than two years ago (not with markups but with a "rich" editor).

Finally I desisted because [technical rant] While I can use the UITextView (an UIWebView) there was a big possibility to be refused on the App Store after using some hidden methods.
The other alternative was building a complete rich editor myself but was outside the project budget.

So, I believe that EverNote must follow a similar route to include links and others features.
Yes it works for me: I could click it in firefox and subscribe in Google Reader as usual.

You could put the following in the head of your page:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Colin's Blog" href="rss.xml">

That enables an orange RSS button in some browsers (not Firefox 4, but still creates a feeds listing in the page info).

Edit: clicking on it in chrome gives an unformated mess. You can provide some formatting by adding a css file. As an example, I made this:
http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/it/news.xml
more-or-less by hand, and it links to a css file.
While that may be true for Facebook users, it's not true for users of specific sites that use their comment system. Part of my thinking when coming up with the idea for IndexTank is that sites need to control their UX (search in our case). The vast majority cannot invest in building backend technology, so they use what's readily available and easy.

Facebook comments are easy, but they are not customizable. I haven't tried Disqus, but if I were them I'd focus on ease of use and control (not by the end user, but by the site).
I would also add that topics about problems with possible software solutions are also relevant.

Problems in politics have led to startups like Votizen and OpenCongress.

Where there is a problem there is a startup. And where there is a problem that people are willing to pay money for a solution there is a business model.
Did you try running vanilla FF? As FF team says, some extensions are performance hogs.
The downvote button is the "meh" flag! Why would you hesitate before downvoting such a comment? Slay evil instantly!
Explicitly ban bots.

This will get rid of some of the (b) comments from bot sock puppets.
Twitter has what I guess you could call a zero level reply system - so why is there a reply button on each tweet?
Hackers Implement Gmail Motion Using a Kinect
This: "Perhaps you need 10% of your community to be "trusted elders," and they have the right to declare comments to be of negative value," might be true, but I'm not sure it scales. I don't know if I would count as "trusted elder," but I'm very sparing with my downvotes and reserve them for the stupid, mean, and wildly off-topic comments (which are often "meta" threads about whether a topic belongs, etc.).

"Perhaps bands of karma, expressed as a percentage of the population (or something) could be used to grant and deny more access to features. Making someone's position is the ranking visible will help that be more transparent."

I think any attempt to automate this will be susceptible to gaming, groupthink, and so forth, and it makes karma too much like a game.
We will all be called to account for every careless word we have spoken.
Just for the experience itself, I recommend to try it on a VM or on a friend's machine with OneNote installed.
I may not be a long time HN user, even less of an experienced one, but I think that the race for Karma may be responsible. The core mechanic of HN is to function through Karma, but unfortunately it is also the source of this problematic. If users are obsessed about obtaining it, why not make that every action on HN costs some.

Another problem is what the comments are about. It's more a matter of Objectivity vs Subjectivity. At first the point of a comment is to give a point of view about the article and then discuss about it. I have found that now it is more a matter of who has the best point of view and that if it is contrary to the majority; it will fail. Thus resulting in multiple pointless comments, giant upvoting for the one who "blasts" the one with a different point of view and so on.

Filtering may be a solution, but if the problem can;t really be solved with an algorithm due to the human nature, it is a matter of a longer brainstorm...
I would say: yes, that's definitely politics, and it should definitely be banned. I'd be prepared to use a fairly broad brush in determining what "politics" is.
I like this. Have both comments and submissions cost you Karma. This way you would think twice before adding your 2 cents.
Trust me, I do understand that well too. My girlfriend has very poor vision, borderline legally blind for driving. When we purchased a notebook for her we went with a 17" screen but also very high resolution. I then used Windows DPI scaling to bring everything up to a size she can read easily but the high native resolution keeps the image nice and sharp. She was very pleased with the results and can use it with ease.
At the Radiohead online store, the "Buy Now" button used to say "Consume". Only artists could get away with making you click a button that says "Consume" to buy their stuff.
Base moderation on a points system, a la Slashdot. Grant a user one (or three or 6.5 or n) mod point every time another user replies to one of his comments.

The effect this has is twofold. It grants some incentive to posters who start comment threads, rather than making just single comments which are likely to strike more users' upvote chords. It also reduces the tendency to blindly upvote or downvote based on agreement or for dumb humor.
I am talking about taking it out of the damaged reactor and into a sound containment/cooling unit.

That is far better politically than letting it sit in a damaged structure leaking radiation everywhere.

Sometimes nations need to STFU about politics and get shit done.
Don't make submissions give the submitter karma. Currently, the fast way to gain karma is to be the first to submit a big story, and duplicates abound because everyone tries something different.

If there's no incentive, there's no race.

I, personally, also like the up-votes costing karma. It'd make the act much much more costly to perform, so high voted comments will be more likely to be selected on content than laughs.
I used to actively participate somewhere with a 10 character minimum. It caused people to add remarks like "10 chars" after a perfectly valid, meaningful short reply to get it past the filter. It also caused savvier members to come up with creative ways to fool the computer into accepting their shorter post without making it appear longer to readers, which caused less savvy members to wonder out loud if some folks had special posting privileges.
To solve the 'third wold' problem, decrease the cost to activate the account to $1 and allow members to activate other peoples accounts. So hackers in developing countries could ask their western friends to help.
I am sorry. I was not being sarcastic. I am surprised how many people don't give the basic "Hello" when they make eye contact with someone a go. When was the last time you said Hello to someone you did not know, without any pre-existing reason for contacting?
This is by far my favorite suggestion, although I think that the messengers should be hand-picked, not based on karma.

I make a lot of lousy comments, because I don't really have a lot of respect for the quality of discussion here. But, you know, if I got private feedback a few times -- even from people who were powerless to punish me -- that my comments were bad, then I would actually stop.
Vote1 The man that never sleeps - Video News Live
Alan Turing Documentary
That's why I said these are "toss in the air and see what happens" ideas. They aren't expected to work, and finding fault with them is no real challenge.

Mutating them into something that does work is more important, interesting and useful. There's more discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

Enjoy!
I've generally found a strong correlation between forum quality and the difficulty of gaining admission. One of my favorite forums put me on a waiting list for three months before they let me post.

So I'd prefer the addition of some sort of barrier to entry. Either an invite system like the private file-stealing sites use, a sign-up fee like Metafilter uses, or a vetting process for potential members.

Ideally, I'd love to see Paul Graham take a couple hundred of the best users and start a new forum. After they had some time to establish the community, people like me could apply for membership, which would involve submitting a written case, and waiting a week for the existing members to vote on it.

*This was originally a reply to lionhearted, who deleted his perfectly reasonable post.
I always find it funny when a paid Huffington Post staffer is upset about the quality of something that's free! You'd also think that Techcrunch would work with an up and coming company working in the space — well I guess the old Techcrunch would have done that...
> Anyone have any suggestions? We're on mostly uncharted territory here.

I'm surprised to hear someone as experienced as you say that. I've only been online since 1997.

All successful internet communities seem follow a common life cycle:

* Early adopters seem to be good

* They attract more users

* Someone pines for the old days

* Earnest discussions start about how to "save" the community

Here things bifurcate:

* Descent into infinitely recursive navel gazing with site population following a visible half-life; OR

* Equilibrium is reached after a certain number of the early adopters leave.

I imagine this can be modelled as stocks-and-flows. It would be interesting to see if there are any predictable tipping points or at least observable, predictive metrics.
TL;DR; Hates facebook comments, but is going to keep them because mediocrity is a small price to pay for being able to track and identify users.
ah, OneNote... so much potential, yet such an appalling lack of vision. The online version of onenote you mention is one of the best experiences I've seen in a javascript-based editor - blows google docs out of the water in terms of responsiveness and simplicity. And where does Microsoft put it? Some dark corner of that Windows Live documents/skydrive mess no one ever uses.

I feel OneNote would be better if it acquired that awesome Operational Transformation features that Etherpad demonstrated so well, and shed all that fancy formatting features that requires so much complexity.

Normal people don't require yet another Word clone - a simple editor that supports basic Markdown-like features (bullet points, numbering, headlines) is perfectly sufficient to get the contents of a document rolling (and if needed, Word can be used for adding formatting later), but what _is_ essential is a dead simple way to collaborate.

I've been following the OneNote team blog for quite a while now, and it seems like they're adding more collaboration features in the next version of Office, but don't hold your breath - it looks like yet another incredibly complicated mechanism that requires more trouble than it is worth.

_Sigh_
Using the public SSL cert is an interesting idea, but I foresee problems.

Dev: "Hey some dude on the Internet posted a vulnerability for our product but it's encrypted with our webserver's public SSL key. Can I have our private key to decrypt it?"

IT: "Fuck off."

Perhaps provide a secure way for the security team of large companies to submit another public key they control?
Hopefully he will put it back, with a donation button ;)
With just a few strategic word replacements, one could turn this into a pretty convincing rant about Wal-Mart.

There's nothing cool or innovative or interesting or high quality. But dammit, they're everywhere, can do a lot of things good enough to satisfy Joe Consumer, and have just kind of slowly sunk quietly into the background of their culture. They're ubiquitous, and that ubiquity allows them to cut corners and keep "costs" low because they operate at a scale no one else can really touch.

Facebook is the Internet's Wal-Mart.