skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I want points gone, but I want something more generic to take their place to filter out useless comments. The ordering doesn't work because 1 - it often doesn't differentiate between a 50 point comment and a 2 point comment, and it doesn't handle useless comments which is a child of a popular comment.
I have an idea, thinking out loud here - so bear with me:

Traditional point based forum systems provide a way for people to up/down any given post - but its a binary decision.

There are a range of factors that one may want to upvote/downvote a post based on. /. had an interesting moderation model by allowing a context selection along with the score - though this too had its limitations.

With respect to the implementation on HN, not showing the score changes the dynamic that we are used to, which is fine - but we sometimes need a contextual vote/filter to promote answers with links/content.

What would be interesting is if one were to post a link in the comment if we could vote up the individual link. So next to the links there were a score for that link -- this way - while we could vote the post author either way, if multiple posts contain links in an answer to a question, the community can vote on the links themselves -- which will aid in people who are seeking the answer.

Additionally, if we have a contextual label selection for posts, then the community can select the label that applies from a list - and the readers would see which applies.

This removes the numerical karmic judgement from the post, but allows for insightful, helpful, informative, opinion or other classifiers to be used.

Would something along these lines work better for us?
BlackBerry PlayBook review
I've seen the same behavior on my comments, and I think I'm upvoting more. I think what happens is that people upvote a comment based solely on their own judgement of it. I know that sometimes if I see a comment that I think is good, but it's at say, 30 points, I figure "Eh, it doesn't need any more points." Now, I have have some idea if others have voted top-level comments up based on their placement, but I still don't really know it's score. So I make sure it gets at least my vote.
>A 20% rate of increase is healthy and manageable.

At this rate, all of mankind will be Stanford CS students by the end of the century.
I have noticed that my karma per post has gone down quite a bit (something that would normally get 7-8 upvotes is getting maybe 1-2 or none). I think it's an example of people thinking "well, someone else has probably voted that up and that arrow is just so tiny".

I'm of course assuming that my posts are awesome and deserving of upvotes, which they may well not be. :)
To clarify, I have been cold calling, email, and networking with many individuals to get advice on building a successful startup. My ex co-founder who joined said he would also do his part, however, he avoided most of his duties and never helped with anything substantial. I am not asking for much, just the same amount as any entrepreneur working on their startup. Also we are both undergraduate students, that may help even out the thought process.
Well, I said they started to. You're right, the Mozilla guys never stopped developing but with Chrome coming out and seemingly running circles around them I definitely felt like they were going the way of the dinosaur. I will readily admit it was more perception than reality.
Exactly what I thought. The effect is way too big -- if it were that big, convicts would have caught on by now :)
I thought people were supposed to vote up/down based on whether the comments adds/detracts value from the convo?
> I find that going into a thread an hour or two old and seeing comments with 50-100 points is a major disincentive to commenting, even if I have something to say. That comment or couple of comments and their resulting threads are going to make sure very few people ever read what I've written.

I hadn't thought about this, but you're absolutely right. I think having the numbers on other people's posts does facilitate gaming the system quite a bit more. I'd be curious to see what the actual distribution is on points/comment, which might inform efforts to implement a logarithmic scaling on the effectiveness of upvotes.

No matter what happens with having other people's scores, please keep the option to have our own scores displayed. Having feedback on what the community finds upvote-worthy is definitely helpful.
Here's my use case: suppose there's a comment with a longish reply. If I see that reply has 120 points I'm definitely going to read it. But if I just see it as a sole response to a comment, there's a very good chance I won't read it (there being so many comments).
I think this would be an excellent way to do it, for the same reason that many online polls don't show the votes until after you vote.
This is why I voted for points as well. When people put their site up and ask HN for feedback, you can easily see the most critical advice based on the points score. Without it, people have to start posting "I agree that's really important" underneath. Just like I have here.

Edit: Perhaps a hybrid option would be to just enable points for Ask HN's where people are specifically requesting feedback.
What about an experiment? PG could take a few dozen people he wants to be exemplars for the community, pick some semi-popular articles before and after the change, and ask the test subjects to rate which article had better comments. For best results, only pair people with articles they haven't read.

Myself, I didn't even realize how strong the group-think effect was until the comments were turned off. It feels like there's more substance now, but I might just be reading more closely in the absence of loud communal signals.
Anecdotally, I've found that there is a "visa discount". H1B workers are paid a lot less than you'd think by looking at these public numbers or the salaries paid to citizens.

When you can't quit without being deported, you tend not to negotiate too hard or complain when you don't get a raise.
Often, when the discussion is related to the field I'm not knowledgeable in, the points are very useful to me.

Simplified example: if I know nothing about security, but I can see that the comment "Emailing passwords in plaintext is wrong" is heavily upvoted, and "Emailing passwords in plaintext is not an issue" is downvoted, it helps me learn things.
Okay, point taken. But now ask yourself whether the following are things that you're looking for in the "software business" forum you describe:

advertising, or "SEO" in various guises, people selling their useless web app, pushing their own affiliate links, breathless chortling over the lastest gray areas to investigate for reducing their taxes, or promoting their own blog
http://biz.yahoo.com/p/s_qpmu.html
I'd give my left arm to get to use Stripe. I'm in the situation of the OP and I'm neither ready nor capable of dealing with PayPal and merchant accounts.
Knew the guys and realized how easy their product is to drop in with no setup. Full interface for any non coder to use easily. Braintree's setup and site aren't that easy or simple. If I want to put in the work, I'll fully switch to Braintree
such an awesome domain name! (stripe.com)

can anyone get me an invite :-)
Clearing Out New York's “Rubber Rooms”
Only display points when logged in. What about that?
From reading the author's other posts, the clear implication is that Lisp (and only the author's preferred flavors of Lisp, not pale imitations like Clojure) offers the only possibility of breaking out of the hopelessly broken paradigms accepted by the unwashed masses.

Personally, for all the problems and terrible design decisions that we're all living with, I find a whole lot of what fellow programmers do amazing and inspirational. A lot of the stuff they produce with so-called broken and unproductive tools are amazing products that provide a lot of productivity and enjoyment for a wide range of people. I've also found that almost any sufficiently popular language or environment has its share of brilliant, original thinkers trying to build new tools to make things easier and better for others. These are people who should be thanked and celebrated for their contributions.

I looked further into the author's blog posts. The dominant themes are bilious and scornful attacks on other's work, or lamentations about the sad state of software today. He claims to be producing a Lisp-based operating system. Curious to see his progress, I checked the source repository, to find that it only contains a README indignantly protesting the the treatment he's received from others.

This guy's combination of arrogance, scorn, and complete lack of demonstrated competence makes him oddly fascinating. I wonder what kind of social factors in our industry produce people like this, and how we can work to counteract them.
How to teach C++ Badly
I'm not saying you should look at prevailing wage to see how much you should get paid. I'm saying that prevailing wage (listed on each application) is an indication of how much the employers' estimates of salaries for purposes of low-balling their foreign staff are out of touch with reality. I was too embarrassed to share my actual salary, which was higher than their 'prevailing' wage, but still pitifully small.
You could also try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevia
Hacking Education with DonorsChoose.org Contest
I believe Spreedly's new http://spreedlycore.com is supposed to do this.
Right, but they publish the salaries of all employees. If they published the salaries of just the out-of-state workers, we have a similar scenario.
I'm not even sure there's value to having the score appear after any period of time, though very little disincentive to have it appear after voting. Since HN is, on the whole, a time-wasting avenue for me, I rarely look at things older than a day anyways.
How about only giving the option to view comment scores to users of a certain age, or reputation?
Unfortunately openness probably won't matter in the short term. If it works, and untethers iOS devices from Macs then people will use it. There is hope, however, that open wins in the long term, and Apple will eventually have to play along.
Yes, I agree. There are a few ways around that:

- Some out of band signalling between the edge and the core to indicate current load levels at the core.

- Implement similar form of overload protection at the core. You might now say, "Aha! But you're throwing away messages you've accepted". The answer is no: the edge nodes are typically just relaying messages after some checks, application layer processing is typically done in the core.

This thread is becoming slightly hand-wavy but I hope you get the gist of what I'm saying :)
I think it's great. It makes people slow down and consider the discussion instead of being guided by those who have seen it earlier. That reduces the impact of the first-to-vote.

Essentially, it makes each vote more independent.
Ask HN: Review my weekend project, testist.com
Backstory: About a year ago I started searching for a service that made creating custom tests easy and had some useful features (API, email results, etc). After looking for a long time, I could only come up with one -- Zoho Challenge. After working with that for about a year, its been nothing but headaches, broken functionality and customer service problems. Fast forward to present. I need a project to help me learn Rails (better late than never?). So, I decided to build something I know I would use -- a better online test service. I'm trying to build out the functionality I want to see in a form that others could use.

What it is (or will be): A better version of Zoho Challenge, initially more oriented towards developers. Or, perhaps a good description would be Wufoo for tests/quizzes/exams. Basically, a service built to create, host, and integrate online tests easily into whatever you're doing so that you don't have to code something up yourself.

Link: http://testist.com

Its a weekend project in which I was learning along the way, so its a little bare-bones. Other than that, any thoughts? Would you use it if it were more fully featured? Etc..? Right now I'm aiming for the features I want (since I'm my first customer) and things are kind of simple, but I'm aiming for more complex features in the future to touch upon a more academic level of service.
This only applies if deportation is a threat to you. I am a H-1B employee and I have absolutely no problems going back to my home country in an instant.

I don't know if that is the reason but my salary is definitely not discounted compared to my American co-workers.
It sounds diplomatic to let each group choose their preference, but what is much more valuable here is to learn what exactly those preferences are, and why they are held. If there were an option to let each choose according to their preference, then we could all quietly revert to our preferences instead of taking the opportunity to be confronted with a bigger picture.
Here's a link to the Firefox Channels page, if you want to check out Aurora. It's rather hard to navigate to from the techcrunch article.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/
The graph of "Facebook API" to "Twitter API" rebuts this argument. Growth in Facebook searches is correlated to growth in Facebook API searches. But Twitter searches have grown while growth in Twitter API searches have turned around.

Of course there are tons of problems with drawing any conclusions from Google Trends but it's an interesting point to raise.
What am I missing? I don't understand why this college vs uncollege horse race is generating such furor.

We're engineers not because it pays well (which thankfully it does) but...because we just _had_ to be. I was born to be an engineer and my official first day on the job was when my dad brought home an Apple IIe.

College might be part of some engineer's education, it may not be for others. It was part of mine, but I learned how to work with Bayesian network, randomized algorithms and linear algebra after college.
Ideally, I'd like the voting history - both upvotes and downvotes in a little sparkline (or at least the %). That can tell me more about the comment than upvotes alone.

If there will be no points on comments, it would be very beneficial to have some kind of indicator on the comment that it has 2-3 std deviations of votes above the average comment on the thread.
well if you share them with "x" amount of friends you'll bump to the top of the invite list.
The merger was sheer brialliance on the part of AOL. Aware of how completely overvalued they were, they "merged" (aka bought) Time Warner for pennies on the dollar of real value. Then when the dot-com bubble burst, they didn't get completely hosed as their share price dropped to nothing, which is what happened to everyone else.

(note: I'm not sure of my history here, so please feel free to correct me if you know better)
You're right. Negotiating from strength requires being willing and able to walk away.
Whatever sounds best.

Someone who gives good advice who can't justify it, isn't giving good advice.

Plus, if somebody gives bad advice, other people are likely to comment and point it out.

I think there are some kinds of things where you really do need raw numbers (this thread for example), or "which front page is most aesthetically appleaing for my website," and those kinds of things can use polls (as this thread does).

EDIT: On second thought, after reading what some others have said, I think there really are some Ask HNs that could use comment scores (but I don't think all of them need it).
Very good point regarding the UI.

I find it quite annoying when people complain about Blender's UI. VIM's UI is also not "new user" friendly but VIM's UI itself is very powerful.

Blender and VIM are made for speed with familiarity.
I notice that my eye gravitates to longer comments now. That's probably a good thing.
That's not a bad idea.

I think it'd be neat if whoever posts anything can choose whether to have comment scores display in the discussion thread, at least until/unless the community decides that one way is definitely better than the other (since opinions seem about equally divided right now).
"My goal in not showing points on comments was to prevent the sort of contentious exchanges where people (in this case literally) try to score points off one another."

I think a suitable compromise would be to hide for X days until most voting activity is over (reusing the threshold where downvotes are no longer available but upvotes still are might work). This would still meet your goal without the cost of information loss.

EDIT: I'd hate to give up lists like http://top.searchyc.com/comments_by_points and http://top.searchyc.com/users_by_average_points_per_comment .
With just this, it would be fairly easy to learn how many votes translate to what color, and you're back at square one. Maybe color as some function of upvotes on the comment and proportion of all upvotes (maybe only those comments at the same level in that thread)?
I'm not so sure there is a bigger picture, just a bunch of people who each get different things out of reading/posting here on the site. Look at any of the comments on the articles about this so far, and you get the what and the why (people's reasons seem to run the gamut).

But let's postulate that we revert back to the previous system where comment points are displayed. I can't think of a reason why it would matter if I personally don't want to see comment points.
How about showing comment points after a set period of time? I can see the value of not showing points on current submissions, but I was frustrated when I was trying to skim older topics.
Perhaps make this a configurable option and keep them hidden by default?
Even if the difference only amounts in cosmetics, I still would prefer HN without points displayed on comments. Hopefully though, it will place an emphasis on the message--you can always intuit its popularity by its position.
Rails 3.1 Adopts CoffeeScript, jQuery, Sass and.. Controversy
Conceptually, I agree with you; but your HN profile isn't like setting up a Wordpress installation. There's a pretty minimal amount of things which can be tweaked.
Yes, it requires a sorted list, but so does the naïve implementation. The performance is equivalent to binary search to find the entry, although you then have to scan backwards to make sure you have the first entry with the same value.

Since performance is probably not an issue for most rankings, the biggest benefit is a clear, easy to remember definition, which should reduce the chances of making the same mistake landhar did.
If points count, then I want to see them.

But there's a bigger problem, as long as points matter for anything: Early comments, even fairly inane ones, have an overwhelming point advantage over late comments, even fairly good ones.
Ask HN: "Unknown or expired link."
It started appearing very recently in HN when I press More.

Is this a feature or a bug in HN? :)
I hate not seeing it, which is why I think it's important to keep hiding them for a while. I find that I actually judge a comment by how I feel about it, rather than what the community feels about it, which is nice.
Joshua Topolsky reviews the BlackBerry PlayBook (before anyone else?)
I too am a GoDaddy refugee at Namecheap. Very happy so far - responsive support, half decent interface and no upselling.

But you do wonder about the name... given they're a domain name company you'd think they'd have a better one.
Given their new DC builds in NC though - and the recent purchase of 12 petabytes of Isilon storage... the writing is on the wall.
But Facebook started off with a non-technical audience and Twitter started off with an extremely technical audience
That wasn't Carmack's blog so how could he be trolling? His comment was extracted to troll places like HN. I was trying to head off a long debate from the post.
That could be another side effect - more "I upvoted" comments.
I think this is perfect. Reveal after a vote so that the vote isn't biased by the points, but you still get to see where your opinion stands with the audience.
Hacker Monthly: One year old, 5000 subscribers
Where Does Inspiration Come From?
I'm going to toot my own horn: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hahhhdmfdgfiehpg...

I prefer them hidden until I don't want them to be hidden. It makes sense to hide them prior to voting, but I do like to see them sometimes - either after I vote, or on the comment's "link" page. But getting rid of the first, default display is nice once you get used to it.
Thank you for this succinct analysis. Put this way, Chomsky's model sounds downright Platonic in its insistence that the messy things we observe are merely instances of an ideal form.
Today, local media reported Vimeo as saying :

"we take no position on whether any of the statements in the video are true or not.
Rather, we have merely determined that the video could be subject of a defamation claim and, under
Australian law, could subject Vimeo to liability.”

I was surprised by this quote on two counts : first, it's a bad business model to allow a third party to so easily expunge Vimeo users' data. Secondly, because the previous day, FMGs Cameron Morse told another media outlet that Fortescue has had no contact with Vimeo.
You mean steam
"One idea I've had that I think might be interesting is dealing with upvotes or points in terms of logarithmic scales. "

Ah, came here to say exactly this! The difference between 100 points and 120 points just isn't as interesting as the difference between 1 and 10.

Displaying something like floor(ln(points)) instead of points would be the way to go.
I use iStock, but not happy about it. The good stuff is being added to the premium and vetta collections and it's hard to find something that looks good and isn't at least 10-20 credits.
Agreed, just think of the number of "golf pros" out there that can't even make the tour. Every course has at least one, and these days most driving ranges have them. Unless he discovers that he happens to have some hidden raw talent, his chances are slim-to-none.
Particularly if it was relative to other posts in the thread, and maybe only after a certain threshold, so it doesn't serve as disincentive to posters who are just late to the party, but still allows users to quickly see the best posts.
I'm thinking about mailing a dead fish to Microsoft HQ for every time I see the term CLI used on a web page and it's the .NET thing and not the should-have-been-well-known--to-them-already abbreviation for command line interface. And don't get me started on the names .NET or C# either (sharp? really? when serious programmers/sysadmins already would have expected hash or pound? really?!).

Other than that, good article. Nice little survey and perspective.
Wow, i'm amazed how low a lot of those salaries are
I'm writing a robust parser for English using the principles of construction grammar. In contrast with Chomsky, CG has as its chief characteristic a pairing between form and semantics. We learn that "bird" means the concept of bird. We learn idioms the same way: "he's a cool customer" means the concept of a person calm in pressure situations.

One is indeed lucky if born into a culture with patterns between these pairings.

In my opinion there is no universal grammar and if my parser eventually works for English, it will have completely different construction rules for each targeted natural language beyond English.
Give it another week or two. Then poll again. It's too soon to conclude, both for people who may take time to get used to it, as well as people who don't visit HN that often (but still regularly).
So you can program, but you should hire a designer.

Edit: this is not a barb at the OP, just a recommendation. I think his drive is in building, so why not make it easier on yourself by getting some help?
How about only showing them a day (or whatever arbitrary amount of time) after the date of submission? That'll avoid all the charges of groupthink, force people to evaluate all comments fairly, and advice threads will still be useful.