skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are missing the point: is there anything of the above that can't be done without a third party having access to the encrypted content vs having a simple hash of the email/poc sent to the vendor?
Polyconseil - Paris, France - Django developer

We are a small strategy consulting company focused on exploring new fields of activity. We have launched several spin-offs in the past years.

We are creating a large scale car sharing service (several thousand electric vehicles), launching in Q4. We are looking for highly productive and motivated developers to join our backend development team.

Interns with strong programming skills and learning abilities are welcome.

Drop me a line (aymeric.augustin@<company>.fr) or apply online at http://www.polyconseil.fr/careers/
I got a space at a startup lab/incubator. Only been there a week, but I've noticed that I get distracted a lot less when other people are around. Ironically, I am there especially for the social atmosphere because working from home can drive you nuts. But even with the social time, I am more productive because doing all those things like reading non-useful things, videos, games, etc just don't seem appropriate around others. Hoping this works for me, maybe it will help you too.
Just 18 #3
direct link to the google preview http://docs.google.com/gview?url=https%3A%2F%2Finformation-t...
Perhaps HN could ask the submitter to include a short justification as to why a busy hacker should take time to read this article.
With an auto-flagging system, a comment might get stomped out by a small number of trolls.

I kind of like how YouTube does their voting system (showing both the number of upvotes and the number of downvotes).
I'd find a way to show what was a good comment with something besides points. Show that flag, but still hide the number of up votes. This flag would tell you whether it was a good comment, but not exactly how good. That's what karma points do well
It's interesting, but is it useful for a busy founder?

Or to make that more concrete, would you forward that link to multiple portfolio CEOs and suggest they take time out of their day to read it and discuss it?
The problem with this is tv news is uneducated for the most part. People end up posting things to HN that don't fit well, because it doesn't get discussed in other venues. So yeah, you're right though. It's got to be a hard line.
Can we say use common sense? They'd cover Facebook IPO on TV. Yet it would have an impact on a lot of small startups that frequent here.

"Common sense isn't all that common"
>Is there some other way to show what the most interesting comments in a thread are? How about if I displayed the point totals for subtrees, but not for individual leaves?

How about dispaying the rounded log(score)? You give some indication of how well a comment is doing but it's hard to vote strategically.

Not that easy with negative and zero scores, obviously, but those usually aren't the comments people are looking for.
I think you'll like Janus:

https://github.com/carlhuda/janus

Your goodies plus a whole lot more.
"AFAIK, that would require a) automatically selecting trackable objects and b) tracking many of them simultaneously."

I'm not really sure I understood you, but this two problems are already solved. Hugin[1] for example has automatic control point generation for photo stitching. Were you talking about something else?

[1]http://hugin.sourceforge.net/releases/2010.4.0/en.shtml
HN would still be open for everyone to see, commenting and submitting threads would be invite-only.
"I refuse to make predictions as the only thing I know with certainty is that some day I will be dead"

Umm, ok? If you really want to get technical about it, indeed there is nothing with 100% certainty, even your own demise. However I think it's worth analyzing past trends with current trends in order to make an educated guess on what may happen.

I understand what the author is trying to promote here, but going at it completely blind isn't just unwise, it's plain stupid.
If I had a way to improve the quality of HN but that would require a complete overhaul of the voting system, extensive testing, and slightly more work by 5%-20% of users, do you think people would go for it?

My feeling is that things aren't bad enough for radical change here yet, but if the right 5% are, it might be possible.
I agree with you, but my point was only that paying (or simply taking a loss by paying rent in NYC for the Summer) might actually be rational on the student's part. Whether or not the firm receives the payment makes little difference to me in this case although I do appreciate the distinction. My comment about Google charging certainly could have led one astray.
1. Establish a comment review system: two steps to get the comment public.

2. Show a random subset of the comments to users under a threshold score. Would avoid to an undetermined extent the accumulation of votes in specific comments. Would help avoid the current winner-take-all problem in comments (the top comment is read more and gets more upvotes regardless of quality).
You could show a simplified indicator of Great Comment, Good Comment or Bad Comment (or a similar set of values) so that users can skim a thread effectively. It's hardly a model community, but I think Engadget used to have a system like this.
When tptacek flags a front page article (and tells us he did), I can't think of a single time I have disagreed with him. Yet, the story usually remains, for hours or indefinitely. So, find more people like tptacek, and give their flags more weight.

In other words: Moderators who enforce the spirit of HN and have the ability to just kill stuff. I'm really surprised this isn't happening already. If I go post some derogatory remark on a heavily moderated blog or forum, it's get's junked almost immediately.
Several reasons:

1. I can use custom (internal) domain names for my vmware virtual machines.

2. I don't have to depend on shady DNS servers on public wifi networks.
MySQL High Availability breakthrough?
Not sure what 'founders' and 'CEOs' have to do with hacker news.
I desperately hope that the "social" features are implemented as an add-on (presumably installed by default) that can be removed by those who do not want them.
That wouldn't do anything currently. Only really atrocious comments get flagged, and they always have huge negative scores. Though of course if flagging had more effect, maybe more people would do it.

Another thing I've considered is having specific types of flags on comments, and having them have different effects. E.g. there could be a flag for incivility, and if you got enough of those (maybe in proportion to your total number of comments) you'd actually get kicked off the site temporarily.
Yes, you probably did something wrong. If you want to have a job after graduation, the surest path is to do an internship or coop while you are still in school. Surprisingly, it doesn't have to be much either. One summer is usually sufficient, as companies don't want to roll the dice on full-time hires with no documented work history.
I like the idea of showing point totals for comment threads. Entire threads (and subthreads?) with the highest total points could be near the top, which would indicate that those are the most interesting without revealing individual comment scores.
Not a dead horse at all. I haven't used firefox as my primary browser for almost 2 years now because of this very issue. I don't care how many cool features a piece of software or hardware has if it doesn't do the most basic functions well. Sadly there are very few companies and organizations that focus on the core performance of their product.
I can't see this working, but heck, I'm willing to give it a try.

Two main problems: 1) everything is politics and current events. That is, everything touches in some way on what's going on in the world and how you feel about it. Maybe I'm applying too broad a brush, but I can see politics and current events in every post on HN -- and always have. About the only exceptions would be the driest of technical articles. If you want a board of Erlang innards, go for it. Other than that, it's always going to be Steve Jobs, EFF, which VC trashes which other, etc -- all gossip. (And gossip is just a broad term for current events and politics)

People post, comment, and vote based on emotional response. You can pretend to cut that out by banning, say, any mention of political parties or politicians, perhaps any pending legislation, and past legislation, how economics prevents or helps startup creation, etc -- but I think you'll just trade one monster for another.

2) I've been thinking about this for a while, and the key problem here is that the commenting system promotes learning how to fit into a community of hackers, not actually doing anything useful. We think of the system as being some sort of logical function to take all kinds of input and provide the "best" stuff for hackers, but it's exactly the opposite: it teaches hackers how to get votes from other hackers. In other words, spend 3 or 4 years on here, like JacquesM did, and if you're lucky you become an expert on what to say and do to make large groups of hackers agree with you. The karma system and large crowds isn't training the material to be more targeted to hackers -- it's training hackers on how to target other hacker's response with their material: how to fit in, what to post to get a rise, how to succeed without really trying, etc.

You can blame the topics for being too emotional, but I think it misses the point. We've always had all kinds of issues on here. What we're getting is a larger pool of people actively gaming the system in hundreds of ways: what kinds of snide comments might sneak by, what's the best time to run flame-war submissions, who to praise, what topics to champion or deride. That's a function of forum size, not system parameters. And that's not even getting into the fact that with a large enough audience, somebody is going to get pumped about just about anything that appears on the front page.

There's nothing nefarious about this. It's all just people being humans. After all, if you are in a conversation, do you speak in order to provide factual information? Or do you speak based on your current emotional state and to effect the emotional state of others? Why would we expect HN to be any different?

Nyah. That proposed rule -- if you could somehow miraculously define it with the precision required -- wouldn't give you the results you desire.
Sorry for the delay in replying - I'm now trying to remember where I posted that from ...

I would guess from work, where my external, non-work browsing is done with Firefox 1.5 running on SuSE 10.3. I think. I'm not there and can't tell.

Thanks for the response. I'm unlikely to see further replies, but feel free to email me.
As always, if you have steps to reproduce we would love to hear them. Startup time is still the #1 performance metric we optimize for.
I think political stories and economic trends that relate to startups would also be appropriate (for example startup visas, growth of middle-class in China) as these are area that impact startups in the long term.

Obviously if the discussion on these threads is purely political then they probably shouldn't have a place here.
Depending on how well the computational load can be reduced to hardware small systems could provide for head mounted tracking systems

He's clearly developing it on his laptop with a shitty webcam. That's why this is amazing. Screw robotic manufacturing, this is for my phone.
This site has been my go to place for reading material for a year to more. The other day I finally got an account, to test the waters of participating in the comment section, which often times are more interesting than the articles linked to. I hope my participation maintains the expected levels, but there in lies the problem. Anything based on a community, is bound to that community, like democracy, freedom to choose doesn't necessarily mean, the people are going to choose well. One universal truth through out human history, what rises, shall fall, when it involves a community of people. I figure, if my participation isn't rewarded, its not the place for me, so I'll move on, or just refrain from creating more noise. Its hard to convince people to self regulate like that, which is the only way to deal with it not becoming an over generalized, overly watered down link repository, that lost its niche in a flood of popularity, which would be a shame.
What if comment scores aren't related to karma, but rather the position of a comment within the context of the story. You up or downvote a comment to move it up or down. The effect would be to rank comments based on their perceived value rather than score.
There needs to be a better system of moderation. Perhaps highlighting moderators and/or allowing people to apply to become one.
Limit us to N upvotes per day.

In other words - make votes precious.

That way people will think more about how to 'spend' their precious votes.

A similar thing works in poker. If you empty out your change jar and give everyone a fixed amount to start, and at the end of the game it all goes back in the jar, people play in a certain way. If you play for actual money, even just change, the gameplay does often change for the better, because their chips now have value.

At the moment we all have an infinite amount of votes to spend, so we can casually upvote anything we find briefly interesting - because our votes have no value to us.

By limiting the number available per day, we are forced to spend our votes more wisely.

Alternatively, making upvote decrement our karma will also add perceived value to the action of voting. However I think HN users care less about their karma scores so I think this approach wouldn't work as well as limiting users to N votes per 24 hours.

N can be fixed at, say 10, or increase with karma so 'better' users get more votes and thus more influence.
Sounds like a lot of open source software.
IMHO, that hasn't worked so well for Reddit.
Complete bullshit statement, from the Facebook Hackathon where 25 of the most skilled software developers from all over the world competed:

>And all twenty-five coded atop, um, Windows machines. Facebook offered a choice of Windows or Mac, and according to Alves, no one wanted a Mac.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/12/facebook_hacker_cup_...
There was an article about this on Lifehacker written by Clay Johnson;
"...there's an optimal number of pixels you need to complete the tasks you need to complete. Worry about that number, not the number of monitors you have. That optimal number, for the vast majority of people is about 2500x1400. In 2003—before widescreen became commonplace—it was the case that 2 17-20"(2560 pixels wide) LCDs was the only affordable way to acquire an optimal number of pixels. Today, you can pick up a 27 inch display with 2560x1440 pixels along with a computer attached to it for under $1500. This number of pixels allows you to accomplish most tasks—whether it's writing code and debugging, writing a blog post and reading primary sources, or editing one spreadsheet with data from another."

Source: http://lifehacker.com/#!5616859/is-the-multiple+monitor-prod...

That was written back in August of last year, so the price of a 27 inch display is even less now...
This is more or less me thinking out loud, but why allow upvoting for new users and not downvoting? Does it not make sense to have a barrier to entry for each? Maybe the ability to upvote only happens after you've been here for 3 months and downvoting after 6 months? (I personally like tying those abilities to seniority vs. points as I tend not to comment often, but can easily identify a snarky comment that adds no value -- with no ability to downvote it).
I can say that it's more than "a few."

How can you say that? How does your personal experience of flagging postings in any way give you insight into the closed CL system?

I agree that flagging/community moderation is a good and necessary thing, I just think CL does it in an absolutely terrible way.

For example, if people find your post annoying, there is no "flag as annoying," or "flag and leave a comment." Instead, someone inadvertently offends someone else, and their post is taken down as spam. This example has netted only irritation for all parties involved, with no learning or progress. To me, that is simply a bad system.
The key thing seems not to be the specific algorithm, but the idea of using images obtained during performance for training - an algorithm that can do that. An early prototype algorithm, with lots of room for tweaking - and there are likely radically different learning algorithms, as yet untried or undiscovered, that work better. It seems that in the past, performance images has been religiously separated from training image.

It reminds me of early approaches for robot walking, which tried to plan everything out, and more recent approaches of incorporating feedback - which turned out to be much simpler and work better. Sort of waterfall vs. agile.

It seems a tad unreliable (his "mouse pointer" was lost a few times while still on screen), but this is still a prototype. It's really impressive how the panda was tracked in 360 orientations - probably helped by the distinctive colouring.

New input devices (this, kinect, multi-touch) and applications that can really use them, may be a main source of disruptive innovation in computers for the next decade or two.
I think it is in part the comments but also very much the articles.

One very simple suggestion: an 'off topic' tab where stuff that does not fit the HN bill can be moved to. An 'offtopic' link similar to the 'flag' link for users with more than 5K karma, that answers the questions 'what do you get for karma' nicely as well too.
Valid comment but its analogous to claiming peanutbutter cups aren't novel because peanut butter and chocolate were both well known. There is novelty in being able to synthesize new systems from known elements which frankly I don't believe gets quite the credit it deserves. But that is just me.

The point is of course that being broadly familiar with a number of things can help you put together a novel thing out of a previously unknown combination of those things.
I don't see a guideline saying something has to be useful or forwardable among CEOs.
It's a solved problem already, a new /classic/ every two years. Looking forward to /classic/classic/, since /classic/ has really gone downhill lately.
I assumed that the target market for HN is people in startups and people about to start startups.

That said, if the target market is just 'hackers', just modify my question to refer to 'hackers' rather than 'founders'.
Facebook Comments Epitomizes Everything I Hate About Facebook
Making it cost karma to comment would be one way to do that. I could also do something like slashdot and reddit do, and not show comments below some threshold.
If you remove the vote count, that doesn't mean you've removed the sorting by vote, right? Isn't that enough information for people to find interesting comments?
He's published 4 papers on the subject (they're available at the bottom of the page) why not start there?
Add a story downvote at a very high karma threshold.
darn - I feel like a groupie - but it is true. I can't believe you are on HN!!!
You can already flag comments. Click the "link" or "reply" links by a comment to see it.
I don't know but maybe get rid of Karma that caries over from article to article. This is what drove me insane about Reddit. The mean, smart ass, slightly funny but useless comments made it to the top while other more useful comments where completely ignored or buried. The problem with democracy is "Bandwagon" + "herd mentality".

I myself tried this on TechCrunch and got up into the top 5 most "liked" commenters. All I did was post snarky, rude ass, criticizing, comments that appealed to the sarcastic douche bag within us all. It was easy. My faith in humanity vanished over that time period because it was so easy to do.
There is no scarcity with upvotes. If I have an infinite amount of money to spend, I will spend it without prudence.

Cap the number of upvotes that a user gets each day and give explicit feedback on how many upvotes that they have left.
A bit of a funny story - Took the family to see "The Black Swan" when it first hit the theaters without knowing anything about it. So on the way there, I was explained the concept of a Black Swan as a rare-event, an outlier, etc. Needless to say, I was a bit red-faced during the lesbian ballerina scenes. "Uh, Honey, this is a -different- kind of Black Swan"...
I think people can figure out for themselves what an interesting or useful comment is on their own without points. We need to give people some credit. The use of points to rely on what others think is valuable, useful, helpful is irrelevant. At least for me. I can give a darn what other people think is useful. Maybe I find some insight useful where everyone else doesn't.
HN is for hackers, not startup founders. There just ends up being a disproportionate amount of stuff about startups, because YC is in the startup business.
We're a PHP shop and we have version control. All but one of the companies I worked at used _some_ sort of version control, so it just doesn't make any sense that deploying an old release should be so tough.
Off The Rack
"The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

Find a few examples of comments that are unambiguously (a), (b), and (c) and have either you personally or someone you trust flag them as such. Next, take the set of all people who upvoted the abc-flagged comments. Their votes now have a 50% chance of not counting towards vote totals from now on, but in a way that the user isn't shown that their votes aren't being counted -- perhaps with an artificial "offset" vote that appears a few minutes later.

There's fun parameters one could throw in there too, like exponential decay on the likelihood of a vote being magically offset that spikes back up every time the user votes stupidly.
One possible implementation is to scale the number of comments a person can make in a time period dependent upon his median comment score over some previous last time period.

I've got no citation at all, but I'd bet that people who have N comments left in the next week will be more miserly about using them. You could also make exceptions for replying to replies and that kind of thing, so as not to artificially limit back and forth (which is sometimes a good thing; for example, tcptacek and zedshaw always have good conversations, if a bit argumentative).

It'd cut back on people who shotgun "funny" comments and have them land occasionally without disrupting people who try to only comment when they have something valuable to say.

A set of super voters would also be good, but, again, not super democratic.
My experience with the computer language shootout
Not to dismiss the importance, but the idea is used in developing Ensemble Tracking: http://www.merl.com/projects/ensemble-tracking/
You don't even accept the interview if there's no chance you'd work there.

You don't know that there's no chance of working there until you know what your other options are. If you're still interviewing (i.e. you don't have offers/rejections in hand yet), you don't know what options you have. You might know that you won't accept Company X's offer if Company Y also makes you an offer, but that's quite a different situation from knowing there's no way you'd accept Company X's offer.
I'm excited to see Identity Management finally being rolled into the browser. Mozilla's been talking for some time about binding your accounts to the browser itself, rather than loose, forgotten usernames and passwords.
Join the club lol
You think it's a good idea to penalize people for commenting? How does this help people new to the scene? "Thanks for joining in the conversation, here's a penalty" This only rewards people who have been around in the scene for a while, while penalizing all the new people.