skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I am too late to the discussion already, but I think all of pg's a), b) and c) are caused by people who think that this is OK-behavior.

I think a new user should, by default, get "read-only" access. Once the account ages, so the user sees what is acceptable behavior, should you get write-access.

Another idea is to actually make good the name of the site (Hacker news). EITHER a) Show us you actually are a hacker-- do you build things, or just troll? Is your relation to technology deeper than "I read techcrunch?"
This could be a simple matter of adding a text-field or a mandatory homepage/startup URL field, and asking (say) 3 longtime HNers to decide if the "applicant" is interesting enough to the HN community.

OR b) get invited by a long-time HN-er to join (There should be a strong disincentive to invite indiscriminately: for instance, everytime a person you invite gets downvoted, you lose 0.2 karma points).

I know, this scheme sounds elitist. And it is. Yet, I can't think of a single interesting HN-er this would filter out.
I believe adding additional barriers would be bad. I currently do not comment very often. I feel that my comments would add little to the discussion, but by being allowed to upvote good stories and comments I feel like a part of the community.

By requiring some karma to upvote people would probably contribute more low quality comments hoping to gain the karma required to contribute in other ways.
I think that having more content on the front page that isn't shallow industry gossip would have a positive effect on discussions overall - they tend to drag down the other threads, and bring in a lot of people who don't understand / follow the commenting culture here.

The new page is out of hand, IMHO - there's a huge incentive to be the first to submit an article (and no cost), so new content is continually posted. Many interesting posts fall off the bottom of the new page within an hour - a post has to quickly appeal to lots of people, or it's gone. This leads to lowest-common-denominator submissions.

Instead of moronic "first post!" comments, we've got a plague of "first submission!"s.

The sum of the scores on the new page divided by the oldest's age may be a good metric. Currently, the total is 217, and the oldest two say "1 hour ago" and "2 hours ago", roughly 90 minutes. That's only 2.4 points per minute, and this thread (118 points, 1 hour ago) is a major outlier; without it, it's 1.1 per minute.

Whether you make submitting articles cost karma (3-5 points?) and/or add a penalty for posting an article that was subsequently flagged and deleted, fewer dull submissions would improve discussions. (It would also help with spam.)
Actually, you just gave me a great idea (I think). The problem is mainly snide remarks, right? So make it impossible to make snide remakrs. How?

Minimum comment length of ~50 words.

This would A) get rid of casual snideyness, as those sorts of people wouldn't put in the effort to formulate a longer post; B) discourage crowd-pleasing one liners, which while enjoyable have a long term negative effect; C) still allow jokes, they'd just have to be asides to actual substance; D) encourage longer, better thought-out posts in general, and backing up of claims.
It's an interesting link, but I fail to see how this really belongs here. If I wanted to view this, I would go to reddit. If I come here, I'd enjoy to read "hacker news" related articles.
I never wanted to spend the time reading the 100+ comments in the original thread; while it would be interesting and enjoyable to do so, I have other things that are higher priority right now.

However, I was pissed off by one of Linus' comments (which, taken by itself was pretty ridiculous), and made a comment on HN about it.

My comment was sarcastic in a way that I think was misunderstood and made many people angry. Many insults were hurled my way, and I tried to defend myself, resulting in an ever-worsening spiral. It's pretty much just become a massive shitfest.

I wish people hadn't been so quick to attack myself and my character (yourself included). This kind of thing is definitely contributing to the decline of HN, which is something being discussed lately (as always, I guess). And, yes, I'm contributing to it too by even trying to defend myself, or maybe by defending myself too aggressively.

I can understand if you read the whole 100+ thread and then point out that what I'm talking about is completely unrelated. That's true, but I wasn't talking about the whole discussion; just picking at a bit of unreasonable rudeness on Linus's part that failed to make any intellectually worthwile point. And I stand by that: the individual comment I was picking at (i.e., the one linked from this HN post) was pretty ridiculous.
I am wondering how much money that techcrunch gets from the facebook in oder to keep their comment system. Disqus is much better system than facebook comments.
I just wanted to float this option out there for discussion to see if people thought a tighter clique would be better. I would also be cut out of the community if it were invitation-only.

I note that the /old experiment (a Hacker News whose voting data set was limited entirely to accounts > 1 year old) demonstrated no obvious improvement in quality.

It seems to be entirely a question of the public choice of what is acceptable content to submit.
Going a bit further you could add a simple pixel shader and modulate the pixel normals along with the waves.
Not if you look at trends. Windows has been around for over twenty years, Blackberry for twelve, iOS and Android for about four. So in the last twelve years Windows has gone from about 98% of devices to 50%. That's not kicking ass.
We could penalize commenters not using their real name.

Techcrunch comment quality has improved by an order of magnitude and trolls have been largely wiped out since they started requiring people use Facebook or Yahoo accounts to comment.
It sounds like to me there's an excellent opportunity here for some clever security researchers to set up a company like Underwriters Laboratories (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwriters_Laboratories).
Let moderators mark a comment as "not useful". And everyone who voted for that comment earns negative karma. This will make people think twice before voting for a comment. Dumb and mean comments won't be voted on.

This allows you and the mods to set the tone for comments.

Of course, the weak point is - moderators bias may show up. And a worthy comment may be marked as not useful occasionally. So depending on the number of moderators you have, you could make it so that the minimum criteria is x number of moderators have to mark a comment as not useful.
Gorilla arm would prevent people from using that kind of system to replace mouse and keyboard, but I don't see why it could not work for some applications. I can think of several use cases where I would like a UI that does not require me to touch the hardware (think cooking or watching videos in the bath tub).
After investigating this (and raising the aforementioned Emacs bug), I've concluded that sRGB hex colors - as used by Ethan - are simply not the right hex colors to enter in Emacs in order to get the desired results. Instead, Emacs apparently works with Generic RGB values, and after some laborious conversion calculations in Apple's "ColorSync Utility", I got the right results:

https://github.com/purcell/color-theme-sanityinc-solarized

The color fix will probably get into sellout's repo, so interested parties should prefer that one over mine.
This is perhaps the interesting bit, using the 10 year t-bill rate to compute what it would take to make the median income. (its not $30M at the moment though, median income is $47,127 [1] federal, state, and other employment taxes reduce that to under $40,000 (that would be your 'take home' pay)) You will want health care however which depending on your age will add $500 - $2500 a month. So more like $60K). Now 10 yr bill are currently at 3.25% so you only need $1.85 million in 10 yr T-bills to pay you that amount of income. $30M in t-bills is about $975K / year which is way above the median.

[1] http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/income_weal...
Then: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.

Now: Every program attempts to expand until it can annoy the user's friends.
Meet the 12 year old with an IQ higher than Stephen Hawking’s
Im a bit weary of the "the problem with microsoft is ..." articles.

Micorsoft is in an almost monopoly situation. And they don’t have to even try selling their stuff. It's pretty much an opt out model when you buy a computer. They got themselves into some tar with product quality on occasion. Some argue that they got out. I don't know or care - i'm not really using their stuff unless I have to.

Regardless of how much I disagree with their methods, I have to respond to this saying "I wish I had their kind of problems". Something makes me think that so do many of the "the problem with Microsoft" posters. But maybe it's just that the grass is greener on the other side.
You, and other users both in this thread and in similar ones before it, are only looking at one side of the equation.

The problem is only partially too many bad comments, it's also too few good comments. Your proposal is targeted at lowering the amount of bad comments, but it might do so at the expense of the good ones.

Most of the users that have a high karma count have so because they always have something insightful to say (mechanical_fish (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mechanical_fish) is a good example), and their incentive for posting interesting stuff is marginalized by this. Almost all people, whethere they'll admit it or not, are incentivized by other peoples approval, eg. karma, and downplaying their contributions will make them more prone to not submitting great comments.
As noted in the article the level of quality of comments is much higher with Facebook comments, plus with the comments showing up on people's Facebook stream it gives Techcrunch a huge amount of free publicity.

So I doubt they need money to convince them to use Facebook over Disqus.
I like this idea, but it would need some tweaking before being used.

If voting on a comment gives karma to the commentator and it takes karma to vote, then people would need to comment to vote. I think this type of zero sum game would increase the number of poor comments from people who want to vote and an increase in poor comments is what we are trying to prevent.
I like this idea-- you might even start with comments collapsed so users can quickly identify threads of interest. Here is a simple mock-up of what I'm envisioning:

http://imgur.com/SGbyG
I have 6 screens hooked up to my main pc at home: http://i.imgur.com/Vt7D9.jpg

6 is a bit overkill (though sometimes handy) but 3 is great. At work I've got 3 hooked up to my laptop, perfect for things like TDD, especially given Visual Studio 2010 allows you to have code windows on different monitors. 1 window for unit test code, 1 window for code under test, 1 window for test runner/results.
You got downvoted, and maybe I've misinterpreted the thread, but my perception was:

* Parent commenter thinks messages should just use RSA, and not RSA+AES.

* You try to explain why he should use RSA+AES instead of RSA.

* He tries to post an analysis of why to use RSA-only.

Can I just step in to say: (a) using RSA only is way slower, like you said, and (b) it is significantly harder to make bulk RSA encryption secure than it is to make bulk AES encryption secure, just like you said?
I'm surprised this book hasn't been mentioned here yet:

http://www.amazon.com/Building-Reputation-Systems-Randy-Farm...

If you read that book and then look at HN, it's clear how its design encourages behaviors that are not aligned with the goals of the community managers.
I agree, but I don't think that invalidates what I'm suggesting. I think the solution is just to not give Gruber a bonus, or else to even give him a negative bonus.

The idea is to reward people who are writing good stuff but who aren't making the front page, not to reward people who already have all their stuff upvoted.
I think only time scale we need to think about is the front page.
I was thinking about this in the car and came up with the same thought, that it could just be a comment that no one but the OP (and mods, perhaps) saw. I am definitely guilty of posting some bad comments as far as the HN definition goes. I blame living on USENET in the late '80s and early '90s and the WELL, but the reason is immaterial. The problem is that many times I don't really see the comment as particularly bad, or I haven't thought about how someone else might interpret it, didn't realize how I was being dumb, or I simply forget the tone of the venue I'm in.

When someone points one of these issues out, I often feel bad about it. However, I usually don't edit my comment to remove or reword the offending portion because I think it's rude to the person replying and, oddly enough, those who later read it. Because they've made a good point, if I fix up my post it breaks continuity, possibly makes them sound like an idiot, and feels like I'm trying to cover up my lameness.

If I got a similar note that was private I'd feel free to make the changes without as many of those worries. Especially without concern for how they'd take it as presumably they're looking for me to shape up not score points on my misbehavior. I also think that some people that might say something are loathe to reply publicly in fear of just making it worse.

Of course it could seriously backfire if people used it just to be mean back without fear of the community observing. But it seems like it might be worthy of trying.
SCEA Files Motion to Dismiss Class Action Again
But how would this help improve comments? Wouldn't the worst-behaved also be the least likely to hit such a button?
Commenting is almost no-friction and there is an immediate psychological reward in getting your voice heard. This makes it extremely easy to knee-jerk. Perhaps you can A) make commenting cost more or B) delay the reward long enough to force a re-evaluation before the comment goes public.

For A you might try making commenting cost karma in certain situations.

For B I've got no ideas. I'm thinking about how I sometimes will write an emotionally charged email and then wait a day before sending it because I know I'm unable to think clearly. Emotions will have cooled by then and the email looks like it was written by a crazy person. There's not any way to force delays on commenting that I can think of since the articles and discussions here move so fast.
I feel like MT has gone downhill in the last year or so. Support used to answer my tickets in 15-30 minutes, whereas recent ones for my remaining dedicated server with them have taken 4-48 hours.

I much prefer the full-system control I have with Slicehost or EC2.
You can run anything you want on their VPSes, just like any other VPS provider.
There's more than enough hacker-appropriate linkbait to fill the front page, if that's what the readership wants.
Is the source available for your Android equivalent of BB Mobile? I'd love to take a look at adapting that for my school.
First, thank you for acknowledging this as a real problem. The quality of HN is a function of the community. This doesn't just mean who's here - it means who's here, and how they act when they're here. While tweaking the "game variables" on the site may help, I believe it's more important and to the point to reinforce community standards somehow.

When I first discovered HN, I quickly learned by various cues that this is not a place to drop sarcastic, one-line zingers, but rather a place to act as you would in a real-life business setting. The cues included both the example of the dominant commenters, and their chiding of non-conforming commenters. Over time, with the growth of the site, there are proportionally fewer commenters setting a strong example, and more commenters lowering the bar and getting away with it.

We are conditioned to feel that democracy = good, but in online communities I do not believe it is the case. Rather, when there were more "good" commenters, democracy was on your side. The "good" commenters had the power of numbers. Now, increasingly, the unconditioned, lower-quality commenters are beginning to gain the power of numbers. In order to counter this, you must provide the "good" commenters with a some other type of power.

You could hand select a number of members, based on your personal knowledge of their historical comment quality, and how much you think they reflect the HN that we want. Give them the ability to super-downvote. This status does not need to be public. It's not a status-symbol. As a bonus, this could give the exemplary members some small incentive for sticking around, by making them feel like they can do something meaningful to fight for HN, beyond just complaining.

Also, Eliezer has dealt with this problem quite a bit, rather successfully, IMO. Maybe ask him.
Holy crap, the loading bar on top of the tabs is genius! File upload indicator will be similarly awesome.
I don't really care for startup time as once a browser is open it doesn't get closed till a reboot comes around which for many will be the case. I do care for nice things not eating up my cores.

Here's a simple example I botched together. Firefox has the worst performance when it comes to rendering a simple css transforms. Firefox hits > 80% CPU time when the effect is in play compared to < 30% for the competition and < 7% for Safari.

http://pastebin.com/NnNrEbTs

Copy / paste and mouse hover like a mad man.

Firefox and Performance still don't belong in the same sentence for me as it stands.
The simpler ideas I have are to aggressively kill any snarky or pun-filled comments and raise the downvote karma limit (again...).

A slightly more interesting idea would be to temporarily ban any member that does very anti-guideline things from posting for a little while, coupled with an explanation as to why they were banned. Even an hour-long ban may be effective. The GameFAQs boards do this, and while they have their own problems, not following the guidelines isn't one of them.
I think Jon to some extent fails to realize that having options (i.e. sorting by date) comes at the price of complexity.

A significant amount of modern software has gone the opposite way seeking to remove options to simplify products for users.

Facebook grew up competing against MySpace, a site which gave it's users more options and configurability than anyone could want. Facebook realized that users don't want to be able to tweak everything, they want things to be standardized and just work.

It's philosophically the Facebook way.
One reason comment threads get tendentious is when people think other people are commenting to game the thread and collect karma. The karma-ceiling flag tries to say "this is a good faith comment".
Yes the quality of the comments increased, but the number of comments decreased in every article which implies less interaction. Thus if this trend goes, techcrunch might end comment less. thus loosing the free publicity that they after.
No, do what reddit does. Pick random stories from the new page and show them in a separate box on the frontpage
Look at the current windows UI and count how often you read 'Microsoft' or 'Windows', or how often you see a big gaudy Windows logo somewhere. It's gauche. It's tasteless. It's pointless. It's over-branding.

If I'm paying for something, I don't EVER want to be advertised to about it again. I made my choice. Don't make me regret it.
Brendan Eich - A Brief History of JavaScript
I think it is very likely that there are voting rings and sock puppets here on HN. If so, it would cause a distortion in the scores awarded to all the content, sometimes up or down, depending. Therefore anything that helps fight that would improve the site by more honestly gauging the quality of submitted posts and comments, which then improves the S/N ratio.

How to do this exactly? Not sure. But I'm confident that fighting it more will improve any site.
Would have been a pretty interesting story if the author hadn't ruined it with his, "haha, look how clever I can be" style with all the references to different publications. Whatever happened to journalists just reporting a story?
How about having an additional metric in terms of responses to a post? If it doesnt deserve a response, it probably doesnt add much to the discussion.
Decompose commenting score into a two-part system representing up-votes and down-votes:

Up-vote score = sum(karma of up-voter)

Down-vote score = sum(karma of down-voter)

Score is displayed in both absolute and relative terms. Absolute score would be the same method as we're currently using. The relative score is presented as a part of the whole.

Something like [+++++++|--] could represent the ratio of the positive score to the negative score (which are the weighted scores based upon karma).

And, as a possibly added benefit, taking this approach enables the ability to reduce the karma level before allowing of down-voting, making people feel like they're able to participate more-fully earlier.
This reminds me of the Slashdot lameness filter, which IIRC just caused (causes? I haven't been there in a while) lots of posts ending in, "La la la la, adding some content to get past the lameness filter." and the like.
* ABP

* Greasemonkey

* LastPass

* Pentadactyl
After edit: another comment from another user in this thread prompts me to ask whether all new users who sign up see the site guidelines automatically or not.

That is interesting. Take it one step further: if this is set up (or if it is already), requiring them to pass a short quiz can ensure they actually read it with comprehension.
EDWARD SAID: How do you measure success?

RONALD REAGAN: I measure it in our prosperity and in our influence on the world stage.

Translation: Money and power.
Ok, I see. I haven't noticed that phenomenon of gaming the thread. Is it so common that this would be the best way to fix comments?
The Rant: Magic the Gathering
I have one, and it's pretty nice. Haven't done a whole lot with it except revamp the chronograph function more to my liking for my workouts, though. The 915 MHz frequency band is limiting; a 2.4 GHz 802.11 transceiver could be much more interesting.

The large face scratches easily; it's just acrylic and not glass. Easy enough to buff out, though.

The product page is here:
http://focus.ti.com/docs/toolsw/folders/print/ez430-chronos....
I have dual screen setup: a 24" screen connected to my laptop. But I find I am most productive sitting with my legs stretched out and the laptop on my lap. Anyone else?
Like the Erlang "bombs" of past? I haven't noticed them in a while:

http://erlanginside.com/hacker-news-full-of-erlang-articles-...
on the author's site he mentions plans to replace nailgun with nrepl, if possible. http://icylisper.in/jark/vm.html
Uhh...I think you have a copyright issue here.
Have you tried Evernote?

http://www.evernote.com/
This isn't really the place for this, you should try stack overflow.
lol :) No it's like saying that given a choice between several alternatives or permutations, where each of which can cause me to have say a $1m/yr income, some of which require that I have employees and some of which do not, that I'd prefer the scenarios where I did not. It does not mean I'm 100% opposed to it under all circumstances, just that I consider it a non-ideal and problematic state, best avoided or minimized.