skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We could have choice, would have to be in conjunction with either a tagging system or a completely separate list like subreddits. With tagging in your profile you could have things to opt out of like politics and current events and tech gossip.

The when these submissions popup all you need is someone to tag them as one of these things. You could either assign people to do this or weight it by karma or something.
To only sort by date is simplicity.

To only sort by "relevance" as determined by friend-of-friend connections is needless complexity.
that would definitely be helpful. my efforts resulted in little success, so I didn't put any additional effort in.
Which browsers? uzbl? midori? seamonkey? lynx?
Feedback on my spare time project
I am very curious to know what people all over the worked think about brands. And with Facebook and Twitter, you can even compare where you stand against your friends!

Take a look, let me know what you think!
This plays into RiderOfGiraffes' experiment with leaving comments that tied together related (or identical) discussions, which I was rather sad to see him discontinue (especially in cases where two threads were discussing different aspects of a story). I don't recall, though; was he automating that, or was it a purely manual effort?

I suspect a "closed as duplicate" system, ala StackExchange, could work well here, assuming a high enough bar were to be set for who could do (or vote for) such a thing.
Show HN: Watermarked images with watermark.js 1.0
I totally agree. I have two 1920x1200 screens, and I put two browser windows per screen, so I always max out at exactly 960.
I know why I'm being downvoted, it's always a risk when posting a comment with a certain tone. Though I don't normally post in this style, I just didn't care when I wrote it. I realize this thread may have prompted an inordinate amount of frustration in me which should probably have been directed towards worthier targets.
That reminds me of this post on how Craigslist's business is being eaten away, and why it's taking so long (because of the critical mass needed to compete against its network-effect benefit): http://www.quora.com/Why-hasnt-another-product-disrupted-and...
A little design feedback: With my 15.4 inch screen I could only see the first service, so I initially assumed that you were for some reason having ads for amazon cloud drive, and I also noticed an empty site forum (which I now believe is the forum specific to that service). It took me a great while to understand that I should be scrolling down - the page looked sort of complete as it was.

You really need a more compact layout: If you want me to know what's not available in Canada, why can't I have the whole list at once? (I realize you might want the forum and news stuff - but perhaps cut a lot of the unnecessary whitespace (while still trying to keep the design spacious! :-) ).
Are copyright laws more strict in Canada? Or are royalties a lot higher? There seem to be primarily music/video content services on the list.
Granted, I'm not in Canada, but I'd be curious to see why a particular service isn't available.
It'll probably be labeled for export-only, because in the US, we don't need it because we already have democracy, so it would only be used by t'rr'rists.
If you turned off gravity for comments, then ranking would indicate their relative votes. Users could vote to create what they believe is the appropriate ranking.

I also think quality was higher without gravity for comments. Now, I scan comments to find the highly voted ones. Do you think gravity for comments was a net gain?

BTW: Is it possible to objectively measure the impact of changes, as opposed to be being persuaded by articulately argued complaints?
I wonder how much of the new-user experience is to avoid an eternal september? Allowing people to easily sounds off on a few things and leave(like I'm doing right now) is not conducive to building a community.
Great idea!

Minor note: the "Think something should be here? Contact us about it." link text was very hard to read (Chrome 10, OS X). Maybe it's too small for that font and weight.
I don't offer any solutions, but I can offer a cause of the problem.

HN has become important. I know people IRL who will get their friends to help mod their submission. I likewise see stories that just scream, this person has friends who probably modded them. These won't stay on the front page for long at all, but they do increase the signal to noise significantly.
One idea is that you would only allow users with X month old accounts to comment. X is simply the time since you started noticing the decreasing quality of comment threads, with perhaps a small buffer added onto that time.

This would still allow everyone else to utilize HN as their source of news or as their RSS feed into the tech/startup world, while testing for the source of the decreasing quality of comment threads.
there are more: Google checkout is not available for sellers, zappos (they just closed their canadian store), unlimited internet etc.
"There needs to be a "hot discussions" tab that allows people to continue the conversations."

http://news.ycombinator.com/active
Thanks -- I couldn't find a SkypeIn logo, so I should've clarified the text. I've just updated it.
You have mail.
Great idea!
Are you expecting the forum to be used for references to the next best alternatives that are available in Canada? That's what immediately comes to mind. But then I wonder if those topics would quickly scroll off the list.
Ask HN: How to effectively generate big data reports?
My co-worker and I have been developing a tool in our free time to help us monitor our servers at work. At work, we have to keep an eye on nearly 100 servers - most are virtual machines. We wrote a tool that fits our exact monitoring needs (monitors a particular process, and various attributes about it) and have been collecting data on a per-minute basis from all 100 servers - we have quite a bit of data collected thus far. We're storing all of this data in MongoDB at this point.

The second part of our goal is to be able to view reports via an intranet web app. These reports are going to include data from all 100 servers, or that's our goal anyways. We'd like to start off by simply sorting these servers by CPU usage (we're storing CPU usage for each server, every minute), and viewing a graph of CPU usage over time.

First, uneducated plan of attack would be to simply run a report generating routine every minute or so that does the big query and stores that data set on a per minute basis. So, the dataset for this CPU usage would just include all server IDs and their CPU usage every minute - leaving out everything else we collect. I'm not sure if this scales very well, though.

Does anyone have any suggestions or pointers on how to plan out my scaling strategy for this? Thanks.
As far as I can tell, it's a combination of the licensing being different (as in the terms of your license probably only cover the United States to start), and the CRTC's content laws and other regulations being annoying enough not to bother with considering our relatively smaller market size.

(I think it's considerably easier to go from Canada to the US than in the opposite direction.)
No Skypein numbers? How? I swear it's available in a lot of obscure countries? And Canada is far from that, you'd expect it to have this.
As someone pointed out on the last "curthopkins"-submitted story, the account seems to be a blogspammer. It has zero comments, and every submission is from this readwriteweb domain.

Since we're discussing ways to improve HN, I suggest banning both the user and the domain, and restricting the submission of articles to users with over a certain comment threshold karma.
I think the root cause is inherent to growth. As the number of naive new users increases exponentially (assuming this is happening), the more experienced portion of the community has a harder time swinging vote totals for quality pieces. It's not that new users are stupid or malicious; new users are simply uneducated about the type of comments and content that are most fitting with HN. With more new users, the community gives affirmation of mediocre content through votes.

I've been fairly active on HN for about 6 months. A year ago, I remember submitting articles and making comments that, while at the time I thought were fitting, I am now embarrassed of. (This also may be the case 6 months from now for my current submissions).

Sure, I perused the introduction, FAQs, and other comments and articles. However, I didn't get a real sense of quality until recently. Just like with software development, the best way to learn is by doing.

Here are a few ideas:

- Enforce some sort of social contract that users must agree to before submitting articles. Describe appropriate usage to give users a sense of pride in the community.

- A combination of account age and page views could be used to ensure new users are experienced enough to participate. There are the obvious negative side effects of this.

- Allow high-karma users to send private messages (previously mentioned) to users that submit inappropriate content informing them of the reasons why it may not be best. Down-voting and public comments are too cold. A warm private message from a 5 year HN veteran explaining how I can be a better member would be welcoming.

The bottom line is that the quality decrease isn't from malicious users (rude and negative comments aren't necessarily malicious in those users' eyes) but from naive users.
Perhaps if the bio community had been better about treating animals humanely when they weren't being watched, you wouldn't be subjected to so many rules now.

There are many inhumane things done to animals outside of the lab. Does that mean that we should work to reduce the cruelty of things like glue traps, or that we should increase the cruelty of animal research?

I'm sorry that you have to fill out a lot of paperwork if you want to inflict deliberate pain and suffering on a living creature.

The ethical questions raised by animal experimentation are a well-trodden debate, and I suspect that you have spent enough time listening to, perhaps even engaging in them, not to rehash them here.

We need medical advancements for humans, and sometimes that requires animal testing. That may be, but we also need to advance in our ethics and morals while we advance in our technology.

"You can judge a society by how they treat their weakest members."
Unlimited internet is, but for enterprises only.
>> I get the feeling that there are conflicting communities here.
>Maybe, though that matter seems to be resolving itself on its own currently.

Well I think HN grew due to the hacker community. After reading some in the post I linked. I am thinking that it might not be right that it be hijacked. I was a big Redditor and felt driven away somewhat recently. I guess this is all tangential, but no offense taken. Best.
Reading this article made me think "wow, not everything is lost, this is exactly the kind of stuff that HN used to have on it before the decline", so I definitely disagree with Udo
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining. My assumption was that, since the initial "1" doesn't add to your rep now, votes would still be the only thing that actually affects you.
> what if you wanted to listen to mozart himself or have an original renoir?

Then you did as you have to do today - you went to the source.

Thanks to amplification, more people can hear Bruce Springsteen live than could hear Mozart.

> my point is you couldn't buy a copy

That's true, but that's not your original claim or the claim above.

Your original claim was that you had to pay. That claim was wrong.
You can view all the apps installed just fine. Ubuntu, unlike many distros, doesn't install 10 of every kind of app so I don't think its necessary.
In fact, the SUN-1 was 68000-based with a custom MMU.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-1

Though, I'd likely agree that UNIX probably wasn't that useful on these 680x0 workstations until the SUN 3/50, 68020 1 Meg RAM.
"You can judge a society by how they treat their weakest members."

In the US, child protection laws were modeled on previously created animal rights laws.
This situation makes no sense at all based on the explanations here by chrisleydon.

You have backups of the code - can you explain why it isn't a pretty straightforward process to set up a new server? The fact that you have a fixed IP address has no importance as far as I can tell, and that's the only explanation offered.

> It would have taken us months to get TinyGrab v1 back up to scratch

Really?
Just a ban on "current events" (aka news)?

Past political essays, e.g. by Cicero, will generally be intellectually interesting.
This is a proposal going that direction: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404513
We see way too many splash-pages submitted lately that somehow still get voted up, but yet show no details of what they do, no working demo, or any way of us to try it out to provide any feedback.
I feel bad hijacking the discussion like this. But I'd really like to know how a blog post on how the government should abolish ethics oversight in research is hacker news? Obviously, you have been here way longer, so what is that I'm not getting?
The standard for an article's appropriateness is whether it's something "that good hackers would find interesting", not whether it's "relevant to most hackers."
What you described is becoming much more common. I still have concerns, but I'm excited by the promise of websites like http://patientslikeme.com

(Disclaimer: I'm actually starting an HN-like website for rare disease people in a week or two; I had (or have) a rare type of cancer called Chordoma.)
SEEKING WORK, Colorado/remote

Front-end web development, WordPress

My personal site: http://benword.com/

My freelance site: http://www.hypetreatment.com/

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Is Canada any worse off than Europe, Asia, Latin America, or Africa in this regard?
The McDonalds and Burger King logos seem like they are part of an interactive duel. I was surprised that I couldn't click on one and then login with twitter or Facebook.
The captions only show up when you hover over the images :/
I wonder why someone down-voted this. I believe this is a great piece of advice. At events, I frequently get stuck talking to people who aren't beneficial to me (and I'm not beneficial to them), and loose opportunities with others.

I typically just say "Hey, well it was great talking with you..." and it ends naturally.
I would recommend getting rid of up-voting and positive karma. People make pithy comments in order to get positive karma. Same reason for meme threads.

The real reason for a karma mechanic on HN is to filter out incredibly stupid comments. So keep down-voting. Things that are down-voted should go to the bottom of the stack.
I got excited by the title, as I misunderstood it to mean that we would actually see the images the drone took (the photos of the drone are still interesting though).
I think it's a problem inherent in the larger audience - it's a different dynamic with less intimacy. To restore the intimacy that begets the high quality, I recommend introducing ways to customize my experience, whether it's sub-HNs, categories, following, or something else. That way people can create clusters and privacy for themselves and control their experience.

I don't think this can just be solved by tweaking karma logic.
You're saying that you are a "tech accelerator" who values social networking more highly than technical skills. I'm just kind of baffled by the implications of that.
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A Statistical Test Gets Its Closeup
Teksavvy has unlimited plans for residential.
I am sure that on average they created at least $880 million of value to society to make up for the $880 million of resources they were compensated with.
http://git.libav.org/?p=libav.git
It's a significant change, but I think the way to solve the problem generally is to have move than one dimension to vote on.

As social sites rise in popularity, common denominator posts such as humor or common circle jerking are going to rise to the top.

The answer, I think, is to allow people to vote on multiple metrics: 'cool', 'funny', 'good idea', 'hacker porn'.

With those separate signals it would be easier to tweak the algorithm to get the front page looking 'like you want it to,' or the users could choose how they want their posts to be ranked.
> So a quantum calculation is more a probabilistic restriction on which state you want, rather than a direct calculation.

Not necessarily, some quantum algorithms give an answer with 100% probability (like the Deutch-Josza algorithm). You're right in that the two most interesting ones (Grover's and Shor's algorithms) are probabilistic, though.
I'm actually starting an HN-like website for rare disease people in a week or two

My contact info is in my profile. I would love to know when this is up.
Teacher, Administration and Government who doesn't understand said technology. http://whoshouldbethenextpresident.com/
One trick I do is to have an inbox and outbox for your business cards, e.g. left and right pockets.

I've embarrassingly given someone a card I had received prior. Mixing received cards with your own makes for awkward fumbling as you pull out a business card to hand someone.
A lot of these issues can be resolved for $5/month and less than that if you're willing to setup your own private server.

http://www.unblock-us.com/ lets you access American Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, ESPN3, etc etc. I'm not affiliated with them, but been using the service the past couple of months and it works amazingly. In fact I'm using American Netflix on my Xbox 360 as we speak. $5/month is a heck of a lot cheaper than moving to the states and I get to keep the free health care.
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Oh gee, okay, let me look at this...

Hmm, McDonald's or Burger King? Okay then, I guess I'll just click on Burger King and... what? click click click. Huh, I guess those are dummy buttons. So it wants me to... what? Sign in with facebook or twitter? What happens then? Will it take the opportunity to spam all my followers that I like Burger King? How long will it take to clean up whatever mess this thing makes if I let it access my facebook account? What incriminating data can it gather on me? How do the facebook privacy restrictions work this week? Why was this submitted by a sixteen-minute-old account?

In conclusion, looks dodgy. If you are a dodgy person trying to pull some scam, then tut tut. If you're not a dodgy person trying to pull some scam, then you need to realise that folks aren't willing to hand over the keys to their facebook or twitter account without some clear value proposition, and the opportunity to vote on which of two brands is better just ain't one.
I hate to be unhelpful, but I think this problem is intractable.

The fact that these meta discussions predictably offer a wide array of solutions -- many of which are at odds with one another -- leads me to believe there isn't a solution. In fact, it seems like many of these discussions devolve into:

1. I have an idea!
2. Yeah, but that won't work because...
3. Oh, in that case we could just...
4. But, then...

The "quality" of HN and it's community is a function of many variables. It's hard, maybe impossible, to tweak the site and expect predictable results (and, there are always unintended consequences).

It doesn't help that the feedback cycle is so long.

Let's have a hypothetical. Suppose, we decided the problem was that HN had become to design-centric. We want fewer designers and more programmers. So, let's make HN ugly. Really ugly. Then all the designers will leave and we'll be left with programmers. How long after making the site ugly will we have to wait to see the results? What if the designers retaliate by making a client-side css hack to make HN look even better? Do we end up with more or fewer designers? Did we do damage to the population of programmers who also happen to be designers? And, how do we account for outside influences? What if a prominent designer linked to HN the week of our changes and our tweak is overwhelmed by the flood of incoming designers?

I hope I'm wrong. I've been here 1467 (!) days, I'd like to stay a long while longer.
tarsnap is not available to canadians :(

(info: developer of tarsnap is canadian, he has his reasons)
You should check out a review if you haven't actually used the UI.

http://maketecheasier.com/ubuntu-natty-beta-1-review-screens...
The worst codebase I’ve seen in my life
Uninteresting stories seem to come either from the same old accounts or from brand new accounts. I'm not sure why brand new accounts aren't banned from submitting stories until they get (say) 100 comment karma.
This pain point has been addressed before. One proposed solution is given here:

http://popalg.org/curated-by-choice-part-1

Implementation pends user excitement and suggestion for how to start-up.
I haven't had time to distill the ICEs into proper bug reports anyone would want to touch. The last failure was easy to reduce, and I added a note to an already open entry for what seemed to be another instance of the same bug.
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I'm sure it's about the same. However, since we Canadians get such a huge amount of our media from the US it's likely more of a disappointment.
I agree. Posting this kind of content can be a plot to block out HN in China. Lots of site get banned like this.
Weight upvotes differently as they come from different people -- or, play around with displaying different "top" content to different users.

Some starting places might be:

* upvotes from someone who reads regularly but votes irregularly count more

* upvotes from IP's that have not clicked through count less

* using a collaborative filter on upvotes to guess which stories are more likely to appeal to different readers

* randomly putting a few threads or stories out of order for each user

* users who, early on, vote-up comments that are voted up later are rewarded (f''<0 or just a ceiling on the reward like 10 upvotes) with their upvotes being worth more

* modal version of the above, using a pagerank style algorithm to calculate the helpfulness of users

* upvotes from people with more karma are worth more (again f''<0)

* mess around with sub-thread weighting. I don't know how you do it right now but it seems like a good comment on a lower sub-thread is less likely to be seen than a mediocre comment right below the +43 top comment.

* mess around with page-placement weighting. The very top is most likely to be seen and voted on. 3/4 of the way down is very likely to not be seen -- so a vote either way means more there.

* limit the number of upvotes each user gets. Could be per time, per story, per karma....

I didn't use HN a year or two ago, but it seems to me that across such social news sites the following types of content are unjustifiably upvoted:

- confidence

- lists of books

- slams (mother###ker)

- references to high-IQ stuff

- certain lengths are preferred [must be 2-3 para's long to get hugely upvoted, 2-3 sentences has a higher prob. of just a few points]

If you do some more research perhaps you could just decide on what are "bad" kinds of comments, such as negativity, and use text mining / sentiment analysis to detect them and hold back their points.

Using any of the - ideas would force HN designers to commit to what actually constitutes bad content, rather than social engineering (* ideas).