skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These $ <= 0 sorts of internships seem concentrated in fields where social capital is highly valued -- politics, PR, talent management, etc. Could it be that young people from upper class backgrounds are the most likely to possess the social skills and pre-filled Rolodexes required to be successful in these industries? Even if this is not true, it is certainly possible that the head of a PR firm from a wealthy family could not imagine it otherwise. I also wonder if, in addition to no pay, the price of the internship is actually negative because of the reciprocity expected from the social connections used to secure the internship for the recent college graduate.

I am imagining a voice mail like this:

"Hey, Joe [the VP at the PR firm which represents Large Company X], this is Bob, [the internal head of PR from Company X] calling. Would you mind doing me a favor and taking a pass at my niece's resume? She's interested in PR and would love the opportunity to do an internship with you guys this Summer. The pay isn't as important as the experience, and she can stay in her aunt's apartment on the Upper East Side. It's great that we do business together. Talk to you later."

How much has Joe "paid" for his niece's internship?
Some policy/feature/system to aggregate related stories ("killing" stories that duplicate stories that already have active threads, and posting a link to the "duplicate" story in that thread, or something similar to that --- I'm being minimalist here).

A lot of dumb comments appear to germinate on threads that are the 3rd or 4th take on some tech news story about Facebook or Apple.
Great feedback! Yes, definitely a reputation system would work and help users.

For the shipment problem (the fact that shipping just one comic may not make sense), a solution could be to allow users to specify in their preferences the minimum amount of comics they want to ship. For example, I may choose 5 comics and then the system will match me with another user only when this other users would like to receive 5 of my comics...so that I can ship all these comics to just one user.
Would also be nice if the flag button were visible without clicking the comment.
Perhaps the problem is with the mouse, then, not the screens.

I've had best results with two 22-inch monitors, everything either maximized or divided vertically (two tall windows). Tiling window managers work very well for this, as does Emacs. Switching between the monitors and different workspaces via the keyboard helps tremendously.
Firefox 4 removing the menu bar is a one-off attack on the same problem. Better to solve it once than require each application to come up with its own fix.
Ask HN: How does HN need to change to prevent its quality members from leaving?
> The only thing I haven't figured out yet is how to stop people from publishing open source clients

Forget about that - someone will create a web interface for the protocol and you're back to square one.
Gotta agree.. I sometimes fall into commenting on or upvoting politics threads, but that's really not what HN is about... a harder line against that stuff would probably help.
Spot on.

There's a lot of current work going on that effectively splits computer vision into multiple parallel tasks for better results but uses previously well known techniques (PTAM is another good example).

As an aside, I read through the paper and it doesn't look like this could track, say, your index finger separately from other fingers if, for a moment, your hand was occluded. This pretty much bars using this exclusively in a Minority Report style interface (you would need hand pose tracking like the stuff Kinect does). Though, I'm just re-iterating your point that this isn't the second coming of computer vision.

That being said, there are some really good ideas here.
In cases where a student can earn academic credit and not just a certificate for the internship, it could be a worthwhile investment. The student has to pay for those credits anyway to graduate, and real-world experience can provide educational benefits unlikely to be gained in a classroom.

If, on the other hand, the university or college does not give genuine academic credit but simply notes it on the transcript AND they charge for that notation, it's likely a bum deal.
Have you considered adding a down vote button like Reddit has? I know you can flag comments above a certain karma level but I think that either giving everyone the option to down vote or having a lower karma threshold to down vote would allow the community to regulate itself.

Just a thought, but it seems to have worked for Reddit. This puts a lot of responsibility on the community to keep the quality of the discussions up, but I think enough people on here care about the quality of the community to help out.
Politics, I'm definitely with you. "Current events", though, is an extremely broad term -- what exactly did you intend it to mean?
A privmsg feature, available to people who cross a karma or karma average feature, that would allow gruseom to tell people offline that their comments are dumb. Sometimes it's good to make an example of a dumb comment, but other times it just begs for an unproductive fight.
Maybe flagged comments could be killed in a similar manner as flagged stories are, rather than just stopping them from getting any further upvotes.
I disagree that the quality is declining. I think you're just suffering a misapprehension of the quality of old.
I do like that idea. I think I tried it a while ago, but users complained that without comment scores it was too hard to figure out what were the most interesting comments in a thread.

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? Would it solve the problem if you could follow other users, and see their comments graphically distinguished in some way?

Another problem is that people use point scores as a guide to voting. It's clear from voting patterns that many if not most users vote not to express approval or disapproval, but to cause the comment to have what they believe is an appropriate number of points. If I didn't display points, people couldn't do that. Perhaps that's not a problem. But if it turned out that that's what voting was for,
then this could break voting, which would in turn break the sorting of comments, which would be a problem now that there are so many.
I was writing an open letter to HN on my blog for this topic, but this now seems a more appropriate place to reply (apology about the style which seems out of place in a comment):

Once upon a time Hacker News was called Startup News, it was a place to share links and discuss between people passionate about startups. Good links and discussions stayed around for days, every aspect of startup life was discussed.

Sadly that time has long gone. As I write this, on the front page of HN there are maybe 4-5 stories out of the top 30 that relate to startup topics.

Articles relevant to startups are being pushed out by generalist tech and programming articles that are better served by the many many subreddits on these topic. While it's open to debate whether these are on-topic on Hacker News or not, HN is far less about startups than it used to be.

Many contributors to HN don't even see it as being about startups anymore, even contributors who've been involved in HN for over a year are talking about it as a tech or programming site. The startup stories that reach the frontpage tend to be on technical topics, the non-startup tech audience of HN now means stories focused on the non-technical aspects of startups such as marketing and raising money make it to the front page far more rarely than they once did.

I remember complaining at one point about the number of stories about A/B testing on the front page. I wish I could complain about that now.

Take a look at Gabriel's Ask YC archive - it was created to address the startup questions that frequently turned up on HN, for many of these topics I can't recall when I last saw them discussed on HN.

There are a hundred social networking sites that serve the tech community from proggit to dzone, what differentiated HN was the focus on the startup community. That focus is dying out, and we're becoming just another tech social news site.

I don't think we can make HN be more about startups again, the audience has changed too much for that, and it wouldn't be fair to the non-startup tech community that's come to rely upon HN.

So instead I'd like propose that HN stays as it is, but pg creates a new HN called Startup News, which has startups at it's heart as HN once did.
The comments start at around 6am April Fool's. I assume it was posted that day... Generally, ridiculous things posted on April Fool's start with "Not an April Fool's joke" if they're not...
I'm an NCSU student, so I'm in the same area, looking at mostly the same jobs. What I found is that most students just aren't willing to go through the work to find a job. They want the jobs to be posted somewhere online, so they can fire off a resume they spent a couple hours making (if that). I actually managed to nab a development / systems administration internship straight out of high school for a company out of Durham, mainly because I met one of the management at the company and just asked about a position. I spent two years working for that company (paid, part-time during the year, full-time over the summer) and then a summer and a semester doing [paid] research at NCSU. This summer I've got an internship lined up with Google.

You're absolutely right that a lot of it is dependent on finding internships early on, but I don't think its necessarily that companies aren't hiring underclassmen (though MS, Google, etc. likely aren't), but rather that a lot of students aren't willing to go the lengths to _find_ the job. Not all of them are posted online. Go to your local PUG/LUG/*UG/2600 meeting, and ask around. Most people there will be willing to talk about one with you if you seem relatively competent and willing to learn what you don't know. Plus, as you said, doing projects in your spare time is a HUGE plus. A lot of the things I end up talking about in interviews are side projects that I've done.

Though I'll put the disclaimer that this is all only applicable to the tech field. Unfortunately, other fields don't have it as nicely as we do.
If your maintaining code on a VAX, you care a tad bit about compile speed.
Sounds like it might lead to abuse. If a comment is -that- bad, it should be worth taking the time to flag it.
The guidelines currently say "if they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off topic". The predicate should be clarified, and the word "probably" removed.
Yeah, pruning and growing random forests (whatever that's formally called)
Heh, the fringe Scottish Socialist Party had a much maligned proposal to instate a wage cap of £250k (approximately $350k), which according to this study actually aligns with the conservative ideal. Just shows how firm a grasp of the statistics people have when it comes to this sort of thing.
Make it invite-only to post threads/comments and quietly associate the inviter with the invited person.
Thank God you've noticed. I seem to recall that you brushed off this observation for quite some time.

One thing I've noticed repeatedly in the online communities that have scaled succesfully (in a cultural sense) is that the founders/owners/admins tend to take a very active role, both proactively by being role models and also by stepping in and settings things straight whenever they feel the community is straying too far from their vision. Reddit is a good example of this. Joel's forums at joelonsoftware, which fostered a very tightly knit entrepreneur community, were also heavily influenced by the omnipresence of the site owner.

Unfortunately this is not an elegant technical hack, just simple hard work on the part of administrators.
Isn't that what downvotes are supposed to be for?
Going after a specific topic misses the point a bit. A general ban on topics that tend to be driven by emotion would work better.
If it interrupted your flow of though enough for you to comment on it, then maybe I should stop doing it.
Get rid of the whole point system. I go to HN for the community, not to collect points. It seems to provide incentives for the wrong behavior, even tho I understand that it was originally intended to do the exact opposite.

A community stands or falls on the quality of the interactions. Therefore to a certain extent, you have to let it thrive or die on its own.

Solely my opinion, but I see points as getting in the way, motivating bad behavior, and not relevant to why I come to HN.
Make voting on comments cost karma. Alternately, make new story submission require at least 100 minimum karma level. I suspect the effect here would be to reduce the number of frivolous and spammy submissions. When more high quality submissions are the topics of conversation, the quality of comments will go up.
Thus ensuring that we don't get spontaneous comments from e.g. the UX guy at Zappos on that story about Zappos. A non-starter, I think.
this is gonna be a hit! It has it all: fun factor, social networking, great UX design
A hard limit on the maximum upvotes a comment can get. Say, 25.
Unfortunately a lot of discussions about technology are driven largely by emotion.
How Being Labelled Smart Affects People
The problem with that is that it's hard to say exactly what counts as politics. E.g. is an article about economic inequality like this one

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2402027

politics? I don't think so. Economic inequality is a very interesting social phenomenon, though it is often written about in a heated/political way.
I'd try to severely decrease total # of comments.

Really bad comments are not the root of the problem. Simply having large number of mediocre comments crowds out and discourages thoughtful discussion from starting at all.

I'd say:

* create some real cost to making comments

* make bad comments disappear/not display at all with time

* make things less democratic -- to encourage good behavior identify users who have this behavior and make this behavior more prominent programmaticly
Something slashdotty -- i.e. qualitative moderation, not just quantitative moderation -- would help. If you had seperate upvote buttons for "amusing" and "informative", this could factor into sorting.
It was certainly more interesting then; I wonder if it's because the community was smaller or because the topics were more focused.

I don't value HN as a resource for entrepreneurship anymore. There are some interesting technical conversations here still; but you can find those all over the place.

(Of course there is still a lot of information of value for entrepreneurs here... it's just buried under the flood of everything else.)
This is exactly why I switched to Chrome.
Rather than making the site invite only, how about some means of differentiating read and write access, i.e. the amount of times you can upvote or submit is tied to your karma.

That way the information is still accessible to everyone, and if someone new has something to interesting to contribute, that info will still surface if it's picked up by vetted users.
I think it would be an interesting experiment to add clearly labeled agree/disagree buttons in addition to upvote/downvote.
I have a 30' which is digitally split in 4 windows with my 13' MBP on the right below side. This means I get 5 nearly identical 1280x800 screens.

With this big screen I need to have my browser default zoom at 125% (which means 1024 in width which is exactly fine for browsing the web)

I really feel how it's slower to do things with just one window (the MBP one), especially developing.
Imagine that a group of good software developers were assigned to pick 10 interns out of a pool of 100 applicants for a role at a Facebook, Google, etc. (substitute any software organization which attracts a great applicant pool). What's the probability that most of the ten chosen will be regarded as top engineers ten years from now? I argue that it's pretty high because raw talent is easily measured by skilled practitioners. One or two might have marginal careers because they're flaky or have other, non-technical issues, but the odds of securing a good intern pool from which to hire are quite high.

Are the skills required to be a good lobbyist, talent manager, etc. so easily measured in young people? An internship program wouldn't be terribly valuable for Google if only 1/10 interns were regarded as potential hires after a Summer of observation. What are the implications of such relative randomness on rational behavior on a firm's part w.r.t. internship programs?
Gut: anything that reduces the number of comment scores shown on a thread will to some extent reduce the number of dumb comments. It's a knob. I suggest you turn it. I'd turn it to 11, but 5 might do nicely.
Create positive and negative moderators but make the roles mutually exclusive.

The positive mods can promote stories and comments beyond normal up-voting and the negative mods do something similar with down-voting/flagging.

People can become 'supermods' based on karma, election, or something more arbitrary.
As with all these things, I think the problem is complex, and has many intertwingled aspects and factors. I have many thoughts on what the problems are, but fewer on how to fix them. In part, I don't understand the mentality, so find it hard to understand why things are thus. I observe, however, that what you need to do is to find a way to "incentivize" the behavior you want.

Upvoting a comment that's mean-spirited, unhelpful, or otherwise of negative value should carry a visible cost. But who makes that decision? You can't rely on the community to do so, because that puts you in the same position. Perhaps you need 10% of your community to be "trusted elders," and they have the right to declare comments to be of negative value. Then any upvotes such a comment accrued, count as negative karma for the upvoter. There might be other, simpler and more visible ways to achieve the same net result.

I know good hackers are interested in many things besides hacking, but "intellectual curiosity" is being interpreted very broadly. Any definition will lead to people playing the lawyer game on the words, so that's a hard one to try to narrow down.

Perhaps bands of karma, expressed as a percentage of the population (or something) could be used to grant and deny more access to features. Making someone's position is the ranking visible will help that be more transparent. The idea would be that higher ranks get to decide if the decisions by lower ranks are right or wrong, and hence those of lower rank can advance if they behave in a manner you choose to reward.

Or something.

These are quick "toss in the air and see what happens" ideas. They won't work, but perhaps suitably clever people on HN can find mutations of them that will. A few ideas were being tossed around here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387873

... although that was more specifically to try to solve the "submission race" problem that jacquesm had identified. But some of those ideas, mated with some of the above, might produce more fit children.
I see a lot of talk in the main post about screen size but nothing about what actually matters which is screen resolution. I just picked up a new Vaio Z series with a 13.1 inch screen for when I am on the road. While it only has a 13.1" screen which would seem pitiful at first glance, it is Full HD resolution (1920x1080) and it's quickly becoming one of my favourite machines to develop on. Now I'm not saying anything about optimal screen size because of course everything needs to be comfortable to the viewer's eyesight... but if you're having productivity discussions then total resolution is the bar to measure by. What size and how many screens that is spread across is mostly a matter of personal ergonomic preferences. (though multiple vs. single screens and the ability to truly separate content probably does have some limited impact as well)
Won't it make it just an echo-chamber that would increase group-think? I like the idea that new people can join and contribute or learn from others without having to first curry favor to get invites.
Keep in mind that there's no report of the processing power required to do this in the video. It very well could be an algorithm that is extremely accurate, but at the expense of many CPU cycles. While it's obvious, remember that for use in games, you have to perform the detection and run the game in realtime. Whether or not this can be done with current hardware is what I'm interested in.
A community can grow only so large before it has to provide some personalization so it is not trying to be everything to everyone.

Reddit has subreddits and you can choose the ones from which stories appear on the front page. HN can start with allowing users to 'frontpage' other users aka whitelisting by showing stories from only these users on the front page. The next logical step is allowing blacklisting. Version 2.0 of this would allow whitelisting and blacklisting of content-sources (sites), in addition to users, so that I could blacklist certain blogs if I wanted to.

This will result in some fragmentation of the community, but in my opinion, it will keep HN interesting for everyone. This may also reduce the need to answer subjective editorial questions such as - we don't allow politics, but is open-source-politics politics? Is coverage of world-changing-elections allowed?
Have comments start at -1.

(Or, better yet, -thread_depth).
That will certainly ensure only the acceleration of the decline. The ecosystem will be isolated and perpetuation of 'preaching to the choir' will ensue.

How would have all of the now-members of both HN and the greater 'community' have stumbled upon this resource if it was invite-only?
A few thoughts

A. "flag" for comments? Whether that just brings them to the editor/moderator's attention, or kills them based on some algorithm, would be an open question.

B. More moderators/editors - drawn from the pool of people who have shown themselves to share the "HN spirit" (or whatever you want to call it), who are empowered to kill stories and/or comments.

And maybe some limits on what new accounts can do? Maybe go so far as requiring new users to lurk for some period of time, before being allowed to post? Or some limit on post / comment frequency, until you've demonstrated some sense of alignment with what's appropriate here?
There is a downvote button - it too has a karma threshold. See: http://i.imgur.com/EBYAe.png
The problem with Microsoft is in this office
The GNU Privacy Handbook does a pretty good job of blending both the how and why of everything.

http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html

The biggest thing to worry about is that you only want the private key on systems you trust. If you put your private key on a USB stick, and use the local library or computer lab, you've already lost the battle. If you're running a totally infected Win95 machine, you've already lost the battle.

Second biggest thing is to make sure you properly generate a revocation certificate, and a backup, and store them in a location you consider secure. (And maybe that secure location is just a shoebox in your bedroom closet unless you're worried about the NSA or something.) Then if you realize you've done something stupid, you can just revoke the key and create a new one.

Other than that, there's not much to screw up if you follow the default settings when creating a key with gpg.

For email, I would also highly recommend using a local MUA that connects to gmail. Most people use Thunderbird + Enigmail, but there are other options. Enigmail also has a pretty good manual that covers both the how and why.

http://enigmail.mozdev.org/documentation/handbook.php.html

The various gpg-related mailing lists are also pretty friendly. They're low-traffic enough that people are always happy to answer basic questions; no RTFM replies.