skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"1) The obvious one: Signal to noise ratio in the comments is way down."

One possible solution: depend more on credentials, and give people who have useful things to say / special background knowledge priority. Weigh their votes more and give them karma bonuses. Someone from a YC startup might be given more weight than someone who opines on large-scale, amorphous social problems from a generic position ("outsourcing: economic doom or natural phenomenon? Let's flame!").

I think the big thing, more than anything else, is the learning aspect. We tend to learn more from people who know a lot of stuff and have unusual experiences or abilities. Those people tend to cluster, then less smart people cluster around them, eventually leading toward decline. One way to counter that: identify those people and give them a louder voice. I don't think there's a technical way to do this that won't be gamed, unfortunately, which leads to a major scaling problem.

I mostly try to follow this rule: I mostly comment on areas related to schools / teaching / universities (I'm a grad student in English lit at the University of Arizona), books, or literature. I try to make comments that are as rooted as fact in possible; for example, when someone a while ago said there were no laptops with IPS screens anymore, I left a link to an Anandtech review of one and didn't say much else. Problem is, I don't have any good way of systematizing that or rewarding it except on an individual level.
> If comments cost karma it would lead to less discussion, which I think would lead to better discussion.

I disagree. I think it would lead to a mix of bland groupthink and fashionable rebellion, with no room inbetween for the merely thoughtful.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, limit the number of comments and submissions per user per day... See discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2242505
Xcode 3.x is still available for free from Apple and will work with MacPorts and Homebrew without issues.
This is basically an extension of limiting the display of negative votes to -4. I like it.

Perhaps there should be a "best comment in thread" indicator or something as well?
Music Promotion
Display percentages instead of points relative to sub-tree total. This way points are hidden but relevance stays intact. Then use colors instead of numbers to indicate "good" sub-trees so that people have to convert hexadecimal values to extract the relative karma. Then add a hidden karma-boost mode where a up-voting "short term good commenter" indicates the presence of another "short term good commenter". Add another view called "contested" where down voted links can get a second chance. This might reduce group-think and content-shaping. Let "short term good commenter" double vote on contested links. Add a content merge option to reduce or group duplicates.

I think people are mean because they get down voted a lot by people who "play" HN like WOW and everyone non-omg-erlang is a target. And lots of people here think KARMA == FREE TRAFFIC SPELL. Because spending most of your life on HN showcases how busy you are making money. Although.. nobody will ever read this comment because the thread is already two hours old and the in-crowd has already started writing meta posts that will take over the front page two hours from now.

Or maybe this is all about.. hello TechCrunch readers !
Forgive me, I didn't mean to imply that your suggestion doesn't have merit. It does.

I just think that it's far too easy to game.

Another big issue with comment quality, of course, is in the general vagueness of it all. Jokes, for example, are almost always discouraged. Almost. On some occasions, it's quite appropriate.
The main issue seems to be that comment quality is decreasing, so you could always try my honeypot idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2352247 :)
Could you expand on that a bit? How is it not a solution? If party A will not pay for your labor but party B will, you would choose to work for part B of course and party A would be rightfully deprived of skilled labor because they are not willing to pay for it. What could be wrong with this situation?
Multitasking And User Interface in 1982
I bought a Mac this semester, mainly for use for general university study. OS X is great, but Evernote is nothing compared to OneNote, and I've considered installing Windows on Boot Camp just for OneNote.
The problem with this is new users. When you join the site, you have 0 karma, and so would go negative if you posted a comment (assuming, of course, that you can go negative. I'd rather not experiment with that).

Of course, pg could make new users come in with 10 or so karma, just to get them started.

Now that I think a bit more about it, this could be a really good idea. It would limit new user's ability to comment and influence things until they have gained community approval of their comments and thoughts. And if they don't get that approval... too bad. If they aren't adding anything worthy of some upvotes, they are adding noise, which detracts from the experience of everyone else.
I'm fairly new here, but I've been in a lot of different internet communities for several years now. This seems to happen to every major growing internet community and maybe this is a way to both filter out the bad content and encourage the good content.

What if user's had the option of investing karma into a submission/comment? If a user wants to comment or send a submission then they have to spend some of their karma points in order for other people to see it. This would bring the submission/comment more default points but would be negative points toward the submitter. That means it will appear higher on the page dependent on the amount of points they invest in the post. When/if a submitter's post is upvoted enough to pass the amount he invested, the submitter would gain karma.

I think this would work better because right now people can basically post what they want without worrying about their karma going down very much. This would do two things, firstly it would reduce the karma inflation, and secondly it would encourage higher-quality submissions and discussions.

I originally said this here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403085, but I think this would be a better place to say it.
I've run vanilla FF, but not for any significant period of time. At this point, browsing without at least ABP, LastPass, and Pentadactyl is damn near impossible for me because I've become so dependent on them.
For whoever misses part 1:

http://www.bestinclass.dk/index.clj/2009/09/scala-vs-clojure...
I understand that it might come across as mean...but that doesn't change that it is the truth.

I think it is fair to say that Matasano is well known on HN - based on your valuable contributions to the community.

That is also why it was so disappointing to me - who has watched you add value to the community over the years - to see how you handled a seemingly 'innocuous' plug.

The modus operandi for dealing with those things is downvote and maybe one comment. But you not only likely downvoted but made MANY comments. Constantly attacking the guy.

It was clear that there was something else below the surface. I just didn't know what. I thought that perhaps you guys might have had beef or perhaps the OP might have been a known troll or something, but nothing in his history would indicate that he was trolling. He seemed to be legit.

So it was only when I looked at your profile that I was reminded of your affiliation with his competitor that it jumped out at me.

It was as if Bill Gates was here criticizing someone else for plugging their own OS - because it was 'inappropriate', when it was fully appropriate.

So I apologize if my calling it out offended you, but your conduct offended me and the sensibilities of this community.

I would be doing as much disservice to the community, if I sat on the sidelines and didn't say anything.
I feel that OneNote has some specific key elements like the active "tags". It's also a good idea to integrate part of the document with other sources (like your contacts, or online spreadsheets).

In the past I felt that Google Sites (ex JotSpot) would follow that route but it seems it's now in the limbo.
He is absolutely right. The US should leverage the Great Lakes, Panama, Gatun.
Paul, could you please delete this account when you get a chance? Thanks.
I think you're reading too much into it. Maximization have existed since the 90s, Unity just makes it more efficient in its use of vertical screen space.
I used to use RimuHosting before I switched totally over to AWS because that is what customers wanted to use, so I wanted to be on the same platform for my own projects.

RimuHosting always provided very good support, and I think that they are much less expensive than Rackspace, so you might want to check them out.
Plenty of good suggestions here. I just want to add one thing: I've been here since the very early days and still think the site is great.

Yeah, it's become a much bigger community and there are more of every kind of post (good/bad/ugly). Overall it's still a great site and it has been successfully maintained.

So please do tighten things up some, but avoid any drastic change for now. The system is working pretty damn well.
A final thought: If you don't discriminate between the actions of the vast majority, and the actions of those identified as being aligned with your desired intentions for the site, nothing will work. I can probably "prove" that.

I think any solution will require the identification of individuals whose actions are "more trustworthy," and giving them greater weight, or more powers.

Anything else can and will be swamped by the majority, whose intentions you have no control over, and no reason to trust.
"and why perhaps generalist programmers should stay far, far away from this stuff."

Could I adjust that to say "generalist programmers should stay at least enough in touch with this stuff to know how badly they'll screw it up on their own"?

I've had _many_ heated discussions with inexperienced devs who don't understand just how much you need to know (and how much you need to know that you don't know) before you can start ignoring the simple advice "SSL for data on the move, GPG for data at rest".
The thing about elite prestigious clubs is that a large portion of the discussion and activity inside the club turns out to be about membership -- who wants it, to whom we should give it, who is unworthy of it, how worthiness should be decided, and how awesome we folks inside the club are compared to all those folks who aren't inside the club.

(Or at least, that's what I assume it's like -- I don't know, I've never been invited into any elite prestigious clubs...)

Even if you say "Oh, it's just a time requirement", what are you gonna do if Big Name Smart Person shows up wanting to comment? Surely you're going to let them in. So now you have an elite line and an unwashed line and you're arguing about who should be in the elite line.
Yep, I'm sure he isn't. I don't doubt that you could optimize this algorithm to run on a phone but that takes an insane amount of effort and expertise and is a feat in and of itself. The word lens guys, for example, spent about a year porting from an optimized C implementation on i386 to ARM for the iPhone - they even initially used the GPU but decided that the overhead of shuffling data between buffers wasn't worth the advantage gained by the iPhone's measly GPU (which only had 2 fragment shaders at the time I think).

Also, completely agree on how camera blur would worsen the accuracy of said algorithm, I was trying to point out that it would run faster on a lower quality camera (with the caveat that it might not work nearly as well).
Sorry about the late reply. That's a creative idea. At first blush a defense of these seems equivalent in the sense that both are somewhat "stochastic" defense mechanisms - throw up a wall of obstructions and hope something collides.
What's interesting is that we all KNOW what the answer to the problem is, but no one is going to go out on a limb and say it. So let me do so - HN needs a paid, full time, editor who will go through the submissions not to approve of what he/she likes (though you could go with a council of three if you're really worried about that), but to make sure they are real links to real articles - and that have the time to do the research to insure that the article is what it claims it is about, and hasn't been posted 20 times in the last week under slightly different names.

I always found the boards I enjoyed best back when I ran a C-64 BBS (yes, that was a BBS running ON a C-64 with a 1200 baud modem and two floppy drives) were the ones with appropriately benevolent "dictators" who used a light touch to keep things real and on track. I can't say I've seen anything on the internet to convince me that there's been a notable improvement on such.
Every article from techcrunch and about techcrunch should get an automatic ranking penalty. Seriously. Techcrunch occasionally posts an article that's useful and warrants not banning them completely, but I don't think the community would lose anything by not having the average techcrunch article that gets posted here.
What site is that? I'm curious.
1) Provide an api (or release a dataset) and let people experiment with new ranking schemes.

2) The influence of your votes on ranking could be correlated to your relative importance in the community. You could do this with a simple PageRank where nodes are users and edges are votes.
The point of avoiding political discussions here is to avoid flamewars, sensitive controversial topics, etc., but I think this is pretty uncontroversially bad.
> You have to speak to gain footing.

I suspect that this is true, however. The earlier a comment is made, the more time it has to accrue upvotes before readers move on. I suspect there would be measurable correlation between the time of posting and the ultimate score of comments.
Not really relevant in your case but I found giving a talk a good option :)

After I gave a talk at an unconference I ended up with a queue of about a dozen people wanting to talk to me.
I think psawaya, boundlessdreamz and akkartik are on the right track.

To use a person anecdote, when I come to HN I immediately look to the top. I have come to expect good stories up on top, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that sentiment.

This being a likely user behavior, you could game that behavior by putting 5 or so of the newest stories in a thinly bordered box, above the normal top stories. That way when people go looking for the top stories, they see the new stories, and are more likely to read and comment on the interesting ones.

This will preserve the normal UI of the site, with minor UX changes, while giving exposure to each story as it comes in. If I were to guess, most of the good stories that come in and languish do so because of a lack of exposure. I'm willing to bet that most people don't look at the newest page very often, expecting others to upvote the good stories onto the frontpage for them.
Nice. Orchestra does something similar for PHP apps.

http://orchestra.io/
How about only upvoting comments of at least DH4 [1]?

Comments that state their ranking in your disagreement hierarchy are allowed to be upvoted above a threshold (say 5 karma points) if these comments are at least DH4. The remaining comments are questions, clarifications, suggestions, or plain old mean and/or dumb comments; they would remain below the karma threshold.

You could add an optional DH tag to each new comment and only enforce the threshold rule in an alternative "view" of the HN site (until you are happy with the results).

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Make a graph containing edges from each user to the comments they voted for, and from each comment its author. Then run something like PageRank on it and show the resulting ranks of both comments and users.

It would help with comment quality because it would make people compete for approval from high-quality users.
What about giving some fraction of the karma that the original submitter receives to the early upvoters to try and incentivize people to read the new page?
One way around this could be through badges (a la Stack Overflow). You could automatically get badges based on average comment karma and so on, instead of tying your contributions to the HN community to a mere number.

That way, you're rewarded when you contribute meaningful, valuable comments, plus from a reader's point of view, your comment will still have 10+ votes.
When you make a comment there's a tickbox which you can untick so it doesn't go to your stream.
What would happen if people could see both the upvotes and the downvotes on a given comment, rather than just its total karma score? I've used sites (not social news) that worked like that, and I've found that e.g. seeing +6/-0 on one of my posts is more satisfying than seeing +15/-4. If you implemented downvote visibility I think the overall effect would be to discourage comments that get lots of downvotes. (The current policy, in contrast, encourages any comment that'll get a net positive karma score.)

I'm pretty sure that on the whole that would be a very good thing. Downvote visibility would certainly discourage dissent, which sucks. But I think the kinds of posts it would most strongly discourage are, in order, mean comments, stupid comments, and contentless (e.g. snide) comments -- which are exactly the things that have been dangerously proliferating recently.

And I don't even think it would much reduce the expression of minority opinion; there's a certain pride that comes with dissenting that makes it tolerable or even enjoyable when other people disagree with you. Whereas when you make a cheap joke, being able to see all the people who found it stupid or crass is a major buzzkill.
Have you considered Reddit's 'best' ranking for comments?

http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...

"""
Most of the time, you won't notice that there's anything obviously different (it doesn't affect threading or anything -- don't worry!), but it should improve the quality of the top comments immensely.
"""
Just based on observations, not numbers: Any member can upvote and HN is more popular. There will be more upvotes to be distributed among comments. Early comments seem to be receiving more upvotes than late comments, regardless of the community. So, unqualified comments will be receiving more and more upvotes.

Did raising downvote limit to 500 made any difference in unfair downvoting? If so, giving upvoting to more qualified people will also solve this for some time, means we can focus on measuring the qualification.

Maybe we should be able to mark individual comments as unfairly upvoted. Higher unfairly upvoted scores might decrease the value of future upvotes of voters on that comment.
Perlmonks does this, and based on your total karma you are given a higher daily limit to spend. Works quite well.
Yes. Simple karma = democracy = power in numbers. That worked when the majority were exemplary. That's no longer the case, therefore democracy now works against the site. The solution is to equalize by giving asymmetric power to the exemplary.
That's actually a great idea!
As a Michigander, anyone that wants to divert Great Lakes waters is looking for a fight. Those lakes are Michigan.

Also, the Michigan militia.
Hierarchical menus help with app discoverability by showing all the apps the system has to offer.
Pick as many active users whose judgment you trust as you can find, train a Bayesian classifier on their votes, up and down, and use that to score the voting patterns of users. Set ignore for the ones with the worst scores. Even if it turns out not to help much, at least you'll have had some fun doing it.

Also, there's currently nothing reminding users of the ideals you want them to uphold just before they submit a comment -- i.e., right next to the submit button. It never hurts to ask.
Face tracking is a remarkable well solved problem these days.

I have only a vague understanding of the math behind how it works, yet I'm very successfully using it in an art project I'm playing with. An afternoon's Googling found me the OpenCV plugins for Processing and some face detection examples, and I've got a prototype that really disturbs my girlfriend - I call it "Death Ray" for extra creepiness factor[1] - but I've got a infra-red capable camera mounted on a pair of servos to steer it, and another pair of servos aiming a low power laser. An Ardunio driving the servos and switching that laser, with Processing just "magically" calling OpenCV for face detection in the video stream - _all_ the "heavy lifting" has been done for me - viva le open source!

[1] The thing that _really_ creeps the girl out is when I sit it all on top of the TV, and have it find faces watching the tv and paint "predator style aiming dots" onto peoples foreheads...
If I could have understood with that much additional information, I wouldn't have asked in the first place.
Better Projects: Who approved the requirements for Google +1?
On the website he claims it's a fairly standard dual core setup and you can see the number of frames per second in the video. I noticed at one point it was staying around 15fps. It may not work at this point for an FPS (Especially because it would have to be done in conjunction with graphics and other game-related processes), but it would likely be fine with other less fast-paced games.
The trouble with "leveraging" the Great Lakes is that all but Lake Michigan are shared with Canada. Lake Ontario, for example, is pretty much split down the middle. 9+ million Canadians rely on that lake as cities like Toronto, Hamilton, Kingston and Mississauga are all on the lake. Would Canadians sit still while the US started draining off a resource so critical as their water?
Perhaps make it so that posting a comment actually costs karma (maybe based on your comment karma average for some subset of users with low averages) making people only comment when they are sure they are adding value. This makes it hard for new users to get started though.

Edit: appears I'm not the only one that suggested something like this. searched the page for "cost karma" and found a few comments.
Not being narrowed to computer things, I am happy to up this post. I love coding and start ups but need to keep it in perspectives. These get sense out in the world which i have to understand to better serve. Love,
> I've generally found a strong correlation between forum quality and the difficulty of gaining admission.

There's a well-research phenomenon that people believe that a group is more valuable if it was harder for them to become a member. It pops up everywhere from YC to skull & bones to young men being ritually injured in the deserts of central Australia.