skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Presumably the name changed to reflect the fact that there are many things unrelated to startups that the founding "hackers" wished to discuss. HN isn't entirely about startups now, in the same way Amazon is not purely about books any more.

You seem to dislike the non-startup material, yet those older members who were around at that time must have liked the discussions sprouting from the "more generalist tech" posts, else the name wouldn't have been changed.

Thus, I reason that it is not the range of topics submitted that is the problem, but the quality of the posts and subsequent comments. I believe the older members valued intelligent discussion on any topic (centered around tech-startups).

I think a solution should concentrate on improving the discussion of topics, promoting those that spark the "best" (for some definition of "best") conversations. Therefore I suggest:

More liberal use of the downvote button by those that have the ability (over 500).
Number and score of comments should play a (larger?) factor in ranking stories.
More aggressive moderation of "off topic" or vacuous submissions and comments.
Idea HN: OneNote for the Web?
I think Microsoft OneNote is one of the best tools for personal productivity. It can be used as a wiki (linking pages), add checkbox and other "tags" dynamically.

Why nobody is doing a similar tool for the web? (except Microsoft).
I believe many are using OSX or Linux and didn't experienced OneNote themselves.
This might just be me, but isn't this result obvious?
And therein lies the problem. As HN and Y Combinator itself have grown, as well as the general startup climate, HN has become increasingly startup focused to the point where many would describe it as "for startup founders" rather than "for hackers". And there are a lot of new users who like it that way (or assume it's supposed to be that way). But then you have the old guard like tptacek who would like nothing more than to see HN filled with only hard tech/science posts. That's a gap that isn't going to be filled with any algorithmic tweak or new comment layout.
That could work, actually. Instead of focusing on discouraging bad comments, maybe the answer is to promote good ones. Plus I have some code I could use for that.
No he's not wrong, you're debugging faster while everything else is the same, that means you're more productive.

You always need to debug, that's a fact.
Penalizing comments is also a more graceful solution than invite-only, because I doubt Jason Fried or Joel Spolsky care too much about their karma score here; the only people this dissuades are people who are commenting to game.
Maybe a refinement of this idea: show me the precise number of votes on my comments, and a vague log(score) or good/medium/bad grade for everything else.
Apologies for interjecting. I would like to make it mandatory to comment when down-voting. In addition, if that comment is down-voted, then the original down-vote is restored.

So, rather than trying to weed out poor up-votes, leave it to the community to manage the down-voting. Thus, a quality counter argument will be safe from down-voting and, hopefully, out-vote the poor quality post.

But if there's one thing I've learned from a lifetime in tech, it's that attempts at adjusting behaviour by indirect means always leads to unexpected behaviour.
I think I have a simple fix:

When you hover the up arrow button a tooltip should say "This comment ADDS to the discussion" and on a down "This comment DOESNT ADD to the discussion". Too often I think people just click the arrows based on (1) the username (2) "oh ya I agree, I hate that too!".

Up/down voting should be an extension of the community's ability to assess whether someone's opinion is adding to the community thought process. We often forget that (I do myself).
It's interesting to argue that you should 16px fonts because that's the browser default size and browser vendors must have had a good reason, then in the next section argue that the default line-height is too small and needs to be increased. Are the browser defaults only logically chosen when they agree with your particular thesis?

The browser defaults are set the way they are to maximize compatibility with previous versions of browsers. The 16px font size is probably a relic from Mosaic or Netscape 1.0.
Well, we want something expensive to discourage people. How about we make it $100, or you can solve a problem in Lisp. Alternatives for both the cash-poor and time-poor.
I would strongly prefer an HN that only had startup posts. I think this part of the thread is going off the rails, though. The problem is, "how do you improve comment quality on HN". We can probably avoid debating the premise of the question, and just focus on the (plentiful) ideas themselves.
Phone != Laptop.

It says he's running on a "Intel Core 2 Duo CPU 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM" according to his website. As a good rule of thumb, computer vision runs about an order of magnitude slower (10x) on a phone (like an iPhone) than on a desktop/laptop.

Also - a crappy webcam actually makes things computationally easier because there's less data to deal with. In a lot of computer vision algorithms the first step is to take input and resize it to something that can be computed on in a reasonable time frame.
How about weighted votes based on karma? After a certain karma threshold, your vote value is doubled. The system could also have multiple levels. For e.g. at 2k karma, when you upvote/downvote a post, it gains/loses 2 points. At 5k karma, 3 points and so on. Or maybe the user can choose his vote value, limited by his maximum vote value.
Perhaps we can also use the average karma somewhere in this equation.

Another suggestion is the ability to downvote submissions after a certain karma threshold. We can use the weighted vote system here as well.

Yet another suggestion is 12 hours/24 hours/1 week bans.

Another problem that I admit facing is the unwillingness to post something with the fear of it not getting upvoted and thus affecting my average karma, even though it might have added value to the discussion.
When I'm working on Windows I feel the same way, the way that two monitors lets me easily have two tasks going at once is really nice. When I have better window management facilities available though I find I prefer the flexibility of one big window. This is true even of the default GNOME window manager, Metacity, with its ALT-click behavior - but its even more true when I can install a tiling window manager like Awesome or XMonad.
I know you're talking about comments, but I did a quick snapshot of the front page and color coded each submission by it's category

blue = hardcore hacker stuff

turquoise = industry-related light reading

biege = acceptable entrepreneur/political commentry

red = fluff, stuff we could do without

black = meta (eg. this thread)

http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=scw684&s=7

That's a pretty healthy mixture if you ask me. Only about 10-15% or the articles are unworthy of HN, and even that's debatable. The majority is technical stuff, with a few valuable pieces on business/economics in general sprinkled in.

So although some people seem to think the quality of comments is declining, I still believe HN provides phenomenal quality in its capacity as 'news for hackers.'

I'm not sure if changing the rules will do much good; it might have the opposite effect. I think there's pro-active measures we can take which might prove best, like: finding interesting people and inviting them to HN. Quora would be a good recruitment ground.

One last point, I think the role of the founder/leader is very important to online communities. I've been in other forums which went to absolute shit once the 'pg-equivalent-person' ditched them in favour of Twitter. More essays from Paul Graham, perhaps ones talking about online behaviour/ethos, would be a big benefit :-)
That could be worked around, contributing could be invite only, but also allow a non-invited contributor to post but their post would be collapsed (or at a negative score) by default until an invited contributor voted it up.
Allow commenters themselves to publicly flag their own comments to prevent them from accruing karma. Call it the "sincerity" flag. Actually, this is my #1 top feature request for HN, period.
"If a comment is truly mean, a personal attack on another community member, delete the comment and subtract from the user all the karma that the comment gained."

Even better, deduct everybody's vote on it from their karma. So downvoters get +1, and upvoters get -1.
Add a mechanism that encourages people to think before upvoting, like a karmic bank account. Maybe someone could upvote twice for every once they were upvoted. It could reduce the common reflex of upvoting a short/witty comment; with only so many upvotes to give, you'd want to "invest" in comments that really earned it.
If comments cost karma it would lead to less discussion, which I think would lead to better discussion.

Popular comments will make more karma than they cost, so users will still be encouraged to leave comments that will become popular.

It seems that a system like this will be even more sensitive to what community considers popular. For this to work well you'll need to make sure that comment being popular correlates with it being good. To improve on that you'd may need to further reduce inefficiencies (e.g. time-of-day vs popularity) and maybe implement un-democratic measures if "voice of the community" still doesn't correlate with good.

I'd split test this system (and any other change like this). Have some posts that have these new rules in place (this should be publicly visible) and some that don't. See how this affects the results.
1. Set up a Twitter-like directed graph of users, so users can provide HN with people they'd like to "follow". This graph need not be public.

2. When someone upvotes or downvotes, all followers of that person upvote or downvote the same submission or comment by proxy. If a person follows multiple people some of whom upvote and some downvote, or upvotes or downvotes himself, then cancel their proxy vote. This proxy voting is the sole purpose of the follow graph, eg. "I want to vote the same way tptacek, cperciva and pg do".

Perhaps publish a leaderboard of top followed people and their voting history to try and avoid a Digg situation.

Perhaps limit the number of people one person can follow. This would help with performance as well.

Perhaps the number of proxy votes would need to affect the score of a comment or submission logarithmically instead of linearly.

Edit: there may need to be a minimum level of karma needed to proxy vote to avoid sockpuppets. Perhaps limit it to active accounts, too.
Come on… though I don't use Firefox that much other than testing compatibility ever since Chrome was stable enough for daily use, but FF4 is significantly faster than 3. Your page loads in <1sec in both Chrome and FF4 on my machine.
Hmm, can you elaborate?
Okay, I've given this a little bit of thought and think that like many problems, game mechanics can be applied to control human behavior here.

HN Karma can be retooled to give people a certain number up/downvotes as well as a rate of regeneration. Perhaps new users will get 3 upvotes a day and no downvotes. Upvotes need to be rebranded so that users understand that they are not the mechanisms of popularity contests or flame wars.

This is my vision, feel free to take from it what you will:
"HN tokens are for you to use to make this is most intelligently crowd-curated site known to the English language.If you find a post or comment that helps you to solve a problem, see another point of view, or expand your thinking, drop a token in to promote it. However, if you are found among those using your tokens to add fire to flame wars or to reward comments that have no creative or intellectual value, your token regeneration rate will be reduced. Choose wisely."
Seems to have missed iPod Touch sales, and not noticed that Comscore is U.S. only (Android's global share is roughly similar, but Apple's is much lower).

If you fix those issues then both should be about 33 million sales in the last quarter, but Apple can go a bit higher, or lower depending on what you think iPod Touch sales are (Apple doesn't break them out). It would be interesting to see the pie chart with accurate figures (I believe the PC sales are just a guess too).
Past N votes in a day, a vote should cost a karma point.
I agree. Part of me thought it was a "clever" attempt at SEO. to pair each of their publications with this scam topic. Or was the author just trying to be "cheeky" ?
when does a browser become a platform? The lines are getting blurry.
The markets are neither 100% efficient nor 100% noisy. There is a happy medium somewhere in between.

An indirectly related, but telling anecdote:
In their financial models, M&A bankers are often told to ignore stock prices 24 hours prior to a deal's announcement. Insider trades artificially raise the price during this time.
I think that part of the solution may be to introduce a feature that would give users that reach certain karma thresholds the ability to give more and more points to a comment when upvoting.

For example: a newbie would only be able to assign one point to a comment he's upvoting, but a user over a certain threshold could assign two points. The user that has even more karma (and is over the next threshold) could assign three points and so on. Users should be able to decide how many points they want to give to each comment.

The same should apply to downvotes. Prominent HN users should be able to make their downvotes "hurt more" if they want to.

Also, these thresholds could be used for "downvoting penalties". For example, a newbie would lose 4 points when downvoting, but a user over the first threshold would only lose three and so on. Users with karma above one of the thresholds would no longer lose karma when downvoting.
Maybe give high karma users the power to merge/suggest/link this stories, as Stack Overflow does, and make HN moderate itself better.
Zoey: a JQuery Mobile alternative built using zepto.js
I would strongly prefer we not add features that make HN more echo-chamber-y. For instance, I like John Gruber's writing a lot, but I'm not so much a fan of every one of his posts being on the front page.
Yes, that's the inconsistency I'm talking about.
If type annotations are fully respected that programmers code it like a statically-typed language (no type change for a variable in scope), will it be possible to AOT compile it?
One feature of Slashdot that I did like when I still used it was the option to sort comments by point value, which usually meant excluding everything below a +4. Great time-saver, for those who are not interested in scrolling through long threads. For those who have more time or interest in reading through the discussions, they still see everything.
Forrst is does not require a Gravatar and how does the use of Gravatar in an way resemble a cult?
I've seen this feature in other communities and, given enough time, comments get +10 or 0 in a 0..10 scale. So in the end it's basically the same.
Make flags public, and their outcomes. "16 people flagged this comment." "16 people flagged this comment, and it was tagged uncivil. User was banned for 2 days." "3 users incorrectly flagged this comment, and have lost flagging privileges for 2 days."

alex is right that automatically escalating based on #flags is a blunt instrument. You'd need to perform the escalation manually, you'd need multiple people doing it, and you'd need the decision-maker to attach their name to it ("kn0thing marked this uncivil") so the watchers can be watched in a lightweight manner.
Ok so the fact that he has produced this himself, using off-the-shelf commodity laptops etc is really great.

But this technology doesn't seem new to me - technology already exists for surveillance cameras in police and military helicopters to track an object like a car and keep it in vision as the helicopter turns and maneuvers.

Likewise, facial recognition - both statically and within a video stream - isn't new either.

Not taking anything away from the guy, but just wondering what it is I'm not getting that is new/amazing with this particular implementation?
Wachovia Paid Trivial Fine for $400 Billion of Money Laundering
> If comments cost karma it would lead to less discussion, which I think would lead to better discussion.

This would probably work well if combined with the private messaging function mentioned elsewhere on the thread.
Allow us to mark certain accounts as "friends" or "favorites". Then on every comment and article, display points originating from "favorites". Like "77 points by pg / 15 points from friends." This preserves the democratic aspect of the site, while giving users valuable information they can use to skip boring content.
The parent to your comment, my original comment, is currently scored at 1. I would like to push a button to make 1 the ceiling score for that comment. I would actually like a button to make 1 the ceiling score for all my comments, too.
I'd need about $30mm. At that amount, I can have an income above the US median off t-bills alone. Having said that, I'm sure if and or when I actually have that kind of money, I probably wouldn't be so conservative with it, but that's the baseline.
HN is beyond the point where you can improve comments with small adjustments to the comments or karma system. History (on other sites) shows this. The problem is sheer size.

There is only one real solution, which is to reduce size.

You can do that by closing new signups, which is a little bit like tying rope around a girls feet to prevent them from growing. Not great, and probably leading to rot.

Or you can do that by fragmenting up the conversations. Reddit has the rather primitive subreddit system. It works somewhat. A better system is Twitter's follow or Facebook's friend systems.

In either case, if you do this, the result would be something quite different from the old HN. The uproar would be great, and lots of people would leave.

The alternative is the slow death of online communities with scale. I just don't think that tweaks in the comment-karma system are going to solve this problem.

Good luck!
It sounds like Hacker News needs a reason for being. Who is the audience? What is the value proposition? Shouldn't the needs of the audience and the "problem" HN is solving be the answer to this question?

For me, I came to HN for:

* A free, online location where people can exchange ideas and commentary relevant to tech startups, that welcomes newcomers and experienced alike.

Perhaps it's different for others:

* A place to collect points to boost one's ego and sense of self-worth in front of peers.

* A paid site for members of a small community to exchange topics in a way closed to outsiders

* A place for those who have earned a role as experts or taste-makers to evaluate and/or judge the ideas of others.

Looks like there's no consensus, hence the reason for HN's decline.
Many people are suggesting replacing numeric point totals. That could help, but let me throw out another idea. Why would someone write "You wrote a 1,000 line Blub program? Was it 500 getters and 500 setters?" Simple, they seek to build community reputation/acclaim by coming across as clever, even if it means being mean. But it's easy to take that incentive away. I propose leaving everything the way it is, except two changes: hide all usernames (make visible upon hover/click) and reset visible karma points daily. Truly interesting/insightful comments would still rise up, but with even more clarity as people would be reading for content before casting their vote, and incentive to be "clever" while adding no value would be gone.

Edit: I like my later thoughts on this better (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404267)
Not really. I wrote a web app for navigating /searching the code base, and serving up syntax highlighted code. That with issh and safari give me everything I would want while pairing. On top of that, the form factor is very small, the viewing angle is excellent (which makes it simple to share what I find with my pair), battery life is great, and the one app at a time thing is actually a plus (I would probably be too distracted with a full laptop). Might be a YMMV thing, but for me it's pretty much the perfect pairing device
Interesting. I was under the impression that MediaTemple was only for web hosting.
Yup, we do (I work for Mozilla). We're glad that have this strong competition, it makes for a better market and better products for the users to choose from.

Note that Firefox nightlies are already ~10% faster than Firefox 4. Performance continues to be an important part of our development efforts.
A guidelines link in the header would be a good idea.
I used to be a big contributor to this site, but for the last months I've found that my interest in the site has waned.

I've thought a lot about why, since I used to really enjoy HN - now it's just one of a few newssites I visit every day. It's hard to quantify but here are my reasons and my take at the decline:

1) The obvious one: Signal to noise ratio in the comments is way down. The problem is twofold - there are both more bad comments, and the ones that are good aren't necessarily voted to the top. This makes it harder for me to find the nuggets that would be shown at the top of every comments page a year or two ago. As others have pointed out it sound easy but is in fact a very hard problem to solve.

2) The interaction in the comments is less interesting. I used to have great arguments in the comments. Sometimes I would convince someone of my point of view sometimes it was the other way around, sometimes there just wasn't agreement to be found. But it was always interesting and civil, and I very often learned something new. Engaging in, and watching others have interesting discussions was for me one of the main things I loved about HN. It's like when you go to a dinner party and get to sit next to this incredily interesting guy that is exceptionally insightful and has some really interesting things to say. The conversation leaves a mark on you.

3) I often find that the comments I make that I personally find insightful or interesting don't get a lot of upvotes, while the ones that state something obvious or funny get more upvotes. This isn't encouraging me to interact with people here on an intellectually interesting level. If others do this as well, which I suspect they will, then it's extremely degrading to the discourse in the comments. I often find that I don't bother to write up a response to something because I know won't get a lot of attention. Sometimes my points are totally missed.

4) Maybe I've outgrown the site. Many concepts that were new to me when I joined HN are now familiar, and many discussions have already been had. RiderofGiraffes describes it well in the linked comment.

I owe a lot to HN, and I really want it to succeed, so I stick around and hope that things will change. But for now it's from a less engaged position.
I should also be allowed to pick at least 1 of the startups in each YC batch.
I'm just answering your question:

Since when does EasierDebugging = BetterProductivity?

Since forever. Because you're definitely need to do debugging.

He's not comparing programmer A & B. He's trying to improve himself via various factors, and screen size is one of them.