skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Extracting a requirement from the question, you have

Define bad comment : A comment which has either or both of the properties 'mean' and 'dumb' and is 'massively upvoted.'

Define Hacker News Health : The ratio of non-bad to bad comments.

In previous systems this function has been addressed by moderation whereby a speaker for the culture has the authority to remove comments deemed to be 'bad' and thus by gardening the experience make it more 'good' for the participants. Not a system that scales well.

I see a number of comments "Is this just another Reddit?" which suggests that from a culture perspective there are immigrants from other groups who bring a different definition of 'interesting' which has enough support from the group to prevent them from being pruned early.

That suggests an experiment.

Add east west buttons to comments, and perhaps topics as well. Notionally the value of 'east' is 'more like Hacker News' and the value of west is 'more unlike Hacker News'. Let readers vote on what they see as being more or less what they expect to see. Track their 'east/west' karma (perhaps we could call it there 'wings' with a nod to left-wing and right-wing).

One could imagine then creating a 'fog' effect much like trending topics are moved to the top of the page we could move top left topics to the top of the page and top right topics to a new page. In the ideal world people would self select which page they were more interested in, and HackerNews could in fact develop a community much like Reddit algorithmically with their own start page and their own high karma posters.

Could provide an interesting space to explore if nothing else. Probably a publishable paper in the results if someone were so inclined to go there.
Completely experimental - I'm trying to do this "by hand" as a learning experience. I'd be interested if you would tell me if this works:

* http://www.solipsys.co.uk/rss.xml

Cheers!
It's still not moot, because if as a company you have hired both Programmer A and Programmer B and give them dual monitors, you are still saving money (no matter how different their productivity).

Also - Programmer A will work for you only if you give them the best tools for the job - and that includes dual or large monitors. Otherwise you'll be stuck with Programmer B, and productivity hindered by debugging over a single monitor...

:-)
Childhood Dreams
Make voting transparent. Provide access to who has voted a comment up or down.

The community will act differently if they know others can see their behavior. Then again this may have negative effects.

I think that in general I'd be more thoughtful when voting comments up or down if I knew others could see.
This leads to an interesting question that I've been wondering about lately. But first some background.

One hacker that I work with is currently unemployed. He is absolutely brilliant and could easily land an incredibly good job at basically anywhere he wanted. He's an expert in many widely-demanded but under-supplied abilities, such as reverse engineering.

But he doesn't take a job. After college, he worked for a few years at a tech company, then quit. Why? Because he could pay for his cheap apartment, food, and internet access using interest on his investments and the periodic small contract. To him, having a place to stay where he can play video games and hack on cool projects was "living comfortably".

Now to me.

Over the past few years, I've gone from having practically no money (~$2000 total savings over an entire childhood) to having more than I know what to do with -- through a combination of internships, then contract work, my current job, and finally my startup. Now that I'm about to graduate from college, my income will increase even more -- in large part due to no longer having to pay for college. Of course, I'm probably still "poor" by HN standards.

But I still can't think of anything to spend it on. I haven't even considered getting a car. I'm quite happy with my ~90 sq. ft. dorm room -- bigger just means more work to clean it. I have a good laptop and some external hard drives. I can afford the food I want.

If 1 million dollars were dumped on me tomorrow, I'd buy a new desktop computer, invest a bit in my startup (on a real website, etc), stuff the rest in my bank account, and go on with my life as normal.

But people I've worked with, even those near my age -- particularly at startups -- constantly talk about "what they'll do with the money". They'll get a Ferrari or a BMW. They'll get that big house they always wanted. They'll take a cruise in the Caribbean.

This sort of attitude consciously bothers me. I've experienced the same sort of thing when visiting some mildly rich distant relatives in an expensive country club -- I look around and see tons of money being "wasted". I know it makes sense from their perspective, but to me, it seems senseless.

... and this all makes me wonder: am I just weird? Or is there something more to this?
Yes, this seemed like a particularly offensive metaphor. I suppose it works at a logical level, but to compare a human life to a piece of software seems kind of extreme.
It's really cool that optional, product and sum types are supported.

Does it work correctly with abstract base classes as well? (I'm expecting yes, just checking).

Could it work with structural types as well? That would strike me as "more pythonic", and I've always been surprised that no Python type-annotation scheme can handle structural specs (though abcs are a step in the right direction).
Ask HN: Citizen Census. What do you think?
I read in the news that the United States Census Bureau spent over 11 billion dollars for the 2011 census (35 dollars per person) and still could not get it right. The Census Bureau refuses to use online forms because it says it would be more expensive.

I just put together this online form http://citizencensus.appspot.com/ and wrote this rant http://citizencensus.appspot.com/about to justify citizen census for a recount of New York City census. Let me know what you think.
You'd be surprised how many people don't read the description in search results.
Perhaps a way to include a private note with a downvote, so that downvoted commenters can better understand why they were downvoted (without that meta discussion being public).
> Unfortunately, it's not the tech guys who are running the company

I can believe that is the case now. Things had been becoming more marketing/business driven even when I left back in ~2006. And I was in Developer Tools, which was much more run by the tech guys than the "profitable" parts of the company :-)
Much like with other features we've added recently (Sync, Panorama, etc.), these features won't impact you at all if you don't use them.
I don't understand why everyone seems to have such a hardon for Minority Report-style systems. Gorilla arm pretty much rules that out from the start, and a tablet is more natural anyway.

A trackpad with a separate screen would be optimal (so you don't have to look at your hands).
You may be doing this already as it seems pretty obvious to me, but you could give more weight to comments based on their length. In general the most insightful comments are longer than poorer dumb comments.
Also be more firm on the shouldn't appear on mainstream news sites rule
http://citizencensus.appspot.com/

http://citizencensus.appspot.com/about
Direct link to th ACTUAL article, not some spammy site that copy pasted it into a google doc: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/09/16/jquery-examples-a...
and the people in charge of the web servers may not be authorized to be handling the security-related material they will be decrypting with the key and forwarding off.
Perhaps you're right about this, but the main point was to give prominent users more power when upvoting and downvoting.
The idea was to make upvotes and downvotes of those on http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders count more than the votes of newbies.
The reason why I suggested that users should be able to decide how much points they want to assign when voting is because, there may be situations when you find a comment interesting, and want to upvote it, but not so insightful that you would give it your maximum amount of points.
When the name was changed to "Hacker", the term Hacker wasn't used in the tech sense but rather in the same sense that it's used in the YC application form. As in a clever unorthodox solution to a problem.

But over time people took it to mean hacker in the technology sense of the term, and thus we now get reviews of Ubuntu on the front page, which you would never have seen a few years ago.
One transition from "current" state to "flag does something" state might be to make the flag button more obvious, to make it have a more immediate effect, and to encourage its use.

My perception of the flag button now is that it's the bat-signal; it means that something is so bad that it actually warrants individual admin attention.
Oh sure, NOW add the social sharing. Grrn
Maybe give new stories space on the frontpage so the people upvoting them aren't self-selected?
Hey there. Which extensions do you have installed? We have some problems with a few popular ones and Firefox 4.0. We'll be pushing out a 4.0.1 to deal with this issue.
Limit comments and/or submissions and/or votes to a few per day.
One thing i hate the most about it especially on techcruch is that a person using Operamini cant view any post on techcrunch because (i think) the FB plugin screws up with Operamini.One cannot see the comments and also the page just goes blue. I hope they fix this
Scientist != engineer; the parent to whom your replying is just talking about scientists as is the mostly good essay he links to (the author is quite wrong about this state of affairs "just happening", but maybe he wasn't looking at the situation in the '80s when the NSF (most particularly) started the big campaign for cheap scientific labor).
Because it was "the main selling point", I had high hopes. But after using FF4 for a couple months, it hasn't fixed the annoying lags that creep into simple operations (even scrolling!) once you have a lot of tabs open, and require a browser restart for (temporary) relief.
Perhaps it was intended as a non-snarky, non-aggressive statement, but I still have trouble reading it as anything other than passive-aggressive snark, especially given the context of the conversation.

I find myself wishing I had a 'meh' flag for both your comment and my reply. Not quite a downvote or a report, but... "meh... this is not a useful addition to the conversation."
I would say Forrst tends to be tilted towards web development but of the 30 most recent code snippet posts only two were design related.
Companies will select products with terrible security track records, then pay us to come in and beat up the vendor.
Maybe I'm missing something, but this just comes off as a petty, baseless attack on Ballmer. Was it really necessary for them to explain why their home office is nicer than Ballmer's office at work? Why should I care if his desk or pinboard is ugly?
Hash + reputation = documented finding.

Note that the hash isn't my idea. People have been doing it for years.
Make votes public.
People who have been around longer also know better what the community expects.
Extremely good point.
There is work underway to make the new extension system (Jetpack) load extensions out-of-process. This will make it easy to see how much memory each extension is using. Unfortunately, add-ons built using the traditional system will still be in-process. Most of them depend on being able to synchronously dive into the page or browser DOM and mess with it, which makes accounting hard.

The 32-bit Windows graphics thing sounds like a bug. Setting max-concurrent-tabs in about:config to 0 may help.
Specialized processing hardware != general-use CPU. Face tracking and image stabilization in dirt-cheap cameras is a good example, as is hardware video decoders or graphics cards. If a market emerges, specialized hardware will be built, and it'll be embeddable in just about anything.
Growing communities is incredibly difficult and Forrst choose to do so through invites and an application process.

Charging to get access to a community is not really a viable option until you have the community built to charge access to.
So you have two problems: users need to be able to figure out what are good comments to read, and correspondingly you want users to vote on comments that make good reading.

Have you thought at all about discerning between vote value based on some metric? You'd need something that doesn't disproportionately disadvantage new users.
Limit comments? I think that commenting must COST the poster something, which means that for a comment to be worth while, it must justify the cost.

Karma might be worth it, but a: I don't think posters value it THAT much, and b: this doesn't prevent stupid comments that are likely to gain popular support. In fact it might encourage it.

Instead I would say that a user gets a limited supply of comments to post. Then, the user must decide if their 'lol this made my day' comment is worth giving up a portion of a limited resource.

Determining the appropriate way to limit comment supply without a major negative impact on positive replies is the tricky part. Karma, membership length, submissions and comments could calculate into the figure. Is the figure reset every day, week, month? I don't know. Hopefully this works as brainstorming food.
> You can always do creative accounting to make look good what you want to look good.

Yes, that's why I'm trying to make it clear what all the numbers represent. I believe that you're correct, for example, with China's coal miners having about 4x as much accident risk as US miners, but I think that's still limited to accident risk. I don't remember if Wikipedia explained which figures it was comparing very carefully.

> Do the black lung people even die because of it?

http://www.counterpunch.org/macaray02042010.html

"As dangerous an undertaking as coal mining is, there’s no comparison between the risks of cave-ins or flooding or explosions, and the risks of contracting this deadly disease. In the last decade alone, 10,000 miners have died from black lung, compared with fewer than 400 from mine accidents."

See also: http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/297887-overview#a0199

"The ICU mortality rate for patients with coal worker’s pneumoconiosis with their first episode of respiratory failure requiring mechanical ventilation was 40%, and the in-hospital mortality rate was 43%."

Also look at the treatment tab. Basically, the only treatment is preventative: change jobs (at least get away from the dust!), stop smoking, vaccinations for common lung infections, etc. Oh, yeah, you get put on oxygen, too. It doesn't help your dead lungs, though.

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/297887-treatment

Just a warning, but the pictures in part of that emedicine article are pretty gross.
Many people have made interesting feature suggestions. However, the core problem isn't features. It's developing a general understanding of how to scale up online communities while preserving quality. pg has written before about the benefits of essay-writing as a way of deepening one's understanding of a problem:

"If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything... Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them... Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well."

So why not write an essay on how to build large online communities?
Educational building blocks: how Minecraft is used in classrooms
Comment scores should either follow the opinion of
the elite (role models, learn-from-the-best) or your "peers" (like snide remarks? go ahead).

Currently it's the tyranny of majority. Suggestion for b (possibly intensive processing): Change comment display order depending on your previous voting.
A couple of things I have commented on previously/elsewhere on HN:

A) My understanding is that "formal culture" is the historical human antidote to trying to interact with large numbers of folks they don't know all that well. Older, more densely populated parts of the globe tend to be more formal than American culture. Yet American culture is the primary influencer of many online communities, including this one. The assumptions made by a less formal culture and the practices which grow out of them start to cause problems when you don't actually know people that well and it simply isn't possible to know everyone here all that well with 100k uniques a day.

B) "Greet people warmly at the door": The general assumption that the ill-mannered newcomers are The Problem tends to promote the problem. Greeting people warmly who are new to the site and speaking with them gives them opportunity and motive to learn the culture and try to fit in. Talking trash about how they are mucking up the place and studiously ignoring them until you are ready to chew them out gives them every reason to behave badly or to assume no one really notices or cares what they do and little opportunity to learn to fit into a polite culture. They don't ever even get to experience the polite culture. All they experience is rejection, insults and such themselves. "Eternal September" isn't because there are new people. It is because the new people don't get inculcated. Hating them on sight and giving them a hard time for simply being new (which is the undercurrent of a lot of posts here) is a major fail if you want to preserve a valued culture. Culture is not preserved by just hanging on to the old folks. It is preserved by teaching it to the new people and helping it grow in a healthy manner.

I'm sure there's more but that's what readily comes to mind and, right this very minute, I'm not up to giving it more thought or time and effort.
I upvoted this but disagree. My first submission to Hacker News was an Ask HN[1]. Since that day I have been working hard to follow the advice I was given there. I can't express how valuable the advice was to me. Under your suggestion, that would be impossible.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069477
If it costs karma to comment or vote, then you also have to limit the number of submissions people make. Otherwise people will spam HN with controversial topics to accumulate enough karma to vote/comment. That said, if you could only submit one link per day, and it cost karma to up-vote or comment, I think the result would be much-enhanced. Also you'd have to give new members 100 points or something, but maybe they wouldn't be able to use them for the first week.
I did read your paragraph. In my opinion, your issues with the registry are not with what it can do, they are with how well app developers use it. If they're not even using what's already there, why would they use something more complex?

Secondly, what you want is not a package management system, but an app store. You can build that as a third-party app today, without any additional features in windows. In fact, somebody has already done so, it's called http://allmyapps.com/

You could argue that microsoft should ship such an app store by default, any maybe they will. That would however place them in the position of having to review the apps and arbitrate them. They don't like doing that.
Re-implementing the XMonad window manager core in Coq: PDF
A little research shows the photo is not recent. It's being hotlinked from a wordpress.com blog, and a Tineye search shows it's from Time's 2008 TIME 100 (http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,17337...)

Who knows when it was taken, but it's at least 3 years old.

EDIT: Further Googling confirms the image was taken in 2006: http://stuartisett.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/PORTFOLIO-...
You're on the right track. Rich kids can afford to work for free.
What does 10% faster mean? When people talk about "performance" I'm sure that most of them actually mean UI responsiveness, not raw number crunching performance. How do you measure that and what does 10% in that context mean?
the whole definition of "black swan" is an event that can't be predicted or anticipated - so this article is completely meaningless
It's not penalizing, it's just acknowledging seniority. Sort of like how on Slashdot you can't vote on other peoples' comments until you accumulate enough karma.
One of the Dutch news sites I frequent also has qualitatively different forms of upvoting. E.g., you can upvote for humor, upvote for insight, upvote for new information. By applying different metrics to different kinds of comments, it might be easier to create the kind of balance you want.
yes, but maybe show things a bit differently as well. when items in /newest make their way to the frontpage, remove them from /newest. links with 0 upvotes and 0 comments should fall off the page faster, or rather, any link with at least one other upvote/comment should stick around longer to try to gain traction.
I would advise Googling such things, but just so you know, "non sequitur" means "it doesn't follow" in Latin.

He's saying that what you said doesn't make much sense as a reply to that other post. Indeed, I'm not quite sure what your point was, there. If it was a joke, I missed it completely.
Another option is to have some social cost to making comments. The easiest way to do this is to force real names - look at e.g. Techcrunch (but there are other examples) to see the impact on comment quality.

I can't see it working here, for a number of reasons, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
Same for me, <1 sec for the page, as well as the more entries button.
I think it's an interesting idea to be able to "group" related posts that occur within a certain time range of each other. If five posts on the new iPad 7 come in within the same three days, someone can drag them all together into the "iPad 7" thread.

But this?

the duplicate posts which happen a few months later

Once we're up to a timescale of months, or even weeks, we're no longer being sensible. Instead we're exhibiting FAQ Syndrome: The irrational fear that someone, somewhere, is saying something that isn't entirely original.

I think the cult of originality is actually a big problem at HN, and other "news" sites as well. The important things in life are not particularly original, and they do not change particularly quickly. A site that is determined not to re-discuss previous topics is doomed to discuss nothing but ephemeral trivia. The great thing about celebrity gossip is that it is always new! We can manufacture celebrities at whatever rate is needed to keep the front page fresh. But we can't manufacture Knuths as needed; we've only got the one set of Maxwell's equations; new books on the scale of K&R or SICP don't come along every day. But if we discourage the constant reexamination of these classics they will get placed on the dusty shelves and we'll see nothing but discussions of the latest gossip and bling. You know, like we have today.

I always wished HN would feel more like academia, which cycles like the seasons. Every year, you discuss all the classics again for a new audience of newbs. After a little while, you've heard all the classics and are ready to graduate, or become a professor. This is what makes me miss the days when this was "Startup News" and was more explicitly tied to the YC cycle, the time when you could tell that a new YC class was starting by watching for the influx of new people.
The blub setter/getter comment really is the archetypical "dumb comment", isn't it? Nicely done.

Users should live or die by their votes on that comment. If you vote up the blub comment, you should personally get the downvotes for it too. Upvotes should expose you to the karmic downside of superficial comments.

Especially because the really good comments, the ones most deserving of upvotes, don't seem to get a lot of downvotes; watch the scores on a 'patio11 comment closely sometime to see an example.
Donating to micro charities instead of majority ones