skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I've noticed more 1-liner 'I agree' or 'similar thing happened to me' comments now that a simple upvote can't be used to send a public 'me too'.

Also, totally empty 'nice!' comments (that should've been a public upvote to the parent) are now harder to censure with a single downvote.

There was a definite instructive value in communicating shared sentiments, short of groupthink, via public tallies.

So, it's time for me to resuscitate one of my hobby-horse proposals: two-axis, four-button voting.

The up/down axis is 'appropriateness', the sometimes-platonic ideal of the old voting (though in practice it was always contaminated with a little agree/disagree). 'Up' means 'valuable; more-of-this-is-good'. It accrues to long-term karma. 'Down' means 'subtractive; less-of-this-please'. It also accrues to long-term karma. The net of these two, per comment, need not be shown – or they could only be shown very indirectly as 'positive/negative' or via ordering/shading.

The new left-right axis would be explicitly 'publicly agree/disagree'. Left is agree (keeping with English conventions of usually listing the affirmative first or promoting popular items to a more leftward position). Right is disagree. Neither accrues to karma; they are completely local to the comment. But the net is displayed alongside each comment – or possibly even the total of each agree/disagree, because +100-99 is very different from +1-0. It's just like, it's just like, a mini-poll, a mini-poll.

The right design could keep this from appearing too visually busy: spacing out the buttons, using very faded colors, hiding some details (perhaps even agree/disagree totals) until mouseover or click-for-details, etc.

It would resolve the eternal 'can upvotes/downvotes ever be used for agreement/disagreement' debate by providing an easy outlet for the irresistible human impulse to express sentiment with a single click. It would eliminate many now-superfluous vertically-wasteful comments that are just ways of registering agreement/disagreement. (Many group discussion dynamics require that certain salient statements must trigger at least a grunt of assent or dissent, lest they be misinterpreted as being more or less widely held than they actually are. Having at least one public place to capture this saves a lot of other typing!)
It is going to take time for the second-order effects to develop.

The optimum writing style may change. When threads require more skimming it pays to write more skimmable content. The reading style will also change. None of these changes will happen overnight; it takes time, the way that learning emacs takes time.

So I agree: Let the experiment run longer. What is the worst that can happen? HN becomes an order of magnitude less popular? I liked HN when it was an order of magnitude less popular. ;)
I'm not in a YC startup, and I don't seek to start one. So take it with a grain of salt... the tone here has been better in the short time without points.

I think some of the personality types that YC attracts do poorly in a civil discussions where there is a (public) competitive element.
I'd prefer an experiment in 2-axis voting. The up/down karma points need not be displayed per comment, but the new right/left agree/disagree totals would be intended-to-be-displayed-per-comment. More details here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445476
Chase Paymentech. End of story. If you need to do recurring it's trivial to write - no need for these subscription companies.
Except the subscriber count includes students, so your revenue estimate is probably completely off.
Time for a some what off topic anecdote.

My workplace used to post all H1-B pay rates in the breakroom.

The day after my review, in which I brought up the pay discrepancy between me and the H1-B workers at a similiar grade, they all came down never to reappear.

This is a fairly large company, which made it even more shocking.
> Some out of band signalling between the edge and the core to indicate current load levels at the core.

In-band/out-of-band doesn't make any difference - the edge nodes can't communicate fast enough. Remember, they're O(N) from each other. (Yes, two neighbors are adjacent, but there are nodes on the other side of the grid.)

Long wires doesn't help either - distance always matters.

> You might now say, "Aha! But you're throwing away messages you've accepted". The answer is no

Actually the answer is "yes" - The original claim was "In telco networks, once a message is accepted into a system, it is expected to be processed. You should throw away any messages you can't handle (because of overload) at the edge of the system."

> I hope you get the gist of what I'm saying

I get the gist - the problem is that you must either waste capacity, drop in the interior, or both because of distance and the fact that there are more interior nodes than there are edge nodes. (And, you can't have all edge nodes because of distance and fan-in.)

One of the subtle ways to waste capacity is to run the control signals faster than the data signals.
Anyone else notice lxr has been down for a couple of days?
"Backlash" is a good word. I agree (and without saying no-one else should use Haml.. people totally should if it "clicks" more with them).

I think "designers" or non-Rails people are only the tip of the iceberg though. I've been doing Ruby and Rails since 2004 and while I've tried Haml a couple of times, it never clicked with me because I already both knew and liked HTML. It felt like learning Japanese for the fun of it, yet I can already say everything I want to in English.
I just voted for the poll option with the fewest points. I like rooting for the underdog.
Very cool, I've been thinking of doing something similar. Mix this with ThinkUp and it could be quite a nice tool.
The author of the paper is on Reddit and is taking questions.

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gpb84/chomsky_was_w...
The question he asked at Quakecon 2010 was actually "who has spent at least $20 on the Android app store?"[1], not just on a single game. Your catch-22 scenario still holds, though I think the quantity and quality of free apps in the Android app store has also raised the bar for pay apps.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_SdC8LVODY&feature=playe...
Http://www.wedding.sh/nawd1082-p-9354.html?cPath=157
I Liked comment karma as when I'm just taking a quick HN break I can skim down and read the best comments based on how many votes they got. Now I often just don't bother.
Microsoft Dips Toes in Local Deal Waters -- in Sweden
Points should stay:

If a post has a lot of points on it, it's telling people that they should be paying attention. For instance, (and this may have been after the points disappeared, but the example still works) the other day when ioerror came into the thread that was talking about him getting harassed at airports. I don't know who ioerror is, but points allow people to call my attention to his posts, more so than just voting them to the top of the hierarchy.

I've learned a lot reading comments here over the last 3 years. Lack of showing points makes it harder to discern what I should pay attention to. A good comparison might be book reviews. If I get on amazon and search "iOS4 development", I'll get tons of results, but when a book has 200 5 star reviews, it helps me decide that that is the one I should read.

This is true even if the books are all free.

Don't get lost in the idea that everybody here is a seasoned veteran who knows everything about everything and can easily judge a post's merit based on its content. It's less true for me now than it was three years ago, but it was (and still is) helpful to be able to look to the community to help me know what I should be paying attention to.
Eating sweets does improve mood. There are several known mechanisms. e.g., carbs facilitate amino acid transport across the blood-brain barrier [1], and wheat stimulates endogenous opiate receptors [2]. But, if you want to influence brain chemistry therapeutically, eating sweets is probably not the best approach. Good luck!

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3527063
[2] http://www.heartscanblog.org/2011/01/heroine-oxycontin-and-w...
I'm an ex-'softie and proud of the work I did there. It seems every current or past employee of Microsoft has some story to tell about "the good old days" when everything was smaller or faster or they were all only X steps from BillG or everyone was just more "hard core". Most of the stories I personally hear (or comments I read on minimsft.blogspot.com) about the impending implosion at Microsoft seem more like seeing greener engineering grass somewhere else. Usually in the past at Microsoft.

The internal politics are often toxic and the raw amount of stuff for someone new to learn is so daunting that someone who's been there for a while seems like a god relative to the newcomer. I think that probably helps grow this kind of mythology. More experienced people leave (by choice or because of the draconian review system) and the newer 'softies think the golden age is ending.

Externally, it's a lot of fun to talk about Microsoft dying. In the face of record profits, wasn't it? Yeah, whatever. Are they relevant? What does that mean? Is my sewer bill relevant? I still pay it. People still pay Microsoft.

I could use their stock chart as a straight edge but that doesn't mean they're dying.
Everyone _should_ do that, as CCs generally take a dim view on charging before something actually ships.
Crackberry Playbook review
Agreeing here: I must admit that I used the display points as a crutch. My thought process was, "Hey, this has a lot of votes, it must mean that they have something (good|relevant|interesting) to say".

Now, I am forced to read a comment and ask "Do I agree with this? Does this deserve an upvote?" This is a great thing, and it may slow down my karma-giving, but in the long run, the data will be more accurate.
Yeah this is a tad annoying; started reading HN on my iPhone and sometimes I leave it to keep reading 'more' later and my session expires.
>The rest of you will have opinions whether they are allowed in English. Those opinions will tend to agree.

These agreeing opinions could easily be due to a common cultural heritage and a history of reinforcement. People get reinforced for speaking in a way that is understood (and seen as correct) by others and so they speak that way. It benefits them to conform. Since everyone who speaks English shares a cultural language heritage, there is obviously a shared history of reinforcement. The shared history of reinforcement leads to widespread agreement about rules, and yet there are still plenty of examples of English dialects that violate rules of other dialects.

For instance, Ebonics vs. American English. Both are valid dialects with different rules. Both are English. Are you claiming that Ebonics speakers have a different generative mechanism than American English speakers? Obviously Ebonics has evolved __from__ American English, into something new.

Creative, meaningful responding exists outside of language and the evidence is overwhelming that this creativity is due to reinforcement history rather than some innate quality of the brain.

Anyway I don't think your facts lead to your conclusion at all.
Hmm, I haven't noticed more one-liners. Why would people be less likely to upvote something if they can't see who else has done so?
His answer for "What happens if not all the early employees need to take a salary? " makes sense, but leaves the question of "why don't I get paid now instead of getting paid later if it means I get just as much (or less due to inflation)." Presumably, you'd have an understand co-founder who understands that cash in the company now is a little more important. Failing that, I think it might be fair to add interest to that IOU.
Update: enrollment in 6.01, MIT's "CS1" course for majors, just jumped to 380 this spring from 250 last spring.
> Otherwise your co-founder is going to quit after three weeks and show up, 7 years later, claiming he owns 25% of the company.

Or half the company for a $1000 investment.
On the other hand, are disincentives towards commenting in threads with a lot of high-ranked comments such a bad thing? Keeping high-value comments stratified and rare probably helps to avoid reddit-style circlejerks.
My biggest complaint of the recent changes is that it appears to have broken the hckr news Chrome extension, which added new comment highlighting. For me this is one of those features that I never knew I wanted, but now that it is gone I can't remember how I browsed HN without it.

As for the point displays, I want them to be there, but I think HN will be better off without them displayed.
As long as there are points, and comments are sorted by popularity, not showing the points, I don't see how it can mitigate the problem of people trying to game the system.

If it is somehow measurable who is trying to do so, in obvious way, in some automated way and if this activity is at a level that affects the rest, then the user could be somehow penalized off that karma gained. Nevertheless this is democracy, so I would only expect this behaviour being penalized only if it really affects other in some measurable way, so that the community could approve penalizing users who are trying to advantage of lack of automated moderation.

The contrary could be done i.e. instead of penalizing users who are suspectable in such behaviour, preferably award recursively to each comment in the same thread more points, therefore the commenters who are 'legit' are awarded. Therefore, add a category of comment points named 'HN ponts' which are awarded automatically by the system.
If upvotes are visible, one function they serve is as a simple, 'me too'. If you know they're invisible, you may still upvote – I meant no strong conjecture on that – but if you want to signal to the group your agreement, now you have to add a comment.

Maybe you'll work to ensure that comment also adds a new detail. But it also might just be, 'I thought the same thing when I saw that' or 'That happened to me too' or 'I had the same problem'. All of which are more-compactly/quickly accommodated by a visible +1 tally.
Sorry, but I've tried to use that crap. It is a real PITA to get working, and it stops working for no apparent reason. The implementations are all over the map. Interoperability is horrible. Also, it doesn't have a standard way to just automatically start a video playing from a local to a remote device. It pulls. It doesn't push. So whatever Samsung does to achieve AirPlay-like functionality won't be standard.
Engadget's review is also up: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/13/blackberry-playbook-revie.... They liked it in general, but found the software immature, albeit improving.
How Women Can Get More Venture Capital
Binary Sunset from the first Star Wars film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEUGF3NGbPg
They also have CIM, Customer Information Manager, where you send the credit card info (thus never storing it yourself) and you get back a token. Anytime you need to charge that card, you charge the token instead. PCI compliance is then on Authorize.net
I'm working on starting a small worker co-operative. The advantages are normally considered for a large group (say, to increase buying power for interested consumers) but in the case of a lean startup, the law simplifies these questions. After bills and other fixed costs, you apportion net savings to the members proportionate to their contribution. Additionally, in a small group democratic (maybe even consensus) voting allows everyone to be equally in control of what is a joint partnership. I know Texas has laws covering "cooperative associations," can't speak for other states. Thoughts?
What The Rich Don't Want You To Know About Taxes
I think a user content generated community where huge number of people participate needs an explicit feedback system. We all want to learn from the good sources and filter out what aren't worthy and we need a way to distinguish them. If you think the point rating system isn't good, it doesn't necessarily mean we don't need it.

Here is my suggestion: How about we use the absolute points to rank a comment in a different scale, such as if a comment collects enough a number of point, it will be ranked as 1 star, then 2 stars... and so on. In this way of rating, we not only get what we want but also not to follow "group thinking" as someone said in this thread.
I don't always test my code, but when I do...
As I mentioned above, Authorize.Net's CIM (Customer Information Manager) works in a similar way -- you send the credit card info from your website to Authorize.net (and never store it in between) and you get a token back which you can store, and which you can use to make charges later.
I agree and express the same opinion.
I'm just the opposite ... I'm voting a lot less
... it seems the points do bias me but in a different way ... if something has a lot of point already, I won't bother to vote it up ... but if theres a really strong post and it has few points I'll immediately upvote it ...

I find it harder to read/skim comments now though ... because I'm reading every comment instead of getting the highlights based on the votes.
Why would you care if the community agrees with you? And if you assign value to what the community thinks, why would you want that information displayed for everything, not just stuff you have voted on?
Actually XBox 360 is #3 in the race (just fell behind PS3 WW sales -- XBox kills the PS3 in the US, but the PS3 kills it in Asia by a HUGE margin. PS3 has a slight lead in Europe, but pretty much a wash there).

With that said, for MS the "race" in the console wars really isn't a race. They want to be in the race, but it doesn't really matter that much if they are #1, #2, or #3, as long as #3 isn't 5M units sold WW. The XBox has always been strategic to be in the living room. And for that it is succesful.

The real question is can MS leverage that to do something bigger? That remains to be seen, although so far they've been a bit slow with it. Fortunately Sony, Apple, and Google have been even slower.
I factored that in somewhat. Going all digital is about 140,000 a year. Dead tree is about double that. Either way I would guess over $100,000.
Show HN: My YouTube Downloader MVP
Employees who have unrealistic expectations from the start generally keep that same level of expectation, even across other topics; beginning with an unrealistic figure is not necessarily a good idea, as it may dissuade the HR rep. Alot of the time this is a first question too - first impressions count! </cliche>

Nb - this may be different for engineering; I work in an unrelated field.
I think you're on to something with this.
If I pick up a ball and say "ball" consistently ...

The controversial question is how people learn grammar, not vocabulary.

Even taken the first sentence as given, why does that imply a UG?

That model is what Chomsky meant by "universal grammar". Or so I understand - I'm not an expert.
Traffic Squeezer - Franchise Deals
I have all of tapbots apps, and find them amazing. This appears to be no different. I don't tweet much, but you can be sure I will use tweetbot from now on. Awesome. Best of all, no #dickbar.

Also, this has one of the best demo videos and presentation I have seen.
Ask HN: Where did your inspiration for your start up come from?
"real company" is relative, and what the person does with the weekend project is rather up to them.

i just posted a new weekend project, and some of my past weekend projects have turned into profit. i've also totally abandoned some, as well. none have generated enough interest or money for me to warrant working full time on them (yet).
I didn't say I cared if the community agrees with me, what I said was that it would be nice to know how many people agree with me. Slight distinction, but it matters.

Truth be told, I don't care about agreement, but it is interesting to measure general sentiment about topics, and without a point value, it's hard to gauge.
I haven't opened the file but this sounds strange. I've reached the excel cell number limit before crashing computers with much less than 8gb of ram. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-specifica...
Start your own company, and use a radically open compensation system, perhaps?

That's my plan, at least.
I predict this app will be renamed within the next six months.
I see.

Though it's a little bit mitigated by you being able to see votes on your own comments.
Maqetta - WYSIWYG Editor For Creating HTML5 User Interfaces
never going to work

As I outlined above it's just about the incentive and setting the tone. If you have to write "siht" you'll think twice about whether it needs to be said.

I might do well to add that I am not suggesting this for prudish reasons. I took a creative writing class in college and the teacher banned curses and drugs. Intro to Creative Writing students otherwise substitute force for substance.
A 50/50 split can work for the (very) small subset of cases where two people of comparable skill and commitment start building something from scratch (nothin' but a half-baked idea) together, with no prior investment/work/IP, no domain expertise, no key contacts, no customer channels, nor any major capital infusions. Oh, and both parties have a clear record of making good decisions together and resolve disputes effectively.

But for most other cases in the real world, these two resources offer a more rational and open/honest approach:

http://founderresearch.blogspot.com/2006/01/splitting-pie-fo...

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/fd0n/35%20Founders%27%20Pie%2...
Altium to Relocate its Global Headquarters to Shanghai, China
Seems like Tutorspree could really start in any city. One could use the same argument about AirBnB (a high density of available apartments), but it's still worked out well for them.
However, if NYC is your personal preference, that's great.
I'm in the area, and although I don't know what the tech scene is going to look like 5-10 years from now in the city, I'd love to see it grow and have NYC viewed as something other than the Capital of Finance (or Financial Wizardy).
I've had my eye on D for a few years. But, I never manage to work it into the grand plan. For scripting, I have a slimmer of hope for Rite, from Matz (of Ruby).

Strangely, IMO, I find most of my fellow gamedevs are not PLgeeks.
Hopefully not adding to the noise, but wanted to specify my opinion beyond the simple Y/N of the poll. I like not knowing the precise point value, but I do agree - especially for large threads - that it is nice to have a way to quickly scan. I think that some sort of color coded could work, as several of the other posts suggest.
We just sat down and picked an amount of valuation (or really dilution) that we were comfortable with and went with it. Everyone was at the same valuation. There was no discount for first movers.
Who cares? How much longer is this going to drag on?
It doesn't force you to use CoffeeScript, you can easily continue to write JavaScript or Sass with no detrimental effects. If I understand correctly, it only changes the templates created.
I'm familiar with web scraping...hasn't it always been looked down upon though? It just seems like it's got a negative connotation or something.
Agreed! (IMO the ML backlash is more of a XML backlash that carried over to other MLs).

Regardless - A designer that can design for any* framework with standard CSS/HTML is more flexible than a designer that knows HAML, but could't write vanilla markup.

That why I was surprised about the Coffeescript (preferring HAML is a popular opinion, as-is Rspec: yet Erb and Test::Unit are still the defaults).

Edit: I agree that alt. languages/syntaxes in frameworks are nice. Forcing them on people is not nice.