skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Was SteveB Right In Killing The Courier?
But there is something unsavoury about that sort of elitist/privilige system I think. Perhaps, however, the word-count restriction could apply only to the 'top-nodes' of the comment threads, ie. if you're replying to the submission itself. That way, things are started off on the right foot, and snidey one-liners never get upvoted to the top of the whole thread.
Google says that today, £37k = $60k. In the US that's above the median but no one would call a $60k household income "rich".
This exaggerated and misleading story was pretty well taken apart and stomped to death on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/ghn9y/wachovia_p...
This (comment activity shows up in Facebook stream) is precisely why I won't be commenting on Techcrunch articles any time soon. I have no interest in advertising to my aunt and high school ex-girlfriends that I have a minute opinion about some random bit of software technology. I'm not looking for anonymity to troll, I just want to control my various internet personas. More for the sake of my "real friends" than anything else.
Desperate Housewives season 7 episode 17
> What we're getting is a larger pool of people actively gaming the system in hundreds of ways ...

We're getting politics, in short, even if by a different name.
my firefox experience was plagued with performance problems for quite a few releases, including 4.0. a big problem was that every few seconds it would pause for a moment which made scrolling and watching videos unbearable. (googling "firefox freeze" shows a lot of people have this issue.) i tried uninstalling all of my extensions and installing them one-by-one to figure out what caused it, but the problem never got significantly better.

i was about ready to jump ship to another browser until i decided to completely wipe out my firefox profile and start over. after doing this, my performance problems have not come back, even after manually re-installing all of my add-ons, greasemonkey scripts, etc. i don't know what kind of cruft my firefox profile had accumulated over the years (i've even migrated it between operating systems), but starting over fresh solved a lot of problems for me.
I like the use of the phrases "economic inequality that successful startups yield, and which accounts for a lot of the entries in the Forbes 400" and "evidence that it would be a complement to call ancedotal" in the same sentence.

Despite the very visible presence of Gates, Buffer, Ellison, etc at the top of the list the Forbes 400 isn't exactly a startup playground (a lot of mineral wealth, the Waltons, a still-pretty decent whack of inherited $$$). The idea that American inequality en masse has much to do with startups is an idea that, well... let's just say it would be a compliment to call it sensible.

I'm sure that the American environment has resulted in great inequalities of outcome among, say, _tech_ firms (e.g. big winners and losers rather than having IBM and the seven dwarves pootle along for decades) but this doesn't translate to a fraction of the effect of, say, big declines in the tax rate paid by the very rich, or changes in the USA's blend of manufacturing or service jobs.

Not staking a position here either way, just saying that bringing startups into this is absurd navel-gazing.

It's hard to see what you're achieving trying to undermine specific points in an opinion piece ("You didn't show evidence that X" looks a lot like "I think you're wrong about X but am trying to look like the bigger man here") with this rather pointless bit of drive-by snark.
Bad idea. Trust me.
Why is this a problem at all? Isn't closing over a set of mutable variables the standard way OOP is shown to reduce to higher-order functions?

I have a great degree of respect for Manuel, and I read his comment, but I still don't see how sticking with only copying free bindings is a problem. That's how function calls in Python/C#/whatever work anyway -- when you pass a parameter in, it's just the reference that's copied, so programmers are familiar with it already.
500 Startups - The Brainient Story (with the founder Emi Gal)
Do we have any data to show if that's a real issue here?
I disagree, changing incentives can radically change a way a site is used and interacted with, just like many things in life. The nature of the incentives change the nature of the comments/submissions.

I think that the reason that it has happened to other communities you've seen is because they all had similar incentives. Also, I believe that requiring credentials to use the site (or using referrals/invites) like you suggest is in fact changing the incentives, as people are more accountable to a smaller community/feel more compelled to have a higher standard due to being invited there, rather than just using it as they would public infrastructure (see how people treat a public WC compared to how people treat toilets in homes they've been invited in to).
It's nowhere near free. Money might not change hands, but we pay handsomely with attention.
The hardest thing for me going from studying physics and astronomy to law school was getting used to the idea of a form of learning that had little to do with figuring out truth.
Except these aren't "strong" types. Python has those. These are pretend-static types.
So, this seems like a no brainer... how'd this get to the front page? Is there really anyone that would argue that less screen leads to more productivity? Or that virtual desktops are better for productivity than nice large monitors?

Personally I am a fan of two good sized screens (20 inch) vs. one monsterous screen. It lets me split out the work I am doing into logical groups, and overall helps my productivity.

Now, I will say being chained to a desk isn't ideal, and I still like to go to the park with some wifi to get a breather... but ultimately even with the additional comfort of being away from my desk, I am not fooled into thinking that setup is more productive...
Tourism is very big in Montana too.
First of all, change is inevitable. The worst response is too much worrying about it and talking about how you would like things to be how they used to be. Users come and go so it will never be exactly the way it used to be. A good response is to embrace the change and make it work.

In this case the problem seems to be an influx of new users that don't completely understand what the site's about. It seems to me the best response is to more actively encourage good commenting from new users. My suggestion is inspired by stackoverflow. Over there, below a certain karma threshold, users must submit their edits to be reviewed by others. It might be beneficial to do the same thing for, say, a user's first 10 comments. They would submit a comment, a more experienced user reviews it and gives feedback if necessary. That way new users are forced to learn a little bit about what the community values in a comment.
But it raises the question, do you have a way to single out the corpus of good comments from the past? If past up-votes were reliable I don't think this thread would exist.
Have you done the same for comment flags? I tracked my flags for a week and none of them had any effect. Here is a sample of the things I flagged:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2351266

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2351266

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2348304
And we could make it policy to immediately downvote such cases.
When I see a ping-pong subthread, I just scroll past it. It seems to me that UI changes will create incentives to spread the ping-ponging around to other threads.
A turkish message board (www.eksisozluk.com) with about 200k users faces the same problem, and uses moderated user acceptance as a quality filter.

First of all if you want to create an account you have to wait for the mods to announce application submission dates.

If you can manage to create an account during that period, you are made a 'rookie' and what you submit to the message board is invisible to everyone, except mods. You are only allowed to post a total of 10 messages.

When you are done posting your first entries, you wait for mods to read and evaluate the value you bring to the platform and if you keep within the format & legal limits of the board. If so, you are made a normal user.

A similar process would especially prevent the bots spamming this place.
I just got back from a two-month (well, 85000 minute) noprocrast-enforced HN break, and while I've been browsing the front page for the last few days I haven't felt motivated to comment on anything. I think there's been a drop in the quality of stories as well as comments.

Now, maybe it's just me, but I used to like the science-type stories, or other stories that taught me something interesting and novel from some branch of human knowledge. But I just checked the first 90 stories and there's nothing matching that description. Instead there seem to be an awful lot of "gossip" and "personality" type stories. Tesla vs Top Gear! Tech CEO shoots elephant! Trollish "What I hate about facebook" stories! The interminable "Is it a bubble?" discussion!

On the other hand, it might just be my opinion... obviously somebody is interested in the current front-page stories or else they wouldn't have been voted up. Do other folks think that the interestingness of the stories has declined?
The female version of the old boys club? An elite womens networking group
Moderators?

You could have people who have over X karma (or people you hand pick) have disproportionate abilities to downvote or nuke comments/stories that are mean or dumb.

It would be easy to train a small circle of people how to moderate well. It seems nigh impossible to train the entire userbase of HN to do it.
"Call Now", "Buy Now", all just seems to cater to consumerism's need for instant gratification. Not too sure about it being rude, just short.
Interesting that TFA mentions "Minority Report-like interfaces" several times when: 1.) The Minority Report interface is the canonical example of a UI that is very impressive visually, and is beautifully mediagenic; but is hideously fatiguing and impractical in a real world scenario. (Hold your hand out at arm's length. Okay, now hold that pose for eight hours.) 2.) The MR UI has actually been commercialized, and has entirely failed to take the world by storm.

Also, computer vision demos are trivially easy to fake, and it's even easier to make an impressive demo video. You can have the guy who invented it spend a couple hours in front of the camera trying it over and over, then edit it down to three minutes of the system working perfectly. It wouldn't be nearly as impressive when you have an untrained user trying it live, in the field.
For me a larger monitor out does any other setup. As a dev I have multiple windows open, generally three or more and I have to move back and forth. The less key strokes, mouse movements or head movement to me means less change in context and the more I can stay on my thought processes. The more I stay focused means less time wasted. This is especially true over a longer period of dev time, or especially when you have a learning curve to work through.

I usually get funny looks from the laptop dev's when I argue the point, but I have gotten a few people to try it and most converted. It maybe a creature of habit issue or get into the practice of going through certain motions but I do not think it is subjective for each individual.
What "abstractions for concurrency and persistent data structures" does Clojure have that aren't there in Lisp, Scheme, ML or Haskell?
So, tiny article with 3 comments that is nothing more than fluff hits the front page...

Perhaps the number of comments should have more weight when deciding what should be promoted?
> A privmsg feature, available to people who cross a karma or karma average feature ...

I don't agree. You'll just create another incentive to game for karma and that's what I've seen at sites with karma-linked features.

I'd suggest that either

* nobody has the feature

* everybody has the feature

* only paying customers have the feature
I worked as a manager in the USCB for a few months last year, so I think I can give a little insight as to why the Census is so expensive, and why we didn't use an online form.

Virtually all of the money spent taking the Census was on enumerating non-responding households, hiring people to go door-to-door to count people. Only a few million were spend mailing out forms.

The problem with online submissions is that it's quite difficult to uniquely identify people online, and a large portion of the population doesn't use computers. It's also expensive to go through records of people who submitted both online and mail-in forms with slightly different entries and determine what is and isn't a duplicate.

Government software projects are also very expensive. I know you could throw this thing together in about an hour, but this isn't the same thing as the US Census. The Census doesn't get to assume that everyone uses a Google account that's tied directly to their real-life identity, and they need assurance that their software is extremely secure. It doesn't justify the obscene prices many contractors charge, but keep in mind that most corporations overpay for software, too (e.g. Oracle database)

There's a reason the government doesn't offer to pay people to turn in their census forms. It incentivizes people to turn in multiple forms, making the count less accurate.

There's also not much utility to a form that anyone can customize. Sometimes, when you're dealing with 310 million people, it's easier to treat them as cattle even if they really are all unique snowflakes.
He could use up-votes from a trusted subset of users.
I love it when people dig through old unrelated comments to try and drag out things in a reputation attack. Gosh the next stage is surely the criminal background check so one can triumphantly proclaim: "Bugsy was cited for drug paraphenalia possession in 1983!" It shows how weak the party's position is to resort to such attacks.

You should definitely spend a few days digging through all my comments. Feel free to drag out every thing I ever said and put it on parade in this thread in your counter attack. It's a great distraction from the points at hand and panders to the People magazine crowd much more effectively than than presenting a well thought response. It's fantastic, I love it. Good luck to you in your activities, parasitical and otherwise.
You've called me out in public before. Shame is an effective teacher.
Admit defeat and just use the slashdot system. For all its trolls and failings slashdot still has the best crowdsource comment moderation system on the interwebs.

The Slashdot System

- Comments start at +1 and can range from -1 to +5 only

- Mod points are limited and distributed randomly as needed

- Only members with good karma are eligible for mod points

- Mod points must be used within 24 hours
It could discourage dialogue. Some very good, troll-free, threads are also very deep.
How about a basic API (make comments/votes/users available as JSON objects) so people can build different filters and see what works?
Get rid of karma.
Staticwebsync: automating the fiddly bits of hosting web sites on S3/CloudFront
I know what you mean, but is it really elitist if it's only a time requirement? It's like admission to a club, anyone can get in but everyone past the current site size pays their dues (in this case by sticking around). If the goal of the site is to not die from popularity, this may be understandably necessary.

On your other point, I'm thinking that short unwanted quips can rear their ugly head anywhere along threads.
Politics, flagged.
There seemed to be a lot of interest when Amazon announced the new S3 features for hosting web sites a few weeks ago (I think I saw three separate HN posts about it), so I thought I'd announce this new tool here. The idea of it is to take out the painful bits of using S3 and CloudFront (like doing cache invalidations) so that you don't need to know anything specific about how the services work to use them. Hopefully it makes syncing to CloudFront as easy as using FTP or rsync.
Have a captcha-like box at the bottom of "submit" with methods that need to be written for some giant program created by the community. The interface that gets implemented could be selected by the community.
Instagram: A Post Facebook Social Network?
> Tavis Ormandy ... can just say "I have a new Microsoft bug" on Twitter.

You're right, but what about the nobodies that haven't built up a personal trophy case of exploitable bugs? vulnarb.com may be solving a problem that doesn't exist for people that are already at the top of the vulnerability researcher club, but as with any group of people, there are hundreds if not thousands of people that aren't known and don't care to be the "l33t" ones giving conference talks and swapping private keys with Schneier and Knuth.

This could be a gateway for those people, college students and unknown hackers from non-first world countries (the alleged comodo hacker types for instance), to responsibly and legitimately get into the field. If marketed right, vulnarb.com could be a perfect way to post these notices, without getting trolled to oblivion on F-D.
It's not all bad, but I've noted a disturbing trend of dogpile upvoting and downvoting.

What about taking away downvoting? It would change the dynamic, at least. I suppose it doesn't solve the problem of stupid posts and comments being upvoted.
> Maybe this is just West Coast tech companies, I don't know.
reply

Yep. I know some pretty poorly paid programmers.
When I see something dumb and/or mean that has been highly upvoted, I don't consider flagging it, because I don't think it will have any effect.

However, I don't see an algorithmic way to use flagging in such a situation. The new control mechanism would be subject to the same problems that led to the comment being upvoted in the first place.

I'd like to see the mods experiment with a more authoritarian approach. When a comment sucks, I want the mods to impose their will upon the populace, informing everyone that the comment sucks, regardless of its upvotes. Flags could play a role.
What about giving more weight to users that (a) have been here longer, or (b) have more karma?

I feel like this would add some "drag" to the rate of change.
This creates a powerful incentive to game the system. In the long run you would worsen the situation.
Here's an idea I've seen on other sites: before a comment is approved, the poster has to go through a page that contains general posting guidelines. Often it seems people write something quickly, without stopping to think whether it might be offensive. This would give them an extra chance to censor their contribution.
I think this is indeed a low hanging fruit.
Upvoting should have some negative side effect or limit that makes you think for a split second if you really want to do it.

In articles: personally I only upvote only those articles that I really want to see in my "saved stories".

So one might make voting comments clutter something for the voter and I think that most hackers like to keep things beautiful, clean and searchable if possible. Might work better for articles than comments though.
The problem with these posts on the declining quality of HN is that people can't agree upon what the ideal comment quality should be, just like they can't agree on what stories should be on HN.

I propose we have complete transparency.

PG, please start by giving 10 examples of the kind of comments you are most worried about, so that you define the problem in very clear terms. There might be disagreements and we need to surface those before suggesting solutions to a vague problem.

Extending the idea of transparency generally, make all votes public, such that everyone can see who voted what.
Stop accepting new members for awhile.
Lots of good suggestions, forgive me if my suggestions are a dupe that I missed.

1)For certain high-profile domains, assign no karma to submissions. This would probably a hand-curated list of domains, but would probably include: Techcrunch, pg essays, avc.com, etc.

2)Allow users above X karma (500?) to vote to give any other user a "time out". At some threshold (25?) of votes, that user is muted for 1 week.

3)For any users that submits more than 5 articles from the same domain/subdomain, either suspend karma accumulation or suspend their ability to submit until they reach some mix of other submissions with an average score above 10

4)Create an article tagging system, and/or a way for users to ignore submissions on certain topics and/or from particular domains.
We implemented this on zootoo.com during a contest where posting rewarded the user with points (I understand 100% how ridiculous this is as a concept, how awful it is at achieving any kind of 'quality' by itself - and if I was the one who had been allowed to make the decision on this then it never would have been implemented - but karma is a kind of never-ending contest). Not only did the minimum length limit not work DURING the contest, but even after the contest was over and we had kept the comment length requirement in place, the quality of comments did not increase, and if someone wanted to say something that was below the minimum threshold they would simply add 'foobar-like' content to their post to meet the threshold.

The problem with time wasters is that it's no big deal for them, they're already wasting their time. It's always going to be up to users who care like you, me and others to try to mitigate the exposure of those time wasting comments while not penalizing legitimate contributions by users who care, and that's why I don't think a hard comment length should be implemented.
Here's my 2 cents for what is worth. I have managed several large scale installations at Rackspace, and I have to say that there is a huge disparity between their advertised support, and the quality of support you actually get. I was constantly unimpressed with the overall knowledge of their staff, and had numerous issues with them doing maintenance at the wrong time on our servers. For instance I would open a ticket saying to do it at 2AM PST, and notice that 2PM that day my server is being restarted by some incompetent sysadmin.

In all honesty I wouldn't trust Rackspace to host any of my servers anymore, and would either colo something somewhere else, use MediaTemple, or continue using EC2.
It seems that both reddit and metafilter seem have stronger meta discussions than HN. Reddit seems to have meta posts on the frontpage every once in a while, while metafilter has a fulltime forum (metatalk) dedicated to meta discussions.

Though there are meta discussions once in a while on HN too, they tend to be more general in nature, not specific to a certain comment or post.

I think an active meta discussion community would help with continuous small corrections, and eventually improve people's opinions on what kind of comments are good or bad.