skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Or a karmic penalty for upvoting a comment. That way you have to be respected by the community before you can upvote a thread. Maybe it would help curtail negative or snarky comments, if only because people upvoting have been around longer.

Stackexchange kind of does this. You need a certain (low) amount of karma before you can post certain types of submissions.

I think it's important to let new users have a visible voice, but giving older users greater powers for moderation might help preserve the older attitude of the site.
> But if you ignore the keyboards and the screen sizes, and just look at all of these as computing devices, what does the market look like?

It looks like Windows is kicking everyone's ass in.
To help improve the quality of comments, what if the OP's vote was weighted more than everyone else's? Their upvotes could be worth 3-5 instead of just 1 point.

An OP is motivated to keep their comment thread awesome: having better comments leads to more upvotes on the story. And, on a personal level, the OP would be less likely to upvote snark against their own story.

The obvious downside would be that the OP could effectively censor opposing ideas. However, I don't think this would happen that often: counterpoint comments generally do pretty well on their own, and would probably still rise to the top even without the OP's help. (Of course, the best OP's would recognize the benefit of discourse and promote these comments anyways... but not everyone is perfect)
Yes, but since the content is there anyway you might as well give it its own spot and stop it from cluttering the homepage. Those that want their junk food can have it and the rest of the readers get theirs too.

I'm not advocating 20 different subjects, just one, 'offtopic'. The place where threads go that get too many upvotes to flag (because apparently they do interest people) and that do not contribute to the topics of 'startup' or 'hacking'.

It's either something like that or much more active moderation of the content.
I think it is about whether the identity of the HN community remains in tact. HN can survive as long as the identity (even if it morphs) remains something specific and associable. Reddit, for example still has a distinct identity/culture even though it is a very different one today than in 2007. Digg, for example, had less of an identity and culture. It was more of a "mainstream place". Reddit kept its quirks and its colorful users which made the place unique.

As long as there is an identity that people find distinctive at HN, I don't think it will die.

All of the suggestions here kind of fit into that paradigm for me....how do you control/preserve identity?

- You could give old timers more control (downvoting)

- You could give newcomers less control until they prove themselves (no account creation just to upvote your friend's post)

- Enlist help in keeping tracking/managing the pulse of the community (like reddit, which has multiple admins on the lookout for issues)
Would it work to make the new page longer?
How about calculating comment and submission scores as log(sum(karma of upvoters) - sum(karma of downvoters)), while the way individual karma is calculated would stay the same (that is, total number of upvotes minus total number of downvotes)?
I've often wondered about this. There are a lot of variables and few folks have done the really heavy lifting of trying to propose an experiment that eliminates as many as possible.

My current setup is two 24" monitors one above the other in 'landscape' mode. It is more productive (for me) than two monitors that are adjacent. For a while at Google I used one monitor in front of me and one to the right in portrait mode. I find reading code in portrait mode helps.

When I'm playing with one of my old VAXes and have a VT420 with its 25 line by 80 column screen it is almost comically painful.

However I'm about to embark on a 'new' thing, which is three monitors, a 30" one in the center and then two 24" monitors in portrait mode on either side. This achieves the curvature which is important (you really do want your monitor surface as perpindicular to your eyes as possible) and avoids the seam in the middle for large surface area things.

I have tried off and on to find someone who either makes, or could make, a SWXGA (stupidly wide XGA) which is 2550 x 600 or maybe 1920 x 480. With a touch screen. In my ideal world this would be at the base of my center monitor, display useful information (think a whole monitor for a system tray / atop / system monitor / notifications) that I could touch (on the info) to bring up an app on the main display to dive deeper into it). I currently have the 10" MiMo monitor [1] with some not so clever yet custom code to interpret screen touches as non-motion mouse clicks (which is to say I try not to reset the mouse co-ordinates to the Mimo monitor but I do want the 'click' event delivered to the window that is open. If you're digging around for a startup plan with a hardware component you are welcome to make me one of these, happy to give a requirements document to anyone who wants one.

As for the mechanism that makes one more productive, its apparently removing the physical action. Specifically if I need to refer to another window/data to continue I don't have to move my mouse and click I can just 'look'. My first use case for e-Readers was keeping PDFs of component data sheets open on my workbench much like one used to have a databook open to the correct page.

[1] http://www.mimomonitors.com/products/imo-monster-touch-10-in...
It's interesting, but is it useful for a busy founder?

Aren't founders as busy as they are in part because they hope to reach the top 1 percent of income in their country? I would want to know what my country's policies are toward high-income people, and what social trends are influencing those policies, if I were pursuing a high-wealth business result, as at least some founders are.
Find some way of qualifying upvotes by who made them, at what point in the lifetime of a comment and each upvoters upvoting frequency. Use these factors to adjust the score, rather than just a score+=1.

A user who upvotes ten comments a day should have far less impact per upvote than one with very high karma and a high average score who only upvotes infrequently (and is not involved in the thread).

I realise that you're asking about comments; I think that this applies equally to story submissions.
And my Firefox 4 periodically OOM-crashes on Windows 7. It's also extremely overzealous in its allocation of decompressed graphics buffers (far worse than Firefox 3.5), so it typically uses upwards of 2GB of RAM for a set of tabs that previously only used 1GB.

Sometimes if I have tabs with a lot of large images open, Firefox will start up, allocate up to the 32-bit limit on Windows (~3GB)... then deallocate all the graphics buffers and drop down to 1GB. This process can take upwards of 5 minutes.

They blame the memory leaks on extensions, but if there's no way to see which extensions are using the memory besides a month-long exhaustive search (it typically take days to leak enough memory to crash), how are we to know?
No, it assigns a cost of 2 points to commenting.
Add more moderators, put them on rotation duty, and, instead of having them kill comments (except in the most egregious cases), have them patiently educate the people who put up the mean/dumb comments, as well as the upvoters. Write software that makes this process efficient.
Add "Assume Good Faith" to the guidelines; this is one of the few Wikipedia rules that I think really helps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith
Users from non-first world countries would suffer disproportionate from not being able to participate.
Perhaps only users with a certain level of karma have it roll over to the next version of HN. Everyone else gets reset (or even loses their account).
Yeah, there are many ways to detect features but I haven't read the paper yet and I don't know what kind of features it wants and if there are any problems with choosing them automatically. Like, can it group features into distinct objects without a human pointing them out?
Require articles about (say) economic inequality to be scholarly.
How does that address comment quality?
Clearly not everybody reads the site guidelines. Perhaps enforcing that periodically would help.
I really like the /classic front page view. Could we try a similar comment view as well, with votes only counted from users who've been here for at least a year?
If I were to rephrase the question on this thread, it seems to me that it could also be stated as "how do you keep HN comments from turning into Slashdot comments"? I don't say that in jest - I used to read Slashdot, but after a while I got really sick of 1) the vitriol and 2) the inanity of the comments that were on the first page. Granted, some folks had really interesting things to say, but truly funny/insightful comments seem to be a rare commodity.

But look at it in a positive light - the comments on HN could never be classified in the same - or even near the same - bucket that comments on sites like YouTube and Yahoo! News.
Would it be possible to make public a data set of heavily up-voted comments that suck and challenge the community to come up with algorithms that can predict whether a given popular comment sucks or not? I'd think you could get a fair amount of mileage just by measuring frequencies of certain technical noun phrases.

I paused for a second at the privacy implications of this, but honestly all comments are submitted here with the assumption that they will forever be visible and subject to moderation or critique.
I have a hard time believing that a fusion power source would work at all like a fusion bomb. Quite the opposite: one needs to keep the reaction under control, so keeping it small makes things easier. I suppose, in theory, it's possible, but I doubt it.

If you have a citation for where Sandia says there are proliferation risks, I would be interested.
No it is not plausible. It is extremely unlikely that this is anything other than a hoax.
Check out the first cluster of comments: http://i.imgur.com/phz9X.png

The third and fourth comment are directed at the second comment, but are displayed in reply to the first comment since there's only one level of replies. Confusing.

Also, instead of linking to the comment to show this, I had to take a screenshot.
Confirmation won't help here. In your hypothetical example, I set up a mail server at bulkdownloadrobot.biz and get my bot to use 00001@, 00002@ etc. The bot follows the confirmation links before downloading 60MB for each account.

Now, you might detect that bulkdownloadrobot.biz is a bad domain and blacklist it, but all I have to do is to register a new domain each time that happens.

So now you implement a heuristic that detects patterns of signups from domains. Now, I start buying Gmail accounts created by workers in a CAPTCHA-solving sweatshop.

You've increased my costs slightly, but you haven't solved the problem.
Performance? Don't make me laugh. Want an easy example, here's my old blog (don't mind the ugliness I changed it long ago) it takes over 10secs for me to load on Firefox. Chrome loads it in 0.2secs. That's what, 5000% faster for Chrome? No CSS at all, just pure JavaScript. Click on the "Display Next 30 entries" at the bottom of the page and notice how it takes 5-6 secs every time, while Chrome does it instantly.

http://dendory.net/blog.old.html
It's a shame that it all seems to be up to one person and what he will allow considering how often the shootout is referenced in discussions. I wonder if Mike Pall's experience was similar when he posted the Lua/LuaJIT versions.
I understand this is primarily about comment quality, but I had an idea for keeping story quality high: Score votes via bookmarklet as higher than a standard vote. That'd be one way to ensure that someone actually read a story, rather than just upvoted a catchy headline.

Naturally this would have to be kept secret, since it'd invariably lead to a potential voting ring issue.
SubHNs
3 words: Bayesian Comment Filter. Just does the opposite of what the spam filter does. Use the corpus of great comments from the past to find great comments of the present.

I'm only half joking. Fundamentally, the thread is about a filtering system.
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, you can apply that argument to just about anything.
I think you're right about mediocre comments being the real problem, and about identifying good users and rewarding them programmatically. I would take this a step further though and apply the same logic to story submissions.

For example, bloggers who write insightful stuff on a regular basis should get some sort of bonus when content from their domains is upvoted early on. Maybe each upvote would internally count as 1.5 upvotes for the first 100. Similarly, bloggers who have a reputation for writing linkbait should get some sort of penalty.

Right now you can easily spend ten hours writing an amazing blog post and have it not even make the front page. This provides an amazingly strong disincentive for intelligent people to contribute, especially when the front page is dominated by vapid current events gossip. The heart of the problem is that the current system is set up to reward people for submitting garbage from TechCrunch and to punish people who try to make thoughtful contributions of their own.

Similarly, content that takes longer to read should stick around on the new page for longer. Otherwise the front page gets dominated by fluff. Again, there are lots of people who would be willing to spend 10+ hours writing a 3,500 word essay designed to benefit the HN community, but they don't because they know that there is essentially zero chance of it hitting the front page. Right now by the time the first few people finish reading, it's no longer on the new page so any upvotes basically count for nothing. This problem gets vastly worse as the amount of content submitted increases, so if nothing changes then we're probably only a couple more iterations away from having the front page be dominated by pictures of cats.

On the other hand, I've been ridiculously productive the last few months now that HN is basically unreadable, so maybe the decline in quality isn't such a bad thing after all.
Note that this won't "fix" the comment problem, but every time it is used, more likely than not, it's going to improve the comment threads, because the alternative is publicly calling someone out.

Please label it "the gruseom button".
Cool. All this time here, and I'd somehow failed to notice that before. Thanks!
I'd rather see a few items from the new page on the front page, separate from everything else.

As far as making it longer, I usually click over to the second page of new submissions before I give up. I have no idea if that's typical, though. Perhaps you could keep track of how many pages people usually look at?
Actually that's something I've already changed. A few hours ago I made flags have a lot more weight.

The old weights were ok for the more engaged users we had a year ago, but now the ratio of votes to flags on a fluff story tends to be a lot higher.
And vice versa! As a sysadmin I wouldn't want to give the private key to someone with the knowledge of how to use it for interception of the traffic it's protecting ( and possibly the opportunity!)
This looks like a slightly better cake. After all, cake provides a persistent VM and you can run scripts with cake with !#/usr/bin/env cake.

It's nice that it doesn't require ruby and has a few additional features like search & install from clojars, and doc search. But it probably doesn't justify the cost of switching since I can get those functionalities from cljr.

What would really be nice -- the maintainers of lein, cljr, cake, and now jark all need to get together and work together instead of providing competing and slightly different tools.
The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted.

a) 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. That is something that can only be done by someone with curator powers here, but the rest of us can be encouraged to flag such comments more, and reminded not to upvote them.

b) If the comment is dumb, make a better comment in the same thread and downvote the dumb comment, especially if the dumb comment already has significant karma accrued. Anyone who has downvoting power (and user who has made many upvoted comments) can do all of that, and anyone who can post a comment can do some of that. Again, the curators can remind users from time to time to maintain those standards.

c) All users can browse the bestcomments list

http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

to search for massively upvoted comments that are still within the downvoting time limit, and downvote those that are mean or dumb. Curators can delete those comments as needed.

Example and reminders go a long way. (By the way, because I, and I suppose most users, don't read this site exhaustively, I'm not fully aware which recent comments may be the most problematic. But definitely feel free at any time to provide me or other users with advice on how to raise the quality of comments here.)

After edit: another comment from another user in this thread prompts me to ask whether all new users who sign up see the site guidelines automatically or not. That might also help a little, if it isn't already done. Posting links to the site guidelines in threads with problems might also help.
Idea 1. Charge for memberships like Metafilter.

I believe in the Quaker rule, "Only speak when you can improve the silence." Other people think speech is like squatting on land. You have to speak to gain footing. By charging people for the privilege of speaking, you make them consciously decide whether what they have to say is worth the $5 to join. They will probably say no.
Here's one you suggested to me: have people pay to comment.

If this were any other website, I'd suggest simply requiring a Facebook or twitter account to log in. Worked for Gawker et al, but it won't fly with this demographic.

So just charge people $1 to activate their account. It'll reduce the shite, and 99% of the commenters won't care. What happens to the edge-cases of people who don't have a credit card is an open question, but I suggest validating them some other way (solve a problem in Lisp perhaps).
You're just one of the people who I go out of my way to read, and among those people you're the only one who goes out of their way to help police thread quality. I'm sure there are people who do it more.
Thanks! That leaves the question: when is mmap slower, or is it always faster? And why isn't mmap the default usage pattern if it's better in most cases (and easier to use to boot)?
users complained that without comment scores it was too hard to figure out what were the most interesting comments in a thread

I was one of those complainers. And that was then; this is now. I'm not sure I'd complain if the points went away again.

Today I find that comment scores are no longer a reliable guide to anything I care about. Something has changed -- most likely just the scale of the whole system.
My current setup is 21.5 inch iMac @ 1920x1080 & 22 inches Dell, vertically @ 1050x1680.

I prefer 2 screens instead of 1 big screen. The reason is simple enough: I would like to watch movie and monitoring another stuff at the same time (quick glance for every 3-5 minutes or so). Having 1 screen would force me to either not go fullscreen (quite hard to enjoy the movie) or switch context all the time.

Also multiple screens give you this sense of "border" where you can feel natural to snap them to the edges.
Idea 2. Restrict memberships like Gmail invitations.

Give finite invitations to your YCombinator classes and alumni. Have them pass out invites to people they know. Give out more invites when you think you need them. At least this reroots the site back in the "Startup News" seed.
Agreed -- since entering college, I have yet to be paid less than $6000/month for a software-related internship (counting benefits such as free housing, etc).

I have typically been treated as a starting employee who's simply only going to be around for 3 months, not an "intern". Maybe this is just West Coast tech companies, I don't know.
"Startup time is still the #1 performance metric we optimize for."

Isn't it a bit wrong direction now that people keep the browser open all day long (compared to years ago that they close and open it frequently)?

Don't get me wrong, though. I would like to have Firefox startup fast. I just think maybe the focus at this stage of browser development should be something like faster tab creation and less memory leaks?

Firefox 4 is pretty amazing, but I just encountered a problem today: on the Mac, it doesn't even try to use the system's language priority, and by default it displays Japanese characters before Chinese (thus inconsistent rendering of characters), even though the system preference is configured to have Chinese over Japanese. Eventually I found there is a Firefox-only language setting in the browser. Maybe this is just design-philosophy, but still it feels not very native system-friendly.

So far, Firefox 4 hasn't yet won my heart. Most of geek friends I know are using Chrome, and giving the current situation, are unlikely to revert to Firefox any time soon. I'm interested to see how the Firefox could regain its older crown.
First of all, you should not have signed that contract.

Secondly, you should definitely advise them of every idea that you have, big or small, but especially small. Start with the small ones. I'm sure that pretty soon they will advise you what level of detail is required.

Keep all correspondence, and good luck. ;)
Thanks for the answers.
I know, a lot of questions: this is because we are architecturing our plateform and having a detailled help from a successful website is very helpfull.

Looking forward to see the next article.
> First, nobody cares.
Can this really be true? If so, why do you have a job?
Simple isn't always bad ;)
Apparently tptacek suggested something highly similar here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403750
If you ever have a $1bn idea, they'll sue the shit out of you because you failed to notify them.
* more comments than upvotes seems to correlate with low-content articles, because everyone feels qualified to comment

* articles with disproportionately few comments per upvote are sometimes the most interesting

if you can get low-content articles off the front page faster, and more interesting non-pop articles visible longer, it would probably attract the hacker community more and the pop community less.

misc ideas:

* remove all system incentive to submit links

* change UI to increase visibility into user history, so that reputation becomes even more important, and low-quality activity sticks with you for a while

* fix the new page! incent people to upvote new links, or a creative UI hack like a single new submission at the top (e.g. "sponsored" on reddit)