skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry, but even though my passing knowledge of linguists may be far outstripped by yours, I still think you may be mistaken.

The statements made by the article are related to something called Universal Grammar, it is not related to syntax theory or Chomsky hierarchies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar

According to the article, Chomsky probably didn't invent universal grammar, but he was certainly a strong proponent.

As to the second point, the article claims that languages have been evolving for a minimum of 4,000 years, not a maximum of four thousand years. This is a perfectly accurate statement about all known species of animals. All it really says is that we have records that lead us to know for certain that certain sets of languages had common roots as soon as 4,000 years ago, but we are not sure about their common roots before that.

This sort of argument is very common in genetics; I recall reading a book about how human men can all be traced to a common ancestor 90,000 years back. This does not imply that scientists believe humans sprang into being 90,000 years ago.
• I'd like to at least get some feedback when I vote, now my vote seems to just disappear into a black hole. Perhaps make the arrow orange after I click it (or simply a tick, ✔ voted)?

• It feels pointless to upvote the only comment in a thread, it doesn't affect anything unless more comments are posted (again, lack of feedback).

• I often can't tell if a comment is any good (e.g. an answer to a scientific question), points really helped here.
No need for it to be grand. But it has to be substantial enough for anyone to want to read it.
Top Missing PostgreSQL Features
Check out Imagine K12[1]. It was recently on HN[2].

[1] http://www.imaginek12.com/index.html

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2337362
"...At the last Quakecon I took a show of hands poll, and it was interesting to see how almost as many people there had an Android device as an iOS device. But when I asked how many peple had spent 20 bucks on a game in the Android store, there was a big difference. You’re just not making money in the Android space as you are in the iOS space."

Interesting
I think it would be useful if the points were shown after a time delay. Throughout the day, I visit the same thread a dozen times and follow the discussions. It would be nice to gauge what the general consensus is by seeing the comment points upon the 3rd visit or so..

But to answer your poll, I voted for them to be hidden.
Use case for displaying points is that it allows you to get an idea of what percentage of the users on the site agree with the comment. I think that's really valuable. I'm often more interested to know what the masses think because it helps you understand the audience.
can you elaborate on why screen scraping is bad practice? or do you mean bad practice for specific types of data?

I ask because I recommended screen scraping and have used it successfully in the past. Though I do think it depends on the application.
What is the algorithm that determines where a comment ranks in the hierarchy from top to bottom? It appears that there is more to it than just points.
I like comments without, I find myself focusing more on what's being said than skipping over folks with significantly less comments.

I've read criticisms about not being able to quickly/easily filter out top comments (which I care about, too). But there might be other (better?) ways of achieving that without reverting back to scored comments. For example, coloring/annotating comments that cross a certain threshold (either an absolute number, or relative to the other comments in the post). The advantage of color is that it becomes easier to visually filter out highly voted comments.
I think no comment points is fine, but in the case where there are no points I think you need to have a more accurate comment ranking system on the page. While having gravity to pull comments down is perfectly reasonable when points are displayed (because users can still look at the points and pick out old but valuable comments), without points the most important indication of comment quality is based on the ordering on comments.

Also, perhaps it would be useful to still display comment points in single-view? It would prevent eye-balling a comment, but would still allow you to view a comment score with a little extra effort.

I am aware this could provide preferential treatment to comments already on the top of the page but with the influx of new users the most important thing to prevent is a deluge of mediocre comments, not necessarily the dearth of exceptional comments.
What about extension compatibility?
I immediately liked the change. I realize now that in addition to evaluating the comments I was reading, I was also evaluating the readership's collective response to the comments. It makes for better reading to only evaluate one thing at a time.
I wish they didn't disclose both the company name and the title since some companies create a title just for one person. It takes no effort to figure out who's making what, myself included -_-

Open data / Gov 2.0 and that whole spiel is great but it'd be nice if privacy was given a second thought, even if it's the data of non-citizens
but someone who does 3-4 years at Harvard, MIT, CalTech, etc.

<rant:driveby>
I am sorry. I HATE to hear this hog wash.

I have met many people from Caltech and MIT and the way you are saying it, it is like they are the distinguished elite... and yes maybe a select few are but don't generalize... they are really ditzy and honestly stupid people there. Structure, fear and the title of those prestige schools will keep you from doing something silly and failing out.

Last time I checked... Once you get in (from high school SAT / A-Levels / AP / CAPE) you are in for the full four years. So it is not the students. Scratch that.

So then what are you really saying the professors there will give me a better education than I will give to myself ? Ever heard of student cram sessions ? Students who study before class only to argue or sleep during ? I highly doubt a professor from another school will not provide a similar level of education other wise you are insulting them. So it is not the professors. Scratch that.

So is it their courses ?
MIT has OCW, CalTech and Harvard I think have lectures on YouTube and elsewhere for the public viewing. So it is not the courses. Scratch that.

Stop giving credit where it doesn't exist.

And you missed what smanek is saying. This is someone who has either learnt material that would be covered in first year uni (which happens if you do AP or A-Level) or who is learning on his own. No one said that one will not learn jack shit when on the work force .. that is just stupid.

</rant:driveby>

Signed
Pissed off Canadian on behalf of
-UFT
-McGill
-UofA
More importantly than hiding points, I think names should be visible on mouseover only. There's truly no need to see the username before reading the contents; rather, you should look to see who wrote a particularly good comment after having read it.
A better way to do this experiment would be to have half of threads show comment scores, and half not.
For years I listened to users complain whenever I removed something they were used to for the improvement of the whole endeavor. I have rarely encountered a user that was happier with less information.

Now I know how they feel.
I think it's useful to see and read this story. It goes in to how tough a real pivot can be. Twitter grew out of Odeo, but the process by which it happened was a complicated mess. I'm glad that Noah Glass is finally getting included in the story.
Why JS performance matters
Maybe I'm unusual, but I don't pay attention to others' karma scores that much. My own experience on Reddit and HN has shown that karma scores have more to do with early-entrant effects and brevity than the quality of the content.

Many of my best Reddit posts, in my personal opinion, are at 1 or 2 points, just because they got buried in huge threads. Whereas I have one-liners that took me literally 5 seconds to come up with and ended up at 100+.

If I were to make an automated system for judging quality of message board content, it'd be a function of text readability (grammar/punctuation, avoidance of overly-long "text wall" paragraphs), size, and user feedback. A 500-word post with 7 upvotes is probably more awesome and more deserving of prominence than a 10-word one-liner with 125 upvotes.
Oddly the point system went off when I hit a karma of 250, making me think I was being punished in some way. Great to see that isn't the case.

Honestly, there are sometimes WAY too many comments to wade through, and I feel that comments with higher points have been vetted by the community, so I tend to focus on them. This isn't the case when there are just 10-12 comments, but with over 70 comments, the point system can be helpful.

To remove the system is to imply that the community can no longer be trusted to handle the sometimes contentious exchanges on their own. I hope that hasn't become the case.
"Without," because the lack of points on this comment has led me to have to think through my objections to it. Rather than, e.g., noting that it has a smallish number of points and so therefore my opinion is already shared by the community and I don't need to say anything.
One thing about points its I can pinpoint the "best" or most controversial comment quickly - if you can do that other way, for me its fine.
To reinforce your point, I just tried to upvote you in response to the scientific answers point, but I may have accidentally clicked downvote instead. I'm really not sure.

So, if so, I'm sorry.
Anecdotally, my karma per post has gone way up. Either that, or I've had a lucky few days.

My guess is, when people don't see how many points a post has, they have no way to calibrate whether it has "too many" points or "too few".
I voted up both as a sort of "abstain". At first, I hated it. Now, I think I might like it. It's stopped me from voting comments up and down so much but I think, perhaps, it discourages the wrong sort of people from voting but the right sort of people keep on doing it anyway. If that's true, it could be a big win.
I just lease a dedicated atom based server from interserver with a 1.5 TB sata drive in it. It comes to $49/month.

I end up using it for lots of other stuff like a vpn host so that I have an american IP when overseas, a small web server for personal projects, an always on VOIP switchbox to route from one number to all my cell phones, and a git host with gitolite for code.

For backup, I just use a bunch of rsync scripts that dump onto the big disk.

IMHO, everyone should have a personal server in some datacenter somewhere.
Staedtler and Faber-Castell's productive pencil rivalry
You know, I hadn't noticed before but now that you mention it, the conversation is more pleasant lately. I can't understand why though.
I agree. My vote goes to making it configurable, with a default behavior of not displaying points.
I'm not going to pull out the dictionary, but I think we are both right. I actually love change when it is for the better and I think you're right, as entrepreneurs we are always seeking to undo the norm... but the moment something changes that you have no control of, most people are left unsettled for X amount of time. Even us.
Intro caught my attention:
"The ancient city of Nuremberg, steeped in medieval and Nazi history, is home to a cluster of fiercely competitive pen and pencil manufacturers whose survival is driven by innovation."
Agreed. I find that without the points, I am now reading comments more closely to determine for myself if a comment has merit rather than relying on the points and skimming.

Maybe having it as a configurable option would be best.
How, and with what input and output formats? I said I like SCSS.
I mostly like no points displayed, but with one exception - comments that provides information you are unsure of trusting or not, and there hasn't been replies to it yet. (eg. scythe's recommendation on domain registrar [1]). In order to have better information on the post's trustworthiness, I had to click on the user's link. I guess we'll need to wait to see how much other nuances for this no points display.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445061
One option is Clickbank.

No need for a merchant account and they easily handle affiliate commissions (if that's something you want).

Downside is that people will see Clickbank.com on their credit card statement, not your merchant name (but that's the same with a basic PayPal account as well).

Upside is they have a very good track record at processing recurring payments successfully (much better than PayPal) and they don't freeze your account like PayPal or Google Checkout does.
I've spent somewhere in the range of $20 on various apps in the Android market. That includes one single game -- an okay racing game. Do I want to spend more? Absolutely (I spend an average $50 a month in Steam on the PC) Why don't I? Because there is an dearth of high quality applications.

So when Carmack -- as a leader of high quality applications -- does his survey's and unsurprisingly find that people haven't purchased many apps (the platform runs on the power of Google's apps, which for most has to suffice), he's presenting a chicken/egg situation. If Rage were available on Android it would sell very well. The general absence of good apps would virtually guarantee that it go gangbusters.

He is acting like a follower. Eventually A-games will come to Android and id will have missed a remarkable opportunity. He can then do his poll and say "Gosh, I guess it's a good platform now" and can wander over and be just a me too competitor in a crowded market.
I've been getting more upvotes since the scores were hidden. Maybe my comments were better, or maybe groupthink was holding people back, but either way, my karma has increased wince the scores were hidden, so.. I'm all for keeping it how it is. :-D

Seriously, though, I kinda like it without scores, because I don't get inadvertently suckered into voting to go along with the crowd (I try not to anyway, but sometimes it happens without thinking about it), while now I only vote if I feel the comment needs it (ie, the comment is very relevant and informative (up vote) or off topic/rude/irrelevant (down vote)).
I think it would be a good idea to keep it for another week or two so that we can all get used to it first.

The advantage I can see from not having points is that I spend more time actually reading the comments and not be influenced by the majority here.

The disadvantage is that I lose a bit of information when there's a comment with scientific content in which case I like to look at votes to see if it's correct.

I agree with some people to show the points in topics that are more than 2 days old...
The problem every startup faces: Which platform?
This sounds desirable to me too; if it were a poll option, I'd vote for it.
There are quite a few people here who are suggesting pg make it an option. While that would make everyone happy, it wouldn't solve the problem; people who vote based off points will continue to do so.
I haven't seen much of a bump in my own karma coinciding with this, but I have noticed that I'm voting significantly more than normal.
Better yet, if your company employs H1-B visa holders, they are required by law to put up the job advertisement along with salary offered in a public area of the office.

This requirement is to give opportunity to existing employees for the new position.

In a small company of about 400 people, where I worked, the job advertisements were posted in the kitchen area and it wasn't very hard to deduce what the salary of the newly joining member of your team is.
I thought it was working well without points until this morning.

With this ASK HN post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444709
) about the best credit card payment method I would typically immediately go and look at the comment scores.

Because a vote for a comment is typically a vote for the thing being recommended.

It's really a "poll-like" question except it can't be a poll because the OP doesn't know the options in advance.

Other than that one problem though,I found I was judging people's comments more thoughtfully without the scores.
I prefer without comments, but would like some mechanism by which comment scores affect layout. It is often now difficult to process a large discussion, as high signal and low signal replies are indistinguishable.

For instance, having predefined threshold for collapsing to a title (5, 10, 50) or deep shading for >= + 10 comments would be very helpful in processing a large discussion.
How to Play with Rails 3.1, CoffeeScript and All That Jazz Right Now
Nike Air Max 2010 Running Shoes, Air Max Nike Shoes
Consider this: Facebook is remarkable precisely because no matter how big it gets, your experience with it is more or less bounded by your personal circle.

Points are a good proxy for user counts, and over the years I've become more and more aware of the number of people reading and judging. For me, at least, not seeing those points makes HN feel more cozy and private. With points I tended to chase after them rather than learning.

I suspect that this feature vote will be very close. I suggest weighting this vote by contribution of the voter (submissions and comments) rather than raw vote count. After all, this experiment is intended to increase the value of contributions.
I think the best part of this HIB is the linux port and the opensourced project they are hoping to build community around.
I find this interesting given the discussion yesterday about transparency about salaries.
In most states you can look up any state-employee's salary by name.
Why not let the person who submits the article decide whether or not comments are visible for that thread?
I skim through the points, both on stories and discussions to decide which ones to read. As the size of the community has grown, I believe, probably mistakenly, that the points are more closely related to domain names on submissions and user names on comments, rather than the quality of the comment.

I tend to read some comments based on user names, irrespective of the points, for a few users, raganwald being one, primarily because I have read pretty much everything he has written and find it interesting more often than not. Even in cases where his comments has garnered few points, I have found the comment worth while. So I can understand the tendency to up vote comments based on user names.

Having said that, I vote for display of points and the hiding of user names. I would like comments to stand up for themselves rather than for the user posting the comments.
I assume you mean in regards to entrepreneurship?

How about Pursuit of Happyness in the drop in center where he's fixing the last X-Ray machine in the middle of the night, long after the last light inside has automatically switched off. (sorry for the bad description, haven't watched it in ages). It really shows the tenacity he had to become successful.
Without. I don't want to have to read the whole comment thread to get the HN Zeitgeist.

What if it was an option? Or better yet, something like "Hold Ctrl to see comment scores", or "hover here to see the score for this comment", etc.?

Seeing comment scores is massively valuable to the way I consume HN -- skimming the article, then reading the top-rated 2-5 comments.
I know you mentioned not liking Amazon for the sign-up step, but in practice I haven't noticed much of a fall-off because of it. I use Amazon's Flexible Payments Service for taking small payments (<$2), and I've been pretty happy.

About 10% of the people who click the "buy it" button on my product get to the Amazon sign-in/registration page and then bail. Abandoned funnels always sting, especially so close to completion, but is a 10% abandonment rate worse than it would be for a more direct credit card payment system? I doubt it, though I admit that I don't have any solid data to support that assertion. Might be worth trying.
Isn't CoffeeScript bad for perf on mobile because, for example, its extensive (over-)use of closures?
Or check the local Barnes & Noble. The one in my small town at least has "Nature" in the magazine section, at around $20/copy (but of course you can read it while standing in the magazine section...).

At first I thought "this can't be the well known peer reviewed journal!?", but it was full of full research papers and sure appeared to be a peer reviewed journal. I don't know if it is the exact same edition as universities get, or some special edition aimed at members of the general public who happen to like reading research papers. It did have a section in front full of general science news and articles, and the part with the papers didn't seem to have a table of contents which struck me as odd.

This wouldn't be the first unexpected thing I have found at a "normal" bookstore. At either a small Waldon's or B. Dalton's in a mall I found a copy of Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's tome "Gravitation".
Ask HN: Is anyone attending XMediaLab Perth tommorow?
http://xmedialab.com/event/2011/perth/xmedialab-perth-interactive-storytelling

The conference is tomorrow and bills itself as a good place for hackers and entrepreneurs.
I'm going to check it out, anyone else attending or have experience with XMediaLab conferences before?
Amazon S3 with reduced redundancy will cost about $45.00 per month plus the cost of the initial data transfer in. EC2 with a reserved Linux micro instance and 500 GB of EBS storage will cost more at about $60.00 plus the cost of the initial data transfer in.

A couple of months agao, I went through the same research as you and it is hard to beat S3 storage costs and ease of use. My requirements are more modest at about 100 GB per month though.

There is a handy Amazon calculator here:
http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
He won't be able to. It's not a one man job, however, it is possible to code out a demo. I have some cs friends who are willing to help out, but are not fully committed to be a technical leader. In a sense, I am looking for a technical co-founder who will be able to commit enough and lead a few other friends of mine that are willing to help out.
Yearning Lurker
lurk here
Not as much lately
Miss it
Thanks
Making an option is a tempting choice, but as always the devil is in the defaults. In the limit case you get things like Linux apps with umpteen million options, and still no one is happy.
I generally support not displaying points on comments. But I did run into a case where it would be useful to have some sort of feedback on a series of comments (even if it's just dots or some other non numerical indicator).

I was reading a recent post on the open-sourcing of some of Greplin's Lucene and Bloom filters code. sigil made a comment asking about performance based on how they implemented prefix matching. Then nostrademons responded[1]. When points were displayed it was trivial to get a consensus of whether the community agreed on the performance assessment or whether it was dubious/questionable. Since points are not visible I can't rely on the consensus of the community to help verify or make a decision. Instead I just have the posts and order of the posts. Which, of course, isn't necessarily bad. But has taken away my ability to use the HN community's consensus as verification.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444585
I think it would be useful to see the number of upvotes and the number of downvotes instead of the total score (or possibly a percentage instead of a hard number). That way, you can see whether a comment is at -2 points because it's bad, or if it's at -2 points because it's controversial.
How about, display a discretized form of points? -- e.g. high, medium, and low, with unknown thresholds (that may be changed through time or whatever).

Can still use them as a heuristic for filtering, but the details and possibly divisive aspects of worrying about minute differences are hidden.
Geolocation, Rails and MongoDB - a recipe for success