skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Upvoted back to one point. Whether it's right or wrong, someone downvoted it because they disagreed with the premise.

HN used to be full of stubborn individualists arguing amongst themselves with excellent writing, interesting experience, and data. In the last year or so, it just feels like everyone is trying to avoid saying anything outside our little bubble.

When I used to debate, we talked about how it wasn't if the judge agreed with you that won you the debate. It was how persuasive you were and how well you said your piece. This comment made a point and it made it well. Don't try to vote it away just because you disagree with the point.
Except with sufficiently snarky/provocative comments trying to shame the commenter might look from the outside like something very similar to petty disagreement.

I think some people here are learning that hugely self-confident, strongly opinionated, obvious writing tends to spark a strong agreement reaction on the readers, who quickly upvote a comment that adds nothing to a discussion. These are a problem, as they encourage snark and posing over effectively arguing things out, but they are very hard to treat as disagreeing with them is likely to cause knee-jerk reactions in many upvoters.
I don't know much about anonymous, but it's actually a pretty good letter...except for the penises in the hornets nest thing. Had to double take that one.
MS in CS after 4 years. Good idea? And Swedish University or US University?
I am very confused. Granted that these are my personal decisions and I should take a call on them, but I could use some advice.

Here's the thing. I have been working for 4 years in IT. I am from a developing country and fortunately(or unfortunately) I had chance to go to Japan 2 years ago as a contractor. I liked it there so much I decided I want to live in a developed country (since I knew I will be sent back once the project gets over) and MS was a way to achieve this.

I got admits from UC Irvine, North Carolina State U and Linkoping University in Sweden.TO add t confusion, I have received an offer from a Japanese firm to work as a permanent employee.

Reason for confusion:
1) Normally I would choose UC Irvine, but Linkoping is offering me scholarship and I have a fascination for Politically liberal Sweden. Not many people opt for Sweden, which holds an inexplicable charm for me.

Is it easy to get job in Sweden if I do not speak Swedish? I know it is difficult for part time but how abut job when I pass out? I 've heard all Swedes speak/understand English so it should not be that difficult(?)

2) Should I opt for going for MS? or just take the job with the Japanese firm. That way it would certainly help me financially.

ALL Comments/Suggestions welcome. A great board to be honest!

tl;dr - 4 years experience, want to live in developed country. Which one to choose - Japan (without MS), Sweden (with MS from top Univ in Sweden) or US (with MS from top University in world)
How to know when to launch your startup
If I were trolling, would I expound upon my suggestion as I did? If you stopped reading at that quotation, you're right: I'd be unsure if I were trolling as well.

This is about what the community wants and needs. pg and the other long-term users want the community to stay a certain way, hence this item itself; closing off that community to only those that participated in the development thereof will allow the community to remain where it is desired.

> Perhaps the old guard/high karma users keep posting here in part because they know they have a large audience. What makes you think they would stick around if the site were walled off?

The same thing that made them stick around when the site did not have a large audience.
Every N times someone upvotes a comment, prompt the person with a reminder that good reasons for upvoting a comment are x,y,z, not a,b,c. One especially important thing for the latter category is "You agree with the content of the comment."
ok. That's great. What are they going to do about it? DDoS Sony's servers? That does nothing except piss people off.
I will check them out. Thanks a lot.
Extraction Zone app helps first responders safely cut through modern cars
I hated it as a platform back in the day but the Amiga did multitasking with a GUI environment back in the late 80s as I recall. Although i really hated those rectangular pixels with a passion...
I'd be careful of comment thresholds at least to some extent. It's pretty well known across many of these services that if you reply quickly to a new story you're much more likely to get upvotes. Similarly with replying to a top post. If they need to be written quickly they often aren't as high quality or carefully considered, or may even fall back on some of the easy bad posting styles you're trying to eliminate. If you take the existing karma whoring incentives to do this and add to it that you may never even get read if you don't get in early that might cause a lot more people to play that game. And cause a drop off in participation from people who might only be able to respond to a thread when it's hours old.

I think in general you already have most of a filter in that bad comments get pushed down and the lower sections of comments seem to be read much less often.
As developed through this discussion, my point would be that we need an outsider's perspective on the quality of a community. Perhaps a "passer by".
Labscam
How about adding a star to the top log(n) comments in each post?
and the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxMKuv0A6z4
This looks awesome! I want to build this into apps for iPad 2.
How about rather than down-voting, you allow people (possibly with some minimal karma) to delete comments if they violate the terms? If a comment is deleted, there would be a trace showing that there used to be a comment that got deleted by John. John's profile could then show all the comments he deleted, just like it now shows John's submissions and comments and anyone (perhaps with the same minimal karma) would be able to revive a frivolously deleted comment. Hopefully, that would mean that people would not delete comments unless they can stand for it.

But I'm pretty new to HN, so my comment may not take into account its evolution.
I think the answer is fairly clear. If you remember Digg before it got popular, and Reddit before it got popular, you understand how these sites lose focus when they increase readership. The devistation of Digg, and now the serious problems at Reddit, are forcing more general-readers to HN.

Solutions:

1) Reddit staved off this effect for a while by both re-tuning the karma ranking computation, and wiping everyone's karma back to 0. The effect of hyper-people with too much power is problematic. I don't think that will work here, but it's possible a re-tune will help.

The general idea of a redo on the karma system was stated above: the right answer is to take a look at "good comments" and "bad comments" and look at new threads.

2) HN as invite only. Anyone can read, few can vote/comment. I'm not sure I'd make the cut if you were to have certain blessed voters/commenters. I like the suggested improvement of having this calculation be hidden, and never to show karma.

3) Moderators. The community I live in with the longest lifetime is "chowhound". They don't have a voting system (or good web technology), they have ruthless monitors. Monitors are never supposed to remove for quality of post, but they do simply nuke from orbit "that's what she said" post chains.

4) Look, there's one real fact here. As someone who, myself, sells a database product aimed at people like those who read HN, I have a huge incentive to get an article into HN. It could make or break my company - no fooling. Once you incent bright people to break your system, it will be broken. Socket puppet rings will rule. Eternal vigilance - that is, a moderator-like junta charged with looking at quality every few months and ruthlessly implementing whatever solution is correct at that time, is the only way to continue HN's spirit.

5) I will guarantee you that if something isn't done, there will simply be a slow, sure slide to mob rule and ignorance.
I presume that this 68000 machine was just a terminal that connected to a Unix mainframe via serial connection. In other words, it's just equivalent to an X window server.

It's interesting. Even way back in 1982 when you ask the question "how can we use a GUI to make Unix better" the solution you come up with is essentially X11.
Farmer Update ve Sitelerdeki Hit Kayiplari
This is a fantastic idea, however, how will it be sustained if the idea takes off?

Non-profit? Consortium funding (scary), other?

Has zed taking this into account and documented?
"... Perlmonks does this, and based on your total karma you are given a higher daily limit to spend. Works quite well. ..."

I always think of the Perlmonk progression as a good idea. It will require a radical departure in use/interaction and might be seen as too controlled. PM had the advantage of doing this from the start (as far as I know) PM #244776
One potential solution to this problem is to distribute the load of evaluating the new page among the community. Look at StumbleUpon for an example of how one might go about this. All new links go into a pool. The user clicks the stumble button and a link is selected from the pool using a weighted random algorithm -- urls with lots of upvotes are more likely to be selected, new urls are more likely to get selected, etc. The user votes on the article, then requests another.

Maybe users should have to vote on X links on the new page for every Y links they view on the front page.
How about penalizing submissions by how often the title keywords and domain have been posted in the last week or so? This should push a lot of repetitive content down, and encourage the discussion to continue on the older submission.

Whenever there's some important piece of news like the japan earthquake we have highly redundant discussions on many different articles. This is wasteful.
One thing I wonder about is whether accumulating personal karma is a red herring: trolls don't seem to care about their karma, and good folks may not care either.

Perhaps the most important thing about upvotes and downvotes is how they affect visibility. Everyone wants their voice to be heard, and some people want the opportunity to influence whether other people's voices are heard or not, e.g. by flagging stories or killing comments through downvoting.

If the big deal here is visibility, then I would concentrate on the algorithms that decide when a comment thread is rendered gray or invisible and the algorithms that decide the ranking of comment threads. I would look for patterns of votes or commenting that might help distinguish "popular but fluffy" from "popular and thought-provoking."
What about adding a separate "flag as politics" option to stories? That way, if enough people feel that it is off-topic for the HN front page, it could get banished to a separate news.ycombinator.com/politics area. Not deleted, just removed from the front page and easily accessible to anyone who wants it.
I'm fascinated with Anonymous' impact as a political group. As far as I can tell, Anonymous is just another term for technologically connected young people, which otherwise would have been single individuals incapable of advancing an agenda. Perhaps it's just me, but despite their misguided actions, I believe me and anyone else who grew up with the Internet is deeply invested in their particular brand of libertarianism: strong belief in freedom of speech, transparency, and personal property.
They should be split, actually. The close button should not be next to other buttons.
> Except with sufficiently snarky/provocative comments trying to shame the commenter might look from the outside like something very similar to petty disagreement.

While I agree with the general case, in my specific case I called somebody an "idiot" out of anger and tptacek called me on it. It was quite mortifying and I've tried to watch my words since.
What Do Kids Say Is The Biggest Obstacle To Technology At School?
Thanks. I assume it works with ABCs, but haven't actually tried it (I ran out of time and wanted to publish something as a first release this weekend).

Structural types would make more sense for general use, but not for what the larger library was actually intended for (I think) so I never really looked in that direction (and I don't have any ideas on how to extend it to include them, either).

I do have an idea for a kind of type matching across sum types which will be quite neat if it works...
RSA APT hack - blogger tells all
Internet Explorer <9, Firefox <3.5, and Safari <3.1 don't support CSS3 media queries. Perhaps GP uses an outdated browser.
It would be nice to be able to click a button to inform the poster, discreetly, that the comment exhibits negative qualities like:

hostility
unclear connection to parent
factual errors

etc.

Discretion is necessary to encourage people to address and fix the problems with their comments and style rather than provoking them to guard their reputation.

Sending individual emails is effective at this, but takes too much time and energy. Being able to click a button that gives a commenter specific feedback could be very effective.
The way to save HN from its own success is to take it to the next level. You need to spin it up into a commercial enterprise. Improving the quality of HN, as it stands today, requires expenditure of human effort, either in the form of professional moderation, or some sort of AI-ish enhancement: pruning of message threads, credentialing users in more sophisticated ways, finding ways to bubble up story submissions that otherwise get lost.

No doubt some will find the commercial option distasteful, but I think the pure crowd-sourced option has run its course. Commercializing HN would allow further expansion, for instance splitting it into several areas of interest. Stackoverflow/StackExchange is a model for this. There is much value that can be added on to HN, as many Hackers have shown in the past with various projects.
The problem is that word features are not really that good predictors of quality.

I have done some research on this (unpublished), and I got a really good performance on predicting hacker news votes by just counting how many new words (not stopwords, not very-high-frequency words) a comment was adding to a thread. Just using a few variations on this theme predicted better than word counts or bigram features.

Fundamentally, though, I disagree with machine learning- based approaches as they can only _reinforce_ present behavior, and we'd like to shape voting behavior.
Sure; in the docs I call them "runtime verification of type annotations".
There are certain people who seem to like the idea of "knowing" a person's "ID" is "accurate". Essentially what they want is a lack of anonymity, which has existed longer than media itself has existed. One example of the value of anonymity: The Federalist Papers.

Either they're not thinking, or they're a member of the establishment that wants to erase anonymity.
Agree with the poker analogy. I played a single player poker game and just went all in repeatedly because I could just restart anyway.

In the same way I can upvote everyone in this thread even though many wouldn't deserve it.
I was terribly disappointed by the performance of FF4. When releasing blockbattle.net (very JS heavy game), we knew it performed poorly in FF3.6 while flying in Chrome/Safari. We made some changes and optimizations and thought that FF4 would be at least as fast as older versions of chrome/safari but no such luck.

We now have to dedicate extra time to investigating and optimizing performance for FF4, which makes it scarily like IE - you get everything working in Chrome/Safari, then spend extra time getting it to work on other browsers like FF and IE.
I was a regular contributor to Techcrunch comments (and not a troll), but I haven't commented once since they moved to Facebook comments. And I won't.

This Techcrunch article is the first one in a week or more that I have read the comments. And I've pretty much tuned out of Techcrunch now, and moved over exclusively to HN. I used to have Techcrunch open all day, every day. Now it's gone.

So, one switch from Disqus to Facebook comments lost me - a long time reader of TC, and an active participant at TechCrunch 40 and TechCrunch 50. And they probably don't even know it.

I wasn't in love with the Disqus system, but there was one feature that was right for me, that FB comments don't have: separation from Facebook.
I'd look at how different users respond to different articles? Do they click on the article? Do they comment? Do they come back to the site after they see the article? Do they vote for the article.

Next, you can correlate how various people voted with whether a specific person will like the article and/or comment. Finally, you should be able to tell who will like or not want something to get voted up. At this point, you can customize for everyone or weight the influence of people based on well correlated their taste is with the top karma people.
When you say for memberships, shouldn't you mean charge for comments? It wouldn't affect the site much if I could still sign in, save threads, set procrast etc. Which would still be useful to many users.
Also, and this is really obvious, I would try to quantify the value of each position on the front page. Given an "average" story at #1, how many votes does it get? How long does it stay at #1? The answer is probably a curve of some sort, or a surface, but the general idea is that if you know what the typical #1 story gets, you can look at a story and determine whether it is outperforming stories in #1 position or under-performing them. You can do the same for all the positions on the page. You can determine the historical likelihood that someone looking at the front page will upvote a story in position #5

This data is interesting because now if you randomly perturb the front page, say by putting a new story in position #5 and lying about how many points it has. Show this perturbed page to a small sample of users and see if the story beats the historical averages or not.

If that kind of thing worked, it could help correct for the phenomena where a popular story stays popular just because it's popular. You can now rank stories by how well they take advantage of their "real estate" on the front page. Those that underperform the average sink, those that outperform the average rise.

One hitch. This might not work if you tell people you're doing it.
mixmax' point 3) reminds me of State the Obvious. Maybe saying something in known agreement promotes consensus (with the speaker). Also anything past the first page won't get as many eyeballs so what's there will get more upvotes still.
Looking at this comment page it's clear that there is an absolute deluge of excellent ideas waiting to be implemented. The bottleneck here is pg. pg doesn't scale. As far as I can tell, he's the one who does the vast majority of work on Hacker News, and as the site grows -- and as YCombinator grows -- pg's (already huge) workload is only going to increase. This is, of course, similar to the "Linus doesn't scale" problem faced by the Linux kernel, to which the solution was git. [1] I expect a similar distributed solution is needed for Hacker News.

Re-writing the software in a language more people understand (e.g. Python) could be a good first step here. But I don't know if pg is willing to give up on his silver bullet (arc).

Turning Hacker News into a business might help. Create a situation where exceptional people can make lots money by figuring out how to make HN great and let market forces do the rest. Although figuring out how to make money off of content could be a pretty tough problem.

More generally, I think pg should be thinking less, "How can I improve Hacker News?" and more, "How can I create an environment where other people can improve Hacker News?"

I mean... investing in startups is a full-time job, running a high traffic website is a full-time job, building a programming language is a full-time job, raising a child is a full-time job... trying to do all four at once probably isn't going to work.

[1] http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9809.3/0957.h...
The idea of kids using their cellphones in class brought an article that Frasier Speirs wrote back in October to mind: http://speirs.org/blog/2010/10/9/run-what-ya-brung.html

He argues that there are a number of assumptions that come into play with using pupil's phones in this manner. He's worth reading, since he's involved in a project bringing tablet computers (currently iPads) into the school that he's working for and integrating them into their teaching. The entire series is fascinating reading if you're interested in mobile technology in schools.
Even when a bug has been fixed in trunk a vendor may not wish to reveal the details of an exploit (either publicly or "just to zed").

A sensitive researcher may not wish their details of their techniques or findings to be revealed to a wider audience.

For context only (I don't want to do the responsible disclosure debate again...) please consider eg recent bugtraq SCADA announcent or Sockstress.
For the zombie genre enthusiast: the hypothetically real threat
I really like this idea. It'd disincentivize trolls because they're looking for a public flamewar. Turning those flamewars/disagreements private would hide a lot of the noise.
i see those pics and remember the typhoon season is coming rather soon.... I pray for very small typhoons this year.
In Natty typing 'term' and hitting enter seems to do exactly what you would want, except you have to wait a fraction of a second after typing to hit enter so that they can populate the list. Not as good as it could be, but tolerable for me.
I also hang about on the "New" page because I think the longer-standing members should do that, and I'm really, really tired of the apparently endless repeat submissions of the same stories

I submitted something new and (IMO) significant. It was my "10,000 Point De-lurk" and another slice of life post about my new life as an entrepreneur:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2391633

Just slid right off the front page, though I thought I had some insightful things to say. I emailed a bunch of my friends, but only one came to upvote me, and I think you need about 4 upvotes to hover your new post on the front page long enough to get some significant attention.
While that makes some sense, I'd rather see the firehose turned down a bit - otherwise the site is implicitly skewing itself toward the tastes of people who have time to sit and rate links all day.
I like this idea. As another commenter pointed out, we seek out external validation (whether we like it or not). However, there's good and bad kinds of external validation: looking for popularity (total number of upvotes) vs. more direct feedback from people you respect (Kuro5hin model: a score with a name attached to it) works better. The fact that a comment would be rated rather than voted on Kuro5hin (with a maximum rating) also has the capping effect.
ITunes... for Android?
They can do something HBGary-style and hack sony's servers to gather confidential information that would embarass the company and bring the stock price down. That would hit where it hurts, can be doable with some social engineering, and any company that big is bound to have some skeletons in its closet.

Not that I condone these actions, I'm just pointing out that they have done finer things in the past than just using LOIC.
You should care about quantum computers because they can factor numbers in polynomial time, which breaks RSA public-key encryption.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm