skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You could help people discover good comments by allowing them to collapse comment threads. A simple [-] button by each comment should do the trick.
The nuclear option: Periodically take the site down for a while and then rebuild the community (kind of like the Matrix). The quality people will likely stick around.
I suspect it's hard-coded into all the clients -- thus they'd have to get everyone to download a new version of the client (which they are now doing, but straight to version 2.0).

Although it should not have been hard to get a new server up at the same IP.
I could not get through that article with all the "clever" references to Condé Nast publications. When did Forbes turn into the NY Post.
I'd suggest that there are more tiers to functionality than are currently in place. At the moment, after 500 points you're given the ability to downvote comments. Perhaps there should be additional barriers in place, such as this:

0 - Ability to comment on threads

50 - Ability to upvote comments

500 - Ability to downvote comments

1000 - Ability to submit articles/stories

2000 - Ability to downvote articles/stories

etc. While this may reduce the number of incoming stories, perhaps there could be a way for power users to sponsor stories submitted by those who aren't able to submit them to the feed themselves. The more I think about it, the more I like this approach - create a queue of "pending stories" that anyone can submit to, but only those who have sufficient experience on the site can approve them (or remove them from the queue).

For those who say that I'd be pandering to myself here, note that I'm at 620 points right now - with this proposition I'd be reducing my current abilities. However I think that it's a small price to pay to improve the quality of submissions.
Performance was the main selling point of Firefox 4, so I'm at a bit of a loss as to how you can claim that Mozilla doesn't focus on performance.
Not having sub-HNs is refreshing. Introducing them would be to simultaneously give up the fight and alter the nature of HN forever.
Slippery slope... I think Digg is the ultimate example of where the "elder statesmen" become the only people that matter.

Anyone who's smart should be able to contribute w/o passing some sort of exclusionary bar.
I use four screens, 1 30", 1 24", and 2 20", for a total of 9.7 million pixels, with some awesome monitor arms. I wrote all about it at http://littlebitofcode.com/2010/02/07/how-i-learned-to-love-....

I like to think of multiple monitors like a large physical workspace. While you are only working on one thing at a time, you can have reams of supporting information available ready to view without stopping what you are doing, saving yourself a context switch. In a physical workspace, you spread your work out so you can see it all at once, it's not advantageous to pile it all on top of each other and shuffle piles, same with computers.

I added monitors one at a time over a period of about a year. This gave me time to adjust my workflow across each transition, and I had a specific idea of what I would use additional screen space for each time. There are still times when I feel like I could use some additional work area, but they are relatively spread out. If money were no object, I would have 3 30" displays, with 2 24" displays above them. I might replace a 20" display with a 30", but I don't want to use less than 4 monitors, and I probably won't do that any time soon.
This site seems to be set up simply for the purpose of promoting a certain text to speech software. I fail to see what is so HN-worthy about it. Could anybody enlighten me on this matter?
Economics : Netflix, The Industry Unto Itself
Flagged because this should have linked to http://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1523.html instead of some random imgur image.
Great ideas. The act of commenting on a thread should cost you a few Karma points. Right now there is now down side to commenting. If you comment and it cost you say 5 points, and you don't get 5 back, you'd probably think about it a little more next time.

Also, on the 'less democratic' idea, up-votes from users with more karma could be weighted heavier. Quality comments would rise up faster.
Make it easier for new stories to get noticed before they fall off the new page. It's a crapshoot if your submission gets noticed, and (it seems at least) the stories on the front page come from the same domains and submitters, probably because people tend to vote based on name recognition.

I realize that doesn't directly relate to comments, but I think some of the declining quality of conversation owes to the fact that it's getting a bit stale. How many blog articles about productivity can we discuss without some decline?

I don't think we should ban political articles at all. In fact, I think less blog posts about "are we in a bubble?" and more articles on economics, science, philosophy, etc would make HN much more interesting. The median comment here is still of much higher quality than at sites like reddit. And although certain subjects can be sensitive, I doubt that banning these topics will actually reduce meanness, it will just make the change in decorum harder to notice.

Finally, a more extreme idea: why not add a second kind of vote? Perhaps we could vote comments agree/disagree in addition to up or down. These could be right and left arrows, to drive home the point that disagreeing with something ought to be orthogonal to whether it adds to the conversation. We could weigh these votes less, so that rankings more reflect how insightful we think something is, instead of how popular.
Talk to any startup founder or early employee about the emotional roller coaster they went on. It's an important part of it.

Start up and hacking are emotive subjects.
Every time something like this comes out, I feel us taking a step away from "video camera mounted on a robot where the eyes should be" and a step toward real perception. I always wonder though, if a computer can one day recognize all different types of hands, could it draw a new one?
> new story submission require at least x minimum karma level

This seems to have worked well for stack overflow. Just spitballing here pg, but what if you extended this to commenting as well? HN could be open to browsing, but to comment, you needed to be invited by another member with x karma? You could quantify this by requiring 10 karma to comment and 100 to post, and allowing a user to gain x karma by getting an 'invite' from an existing user with 100 karma.

Of course, without data, it's hard to draw conclusions about the fundamental issues.
Cap the score that is displayed with a comment e.g., past 10 points, just display "10+". Don't display karma and average scores of users, again, past a certain point: this prevents (subconscious) game incentives which lead to e.g., posting comments that say something stupid or mean but which tend to agree with general tendencies of the site.

For example, I can post a comment decrying Blub with a snide remark (e.g., "You wrote a 1,000 line Blub program? Was it 500 getters and 500 setters?" in a thread discussing software projects) that is both information free and mean (perhaps Blub wasn't the author's preferred choice, but chosen for him or required in order to build an application for the iBlubber). People on this site generally dislike Blub, so the comment will get upvotes without adding any value to the discussion (an example of adding value would be saying you were able to do this in 100 lines of Flub using its cool new hygienic macros with a link to a paper on hygienic macros in Flub).

That's not to say all comment score data should be gone. Comment scores can still be kept and comments could be displayed on stories in the other in which they're displayed now (a mix of comment score and how recently it was posted). Generally, what I've found is that comments showing up _first_ tend to be of higher quality i.e., overall algorithm works more often than not.

[NB: I work at LinkedIn and we do this for connection counts-- we want users to network with each other, but we don't want to make it a "who has the most connections" game, that's why when you have over 500 connections (which is perfectly legitimate and allowed), only "500+" is displayed as the count on your profile]
There will be pros and cons to every system. How else do you think we can decrease the growth rate of the HN userbase, which is probably the root cause of the decline in quality comments and threads
I've happily gone from a pair of 19" 4:3 monitors to one 24" 16:9 monitor.

The thing that's made the net loss of screen space feel like a productivity boost is that now I make very heavy use of Spaces (which I absolutely love), whereas before, I found it pretty jarring with the dual screen setup, and rarely used it.

I've also discovered that four spaces arranged horizontally is perfect for me. The weird thing is that Spaces became MORE useful when I disabled the feature that wraps around from the first and last spaces. (It's not a stock tweak - you'll need to download Tinker Tool to access the option). The very slight discipline this imposed helped me develop a really clear idea about which space I was in. I can now "see" them floating on either side of my actual screen.

So now I think that "single" vs. "dual" is overly simplistic. In truth, optimized productivity can also result from the use of virtual screens, without which, a dual arrangement may be more efficient, but with which, the single screen suddenly gets a lot more useful.For the sake of focus, I love knowing where stuff is, and being able to 'push' it out of view until the precise moment I need it. When I do toggle to it, it's one of only one or two things visible. As a result, I always feel like I'm entirely focused on whatever is immediately in front of me. Also, the vague Minority Report sense of big horizontal scrolling never gets old.

Of course, how well this works varies depending on the task. Obviously, different people have very different jobs. Also, how well people can imagine and handle virtual spaces is by no means constant. In any case, if you're generally a fan of dual screens, but are not 100% satisfied, and have a good spatial imagination, try one big screen + Spaces, and see if this combination makes a difference.
> Is there some other way to show what the most interesting comments in a thread are?

a vague indicator instead of discrete values. People enjoy seeing their karma for a comment tick over from 3 to 4, but seeing a little thermometer rise by 1px is less noticeable and isn't so much something you can keep track of.

When you see your comment score increment, you know it's because a real human decided it was interesting - that's a good feeling, but it can encourage karma-whoring/playing karma like a game.
Something to keep in mind though is that, as the size of the user base here grows, there's going to be an increasing number of people who feel comfortable using "this button will contribute to banning this user"-type controls less than judiciously.
Maybe the fact that there's no separation of topics is part of the problem? Right now it's just one big comment bucket. Maybe some categories of posts so that off-topic stuff can be ignored would be really helpful. Right now, it's just one big stream of consciousness.
And things where discussions are occasionally productive. You can be emotional about BSD, but it's possible to have a productive discussion about BSD vs. another OS.

Have you ever seen a typical political debate? Those are driven by emotion. They're full of catchphrases and insults, and nothing of merit.
politics? I don't think so. Economic inequality is a very interesting social phenomenon, though it is often written about in a heated/political way.

The comments should count as much as the articles do in determining if a particular topic is allowed on HN or not. Because the comments are just as important. To me, at least.

A big part of why I first started reading HN is the the comments in the articles. I could find the articles in half a dozen other places. Still can. But, the comments here aren't usually anywhere else.

And the best comments are typically better than the article itself. If the comments turn political and into people arguing politics with one another, thats not interesting to me anymore. I don't usually find the article being commented on to be very good, and the comments are even worse.

Seeing people argue politics just makes me close HN and find something else to use to kill the next few minutes. I've actually avoided reading articles that I likely would have otherwise found interesting just to avoid seeing the vitriolic comments that inevitably follow.
You might also check out this thread, which pertains to submission karma and its distribution: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387873
ICarTel: An app to make iPhone traffic aware
Unfortunately I know that won't work because I've already tried that experiment. For about a year I've been annotating such comments, but when I analyzed who upvoted them, the upvotes were very broadly distributed.
10 Workspaces In New York That Share Elements of Incubators
That's kind of a "my amp goes up to 11" kind of thing, isn't it? You're just changing the label for "no votes either way."
Alright, having just deployed several thousand apps with a few more thousand apps in the queue, we're going to lock it down for a bit. We'll be back soon!

If you're interested to get in and try it out for real, let me know at s@bushi.do
Ask HN: Rackspace versus EC2, is it worth it for support?
I'm a big EC2 fan. It's incredibly inexpensive and being somewhat comfortable with the command line, it's a good fit for small projects.

A friend of mine is launching a new product and chose Rackspace for the support options they offer. He's not a server guy, and to him having someone available to help fix or scale his servers is worth the little extra he pays.

I have zero experience in load balancing and scaling. My question is: how hard is to learn or at least muddle through if I expect rapid growth? Or is it worth it to have support on hand if I need it?
Make commenting cost 2 karma.
That's a really clever idea, I've no idea if it would work, but that's some great sideways thinking you've got there.
The article was almost unreadable, agreed
There's one problem that's similar to reddit. Although there are guidelines (or reddiquite) you need to go out of your way to find them. Sure, clicking a link isn't that tough, but it's not automatic either.

I wonder what would happen the guidelines or some sort of one-page community code of conduct were displayed when you actually created an account. Would that give users a better set of expectations? Or would they just click throug it like a EULA?

Maybe force existing users to click through it one time as a friendly reminder when the feature is introduced.
The tracking was incredibly good. The first seconds of each example are a little off because the algorithm doesn't have ANY training data to work with. It's 100% ad-hoc.

The tracking improved during the mouse pointer example (which I found incredibly impressive). The point he was making during that example was that it learns the different scales/rotations of objects on the fly and tracking improves automatically.
There is a big difference between saying you focus on something and actually achieving it. I'm not trying to slam the Firefox team, but they have a lot of strong competition in the performance department these days.
> Economic inequality is a very interesting social phenomenon, though it is often written about in a heated/political way.

I think that if you look at the resulting conversations on those sorts of articles, it usually retreads extremely familiar territory.

Also, 90% of that kind of article I've ever seen tends to be someone "broadcasting" a view they agree with ( "hey, this guy's right on!" ) rather than presenting actual new research in economics.

Also, any article like that tends to be something anyone can have an opinion on, tending to attract people that are more interested in those sorts of discussions than about "hacker news".

IMO, at least.
For (c): create a limit to the amount of votes a user can use, for example, make it impossible to vote on more than 5 items in 24 hours. Story votes, comment upvotes and comment downvotes would all count towards this limit. This would be useless if there is a large number of users who vote up negative comments, and would only work if the problem is caused by a smaller number of users who upvote a lot of frivolous comments and stories.
To me, this is the biggest problem with HN rather than comment quality. Tons of related, and even duplicate, stories happen all the time which fragments discussion. Not to mention the duplicate posts which happen a few months later. Thankfully someone usually remembers and posts a link to the previous discussion but that shouldn't be required.
Institute a one-time $5 fee to participate.
I'll go ahead and suggest, since it's on topic in this thread, that passive aggressive snark like this is one source of HN's decline.

One can disagree without being snarky and disagreeable.
or: this is gonna be a shit.

It's exactly the kind of submission I'd like to see downvotes for, like mentioned in the discussion on how RiderOfGiraffes left HN.
I don't actually think articles on "Economic inequality" belong on hacker news. In fact, it's articles like that which are a big difference between this site in the early days and now. I'd prefer a site that stuck to technical and startup business topics but perhaps that isn't hacker news anymore. The fact that these articles get voted up implies that I must be in the minority.
Interesting idea. That would be pretty easy to implement: it could be an ordinary comment, but that would only be visible to the sender and the receiver.
So, rename it from "Hackers News" (which to me has meant "Slashdot that doesn't suck" because that's the type of posting I've observed here) and back to "Startup News." I'll bet most of the non-tech-startup-biz nonsense will go away.
No, the software would still know the scores, and use them to sort comments. The scores would just not be displayed.
Ask HN: need help writting a pig script
Hi There.
We need as part of our start-up product to compute "similar user feature". And we've decided to go with pig for it.
I've been learning pig for a few days now and understand how it work.
So to start here is how the log file look like.

user	url	time
user1	http://someurl.com	1235416
user1	http://anotherlik.com	1255330
user2	http://someurl.com	1705012
user3	http://something.com	1705042
user3	http://someurl.com	1705042

As the number of users and url can be huge, we can't use a bruteforce approach here, so first we need to find the user's that have access at least to on common url.

The algorithm could be splited as bellow:

#Find all users that has accessed to some common urls.
#generate pair-wise combination of all users for each resource accessed.
#for each pair and and url, compute the similarity of those users: the similarity depend of the timeinterval between the access (so we need to keep track of the time).
#sum up for each pair-url the similarity.

here is what i've written so far:

A = LOAD 'logs.txt' USING PigStorage('\t') AS (uid:bytearray, url:bytearray, time:long);

grouped_pos = GROUP A BY ($1);

I know it is not much yet, but now i don't know how to generate the pair or move further.
So any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.
This is pretty sweet, however I don't think most people know the original song. It's a big hit for dance/electronic fans.

Link to the original - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu_zwdmz0hE
imo the "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" guideline and related submissions add a lot of value to HN.

Besides, I don't agree with the notion that mean-spirited or dumb comments or ideology-based downvoting/upvoting are limited to politics and current events. Any thread about iOS, Android, Microsoft etc. is also likely generate a lot of those comments and ideology-based up/down voting :)
1) if there is a list of attendees, try to setup meetings in advance via email.
2) have a very short message, just a couple of sentences for what you do. If you do two things, you really need to focus on just one of them.
3) after you meet someone write down, on their card, key points of the discussion. If you meet enough people you simply wont remember them later
4) be genuinely interested in what they have to say (listen)
5) you will need to be proactive about meeting people
6) Follow up with emails afterwards.
7) try to process the cards every day for that day.
8) dont get drunk and lose all the cards

I can meet about 20 people a day.
I completely agree with you about 3D. I despise it.

The Maxivision goal was a noble one, but it was just too expensive to work. Increasing the framerate of content playback on digital projectors will be a far less costly initiative than the Maxivision proposal would have been. Unfortunately I'm not sure 48 fps vs. 24 fps has enough "wow" factor to convince the average movie goer to go to the 48 fps screening over a 24 fps screening, but I really hope it will.
Well, he mentioned a "Minority Report"-style interface, and there it is. At least they could use cooler gloves: http://singularityhub.com/2010/05/28/mits-ridiculously-color... :)
Comments are certainly declining in quality. For example this thread from a submission I made a year ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1215549

The quality of discussion was much higher than on most posts today. And that was only a year ago.
probably not the answer you're looking for but I've been very happy since moving to MediaTemple

24 hour support and they've been able to help me every single time I've called them.

Their GridService scales with traffic bursts so you don't have to worry about a whole lot. My site was featured on Mashable and brought in about 12K hits in a few hours and it handled it just fine.
That's already the case, isn't it? All emails contain the "if this isn't you part", so the case of the person who didn't request the email is unchanged.
Karma threshold for upvotes. Higher for topics than comments.
I do know that. My point is that of his answers: Kutcher is a movie industry insider, and he responds to questions about the movie industry.
No offense, but I'm gonna trust the guy who did this for his PhD when he says that it was novel and difficult :)
Yikes, if my name is the pronoun for that behavior, I must be doing it way more than I thought I was!
Flag comments (essentially public shaming). Look at how Quora does it. If a user's reply is not in line with the question, other users flag it as "not helpful" (and explain why below).

So the more the people who flag stupid comments (instead of just downvoting), the more these comments should descend to the bottom, regardless of number of votes.
The default shortcut to focus the menu bar is Ctrl-F2. I change it to Ctrl-2 and frequently do things like "Ctrl-2 F <Return> O <Return>" to open recent files. For leaf menu items I set per-app keyboard shortcuts in the Keyboard pref pane so I don't have to do the Ctrl-2 song and dance to find things I use all the time.

There are some undiscoverable ways to use the keyboard on OS X. In many alert dialogs you can hit Cmd-[first letter] to select that button, e.g. Cmd-D for Don't Save, and Cmd-M for Move to Trash. They don't underline the letter because it's ugly, but once you know about the convention it doesn't matter. I like the way Windows displays the underlines when alt is pressed.
How was it passive aggressive or snarky?
Currency.

Threat upvotes/downvotes as currency and limit the amount of coins someone has in one day. If you have only five upvotes per day, you are going to start to think about how to spend them.

Closed doors, but glass walls.

Reading should be open to everyone, participating should not. No more new sign up unless they have an introduction or they submit a request and we can have a way of letting certain users approve.