skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can still see your own scores.
here are my unqualified 2 cents: have you considered showing a user's average karma next to the comment, instead of the comment points? alternatively, what if you hide the points, but let the user see them on demand (hover, show button, etc)?

i think both of those could help solve the commenting-for-points issue, while still helping users determine which comments are of higher quality.
Skype installs EasyBits Go CrapWare on systems without users’ prior knowledge
If not comment scores, what about a tiered color grading system so people can see what the community thinks. If it was blunt enough, it might dull point-jousts.

For example, perhaps red = highly voted (based on averages), orange = moderately high, yellow = just a bit higher than average. Without an actual "score" perhaps the point-jousting would be reduced. If the jousts continue, you could reduce the resolution in the color grading system, so the incremental incentive for arguing is reduced.

The most important type of info that is lost in the current implementation, is that, as an observer, you can't currently be trained in what the culture of the site is by observation. Because of this, I think the current setting will cause the culture to eventually dilute entirely as it is no longer heritable. Posting comment like "Thanks" or "very interesting!" which, while polite, waste everyone's time is the type of cultural affectation I mean. It is no longer obvious to newbies that this is discouraged--and when newbies are the majority, it won't be discouraged.

The non-voting view comment scores option is very interesting though...
if visual scores create problems, why not just obscure them, and use an algorithm to find a better relative popularity between the comments; and show a simple 3 level scale (spam/normal/popular).

If you still need more depth, add a fourth level to the scale.
Some of them sound downright sad: http://pastebin.com/v70Z85aC

Another I just saw was a keylog of someone changing their password after their Facebook account was flagged for suspicious activity. Obviously, they've got bigger problems.

Question: should I contact this person and tell them what happened?

(Thinking about it, it would be trivial to write a script that monitors for this kind of stuff, and e-mails the victim, or sends them a facebook message, explaining what happened. But, uh, seems like it might expose me to liability at worst, and angry reply emails at best.)
Not sure how reception to this idea will be, but with the whole "where people would literally try to score points off one another" thing you could just revoke someone's ability to see points if they're obviously/blatantly doing this. This doesn't solve all the problems obviously, but at least you're not taking the points away from the people that actually do find them useful. Some shouldn't spoil it for everyone!
I think this article has a good explanation of what people find distasteful specifically about those hashbang fragments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592741
At least in Illinois' case, the competitive discrepancies were second to keeping the state government running.
Exactly. As a corollary, I've noticed (non-scientific, anecdotal observation) that my average karma per post is slightly down since scores were removed. I like the current system more, though.
Please go learn what a utility function is before claiming it doesn't apply. Everything you described is simply a part of a person's utility function.

If you wish to claim that the poor disproportionately prefer to gain other things than wealth (e.g., they prefer hobbies/long shots over work which might earn them $0-30k), you are agreeing with me.
How about switching comment scores on after a certain amount of time? I've found myself especially wanting them when looking through older threads.
But no one else knows about my cookie. :(

On a more serious note, pg might be misattributing the removal of scores for the improvements. HN is full of smart people who were already talking about community quality before the scores vanished.

I would like to see a second experiment where scores return, and someone makes a thread every month or so asking us to talk about the direction HN is headed in. Formal introspection could have the same effect without losing visible scores.
Equations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature#Temperatur...
Concur. What if this time threshold was the same as when down-voting comments is disabled. What is that? A week? Two?
> "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

How about this as a counter mechanism. If a benevolent dictator admin decides that a comment is mean or dumb, they can mark it as a troll trap. Its votes go down to a maximum of 1, voting it up above 1 now harms the voter's karma and doesn't increase its vote tally. People who habitually upvote mean, dumb stuff will soon lose the right to vote at all.
For threads created in less than 24 hours, why not only display comment scores for comments with over X points? Solves the issue of bickering back and forth but also lets comments which have significant votes get easily scanned.

On threads older than 24 hours there is no reason to hide, so just always display comments if older than 24hrs.

Just a thought, seems like it might work.
I like comment scores not being displayed, but agree that it would be nice to see them a couple days after it was submitted. I can't think of any reason why this would cause any issues since new comments on 2 day old articles is rare.
Here are a couple of suggestions:

1. Use labels to indicate score comments. Rather than using precise numbers, labels like (low, medium, high). That way we can still see which are the interesting comments, but not see the exact score (so people stop nitpicking on 1-2 random points).

2. Remove the name of the person who posted the comment. Keeping it completely anonymous might help your mob egging concern. Also, that way the comment gets more attention than the person who made it.
I have an under-utilized Linode instance that could presumably do the same via ssh tunneling, and at about 1GB/movie (incoming and outgoing) it should still be under the transfer limits. Though I was under the impression that Netflix also required a credit card with a US billing address. Not an insurmountable challenge, but I'd have to look at the hassle:benefit ratio if that is the case.
What does the app do? There's no description on the web site that I could find. I don't watch videos.
Can't we come up with a way to highlight "good" comments? Some indicator that shows that a comment (possibly nested, which is where sorting fails) has X% of the total votes?
Are they on Torrent? :-)
I'm a convert. I last voted to display scores, but now I think hiding them is best.

The reason is because HN was (is) becoming more affected by the same cycle we've seen play out where content from a small set of users which reflect core site values makes the site good, but this draws more attention and users until content quality begins to suffer; quality posters leave, and find some new site which starts the cycle again.

I think leaving off the comment scores is the only way to check that unwanted behavior. We have to deal with the inconvenience of not relying on scores to skim comments, but I think that can actually be a good thing; I think that's just HN at a new (more sustainable) maturity.
Closure Compiler: Javascript to (better) Javascript compiler
For normal discussion, I think we're better off without visible scores. But there have been threads where two people go back and forth with two completely-opposite views about something that's not definitely Right or Wrong--and that I'm not very knowledgeable about. I found myself missing visible scores in that case, since I wanted to know what the HN consensus on the matter was.

So I guess you can put me down in the category of "Don't show numbers, but do discretize the points and show colors/symbols/something based on that." One thing I'd especially like is a designation for replies that outscore their parents.
Lockheed Martin hit by cyber incident, U.S. says
Virginia Tech is far from a diploma mill or a community college, and is probably on Google's accepted school list. It's not Stanford or Caltech or MIT, but it's not a problem you need to fret about.
Perhaps a more reasonable middle ground can be found: only show the scores after a person votes, a la Slashdot's "you can't comment and moderate in the same story/thread". You avoid groupthink and pissing contests, but you allow someone to see the community response by contributing to the community first.
Yeah, SEO is really just about having good content and having links from other good sites to it. All the tweaks are just to help the search engines determine exactly what your content comprises and where it lives in relation to your other content (see Microformats/rel attribute on hyperlinks). Without good content, none of that matters.

Yup, I do see your site on the first SERP for that query. Here's a shot of the SEO breakdown for that SERP: http://i.imgur.com/URUr2.png Not bad positioning considering there's zero backlinks to that page on your site. If you had 1-10, you'd probably rank higher.

You probably wouldn't see any rise by just doing tweaks, but they're probably still worth doing overall. I would focus on encouraging your users to spread your content. Give them a "share this link with friends/embed this link on your web page" widget. Digg is dead/useless, get rid of that icon. Get a Tumblr and Stumbleupon share icon on there instead. I'd probably space them a bit more away from that big, ugly, unrelated image ad, too. :)
This reminds me of how Microsoft used to get royalties from OS/2 sales.
Read the article.

The only items that Apple is asking for is pre-production versions of previously announced products that have pre-production versions that have already been distributed to journalists, etc.

Big difference to asking for unannounced and unreleased products.

Samsung's lawyers have some mighty big balls to make that kind of a gamble. Frankly, I think it has less than no chance of the Judge granting it.
why do you think Google opened office in Kirkland, WA, right next to main Microsoft campus and did open house shows for quite some time?
I don't see printed media dying any time soon. Television never killed radio; radio just changed tactics. Every time a new medium came out, it meant the end of the others and it never really happened.

That said, what I'm saying is essentially what you're saying. Many in the news business (which should really be called the advertising business) see their futures online and are transitioning their core business to it.

It's not like they can, or should, do it overnight, though. There's still a lot of money to be made on the sun-setting industry.
Dave Mathews spoke about the CueCat IP on Jason's show recently and he said it's the CueCat patents that are behind modern QR code software. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8Tczfk1saQ&feature=playe...
You can split a NF account into several, and even optionally give each account their own separate DVD queues (so you can partition "3 DVDs a month" into 1 per 3 person household, if you want to). This also sections off ratings from each other's accounts.
I'm quite puzzled there too.

In what sense is using a hash as part of the address a hashbang?

Hashbang refrers to #!, #!, and only #!.
I'll just point out that making this - or any other measure - into a vote, runs into the same problem that IMO is at the core of the overall "decline of HN" problem. Democratic decisions will tend to be compromised by the diluted community. In other words, I think it would be better if you either do what you think is best, or poll a group of users that you are familiar with and respect highly.
New Startup? Dude, There’s a (Genome) Map for That
If I had unlimited time, I would be happy to evaluate every HN comment on its own merits independent of any social proof. Not having unlimited time, I need heuristics.

Nasty argumentative comments should always be voted down, right or wrong. That people gained karma from them is a failure of the community, not the HN UI.
If you feel your company has the resources to take over maintenance of something like this, with the understanding that you will no longer be benefiting from the open source contributions from the community (as Python 3's VM has diverged quite rapidly, destroying a ton of projects like mod_python and Unladen Swallow), all I can say is: more power to you. However, continuing to build your empire on land we now all know to be quicksand, just so one day you have the fun job of maintaining the water table to keep your expensive buildings from sinking, seems like poor judgement.
Interesting article that matches up with my long (driving) commute experiences. Driving well requires you to be alert and focused for that entire time, which is effort better allocated elsewhere.

I'm currently job-hunting, but recently turned down a promising interview simply because it was 50m away, with no traffic at all. I'll take a train for that same time with no regrets, but driving it? No thanks.
It can even have a detrimental effect, as people who tweet or blog about something can psychologically feel they've done enough good work, instead of being compelled to take "real" action.
The Pianist in the imdb top 250 is not the one listed on this page. lol.
I always preferred http://pastie.org/ as it's the prettiest and most readable of the bunch. You can select from a good list of syntax highlighting color schemes, for instance (and they have Twilight and Vibrant Ink...)

Here's an example I found on their recent pastes page:

http://pastie.org/pastes/1987149

Go play with the Theme dropdown.
I don't think that's the case. I haven't seen much discussion about comment scores lately though people still grumble from time to time. With the discussion about it tapering off, pg wants to know if people's thoughts have changed.
Maybe you should rewrite to check the year of the film, not just the name.
GMail is not a business tool. Period.
Hacker News was penalized by recent Google Panda update (11th April).
What Makes A Startup Successful? Blackbox Report Aims To Map The Startup Genome
"I may be in a unique position because people love to pick fights with me."

welcome to the top. race you to a trillion?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2478207
Unfortunately, you can't section off separate streaming queues though.
That is very impressive for a 16 year old.
Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, Life Gets Faster
I liked it better when comment scores were displayed and it is better, now, when comment scores are not displayed.

It alternatively fed and chastised my ego with scores visible. It was marvelous showing who was right and who wrong on teh Interwebs...

But without that, the only thing that sustains me here is saying what actually think. I'm "starved", yet I'm better for it.
It's clear from his post that he found varnish to be faster.
By popular demand, I've added a discussion board to phpsadness.com. Join the discussion!
+1. This would return searchyc.com to its former usefulness (with the same old caveat that comment scores may not be a good proxy measure for comment quality).
"Toy Story 3" is at number 34 and number 143.
Why not give people the option to display comments, with the default hidden, and then redo this poll?
I honestly don't see the point of adhering to a law if you don't believe it is just.

Philosophy aside, tylenol will seriously fuck up your day and is entirely legal, while I think we are all aware of certain "illegal" drugs that are completely harmless. It is pretty obvious that these laws are not looking out for our health. Hell, the FDA requires that drug companies load up some legal drugs with tylenol simply to make it deadly. Regardless of my opinion on the rule of law in general, something so blatantly anti-health should be disregarded on the spot.

Modern drug laws are the moral equivalent of laws mandating self-flagellation.
Sorry but REST is fine with forcing the client to maintain its own state (in fact it's pretty much assumed the client will, for any non-trivial application). Using hashes in this manner shouldn't require the server to maintain additional state. If I'm missing something here, could you please elaborate?
Buried is in this longish comment is a particular suggestion I really like:

You can only vote while you you can't see scores. If you toggle "show scores" you lose your ability to vote in that thread forever.

This eliminates the snowball issue, while letting those who want to quickly skim have a good way to do so.
Many great content sites were hit by Panda. I would take ehow in the results over most of the garbage Google indirectly promoted when the made algorithm changes.
Personally I think a hybrid tier system is the best, simplest compromise.

1. Comments with 1 point stay as they are.
2. Comments with 2-9 points are marked as moderately popular.
3. Comments with 10+ points that are marked as very popular.
4. Comments with <1 points are treated the same as they are now.

Comment score tiers could be color coded or use any other marker to identify their popularity range. Hopefully this would keep things fuzzy enough that people don't fight over points while still making it easy enough to scan comments quickly.
What is mixpanel telling you? I'd think you could make this call from your engagement metrics.
Average karma is a very poor metric, and I found that my usage of HN changed drastically when pg started showing it more prominently. One optimizes for average karma by not commenting on stories that are older or less popular, as those are likely to produce a 1 or 2 rating due to lack of eyeballs. However such comments are often interesting and useful contributions, and it hurts HN to discourage them.

A possible solution is to scale by the number of people who look at the comment, although this might be difficult to do well. You could probably get better results by estimating a regression containing the following variables: age of post, score of post, number of comments, average score of comments in the thread, and the depth of the tree in which the comment was posted to get a good determination of how many points an average comment in that situation would get.
Which is strange because I'm pretty sure I watched the Al Pacino version of Heat on Netflix instant in the least 6 months.

Edit: I just checked and it's not on instant, but I'm pretty sure I watched it on instant recently.
Actually, we should be precise - particularly as I first learned about how tides worked from that particularly novel - the tidal forces will only kill you if you are at either extremity of the ship. If you manage to stay balanced right at the very center-of-gravity, you'll be fine.

(We'll leave aside, for now, the highly unlikely scenario of a space travelling civilization visiting a neutron star in close orbit and not taking extreme caution regarding it's tidal forces)
ABTests: A Repository of A/B Split Testing Results
What Makes A Startup Successful?
My 40 minute driving commute was really getting on my nerves. I then discovered books on tape on my smartphone and now it's pretty tolerable. Having a transit commute would be better though because I could read books on programming topics. There are no books on tape where the subject matter is programming that I'm aware of. It's pretty obvious it wouldn't work very well anyway. Maybe "Coders at Work" or "Mythical Man Month" would work well on tape though, since they're written in a narrative style without a lot of diagrams or code.
I think a lack of displayed comment score reduces 'group vote' mentality, and makes the decision to upvote less social and more individual.
This is going to get lost in the noise and will probably be a bit off-topic, but I've been enjoying HN as of late. I'm not sure what changes have been going on behind the scenes (I hope it's not placebo) but the overall site (comments + submissions) have seemed better in the past few weeks. I'd like to think the lack of comment scores is part of this. Thanks Paul for trying to keep the site well-tended.
One additional challenge is that POSTing a form will result in the whole page reloading by default. You will need to take this into consideration if you're supporting dynamic pages with graceful fallback.

I wonder if there's some JS library that transparently "fixes" issues like this for single-page sites with graceful degradation. Form handling, link click events, redirects, etc.
An artist can make great art without knowing the details of how the dyes in their paint are manufactured. The same is true for development.
I can't recall anyone saying HN is doomed without comment scores.

"ps: Based on the current poll on HN with only 39% supporting keeping comment scores hidden, this will got downvoted as spam. But hey, I tried."

Either way it doesn't deserve any up votes.
I switched from a 45-50 minute commute in bad traffic and tons of construction to a job with a <10 minute commute. Despite it being less pay and more hours I stayed for many many years. Those first few months after the switch were amazingly different. Now my commute is less than 5 minutes and I still want to move closer! I don't understand how people survive some of the punishing commutes I hear about. Life is to short to hate your job, it's also to short to hate getting to and from it!
Ah really? Good to know, thanks. That's too bad :/
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
Indeed, pushing MySQL onto a different VPS in the same network basically halved page generation times for my sites.

This is partly because when a table contains a TEXT field, MySQL performs all joins against that table on disk, regardless of what fields you're selecting or joining on.

Which is a problem for, oh, I dunno, every PHP blog engine / bulletin board / CMS ever.
Slight off-topic, but does anyone know of a good way to export ratings out of Netflix? I've only been able to find broken tools for this in the past. It shouldn't be too hard to scrape this myself, but I'd rather avoid redundant programming :) Ever since they removed the "Friends" feature, I've wanted to get my ratings into something else that I can share with others.
My last job had a commute of one hour each way on public transit (bus). I didn't notice the commute until we had lay offs. I wasn't laid off, but left within 8 months.

Now I'm a 20 minute walk to work and 2 minutes from the gym. That might be the best part of the job, even in cold Canadian winters.
How comes this is new again?
Not sure just how useful this is but it's definitely a cool idea.
After reading just the title, my hopes on Coda 2 rised up a little. Damnit.
Netflix routinely adds films to Instant Watch that it will only keep for N months, presumably to keep an interesting stream of new titles available while saving costs on licensing.
Why is it not simply an option for users? Perhaps only an option for logged in users, but an option nonetheless, would balance both worlds.

For the 'point players egging each other on', that's only going to work when you know that everyone else is seeing the scores too, and it won't be apparent.
The motivation for doing this kind of thing is not very well explained in the article. Is it designed to promote vegetarianism?

Eating only what you kill doesn't seem to promote a healthier lifestyle per se; you're still in civilization and you didn't have to trek all over creation to hunt the food yourself, so you get no exercise and very little satisfaction. It sounds like you just show up and kill the food.

Presumably the meat is super-fresh, however, since it's cooked immediately after it's killed. If you kill the food yourself, you know exactly how fresh it is. But really, can't you just trust that the food was freshly killed? Why do you have to do it yourself? And is eating freshly killed meat that much better than eating killed-and-then-chilled meat?

Whatever the motivations are, this behavior will appear to the public to be somewhat psychopathic.
perhaps he could fill in the gaps with tube site links