skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Robert H Frank's article "How not to buy happiness" hits on commuting as well:

http://www.amacad.org/publications/spring2004/frank.pdf
No, it wasn't. When I saw this headline I went and checked on news.ycombinator.com, and it wasn't affected. In fact, Hacker News actually got more Google traffic on Monday, 5/23 compared with Monday, 4/11.
In simple terms, it does decay, then immediately recombines.

When a neutron decays it makes two charged particles. But inside a neutron star those two charged particles (proton and electron) have no room to separate, instead, because they attract each other they immediately recombine.

Normally they can not recombine because of the energy gap - they need some extra energy to become a neutron (which is why hydrogen, which is also a proton and an electron doesn't just turn into a neutron).

But inside a neutron star that energy is not lost, instead it's transfered to some other set of protons and electrons, giving them the energy they need to become neutrons.
Web performance suggestion from Google
Well, an application has many kinds of state on many different levels. The sort of state that serves as the S in REST is the one that a client changes by requesting and manipulating representations of resources identified by URIs.

An application composed of a single representation that implements the entire app with code-on-demand is not exploiting the REST architecture very much.

Actually, even if the application is properly broken up into URIs, it's still not entirely RESTful because the "engine of application state" has become Javascript + secret protocol rather than hypermedia.
I tend to read threads several days after they are posted, mostly because I can scan all the comments at once. I think having the votes would help me scan much more efficiently. Identifying infrequent posters might also be helpful since they often post new/different information that may not be highly-ranked.
I'm using a French credit card on Netflix and my vps in the US with ssh tunneling for the ip. Haven't had any problem.
> "Not to psycho-analyze too much, but the lack of vote scores removes the pressure to have the best comment or a better score than someone that has a different perspective."

This. ^ As someone pretty new to the HN community, I really feel like the idea in the above comment would make it easier to contribute my ideas and thoughts to a discussion.
Curious...polls still show point totals for each answer. It seems that any reason for hiding points before voting on a comment would also be valid for hiding points before voting on a poll.

So if you decide to keep comment scores hidden, I suggest also hiding poll answer scores until the reader's vote has been cast.
Don't trust Alexa, please...
I don't care what their reasons are, nor have I ever doubted that they have them. Racists have reasons too, simply having a reason is worthless.
s/our cutting.\+/the internet./ and you would have got like 20 upvotes.
“They breached security systems designed to keep out intruders by creating duplicates to "SecurID" electronic keys from EMC Corp's RSA security division”

Now all have come into place.

Quick question: which country is most interested in LCMO's F-22 and has demonstrated the ability to use cyber technics to get information?
Laws of Software Systems
It's not to save costs on licensing. It's because those titles are going in and out of licensing 'windows' and Netflix isn't allowed to offer them.
If so, combine it with either a short take-back period for votes or separation between the up and down arrows. Using a laptop, I've occasionally accidentally upvoted when I intended to downvote, and I understand that it is much more common to make such mistakes when using a touch-based interface.
Useful online apps for buying, selling and owning a home in Canada / U.S.?
I look at old threads fairly often, and people who search on certain keywords on Google or Bing are sure to do so.
It is interesting that the author use firefox instead of chrome.
A thought: Make comment scores the square root or log or whatever of the total number of upvotes. For good measure, cap it at +10 or some such.

That might not remove all competitiveness, but it might reduce the effect of the vote-up-everything-popular-guy-says crowd.
Their comments about corporations reminded me of Steve Blank's definition: a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. (See http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-princ... for the full context.) And once you've found your model, then in scaling it you need a very different corporate structure.

This fits well with what they found.
A variant of this is to publicly display the logarithm of the score rounded up to an integer, maybe even as a number of stars. If the base-3 logarithm was used, the displayed scores would be:

-infinity to 0: bad comment, should be dimmed
1:
2-3: ★
4-9: ★★
9-27: ★★★
27-81: ★★★★
81-243: ★★★★★

etc. Though I think scores should be computed in a more sophisticated way than they are currently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar
Dont know about others, but I do and I learn a lot from them. One more reason why I absolutely loved the duplicate story detection script.
LinkedIn is an online rolodex with a job board thrown in. How many people have you recommended on Linked In? How many have recommended you?

The numbers are low, it is a unused feature, it doesn't work.

Vouched has a spin on this feature to make sure it gets used. Sign up and I'll send you an e-mail as soon as we're ready.
I don't see a drop in traffic in those stats - am I looking in the wrong place?

Edit: I think I found it, in mid-April there's a spike downward. But it recovers quickly, and it's not the biggest - change the view to 6 months or max and you can see some crazy changes at times.
Testing jQuery plugins with Jasmine
Intuitively, you could delay comments for just a day or two and get 80% of the benefit we get now. Stupid threads are sprints, not marathons.
How about showing the comment scores after 24 hours?

I personally like the not having the comment scores while the discussion is active. I do think it makes thinks feel more intimate, and you can not just scan the comments and move on.

However, I really miss the ability to save articles and see which comments where the most valuable at a glance. It would also make sites like "searchyc.com" a valuable resource for comments once again.
I'm basically a lurker (I'm guessing I've probably been around for about two years although I've only had an account for about a year). I frequent Hacker News because it's a good technology news filter that keeps me informed of the latest trends without having to sift through link bait blog posts in Google Reader. For me, the enjoyment of lurking has definitely declined with scores being hidden because it's difficult to quickly find valuable comments. I voted for "I liked it better when comment scores were displayed."

I'd agree that comment wars have declined which probably makes it a much more enjoyable experience for frequent commenters. Having comment scores shown seems to encourage lurking and quick consumption while hidden scores seems to encourage thoughtful comments but it makes lurking difficult. I'm guessing the goals of the site are focused more towards commenters/community than it is towards lurkers.
Wow, thanks.

I submitted because Alexa is fairly accurate with very high traffic sites, and the drop in HN's rank and reach seemed to coincide with Google Panda roll out.
tenderlove is going to follow up on this. The issue is for metal-like responders, not for full-fledged apps. We've lost a couple of ms on the low-end due to the stack issue.
No worries, happy to clarify.
so glad I live downtown... I'm a zealot for convenience in all of its forms.. and proximity to the downtown core of a metropolitan area is definitely one of them.
La reina del sur capitulo 63
la reina del sur capitulo 63
half of coca and coca is only worth what you're willing to pay, Teresa knows that nobody can not pay because it was never sold, she is free because coca is not the owner of Teresa, but she is the owner of the drug.
MENS 420 TOP-BRONZE PERF LEATHER [MENS 420 TOP] - $68.99
How about displaying comment scores only to users with a certain karma threshold and/or have been with HN a certain number of days or weeks?

Presumably the folks engaging in nasty arguments are relatively new folks who haven't added much value to HN?
Even worse the other queues can't easily find out if movies in their queue are streamable which is really irritating when I get a dvd that I could have streamed.
25 Beautiful Reusable Shopping Bag Designs
Compiling gcc-4.6 on Mac OSX
I was reading your comment and thinking about what it would like in practice, when it occurred to me that the gray -> green system is functionally identical to a horizontal bar graph that goes from 0 to 100%. You could even make the percentage visible, if you wanted to make it explicitly obvious that the purpose of the commenting system is to create comments that score a minimum number of karma.

Would that actually be better? Heck if I know. It'd certainly make grinding to 600 karma, so you can downvote people you disagree with, harder.[1]

1: Just kidding! Also, vi is better than emacs, and freebsd is quantifiably superior to linux.
I've never understood why HN doesn't let you take back a moderation, not even in the way Google mail does (with an undo link popping up for a few seconds at the top of the screen).
One thing that astounds me is that technology has reduced the need for human labour in manufacturing which deals with very physical problems, but hasn't done anything to reduce demand for bureaucratic labour which deals with information!

How can it be that information technology is so bad at making bureaucracy redundant?
How much money did Apple lose?
As a hackernews convert from slashdot from last week, I'm happy to be a statistic.
Maybe one solution to the problem of comment wars would be to regularly display comment scores but every so often turn them off for a bit of time (a week or a month) to remind the community of the goals of the site. My guess is that if users are reminded every so often to keep things civil by removing the socres; it would probably go a long way in maintaining the community without losing the benefits that seeing the scores provides.
Making it easier to spot popular comments -- without showing comment scores -- would be helpful. But instead of drawing attention to the HN username, why not emphasize the comment itself, with a change of font weight and/or color? So just as downvoted comments now fade to gray, maybe the most highly rated ones should somehow stand out.
Would be nice to have genre and year. Great job, tho!
I'm not in favour of bringing back comment scores -- the quality of discussions was definitely declining when scores were removed, and bringing them back isn't going to change that original problem.

If we need more changes, let's try something new.

For example, would encouraging people to vote more often help the situation?

If it's determined that it would, I have a couple of suggestions. First, make it less of a hassle to vote from my iPhone. The buttons are nearly impossible to hit without zooming all the way in, and I often press the wrong one (with no way to undo it). Second, provide an alternative way to downvote. I tend not to downvote something unless it's downright terrible, because I don't want to bury comments that I simply disagree with. If there were a "bury" button for comments that I consider to be spam, offensive, or completely unfactual, I would use the regular downvote button more often for things that I simply disagree with.
Awesome!!! Thanks Paul!
My brother's first reaction when he saw my galaxy S was 'Wow, they don't even pretend they don't copy Apple anymore.' The phone has an uncanny similar look to the iPhone 3G. I think Apple had a legitimate case and don't understand all the Samsung love here. Apple wanting to see samsung's upcoming model to see if they are again copying, so they can get a jump on the lawsuit? I say 'fair'. Samsung copied the shit out of that phone design, and much of the OS skin. Uncanny resemblance. Samsung, wanting to see Apple's upcoming products? "On what grounds?"
Can you add it where you can close & open (condense) comments? That would make the site much more user friendly. Is there a greasemonkey script for this?
If you have more detailed feedback (positive or negative) I'd be happy to hear it. I'm still figuring this out at the moment.
I'm not sure: While the points did ease scanning for "high value" comments (particularly as participation and the volume of comments has increased), the site feels more "peaceful" without them. Perhaps I even notice a bit more, without point scores to narrow my attention.

OT: I've continued to wonder whether eliminating karma credit for story postings would be a benefit. On the one hand, contributors of interesting topics should be valued. On the other, the "core" of HN has always valued information more than karma. And without a "karma carrot" for stories, perhaps the repeats and marginal/off-topic posts (many of latter nonetheless more recently managing to garner 3 or 5 votes) would decline. I don't care about the 3 or 5 points; I care about wading past the entries. Or finding comments divided between several postings/threads.

But I'd hate to suggest removing a significant aspect of the site's performance, if I'm misreading motivations or missing a significant secondary effect.
Only seeing my own comment scores gives me feedback and doesn't allow me to jump on any bandwagons. Like it or not, I'm influenced by other people's opinions. A numeric score influences my opinion before my critical thinking begins.
I think if you're going to signal anything, perhaps it's who new/infrequent posters are?

When the experiment of not showing comment karma scores started, another experiment started of showing the usernames of new users (I'm not completely sure how "new" is defined algorithmically for this purpose) with a style indication that in my browser shows up as green text.

See

http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments

to see how that styling appears in your browser settings.
It would be nice if we collected this kind of data for social news sites so that we can put a pulse to the "xxx is dying" meme.
I use something much like this on my forum and it seems to work well.

People only need a general idea of the score for it to be informative of value.
I do. I bookmark interesting threads to look at again in a month time or so, when all comment dust has settled, and I have a better perspective.

I noticed that downvote buttons disappear after a while (24 hours after posting is my non-scientific impression), but upvote buttons never do; If e.g. 95% of the votes happen within 48 hours of posting, it might make sense to drop the upvote buttons as well at that point, and display the points -- if you believe they are useful.

Personally, I'm happy with the comments just sorted by points and don't care for the actual number -- although, while you're at it, I would be happy if there was a controversy indicator of some sort -- when I read threads, I'm often interested in the consensus and the controversial. I can find the consensus in the first few posts; I can't tell where the controversy is.
Maya Hansen Fall/Winter 2011-12, Madrid
Home deconstruction: Can an entire house be recycled?
These polls aren't very scientific (much like comment scores) but at least we'll be able to gauge the opinion of the Saturday night HN crowd.
Mysterious markings discovered at Great Pyramid of Giza
Instead of the score I would prefer to see a rating. When a score passes a certain threshold, it gets a star. The low effort way to implement this would be to replace the digits with an 'X'. That way, people could see the relative merit of the comment without quibbling over numbers.
And you waited a significant chunk of time before asking the question, despite numerous threads attempting to address it sooner.
If we're using stars, why not base stars on comment percentile? Every night at midnight, take all the comment scores for the last week, and determine the 90th, 70th, 50th, and 30th percentiles. So every comment in the top 10% gets 5 stars, every comment in the top 30% but not in the top 10% has 4 stars, etc.

Also, I think we should switch it up so that comments are dimmed at more like -1 or -2. Otherwise, if the first vote is a downvote, people might overlook an otherwise decent (or controversial) comment.
As a casual visitor, I really preferred seeing scores. Yes, I can read through every comment and judge for myself what's best (note: this is still possible even when scores were shown). But I prefer scanning the comments and just reading what the crowd liked most.
I think you've missed the point. It's not interesting that public pastes are public; it's interesting that pastebin is being used as a dead drop.
I like the idea, but it's hard for me to get past the opportunity cost aspect of it - meaning, reading something new vs. reading something old. My list of 'stuff to read' is so long, it's tough to justify spending time on things where I know all the cliffhangers and how they resolve.
Excellent article - this is the best explanation I've seen of why I personally find hashbangs so completely objectionable. URLs and HTTP response codes are fundamental parts of what makes the Web work so well, and throwing them away just to gain a tiny bit of loading speed in browsers that don't support pushState is a terrible tradeoff for almost all sites and applications.

Hashbangs damage the Web.
Honestly, I'm a little surprised Slashdot is still as popular as it is. I quit using it in 2006 and have only rarely heard about it since. On the other hand, I guess HN is somewhat a niche site.
> Arguably, trademarks are the weakest and least intrusive category of IP.

They aren't really IP; they're consumer protection. Trademarks are meant to allow people to know who makes what they're buying by giving companies a way to definitively mark their wares without having to worry that someone else is going to rip off that mark in a confusing fashion. 'Confusing' works out to meaning a given trademark only applies to a specific field of endeavor; look at United Airlines vs United Van Lines, the moving company, or Cisco the networking hardware maker vs Sysco the restaurant supply company.

I think it's fairly clear that whatever 'property' interpretation you can put on those laws, it's subservient to the consumer protection aspects.
Good article. I disagree with making "Corner case identification" a major element of your sample coding session. While its great for developers to consider "what happens when X goes wrong", I've definitely spent time with programmers who spend more time thinking and writing about the 'what ifs' instead of writing useful code.

Overly defensive programming leads to code that is _never_ executed. That is wasted code, time and money.

So, in his example, considering that the twitter api may go down and how to handle that is probably a good thing. Trying to self-heal if Twitter suddenly changes their API is probably a waste of time.
I'm curious; will you be looking at comment scores of comments in this thread to help make the decision? There have been a few times when I've been viewing comments in a thread and thought "I wish I was the admin of Hacker News so I could see how these comments are being scored."
569 days old. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=924426
Does anyone know how this would benefit an M.S. patient? It seems like it would be beneficial for recovery during an episode.
Of all the suggestions I've read, I think I like this one the most. But I think it is barely missing what the main problem is. Here is my twist on your idea, please tell me what you think.

Why do we want comment scores?

Because we want to be able to pick out quality comments quicker.

What is broken with comment scores?

They have created a motivation for people to try and game the comment scores. A simple way to do this is by writing polarizing comments, or kicking up an emotional debate. This hurts the comment system.

So what is the root problem? Why do people want to game the comment scores?

The reason people want to game the comment scores is because the comment scores are tied to their identity. If you can find a way to tie comment scores to the comments, and disconnect them from the user's identity, there should no longer be a motivation for people to game the comment scores.

So how can we do this? Here are a couple of my ideas.

1) Kill the current karma system and replace it with some new system. Why? Since karma is tied to comment scores, people don't just get the instant gratification of seeing their comment get voted up. They get to keep those points as long as they have the account. When you log in you see your karma score right next to your name, just begging you to try and raise it.

OR

2) After 10 upvotes (or some other chosen value) start fading the username from grey to green, and immediately replace that user's name on the entire page with a randomly chosen tag. It could be Alpha, or Liono, or characters from the 30Rock, doesn't matter. As long as it isn't directly tied to that user's identity anymore. If you replace the user's name with the same randomly chosen tag, then readers will still be able to see that that person's comments come from the same person, they just won't know who it is.

All I know for sure is that if comment scores come back they can't be tied directly to the user's identity.
is there a standard way of dealing with negative bases? ie, I thought in base -2 our digits would be {0,-1}, not {0,1}.

edit: also, I had a different idea of what "taking a step" would mean. my solution: http://pastie.org/1987386
Sorry for the snide comment, but if you want to really speed up your Rails, switch to Go, it will compile from scratch and start up your project faster than the ruby interpreter starts up.

I used rails in a few projects, and performance was so painful even on pretty good hardware that I said never again. Go on the other hand is pure pleasure.
I've started posting interesting domain names that I find
Hacker Newser rasmus4200 took notes here: http://agilewarrior.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/how-facebook-pu...
Good article with a lot of great tips. But I'd like to see a follow up that elaborates on the practice of hiring experienced developers who don't know Ruby. Many of these questions wouldn't apply in that case and it would be hard to detect any warning flags in that case.
Wow, this submission totally blew up while I was out for dinner. Thanks so much!

You're invigorated me to put some more effort into it. I'm working on the feature requests. :) Check back soon.
By that metric, I think the choice is pretty clear. The quality of the discussion has gone up since the scores haven't been displayed. In an ideal world we could all be adults, and there would not be people trying to score points through fights (I would make semantic case for "arguments" being good, "fights" being bad), but that has not been the case as the community has gotten larger and larger.
tokenadult: You description of "vote xor see scores" reminds me of Slashdot, although there it is "moderate (i.e. vote, but with scoring caps) xor comment".

What would you suggest, if anything, about being able to comment when you can see the scores? Would there be a risk of votes turning into additional comments, perhaps with deleterious affects similar to those of "voting based on visible scores"?
This is a good time to remember John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace":

http://doc.cat-v.org/political_science/cyberspace-declaratio...
I was wondering the same thing. I find my walk (around half an hour) to be a net positive. Significantly better than my previous commutes, which were the same amount of time but by bicycle.

I'm totally spoiled, though. I've never had a car commute except for a couple of years in university.