skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Social influences kill the wisdom of the crowd:

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/05/following-the-cr...
How is this different from LinkedIn?
There is no way you can change the URL (not fragments) without refreshing the page (a.k.a single page app) if the browser doesn't support history.pushState. IE doesn't. That's why people are stuck with hashbangs.
Why is it a gamble? Worst case scenario Samsung is told no and they are right where they are today. It's not like lawyer fees matter in this kind of case. Both companies make enough money and have enough at stake to not worry about the cost. This seems like a low risk move with potentially large upsides. (Obligatory: IANAL)
Yes, they do log your search queries. They even serve ads related to the queries in your GMail and adsense on other websites.
It's a one-month perpetual calendar, not a one-year perpetual calendar.
HN is about to overtake Slashdot.
where is "I will complain about an change"?

It is the third choice
I like it better now. It reminds me of the old days, when I would just peruse comment threads at random, or else read comments from particular users (e.g., pg, paul, patio11, etc.). I think this because eliminating points seems to have discouraged a certain category of user from commenting.
You could probably also do this by running a Rails instance as a service, and then every time you want to run Rails, you tell the service to fork, and use the forked thread.

FWIW, this is how Spork works, a tool people have been using a lot more recently in order to have fast(er) tests on Rails 3. Spork boots up an environment then waits for RSpec (or whatever) to hit it over DRb and then it forks off for that run.
When you look at all the cables behind any collection of devices, the way they are tangled indicates the order in which they were installed and moved around. Unless someone took the initiative to straighten the mess out.

Apparently, the human body is the same way. And no one has gotten around to cleaning up the mess. But all the wires work well enough.
Richard Dawkins shows the giraffe nerve in a video (warning: dead giraffe in the video):
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xdm5he_richard-dawkins-demo...
By "a week to recover" I don't mean that you're totally dysfunctional for a week, but that you're still not at 100% 3-7 days after a night of heavy drinking. If you're trying to perform at the highest levels, you notice it.
I don't pay attention to average karma as it really depends on the type of comments and the popularity of the threads they are in - but my feeling is that high-voted comments I've had since the change have had more upvotes than they would have before, because people are unable to look at them and think "Upvote worthy, but not more than the level it's at now".
Adwords keywords traffic estimator tool does not report acqurate results for cliks. Add the keywords to an adwords campaign to get more acqurate results on CPC and estimated clicks.
No, 'sich mit jemanden unterhalten', is smalltalk. 'Konversation treiben' is a form of that. In Hamburg 'schnackt man mit jemanden'.
I totally agree with this. If you read through comments generally distrusting the community (as I do) then pretty much all specific information is useless. A gist is all you need, anything else is needlessly complicated.
I like the idea that someone posted a while back: have a link to display scores. Once you do though, you can't upvote or downvote.
>You're not alone though - seems that opinion of internet experts is divided between putting full blame on pilots or putting full blame on sensors.

I actually blame both: if the sensors hadn't broken, the mishap would not have occurred. However, even once the sensors broke, if the pilots had better SA, they still could have prevented the mishap. Even then, I don't blame the pilots so much as the training system that failed to prepare them for this situation, given what I already mentioned about how reliant these aircraft are on their pitot-static systems.
Yes, this was released years ago.
Situational awareness is a holistic understanding of the entire situation. A big part of that is knowing which information sources to trust or not, which humans still do better than computers.
People will then just use their main account to post and vote while using a shell account to view scores.

Also someone will probably end up writing a browser extension to show the comment scores automatically on every single thread using information from another account.
I ran a site called Deadabase which I had to later rename to Astrojams (see Archive.org for copies of it) which was one of the first to distribute Dead shows on MP3. 1996 I think. The Dead sent me a cease and desist letter and I fought it. In the end they ended up allowing me to continue to do it, but released the MP3 statement that you've referenced in your post.

This was pre Napster and the cost of bandwidth was about $5000 per month. I was in college and couldn't afford it so I was running Double Click ad banners which generated $7000 a month. The Dead were contacted by an attorney interested in making a name for himself and he was the one that issued the legal pressure. I got to speak to Bob Weir and Jon Barlow about it and both supported what I was doing but because the Dead organization was a corporation, it was out of their hands.

I had to shutdown the site because although the Dead allowed me to continue distributing their MP3's, I couldn't generate any revenues, even as a non-profit. I didn't think outside the box and invent Napster (I tried really hard.) It was a great experience for me and I went on to do better things.

The sad thing is that I pitched the idea of creating the first digital music website to the CEO of the company, it would've been a joint venture, but he was against it. It would've been the first artist sanctioned digital download site, way before its time. That guy missed the boat on that one.
Note: The FFT is using Flash.
Interesting, thanks. I don't have experience running PHP apps beyond a few servers, and the database was always the bottleneck.
I'm a bit concerned about the form of the copyright clause. It says it is creating a "work for hire", but then goes on to clearly describe something that is NOT a "work for hire".

If a work is a "work for hire", the employer IS THE AUTHOR as far as copyright law is concerned. As soon as the work is fixed in a tangible medium of expression (i.e., as soon as the programmer types the code in his editor) the copyright springs into existence, and the owner of that copyright is the employer. See 17 USC 201(b).

The clause in the article talks about the copyright being transferred to the employer after the contractor is paid, and says that before that the copyright is owned by the contractor. In other words, it is NOT a work for hire.

From the discussion in the article, the purpose for this clause is so that if the employer does not pay, the contractor can use copyright law against them. Thus it is clear that the contractor in fact does not wish to create a work for hire situation.

So why use the "work for hire" language? You are just asking for trouble--in a dispute the employer will argue that you intended to create a work for hire situation and that the other language about transferring rights should be tossed out (contract ambiguities generally are interpreted against the drafter).

I don't think they would succeed in this, but why the heck would you want to even give them it as an issue?
evan Iran, who explicitly see it as an existential threat

It probably is. The real question is should the outside let the government of Iran disconnect their citizens to keep their ideals? Should "wilful obstruction of facts known and shared by other humans" become a kind of humanitarian offence, with a bit of leeway for yet-to-be-agreed reasonable law enforcement purposes? Should it become a more pressing consideration the more the difference between rich scientific countries and closed-off/poor/controlled societies grows?

The UN human rights declaration includes Education, and the Cairo declaration of human rights in Islam forbids discrimination on racial, political affiliation and belief grounds, and also "emphasizes the "full right to freedom and self-determination", and its opposition to enslavement, oppression, exploitation and colonialism."

"22(c) states: "Information is a vital necessity to society. It may not be exploited or misused in such a way as may [..] disintegrate, corrupt or harm society or weaken its faith."

22(d) states "It is not permitted to arouse nationalistic or doctrinal hatred or to do anything that may be an incitement to any form of racial discrimination."

(Source: Wikipedia). A right to education isn't much good if it only covers being educated in what some people want you to know. Information may not be used to disrupt or weaken the faith of an Islamic society by that convention, which the internet probably would, but censoring it for being "western" seems close to nationalistic and doctrinal hatred. (Iran may have nothing to do with the CDHRI).
Even if you aren't hiring, I think this is an excellent article to read. These are practical skills to practice, and I'll certainly be keeping them in mind before going into an interview.
You're assuming that all/most users are trying to achieve maximal average karma, even at the cost of getting to comment on what they feel like voting on.

This seems like a rather poor assumption to me. For instance, am I mindful of not having an avg. karma that makes me look like a twit? Sure. But do I let that keep me from posting comments that I wish to post, just because I fear they will get low ratings? No, I know that things will tend to work out overall, because from what I've observed, if you make an honest effort to not be a total idiot on here, you will end up with a decent rating.

I trust the userbase, basically. It saddens me that so many users here, apparently including some of the site's creators and authority figures, seem to lack such faith to an extent that makes them want to hide features of the site from the userbase, even though a strong majority of the userbase says they want to see those features, in poll after poll, without exception.

I understand that the users are not always right, and that one can often achieve better results from ignoring the userbase. I just don't think this is one of those times.
They do as of earlier this year:

https://www.paypalobjects.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_micropaym...
I have a theory that showing comment scores benefits each individual member, especially lurkers (myself included); on the contrary, hiding them will be good for the HN community in the long run, however, each of us will have to sacrifice a bit more of our time.

Here is what I observed during the past two months:

1. I have been more and more inclined to participate conversations, without fearing being outgunned by those celebrities. In old days, almost every thread touched by one of top members quickly becomes a one-man show, other comments (may be more insightful) got somewhat ignored. The consequence is that a lot of us just don't bother to write a word. Now, they are still there, but the herding effect has been much less since, so their advantages are not as obvious as before. The game is more fair. For example, I saw one thread today patio11 was using his BCC as an example, a guy was asking what BCC was. I don't think this will happen in old days if the guy saw patio11's comment had say 300ish upvotes.

2. Those celebrities are not as thoughtful and knowledgeable as what I used to think. I have nothing against them. They gained their fame because they are experts in certain areas and they gave insightful comments there. However, the issue is that they may not be experts in other areas. Without the scores being shown, comments are evaluated in a more fair way, based on its intrinsic value rather than who their owners are. I saw a lot of comments that have spelling error here and there, may not be worded properly, but are really insightful. I appreciate those comments and gladly upvote them. I doubt I would have patience to read them if scores were being shown, more likely, I gloss over them and just skip them because of those minor issues.

In summary, showing scores brings short-term gains to the members, discourages participation and encourages lurking. HN will become cliques around a few key members.
I had a 1-1.5 hour commute when I worked in Chicago years ago and after going through that for 3 years I swore to never do it again. Since then my commute has been a 5 minute drive or 15 minute walk and its greatly improved my quality of life.

I didn't like how much of my life was being eaten away by commuting, even though it was on the train and I would use the time to listen to podcasts, music, or play games. I'd also get less sleep than I like because I'd stay up late to make up for lost time and get up early to make it to work semi-on time.
I didn't say I'd do whatever got the most votes.
Study Shows that Babies can Perform Sophisticated Analyses of the Physical World
I completely agree about the one-man-show thing. I'd like the feature that disables karma accumulation for my comments. They don't mean anything; there are people that RSS my comments, and I am basically scoring on name recognition.
Hi. I'd like to make a suggestion. May be you should try to enable scores for top level comment in the thread and disable them for other comments inside the thread. This would:

1. Highlight what you call 'good' comments.

2. Prevent fighting in threads for better scores.

3. Force commenters only to write replies in their replies and write a separate comment if they have more to say on the topic.

4. Finally, threads with highly scored top comment are probably 'better' in the same sense.
Interesting idea. But I don't think many people look at old threads.
Put it to a vote and a group of nerds is always going to vote for more bells, whistles, and knobs. All I can say is, the site is more pleasant to interact with without the scores.
Impressed by Samsung's reply. As per my opinion, its completely fair to ask for. I felt however, this post is bit biased towards apple.
I wonder if walking commutes are qualitatively different. I have about a 25 minute walk to work, technically above average, but I don't find it particularly onerous, except around Christmas as I have to cross 5th avenue. I was a little surprised that 24 is the US average, but I think the year-and-a-half I spent doing Berkeley-to-Sunnyvale colored my perceptions.
I used to commute from Santa Maria to Santa Barbara, which is a beautiful 70 minute drive but it quickly wore me down.

I called up the county car pool number and got set up with three other people to start a car pool and I can't say enough good things about that experience: it's very therapeutic, like having your daily support group. It also forces you to be efficient with your time because you always leave at a fixed time. Most employers and coworkers won't give you a hard time because you're doing the "right" thing.

On days I couldn't car pool (rare) I listened to books on tape. My favorite was "Tale of two cities."

I'm glad those days are over, though, now I have a 20 min bike ride along the Willamette.
GOOD. HN's placement on Google search results is extremely disconcerting to me. I'm trying to have a conversation with HN people, not the whole Internet.
Add amazon affiliate links for missing ones =)
Seems complicated, just add meta-moderation.
Engagement isn't the test. What I care about is the quality of the discussion.
His logo should be a venn diagram
Has the Bitcoin fad finally passed? This has been here for 11 hours with only 2 points and no discussion.
came to post exactly this, have it off by default and users can turn it on. That way most people won't have it on so the fights don't occur, but it's still there as a convenience.
It's only a day. We'd probably want to hide for a few days, as it's pretty common for a thread to keep going for more than 24 hours.
I'm pleasantly surprised to learn it's so short. I think a week is still a decent amount of time to hide scores.
"I don't understand how people survive some of the punishing commutes I hear about."

I have a 30-40 minute commute each way from the burbs to SF.

I end up reading interesting books, sketching ideas, or sometimes pop out the laptop to do some quick work.

The savings on rent by living in the 'burbs is a decent tradeoff for having more expendable income for my hobbies.
This was a reply I wrote to tptacek (first quoted part his) -

> Meanwhile, not having up-to-the-minute scores makes the site more pleasant to participate in; one isn't prodded to make statements in reaction to ludicrous (and likely ephemeral) voting swings.

I feel the same. The change makes the site a bit harder to consume - particularly, skimming-quickly-for-a-couple-good-points is harder.

But it makes the site much nicer to participate in. First, I don't feel the need to reply to mean, nasty, or incorrect replies to me unless I have something to add. Second - and I think this is really nice - voting has become less about promoting an argument or viewpoint and more about saying "thanks for this" or "less of this, please" - I find myself voting up thoughtful stuff I disagree with more often now, and voting less frequently overall.

Personally, I'd say the site is harder to consume efficiently now, but more pleasant to interact with.

--

It'd be interesting to see voting by people who are regular/frequent commentors vs. mostly lurkers, if there was a way to segment it out somehow. I bet the response rates are different between the two groups.
Hi vaughanhedges,
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Contact me and I will see what we can work out.
Transpose music with HTML5
It's not clear to me that "number of upvotes minus number of downvotes" is a meaningful measure of anything, whether its displayed or not. An upvote from a high-quality user should count for more than one from a low-quality user.

If you consider the graph of comments and users, where each vote is an edge from a user to a comment, and there is an edge from each comment to whoever wrote it, I bet there would be interesting information to be found in the eigenvectors.
Did you post this poll Saturday night of Memorial Day weekend on purpose?

Edit: I posted my thoughts on the comments/no comments debate here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2568995

Basically, it doesn't matter.

HN has become much more adversarial in recent months, and it has nothing to do with whether or not we see a number attached to the comment. You don't need that number to know whether the person who wrote the comment is someone that you probably wouldn't want to hang out with in real life.

My guess is that we're just all strangers now, and that it is human nature to implicitly treat strangers differently than we do friends. What's amazing (to me anyway) is that this change has affected even users whose names I recognize going back years. People whom I used to have a lot of respect for. It's not just the new users.

You either like debating strangers or you don't, and the people who relish these kinds of debates will pursue them even in the absence of a scorekeeper.
scvngr?
And there seemed to be a fair number of QR codes on several subway systems I've used.
I think it would be good to keep hiding comment scores for new topics and then after a few hours show them...

I like sometimes revisiting old topics and in those cases, having the comment scores helps a lot for skimming and finding information. On the other hand, I agree with you that hiding them stops some arguments and makes for a better discussion.

So, why not have the best of both world by only showing the scores once the topic is a bit older and the discussion has tapered off?
Me too. And then Google emailed me the very next day with an invite to Music beta. It's way better.

Oh well, it was just 99 cents.
You're right that it can't be strictly enforced, but I think the added inconvenience would be enough to subtly change the behavior of the majority group. Most people won't bother to create multiple accounts or install a browser extension.

In a similar fashion, nothing prevents someone from writing a browser extension to add comment scores back today, e.g. http://hnpoints.com/ ; The scores aren't official, but they serve the same purpose. Most people aren't going to install a browser extension. Of course, some will. But most people will just use the site as-is, out of convenience.
If you use Twitter, you can follow @queuenoodle (http://twitter.com/#!/queuenoodle). It'll let you know when titles are expiring about a week in advance.
How's it complicated? Meta moderation is much harder.

It would be a boolean flag in the comment that turns it into a trap. The operation of the trap is: set points = min(points, 1) and then if someone clicks upvote when points == 1, then rather than set points = 2, instead set karma=karma-100. Simple.
Those are all valid points, but the thing that's always bothered me about Hacker News is the cult-like feel that comments exude. I would suggest that by hiding the scores, the website disguises the level of futility of voting against this collective mindset, and thereby encourages diversity of opinions.
Wait a second. This article pivots on a fulcrum of crap. I've read hundreds of articles that mistake correlation with causation, but never one so brazen as to straight up interchange the words:

"[Commuting] correlates with an increased risk of obesity, divorce, neck pain, stress, worry, and sleeplessness."

"Long commutes cause obesity, neck pain, loneliness, divorce, stress, and insomnia."
"The problem is, GMail is absolutely unacceptable for business usage, but the folks who use it don’t see it that way."

Its odd you say that above. The people who use it are the ones that matter.? If its used for it, well its works for them for business. End of Story.
I'm curious about the relationship to score and down-voting. He's a hypothesis: with actual scores shown, down-voting was less severe.

From my observations, this community tends to not like jokes, even if they are slightly clever. For new users, a getting solid -5 on a first comment is a pretty solid discouragement. In particular, I'm wondering if there was previously a community consensus that -1 or -2 was enough of a signal?

I think if you're going to signal anything, perhaps it's who new/infrequent posters are?
I wonder what would happens if the larynx nerve cell were actually redesigned properly.
But that's impossible to do. Just the length of the human body already counts as not in the very center of gravity.
Why not make it a user setting, defaulting to off?
That was actually partly why I clicked on it first: I remembered watching the Al Pacino film on streaming some time ago because it was about to expire, and I wondered if the app's WI database might be out of date.
i would like to see the average comment score for yes and no votes compared when this is all over.
How not to buy happiness [pdf]
Libyan opposition hails Russia’s new position over Gaddafi
Benghazi, May 29 (IANS) Chairman of Libyan opposition’s National Transitional Council (CNT) has hailed the new “position displayed” by Russia which now seeks departure of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi
I personally care most about comment scores for preserving the ability to use SearchYC on a keyword of interest and find good advice. This doesn't work if they're off.
True, after all look at all the incredibly original products Samsung has released that other companies have slavishly copied.
We all lose when lady gaga sells music, or gives it away
Besides the net score, I would like to see some indication of the gross number of votes to see which comments were controversial. A comment with 1 upvote is a lot different than a comment with 101 upvotes and 100 downvotes. The score could even be used instead of the net score, ie, just tell tell the readers, these are comments that got a reaction from other readers.