skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would seem that the Slashdot system of capping karma at "Excellent" is s means to this end, but Slashdot isn't a better place for it.

I'd say, that if anything, down-voting should count proportionally to your karma. If you've got 5k karma, you could go on a flaming-spree for days, and still have more karma than the best newcomers.

That said, I don't think it's that big of a problem. When I (and it's seldom) look at a users karma, I always look at it in relation to created-days-ago. Karma 100, created one month ago > karma 200 created a year ago.
A friend of mine does financial software modelling that is used in a number of major banks. According to him these models have predicted a major crash for the last couple of years. They weren't able to see when the crash would occur, but they could see that certain relationships such as household income/mortgage payments were diverging further and further from a historical mean.
Reddit is stable in the literal sense of not changing, but not in the sense of being (socially) bug free.
We INTPs also enjoy it :<)
How did gibsonf1 miss this one?
Reminds of the Just-noticeable-difference concept (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_noticeable_difference) from psychophysics. If disorder is evaluated as a general aggregate of cleanliness, crime etc. An increased baseline of disorder will mean that any personal transgressions that were perceived as "wrong" before would now be perceived as lesser wrongs in comparison.

They probably accounted for this, but is it possible that graffiti is resulting in bikers park elsewhere, implying that it isn't individual behavior that is being modified, but group make-up.
maybe its just the case of grass being greener on the other side
Conversation with a friend:

friend: "You don't look good, whats wrong"-

I: "I haven't slept that well, i was up all night"

friend: "WTF were you doing all night"

I: "Lurking on HN of course, and reading the old Dilbert strips"

Maybe i should try this "noprocrast" feature, but i don't know what to do about Dilbert though. :D

You people are great, i read reddit to find cool articles, but i don't bother to read the comments, but here, i read mostly the comments, they are more valuable than the original articles sometimes.
It's awesome to see that YouTube's comment section still remains as funny as ever even when they're streaming live:

http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/youtube...

Seriously, some of the funniest things I've ever read come from the minds of YouTube-video commenters. This one's not a great example, but still...
64 words... bah!
While he had some excellent points (and I even normally avoid Seth Godin), it seems like the easiest thing they could do is drop their registration requirement and try to syndicate their content (and hence brand) more.

Having your content out there in every possible form is going to lead more people back to your actual site, where you make money on their eyeballs. (If this wasn't the case, then guest columnists wouldn't exist and actors wouldn't promote their movies on late night shows.)

And having the stupid registration wall just turns people away. Sure, it's a very low barrier that I'm happy to surmount for a good article, but there have been many times that I have avoided a nytimes.com article because I just felt too lazy to hit up bugmenot for a fake account. They have kind of gotten away with it because they have a name and decent content, but now that you can find lots of decent content elsewhere, it's just going to hurt them.
How about not being able to submit and/or upvote submissions before you hit a certain karma threshold?
I visited the Ghibli Museum in Japan when they had a joint display with Pixar. The museum had a zoetrope exactly like this one, except with Ghibli characters. I wonder if the Pixar folks were inspired by it?

http://ohniko.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/070826-zoetrope.jp...
Invite only...voting/flagging users out is another option...but there's certainly a better way than making the site cultish. We're smarter than that.
Yes, I think this is an idea that's at least worthwhile experimenting with. Invitation based membership can be quite a powerful mechanism to ensure that HN remains a high-quality and civil place. A place where even the most controversial topics can be discussed without incivility, trolling, spamming and such.

Metafilter and Something Awful - IMHO two of the most successful general communities online - use another mechanism to weed out unwanted people: paid membership. Not only does this keep people out, but it has the psychological effect that members make an greater effort to live up to respective community's guidelines and ethos.

Now, I would gladly pay a one-time fee of around 10-15 USD to be a HN member, but I suspect that this solution wouldn't be accepted by many people. That leaves us with invitations. Knowing that I'm in some way responsible for the people that I invite to the community and that their actions reflects back at me, I will exercise more caution when handing out invitations.

Regards,

WarTheatre
You assume that karma encourages good behavior. If that were the case, then I think this would be a good idea.
Well, seeing has there is no such thing as an XNTP, I'm pretty sure the X in the OP was a variable. ;)
First rule of hn. Don't tell others about hn.
Aside from the new media concerns, the Times' left slant has definitely cost them a chunk of their old base, not a lot, but some. There used to be a lot of conservative democrat types who used to read the Old Gray Lady, but they no longer do.

Granted the Palin types will never read the Times and never have, but that 10-15% of their readserhip that is gone hurts. It hurts a lot.
I heard about it from my friend at work.
Alternatively, there's the Ban-Hammer. Simultaneously more crude and precise, as you only get the worst ones.

Works for Kotaku.

However, it'd require that we properly characterize what is and isn't wanted from users. Trolling's obvious, but there isn't much of that here.
I disagree with that. My feeling is still that a democratic input with some sort of oligarchic oversight would be best.

The flagging system is almost there from that point of view, but it's still pretty hit and miss... I think if the flagging system was tweaked to give more weight to the flaggings of people on the leader board, the system would work extremely well.

Of course, this may be by choice - after all pg may not want to create an oligarchic moderator class on news.yc... up to him.
It actually means someone who is both introverted and extroverted, but I meant it as a variable as well.
Just observing the property value increases in my area made me nervous. I could observe no inherent basis for their magnitude. Housing was experiencing a surge not reflected in the broader economy; it was feeding upon itself. The penultimate "house of cards".

There was no sustaining model for the demand. The population wasn't increasing that rapidly, and people's productivity (or earnings) wasn't rising in a fashion to enable them to afford to occupy an ever increasing quantity of living space.
At Long Last, Physicists Calculate the Proton's Mass
The craftsmanship that was omnipresent in American life up until 40 or so years ago is astounding.

Sad Really.
I don't think that the karma decay function would work or be helpful. Most people on the leader board, got there from hard work and dedication to make this site a really cool place.

I know that my participation in this board was a deliberate exercise in community building. I worked my tail off in trying to find interesting material that my fellow hackers would enjoy reading. It's pretty common for me to spend 20-40 minutes crafting a response to a comment.

A number of us were upset at the downfall of Reddit, and we were determined to make this a better place. I was one of those. And, while I still use a highly curated form of Reddit for news. I never participate in discussion there.

So the leader' karma scores reflect how much we've invested in this site. I don't think that's a bad thing. People on the leader board have made this site what it is. And, they're still the backbone of the site. Can you imagine what it would be like if nickb or edw519 stopped submitting? It would dramatically change the tone of the site, since their contributions to it are so substantial.

I know that I haven't been as active the past few months, but that's because school's done for now, and I've been building product. With any luck, I'll be launching by January. We'll see.

But adding a decay function to a site like this would only punish people who have contributed lots.

Maybe a better answer would be to increase the size of the leader board to the top 200-300 karma. That would give some recognition to the people that are putting in more work on the site, gut their karma isn't on the top 100. Just a thought.
I just tried one of those tests. It said I was an INTJ. Are the letters in order of significance? I.e. is INTJ the next door neighbor of INTP?
No.

I have been here since fairly close to the beginning (for the public anyway), and have moved around in the rankings quite a bit. Since I quit my job in May, I have sunk from 64 to 100. (I don't spend several hours every morning reading HN with my coffee, since I'm rarely up in the mornings now. ;) I can assure you that newer people are able to push ahead of older people if the older people stop participating.

For instance, I have been on here five times as long as qhoxie, but he has three times the karma I do. The reason the leaderboard might look stagnant is that the people in the top 10 are there for a reason... they are consistently more productive (in the karma sense) over the long run. If they started resting on their laurels, people like qhoxie would rapidly overtake them.

Also, as the site grows, it gets much easier to rack up tons of karma. At one time a story was really hot if it had 20 votes. Nowdays it's common to see things go well over 100. I was once really surprised to get 26 karma for a comment I made. Nowdays there are gems on here that regularly go over 50. More people voting means the new users actually can catch up faster.

(Of course, this also assumes that karma actually matters, which I debate. It's nice to know people appreciate what you said/posted, but you shouldn't just be saying/posting it to win a karma video game.)
It would seem that some of these git "problems" can be solved the way you'd automate anything else in Unix...write your own scripts or aliases.

Tools are not supposed to please everybody. (They can't, since for every person who loves the default configuration, there will be someone who doesn't.)

If you can't remember that "foo -bar -baz -squareroot4515" is the command to do X, then make a shell alias or a script that performs these steps for you, and call it whatever you want.
Ask HN:  On building a Social News site and its tools for moderation
I'm working on a social news site built on Django, and I'm coming close to completion. But, I'd like to ask HN about specific likes/dislikes on social news sites they use:

* What features do you like/hate about reddit/digg/hn
* What are the most effective troll guards?
* What are the most effective spam guards?
* Do honeypots work in preventing spam submissions?
* Are captcha's annoying or useful?
* What should the editor/moderator to reader ratio be?
* What things can be done to encourage self-
moderation on sites like this?
* I'd love to hear from the editors/moderators of HN:
What features make it great to do your job? What
tools would you like?

Any other comments on social news site joy/fail would be appreciated.
I'm just thinking out loud.

Elders a.k.a old people in a normal society are respected because they have been in the 'system' longer, irrespective of their accomplishments.
That to me is one form of karma (Age)

Also, ppl who have accomplished a lot irrespective of age are looked up as role models in the society : the form of karma that most social sites capture - contribution.

Similarly bad acts reduce one's karma - independent of the good he has done - Hans Reiser comes to mind.

The total karma could be a function of (age, +ve contribution, -ves).
The age can be based on some condition like page views/logins done etc. - passive contribution OR can be unconditional too (today - creation date).

Active contributions can be also be classified into major and minor. Say a particular post generated > 1000+ points. It has to be given importance irrespective of age. Smaller events can be dampened - just like in the real world - no big deal.
Same goes for -ves too. murder != pickpocket.

my view, karma = function (age, major +ve, minor +ve, major -ve, minor -ve)

and only the minors need to be decayed.
If scribd went out of business tomorrow, how long would it take for you to get a solution working? How much would it cost?

No, I don't think you're making a mistake, but this is a high risk decision. Personally I would at the very least look into using one of scribd's competitors as an emergency solution in case of major downtime, bankruptcy, etc.
I think it would help if a user's first few karma points could only be obtained through upvoted comments, and not submissions. Submissions should be disallowed until you reach a certain karma value, ensuring that you've contributed meaningfully to discussions for awhile before you can add your own. (This would avoid the all-too-common 1-karma-user posts of spam or stuff from Reddit that isn't even related to us.)

I don't think invite-only is a good thing. It probably would have prevented me from ever being here.
Ah, then I'm gonna blame my rather unnecessary correction on being an INTP:

"Precise about their descriptions, INTPs will often correct others (or be sorely tempted to) if the shade of meaning is a bit off."

Edit: Actually just retested and I guess I am an INTJ, but just barely (52% J and 48% P), so I guess I'll have to blame it on my INTP side, whatever that means.
There's two ways to build karma.
Comments and submissions.
So people would need to comment and get upvotes before they could submit anything? Why?
http://www.typelogic.com/intj.html

As far as I know the letters are always in the same order. To put it in regex form: (E|I)(S|N)(F|T)(J|P)
http://www.widecircles.com
hi
this site is very great to any developer.because the hacker news always chek.

sunny
Saying it was a lost decade is misleading, a year ago the dow was up 3000 points from where it was in 1999, and that is after it went down to the 7000's in 2003, which was close to where it was in 1996.

Dow cycles are indepenent of our neat calendar years. If the decade ended last October we would have been saying, "Yowzer what a great decade!"

Well, maybe we wouldn't have been saying "yowzer".
You already called out the problem: you can only be up as often as all of your critical partners are up.

If you care about uptime and reliability, you can only partner with well established, reliable players for core functionality. For example, Google Maps is a pretty safe partner.

Also, what would you do if they went away? I'd make sure you have your own copies of every document, just in case.

Now, in all fairness, scribd has been up whenever I've used it and seems to be continuing to gain traction.
I agree with the comment above. But there is a large rural population in India that 'thinks numbers' in the native language.

May be the article is true only for numbers in the CJK (Chinese-Japense-Korean) languages.

Atleast in the 3 Indian languages I know, numbers are bad in all of them - as bad as it is in English.
One quick fix would be to de-list the site in search engines. This way people coming here are from referrals or word-of-mouth only.

Google shows about 160,000 pages indexed for YC, I'm sure some of those are leading to new users.
I'd figure out how to backup the scribd documents so that your users' data won't get completely lost if and when scribd disappears. You want to make it possible to recover from the loss of scribd, even if it's inconvenient.

Most likely the right answer is to launch now and work around scribd later. If your community completely fails to catch on, then you needn't waste time cloning scribd. If scribd gets you through a year, after which someone else has cloned scribd, you get to leverage their work. If you're really lucky, that work will be open source.

If nothing else, having your community up will allow it to grow and get stuff done while you are busy building an emergency failover system for scribd.

Of course, if your community will lose $1m for every minute that scribd is down, you should consider paying someone to build your own version of scribd. Indeed, you should probably consider buying scribd, or at least their source code.
Now that you're here, you feel entitled to exclude others...
INTJ is the next closest to (E/I)NTP. The reason there are less INTJs on the site is probably because they are more rare, rather than because the temperament is different.
Dumbrella's party board (http://www.dumbrella.com/bb/viewforum.php?f=1&sid=cb8a89...) has a very interesting way of dealing with newcomers.

If I remember correctly, you're expected to lurk or use the newbie boards (http://www.dumbrella.com/bb/viewforum.php?f=2&sid=cb8a89...) for at least 6 months before posting on the party board.

Even then, if other members don't like what you post, you get harassed pretty quickly and often an admin will delete your thread, or lock it with an (often insulting) explanation of why it was locked. If someone continues to submit posts that members just don't like, that person will get banned pretty quickly. There's a certain culture there, and everyone, admins especially, will berate people who don't fit in.

That would work here, but it certainly works for them.
Here's a pic of mine of the pages with ads on both sites in wired ripped out: http://flickr.com/photos/ikirigin/2097211221/

I'd like to do this with a scalpel to compare the height.
All businesses need to embrace change. But too often people forget that change is a mindset belonging to individual people and that it therefore needs to be constantly re-rooted in the organization to actually stay relevant. If your organization doesn't remember to embrace change (document your practices!), if it doesn't constantly re-roots itself with regard to change (challenge the way you embrace change), it will become obsolete.

Regards,

WarTheatre
This is based on soil studies of a limited number of sites in Australia. It implies that as these soils contained more black carbon (soot) than thought - which takes 1-2k yrs to convert to CO2, rather than 100 yrs for organic carbon - soil will contribute less to global warming.

This makes sense but surely to include this in global climate models, you'd need good soot content estimates for a variety of soils worldwide? Either a good global average derived from a wide range of measurements, or an actual global soil map included in the simulation?
Muhaha (looking at the results so far). It's way too late. I pretty much got on board the moment it started to go downhill - same time the reddit crown (me included) came here.

Communities like this have two big problems to solve when they grow up:

1. "The crowd" comes in, and dwarfes by sheer numbers the original community, pretty much diluting the original values to a fraction.

2. Same community, same members, same ideas - after a while you get stuck in a loop, and it's hard to bring truly original content.

Unfortunately these two problems don't solve each other, but rather make things worse. The crowd will assimilate only the most superficial and more repetitive values, while the true target for original content is lost pretty fast.

What I'm saying is things are pretty much doomed, and I'm not talking only about HN. Believe it or not, there was a time when digg was better then HN is now.

As for solutions, I have none. But do like the idea of invitation only... maybe with a twist. You still need to be able to get new members directly, not through aquintances. So how about having "full members" and "regular members". Regulars can't post stories, and their comments are somewhat at a disadvantage (graphically or by initial points. I's suggest both). Their comments have "invite" buttons visible to the full members, possibly with a window showing comment history in between. Full members have a number of invites logarithmically proportional to their karma.

To the HN today it's both too late and impractical to apply this, but a clone could be worth it. Maybe starting with the users with the most karma as of one year ago.
how about a site formatted for the iPhone?
> Most people on the leader board, got there from hard work and dedication to make this site a really cool place.

Try posting every tc, mashable or rww article you come across for say a week. I predict your karma will go way up and this site will be less interesting because of it.
At no point did I suggest that state-sponsored marriage must exist. Nor did I use the term "human right". In fact I don't think I'd be opposed to its abolition, as you've described. But that's like "helping" someone fix a flat tire by telling them to buy a new car. It's a solution, yes, but not a practical one in a democracy where the vast majority of the voting populace, regardless of their stance on gay marriage, does not oppose marriage in general.

I'm sorry if that isn't broad-minded enough for you, but I can't help but view a modern political issue through the lens of modern politics. Arguing in the abstract strikes me as a convenient way of avoiding the problem entirely.
Why googlepages sucks
I believed its a service from a giant - google, so I would never have any problems keeping some images for my blog on it, I thought it would be atleast better than keeping images on imageshack and tinypic etc...
and this is what I get now -
===================================================

The bandwidth or page view limit for this site has been exceeded and the page cannot be viewed at this time. Once the site is below the limit, it will once again begin serving as normal.
@ http://ideamonk.googlepages.com/widelogo.gif

===================================================

Now since I'm at a remote location, not near my desktop, I can't even see that banner I had put, neither does googlepages give any option to download the content I uploaded back, as I try to get back the picture from google pages, it gives bandwidth problem again.
I guess my 9 mb presentation on natural vegetation of India went too popular as the google analytics shows. Maybe thats the cause.
But now what !?

1. What are the good places to host images to be used on a blog reliably?

2. Where can I upload a 9 mb zip file so that end users of my blog can download them without any hassles ?

3. Is googlepages reliable ? Eversince I put header banner etc on googlepages, my blog started taking too much time to show up... is googlepages really worth something ?
lol, that is kind of neat. You should have mentioned that it analyzes a blog instead of actually giving you the questions. I don't know how well it works, but neat none-the-less
"... I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds...."

Freeman Dyson
I'm in agreement. It seems like having the user upload to your server/hardware, store the original and pipe it into the Scribd API. It'll afford you the opportunity to move away from Scribd bit by bit. In fact, if Scribd goes down, you can revert to say a PDF of the original document. It won't have the bells and whistles, but the info is there...