skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many of the comments here and on the blog itself are perfect demonstrations of developers' disdain for usability and oridnary users. "Is it hard to use? Works for me. Man up and study, Nancy!". Good grief.
That encourages lock-in. What if my wife had a baby and I went offline for a year because I didn't have time. Would that make my opinions suddenly invalid?

Tennis rankings are based on physical form. Physical form is something much more likely to change year to year than intellectual form.

Someone might be out of date with the latest topics, consensus from the community, etc but it doesn't imply their thinking apparatus or world view has dramatically altered.
Yes, I tell others about HN, but only those that I know will be valuable and interested users.
The eco machine that can magic water out of thin air
Karma ensures popular behaviour, not "good".

If that's what you're gunning for, it's a great idea. What's popular is only dependent on your users and their tastes, and this can change over time.
Last Night's Bright Meteorite In Canada Caught On Film
needn't be AI. What about biotech etc?
Actually I think it is kind of nice that a submission can get to the front page with two votes. If it weren't so, the reason could be that there are too many low quality submissions drowning the good submissions.
The trouble here is that there seems to be feedback - anti-civilized behavior promotes itself. While they haven't looked at cultural side effects, I would expect a behavior's prevalence to influence its acceptability.

Where can the loop be interrupted? Probably easiest at the point where no minds are involved, it's merely physical mess. So, aggressive cleaning. But for that to be realistic, the spigot has to be closed a little. Hence, bans on litter precursors.
Yes. Think of the probability you'd need to have before you could 'stop worrying about things.' You have to think that it were 99% likely that 'the singularity' would show up in 20, or 50 years!
ur turnin into reddit. 1/2 of the stories about urself. lolololol
I agree with the suggestion that submissions should be disallowed until one reaches a specific karma value. It is becoming incredibly harder now to up-vote the right kind of posts from the 'new' section. A smaller sample space would be helpful in getting mostly the right content on the front page.

Writing thoughtful comments (even if they are disagreements) to get the desired karma for submissions is as good as a pseudo-invite.

The one tricky part would be whether to allow 'Ask HN' posts or not from new accounts that haven't reached the specific karma level yet. I think they should be allowed, as sometimes one needs to create a temp account, to get some useful feedback/suggestions for some situations where one cannot disclose the identity very obviously.
To be honest, I think the up/down notion of karma is the problem.

I'd prefer to see words being attached to comments instead of numbers. "Funny", "Insightful", "Accurate", and their opposites could be the method of rating, with "leader boards" showing the funniest, most insightful etc.

The notion of me as a user being "worth" #### points would vanish, and it would be replaced with a general "run4yourlives: slightly funny, not often accurate" descriptor based on the ratings of my peers.

Slashdot tried this, but they kept linking it back to numbers, which I think is where it failed. The idea should be to remove the notion of a numerical worth altogether.
I made a place to discuss chemical reactions while building a free+open reactions database
Maybe? But I don't really think that would explain the drop from approximately 300 search-related hits per day down to 2 search-related hits per day over such a short period, and on a national scale.
>> It seems to me you look down on such opinion? That's what usability is about - make things easy enough to learn so that users are not recentful.

We're software engineers. It is our job to understand more complex software models. Git's usability isn't terrible, it is just a more complex model that requires a more thorough understanding of the underlying principles. And given how trivial it is to find and read such data, my sympathy is limited.

What's more, git's usability is a radical improvement path. Between services for remote repos (like github and gitorious) and better and better command line tools (GitX, for example). At some point you have to bite the bullet and understand your tools.

We're seeing a lot of this reluctance in the industry as people are forced to confront distributed concepts.
Oh, well if you're referring to petty, childish stuff like that, I have no argument. Telling the difference can be hard sometimes, so all I can really recommend is that you keep an open mind. You seem to be doing that, though.

American Beauty is in my top 10 movies of all time; I recommend it highly!
Even stock split is not always a good idea. Alternative way to split stock is here:
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/fd0n/35%20Founders%27%20Pie%2...
Sweet :-) The quickest personality test ever: don't answer any questions, just type in your URL.
"We know from measurements that climate change today is worse than people have predicted," said Lehmann. "But this particular aspect, black carbon's stability in soil, if incorporated in climate models, would actually decrease climate predictions."
So sad. So true. I wonder where we'd be if Gore won Florida.
I guess the question is which part of the learning curve is there for a reason and which part is preventable.

Someone has already asked the question - is Mercurial any less powerful for being easier to use?

I am sitting on the sidelines (svn) and waiting for the dust to settle. My only interest is to have one dcvs emerge with all the best in it that this field can offer.
I think another million dollar homepage will happen much sooner than that. I know someone that did something similar and made a quick 15k:
http://www.linkexperiment.com/
The signal-to-noise ratio on this site is exceedingly good, by Internet standards. Perhaps HN has "declined", although I've seen no evidence of this, and it's one of my favorite Internet forums. If it devolves into WallStreetOasis or Xoxohth, then maybe such a move would be in order. For now, I don't see a problem, and certainly not one requiring such a drastic solution. A more moderate solution would be to allow down-voting on submissions, which I'd support.
Yeah, it sucks not being able to remember much from my childhood, but it's quite convenient to essentially be reborn every few years. The timing thing can become an issue...

Mom: "Well hello, stranger!"
Me: "Come on, I just called you guys last week!"
Mom: "That was 3 months ago, sweetie."

DAMN!
I think it's important to consider the amount of fossil fuels we are using. One example that springs to mind at one of the older coal power plants in WV they decided to change the location where they deposited the coal ash that was left over. It turns out over the last 40 years they had just kept making a larger mount and it was about to become the tallest mountain in the state. Now you might wonder how this ends up but the simple fact is coal is mindbogglingly cheep. There is literally mounds of the stuff which you basically pickup off the ground. (It's slightly worse than that but not by much.)
Ha. I also got ESTP and I'm an INTJ (I took the test from a few sources because of that compliant actually--still all said INTJ).
Interesting. Trying this http://www.typelogic.com/esfj.html gives INTP, as it does for most of the websites I tried. It loads pretty damn fast, so my guess is they have a simple word or n-gram dictionary that is weighting each term.

Pretty entertaining! : With http://www.lyrics007.com/Nelly%20Lyrics/Country%20Grammar%20... (ESFP Performers )
Playlist.com is hiring for a bunch of positions. If anyone is interested feel free to send me an email.
I'm not sure about the all the science behind this (it's a very big field...), but those at real climate have addressed some of the issues here, for example: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/freema...

Carbon emissions are not a problem because in a few years genetic engineers will develop “carbon-eating trees” that will sequester carbon in soils. Ah, the famed Dyson vision thing, this is what we came for. The seasonal cycle in atmospheric CO2 shows that the lifetime of a CO2 molecule in the air before it is exchanged with another in the land biosphere is about 12 years. Therefore if the trees could simply be persuaded to drop diamonds instead of leaves, repairing the damage to the atmosphere could be fast, I suppose. The problem here, unrecognized by Dyson, is that the business-as-usual he’s defending would release almost as much carbon to the air by the end of the century as the entire reservoir of carbon stored on land, in living things and in soils combined. The land carbon reservoir would have to double in size in order keep up with us. This is too visionary for me to bet the farm on.
My Techmeme Observations
In other news, Vogue magazine is 91% fullpage ads.
I interviewed a bunch of reddit users for my senior thesis. One thing I found was that the karma system really encouraged participation (not too surprising but worth considering if your building a social news site).

Check out http://www.thesixtyone.com. It's a great example of how you can instill a social media site with a really fun, game-like quality. Not sure if you want to go in that direction, but still worth checking out.

As far as spamming and moderation, I wouldn't worry about it too much if your just getting started. I probably wouldn't even do email validation to begin with since you want the barrier to be low when your trying to attract your first users. You can always add that stuff later when the need arises.
Cool.

I tested it out on a few articles/blogs that I've had.

Typealyzer pretty well guesses how I felt when I write things. INTP (my essays, overall), ISFP (a brief story I wrote), INFP (private journal), ENTP (some posts on entrepreneurship), ENTJ (my startup's site overall), ENTP (the FAQ on the startup's site), INTJ (the team page on my startup's site).
My least favorite HN content, by far: Bitching about HN and its content.

Srsly, folks, just don't vote it up if you don't like it. It really is that easy.

This isn't "startup news" or "programmer news", it's "hacker news". It's news that is interesting to hackers. And it delivers quite well.

As it happens, some hackers are into politics or business or meteors or robots or science or economics. Some are not.

You should expect that about 10-20% of the articles will not be interesting to you. Consider that a success.
Having worked on a product that made extensive use of them, I can confidently say that these personality tests are complete psychobabble bunk. The only thing worse than thumping your chest with pride for falling into an overgeneralized and mostly arbitrary population group is being profiled and judged for falling into one.

First of all, personality traits change over time. Even if it were possible to create an accurate assessment, the results would be invalid after a year. The creators of these tests like to say that they identify persistent traits that underly the changes, but these are little more than meandering PR rationalizations. Behavioral bases change gradually over time also. Life experiences have a way of doing that.

Second, the human psyche is far too complex to draw any kind of reasonable conclusion from a result along 4 axes. Imagine that you're trying to find a location in the middle of a vast forest, and your map is a blank sheet except for the temperature, elevation, wind speed, and air pressure of the destination at the time it was measured.
Or, just do what somethingawful.com does, charge a one time account creation fee, like $10. I'd certainly pay.
Says I'm an ESTP, but I'm an ENTP. I wonder how many NT's are on HN? I'd say it's a pretty high percentage. According to David Keirsey they're represented by roughly 12%, so not very much, but on HN it wouldn't surprise me if it was ~70%.
Most of my tests comes back as thai language, ):
So, that'd make you ISTJ, yeah? :P
Some YC news discussions remind me of the early days of Orkut. Their invite-only policy didn't prevent people from filling threads with spam.

I think the best way to keep the quality of YC news high is for committed people (like pg) to do what they can and slowly deploy heuristics when possible.
How about working on your own laptop, committing changes locally, fixing wrong/broken commits, and then seamlessly merging your changes with others. It is also much faster (e.g. try using svn blame), stores all the history locally, makes working on different branches very, very easy, etc.
Would a few weeks be long enough for such an experiment? Keep in mind that HN is basically a massive non-linear complex system and in these systems, effects take a ludicrously long time to percolate. It may take a year before the effects settle down to a steady state (indeed if there is one).
This is like Mood Rings 2.0.
Eye, Brain, and Vision
The more I learn about this crisis, the more I am convinced it all came down to one thing, and one thing alone: leverage.

Now, the situation is obviously complicated and can't be pinned down to one factor like that, so let me be clear: I'm not saying that one fact explains every last detail about the crisis. What I am saying is that the grotesque overleverage we saw was sufficient to cause a crisis. Exactly how it manifested depended on computer models and dumb loans and all the other little details. But the situation where banks and large financial entities were leveraging 30x meant that a crisis of this type was inevitable; the only question was the details.

When you set up a scenario such that any 3% drop in asset value has driven you bankrupt and 4% means you're in horrific debt, you have already lost. How exactly this loss manifests, and how many smart people there are with computers trying to put off the day of reckoning there are hardly matters; epic failure (and I mean that in the original sense, not the meme sense) is inevitable.

Did the geeks tell the banks to overleverage? Quite possibly. If so, then yell at them too. This article doesn't support that claim, though. (In fact it's very vague in general.)
Math problem: can public data reveal which firms use Black-Scholes?
Black-Scholes is the fundamental math model the quanta use. It's based on the calculus missiles use to navigate themselves. Can you write software to identify the money rockets and shoot them down? Would you need active detection, like RADAR? Investments that would that could reveal a rocket in the numbers? If so, should regulators use such tactics to reign in firms? Should the be an "anti-missile" treaty that no one uses Black-Scholes?
Yaaaouch! Seafood soup is NOT on the menu!
nitpick: the word "penultimate" means "next to last."
more detail:

http://skepdic.com/myersb.html
I feel like these personality tests could essentially delineate any combination of letters and have the user feel as if the judgment represents them. All people are multifarious in the sense that we each share both introverted and extroverted characteristics, albeit usually at different times, and within different circumstances. These words have come to describe behavioral patterns that are not nearly as trenchant as we have come to assume they are.
Ask HN: the most amazing python script you ever wrote ?
As I learn python, i wonder what was the most funny/amazing python script you wrote during your work/education ? and how it helped.
Maybe I could also do them as an exercise to build up some python skills as i experiment more and more to learn it.
Of course not. But thats still better than the government where nobody figured it out.
The singularity is always 20 years ahead.
But in all seriousness, why so negative? It can only ever be considered as a guide, and if the end is understanding (i.e. reaching your destination through the forest) then who cares if the map isn't a complete map? Isn't that the point of maps?

If the goal is 100% correctness of analysis down to the letter, than the instrument fails miserably. If the goal is perhaps, an increased self awareness, the possibility of understanding your other crazy peers and friends, figuring out what your strengths are and playing to them, then, isn't the instrument worthwhile?

It's nothing more than a conceptual framework with the goal of measuring and typecasting for deeper understanding. This is what I like about the instrument the most: answer a bunch of questions, get some hopefully insightful profile.

To outright poo-poo it is incredibly negative nancy. What about the people who became more effective at work and at home as a result of taking it? What about the couple that were able to work out their differences and be understand each other? Are you going to invalidate the instrument despite it may have some positive influence on peoples lives? You barstard!

And in closing, the instrument has been verified with a scientific statistical method. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds important. Certainly more thorough than tickle.com.
Out of curiosity, do stories flagged by multiple users get auto-deleted?

I've been wondering that too.
Anyone know if this uses Amazon Mechanical Turk?
Excellent. I'll add that to my movie list (it'll take a while, right now I'm going through my year-old "extremely long TV shows" list). Or perhaps it'll come up for movie night: it's a pretty well-known movie.
I feel like this a boilerplate. These are all the steps you should do, but it never goes that way.

Me? I'm going to continue to plan my heart out and not be the least bit surprised as it continues to unwind in a totally unexpected way.
Version control in general is not meant for "ordinary users"; it's for developers. I mean, sure, it can serve as a versioning system for just about anything, but it is overwhelmingly used for code. Git doesn't need to be easy for my Dad to use because he has no use for it.

Despite having lived partially on the command line for nearly a decade now, there are still commands that are simply not intuitive to me. This isn't the developers' fault, it's my fault for not becoming more familiar with the commands and understanding why they actually make sense.

find $directory -type f -name '<asterick>' -exec mv {} $directory2/. \;

If you want to move thousands of files and can't use a single mv command, something like this will work. Most of it makes sense to me, but what's with the {}? That doesn't seem intuitive. And what about the extra /. \ crap? I would never think to add that junk and without it (iirc) the command returns some esoteric error.

I'm sure if I read the proper manpages, I could figure out what purpose those seemingly extraneous symbols serve.
Amazon offering free access to large public data sets in EC2
Here's my free usability review of that site:

The font is too small.
Say it ain't so!

I love the fact that I can force myself to disconnect on flights...
While you can probably improve a karma system with decay or a more complicated algorithm, there's something to be said for having a system simple that your users understand. I'd make a wild guess that karma wouldn't be as interesting to users if they can't figure out how their actions directly affect their score.
I think the divide isn't really between "believing" in global warming or not - but between blaming "western" progress, industrialism, consumerism, globalism and capitalism, and placing as a premise for a solution that we can't allow our progress to slow down to fix this, and we CERTAINLY can't ask China and India to slow down theirs.

The former is (roughly) the Kyoto/Copenhagen bunch, the latter is the "spend A LOT - NOW on nuclear energy (we need a lot of energy, and it will keep growing) and research in energy storage (fuel cells etc.) and biotech (get rid of the C02 we already have)".
The answer depends on what problem you think the karma-delay function is intended to solve and whether or not there is evidence that this problem is real.

I think the only place a decay function makes sense is in providing historic views of the leaderboard.
The reason I poo-poo it is that I see many people using these results as nearly the final word on how to judge someone, rather than just a guide. Which is dangerous, in my opinion. The map isn't dangerous in and of itself, but it becomes dangerous when the mapmaker gives the impression that it gives more detail than it actually does.

edit: Additionally, there's a large psychological bias on the first information you receive about a person. If you see these results before meeting the subject, you will be likely to frame him according to the results, whether they fit him or not.
i've lost count of the number of times i've tutored my whanau and had to use some variant of 'slice a pizza into x bits and then hand out a slice to y friends - fractions are just a quick way to write it down...' simple conceptual anchor points are crucial - everything after that leverages the basics.
it does (see the questions page)
I wonder what affect the studies on black carbon will have on the projected prevalence of the man-bear-pig?
Facebook's Land Grab in the Face of a Downturn
I think an option to filter out (or just see) self-referential posts would be great. I actually like AskHN posts a lot, and an option to just see those posts would probably encourage people to post more.
If you find the original thread discussing Meyers-Briggs on HN, someone used it there.
Wow, making me realizing how hungry I am right now.

How long before this becomes the fuel for another "HN has off-topic articles!" rant? ;)
Perhaps they should submit their site to http://www.feedbackarmy.com ? Oh wait...
I recently quit from a company that was heavily tied to the Newspaper industry. We dealt with thousands of small to medium sized papers.

The sad truth is most of these organizations just don't "get it."

I remember one newspaper called because another newspaper was linking to their content. They were furious. They somehow correlated other sites linking to their site as "stealing visitors." This paper wasn't stealing content or using any more than allowed, simply linking.

They complain about craigslist taking their classifieds business away while higher-quality niche sites are stealing what little they do have left (pets, autos, houses).

They make partnerships with Yahoo! and are basically giving away their content in return for peanuts (including giving jobs to HotJobs).

They focus on national news when they should be dominating their local market.

The list goes on and on. These people are a dying breed--practically begging to be taken over by faster, leaner, smarter competitors who have 1/10th the staff and no multi-million dollar printing presses to pay off.

You wonder why newspapers are suffering? Its because 95% of them still don't "get it."