skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What you're desribing is the Eternal September[0].

There are strategies to mitigate the degridation of discourse, such as Hellbanning[1]. Are you asking if there is a way to prevent a small community from blowing up? Or are you asking if there is a way to prevent a small community from blowing up and being bogged down by crappy content?

I would say the best strategy would be to have good moderators, and be sure that you do your part to post quality content to the community. Be the change you want to see online. The more quality content, comments, etc. are on a site, the more it will be socially unacceptable to RickRoll[2].

Many sites implement a karma-type system to reward good content and punish bad conent (Reddit, HN, StackOverflow, etc).

However, two online communities come to mind that don't seem to have suffered in quality of content since their inception: 4Chan and C2Wiki[3]. I think this is due to their obscurity from the mainstream and also anarchist nature of their moderation system. On 4Chan, anyone can post, and there are so many posts, anything untasteful to the community is quickly buried in newer or more popular posts. On C2Wiki, anyone can edit, and edits that degrade the quality of the content are replaced just as painlessly with better content. Interestingly, both communities are anonymous.

How can you prevent people from cracking the same tired jokes again and again? Answer coming in 3... 2...[4]

I think first you must create an online community that caters to a specific niche, so users can already relate to one another because they share the same interests. Once people relate to one another, they want to share and converse[5].

Then, if the community grows in popularity, you must figure out how heavily you're going to moderate. Will you agressivley close off-topic posts and potentially turn away quality contributors (like programmers.stackexchange.com)? Or will you let everyone in, and create specific areas for new interests the community develops as it grows (like 4chan.org/sci)?

I see this a spectrum from razor-focused discussion to organic free-for-all. A mistake I belive one mistake that Slashdot made (and is still trying to rectify) is to straddle both ends of this spectrum. They have ended up alienating both the razor-focused users and the free-for-all users and all that is left is the snark.

So, I think, to prevent the degradation of online communities, you must chose which end of this spectrum your community is on, and moderate (or don't) accordingly.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

[1]http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h...

[2]Was going to be a YouTube link, but resisted the temptation to RickRoll HN because I might get downvoted.

[3]http://c2.com/cgi/wiki

[4]I'm really tired of this joke on HN, FYI

[5]http://www.browncafe.com/forum/ (one of my favorite niche online communities)
Stack Exchange

Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky used to run a podcast where they described exactly the techniques they had discovered.

- Communities are segmented according to specialty so as to concentrate expert-level talent. Compare the kinds of questions listed on an SE site to what's asked on any other Q&A site out there. The math questions are asked by actual mathematicians, the photography questions are asked by actual photographers, etc. (You'll also notice that---beyond the gaming site---most of the silos are dedicated to a profession.)

- Many of the professional sites are dedicated exclusively to people in that profession. The Theoretical Computer Science silo explicitly requires PhD-level material. The Quantitative Finance site opens the FAQ with "if you aren't earning a living at this, it's probably off topic".

- Most SE sites explicitly prohibit subjective questions. Something like, "What's better, Ruby or Python?" will be closed immediately.

- Any post can be edited by another user, just as with Wikipedia. So grammar and spelling tend to be pretty decent.

- Moderators are given broad powers to close questions, delete posts, suspend users, and even delete accounts.

- There is a separate Meta site for questions about the site. That segregates questions about the silo's topic from questions about the silo.

Reddit has some siloing as well, but they don't prohibit memes, which is why the content looks the way it does. They also don't have user editing or strong moderation. It shows.
I find many of the posts on this thread to be interesting, but I personally do not think that this entropic process is a problem. I like decay and I am attached to the plasticity of the internet.
Happy - A new and very smart ruby toolkit for writing web apps
I am from Bangalore. If I went around telling this... they'll probably label me a crackpot. Even the geeks around me wud probably consider this too crazy to be real. I will check out and see how the world around me reacts.
May I ask you - if H1B is not a problem, what's wrong with not being in US? Is this relevant to H1B quotas?
Spolsky has an old article on how the UI of the software used affects the community: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswi...
Cincinnati, OH - INTERN Frontend/Backend Django Developers for FlightCar (backed by The Brandery):

Frontend:

We're looking for someone who has an eye for design and can realize their designs with code. Strong working knowledge of CSS, HTML, and Javascript is a must. Graphic Design Skills is a huge +, Django is a +

Backend:

We're looking for someone who can setup a server blindfolded and who has a strong working knowledge of Django (Python) and Javascript.

What will the experience be like?

A lot of learning and a lot of work, accompanied with a lot of fun--expect the sort of environment you had seen in The Social Network, except now there are 12 other teams in the building with brilliant programmers and designers for you to learn from and teach. We also have top notch mentors, thanks to the Brandery, as well as a world class design firm, a bank team, and a legal team, along with dedicated support server side.

If selected for the position, you'll be working at The Brandery from late June until school starts. Depending on the specific dates you work, you'll get $1-3k upfront, along with $4-6k promised upon us receiving our next round of funding, and a little bit of equity, a bonus we give so that you'll have a vested interest in our company (imagine how much that'll be worth if we hit it big!). Not to mention, you'll have free housing in an awesome house with the rest of the team and the opportunity to network with some of the most brilliant entrepreneurs in America--think of it as a way to get your foot in the door of the startup scene.

Since we're in the early stages of development, we cannot publicly disclose our business model, but we're working to disrupt an industry and we think we can hit it big.

Send shrig94@gmail.com a resume and a portfolio of previous works if you're interested!
but the features pointed out in this article have not attained widespread use, and who knows - maybe there's a reason for that. Windows phone has a negligibly small market share. WebOS died. Blackberry 10 is not even out yet. And apparently the newest Android OS is also on very few phones.http://mobile.theverge.com/2012/6/2/3058522/android-4-0-now-...

The features that iOS has allowed are in widespread use once they are implemented. This is just an observation but perhaps there's a reason Apple prefers a controlled roll out of new features.
The thing is that most open source software was designed for use by engineers for engineers and doesn't have a success criteria other than 'makes problem disappear'.

formal usability testing is irrelevant on such things so stop muscling in your own concerns and slating them for a job done.
Great point! Shameful that I didn't even think about it.
not working for me...
Wait, what Steve Jobs does determines your morality? He was obviously a great CEO, but not exactly a saint...
It's been pointed out to me that this has been submitted before:

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3251877

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3703024

In fact, the question has been discussed several times:

* http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3A%28...

My personal observation is not quite the same as DanI-S who says:

it is apparent that timing, rather than
the quality of the link, decides whether
or not something reaches the front page.

( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4058699 )

My observation is that it is a combination of timing, title, content, and luck. Timing does play a huge part in it, but if an item has significant merit, it usually (or at least often) does well despite poor timing.

It's complicated, and unless you pay attention, good items will pass you by. That's why I'm working on a site to augment HN and try to capture good items.
Net has holes. Assumption valid!
"The world is made out of two kinds of people..."

Some discussion formats encourage this (Amazon Forums, LinkedIn) and other publishers encourage the battle of the judgementals... The New York Times invented a new section of commentary designed specifically to encourage knock-down drag-out discussions that go nowhere. It's good for the numbers.

Other phenomena contribute to heat death too. Forums on LinkedIn tend to be awful, particularly in the A.I. area. That's because anybody who knows anything has this neural net they're tending that works some miracle, and everything about it is a trade secret. The people who do talk want to rehash, over and over, unproductive questions like "What is intelligence?" ahd "Why has A.I. failed?" while the rest of us are quietly building systems that can do some of the things you do better than you can do it.
I wonder what would change if, say, all submissions within a time interval (like one hour) were collected and then posted all at once, at the top of the hour, in random order.
Quite possibly just killed by the load HN puts on it when submitted at a good time. Ironic, isn't it.
One presumes they understood the concept of the net and used one with holes smaller than the items it was being used to catch..
Yesterday, I walked into the office of the CFO at work. He doesn't swear a lot, but there was an amazing stream of profanity coming out of that office. Turns out he was trying to shorten a link with bit.ly and was discovering the redesign for the first time.

The funny thing is I went back to my desk and gave bit.ly a try, and got a fairly clean, uncluttered page that was easy to use--nothing at all like that page the CFO got.

The difference? I don't have a bit.ly account. He does, and was signed in.
Ulterior Ref Count: High Throughput GC, No Long Wait
Oops, it's gone down under the load.
Show HN: Muxamp, a unified playlist for YouTube and SoundCloud
Muxamp is a unified playlist that lets you search for and play YouTube and SoundCloud media back-to-back. It is my first web app, written entirely in JavaScript (thanks to Node.JS).

Link: http://muxamp.com/

Features:

* Easy track search

* Drag and drop playlist rearrangement

* Sharing your playlist is as easy as copy-pasting the URL

* Attractive UI, thanks to Bootstrap and CSS

* Free, no sign-up required

This is a personal project of mine that I used to learn more about JavaScript and web programming. Feedback is appreciated! (Tell me if it sucks or not.)

This project is hosted by Nodester (http://nodester.com).

Thanks for reading!
-Robert
DuhCam - a minimalist camera app for iOS
The younger you start using an addictive substance, the more likely you are to become addicted.

Putting an age limit on drugs use is a matter of public health, and protecting people who are not mature enough to understand the consequences of their acts.

Some people take more time than others to reach maturity, so I agree that setting an arbitrary age is not ideal, but it makes some sense.
The seven deadly sins of software development
I think this is a fun idea. People who run sites like reddit or HN or fark are attempting to make themselves middlemen to advance various of their interests. As a user I don't lose very much by finding one cool link on reddit and another on HN. To me it is just another url. But if a prolific respected user of HN migrates fo a new place, that probably causes the proprietor of HN more pain than the users of HN. Because unless you are for some reason confining yourself to the ghetto that is HN, you most likely are looking in a few different places for your enlightenment.
A community with a fuse, as it were, would be quite healthy.
> a result like that borders on the performance of Java

I haven't seen the "Java is slow" chestnut in years.
DirecTV: Apple TV won’t “obsolete our technology”
Facebook C++ Conference Live Blogging
But Starbucks did not start out as a bathroom provider before transitioning into making coffee. If you were a company that provided restrooms open to the public, it would be crazy for you to try to then "pivot" that into a profitable business by making the bathrooms harder to find and trying to sell customers coffee while they danced in place, straining not to pee on your floor as they looked desperately around the shop for your facilities.
Text link: http://muxamp.com/
I wanted to comment on the blog but the comment link seems broken.

This is basically the algorithm I use however instead of using a recursive call I have a variable that keeps track of the current position. When I run in to a dead end and need to backtrack I mark the cell with a special backtrack flag and find the only neighboring cell that I can move back to that does not have the backtrack flag.
Slideshow.html - yet another HTML5 Presentation Assembler
In enterprises where departmental data has been opened up through APIs, like Wells Fargo and Amazon, there have been tremendous benefits.

In the case of Amazon, this was achieved by CEO fiat, and strongly tied to employee evaluation. (To the point where employees in groups that failed to do so would have been evaluated right out of the company.) I wonder if POTUS has this kind of power over the federal bureaucracy.

Also, I would wonder if this is to be done securely.
In most cases that's how the engineers got hired on in the first place, so I don't understand your beef. Plus, what you really want is to hire people better than the ones you already have.
Still works fine for me, and I'm writing this six minutes after you posted. Still down for you?
That's definitely interesting. Maybe if a random selection of links posted in high volume periods didn't show up until low volume periods, smoothing out the curve?
>like the SAT

I would love it if companies hired people like colleges select students.

I'm very good at interviews, but I still hate doing them. If would love it if I could write an essay and send them my SAT scores without going through that awful process.

It would probably also weed out people who are just inordinately good at interviews.

I don't overtly try to exaggerate, but a few times I've been offered a job where I thought in the back of the mind that I might not really be qualified. To wit, I thought my interview skills, not my coding skills got me the offer.
At which point I show the next person how I learned it. It's called training. The best way to do this is documentation.

Usability nazis want people to be able to ride a bike after 5 seconds. They devalue learning and understanding most if the time rather than achieve an equilibrium.
While "At-Will" in theory means that they're immune from wrongful termination, there's some major exceptions in most of those states.

See "Covenant of good faith and fair dealing" (which in some states mean you have to be fired for 'just cause') and "Implied contract exceptions".

I say these not to indicate you're wrong, mostly to make sure the entrepreneurs around here understand that even in a lot of "At-Will" states they might not be able fire completely with impunity.

w/r/t the GP as long as the rules around a trial period are set via an employee handbook or in the contract, generally in the US we're fairly free to try people out and let them go, the US is actually more liberal in this then a lot of European countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
Good article. I would just add that Philosophy classes especially the more abstract 19th (Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche) and 20th century (Heidegger, Foucault, Mearleu-Ponty, Wittgenstein) philosophers are fantastic and often under appreciated tools for gaining deep abstract thinking skills that mathematics didn't teach me. Often times I've drawn on the modes of thought acquired from learning to read them when solving particularly difficult problems in software design and engineering.
So many places to criticize the article, but the one that hit me the most was "Release Early, Release Often" being held up as counter to usability. My experience is the exact opposite; it's not until you've released that you actually know how people will use your product and often too much UX design up-front is just premature optimization.
Ask HN: Blind Programmers?
I'm curious to know if anyone has ever worked with a blind programmer before. Perhaps a non-blind programmer who became blind later in life? How does it affect their work? Any stories?
Things the TSA doesn't want you to see
And that's because artists have crappy deals with their record labels.
EU actually funds the project: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7259339.stm and http://www.tribler.org/trac/wiki/whatIsTribler#Moreinformati...
I hear people talk about the supposed legal risks of hiring and firing. I've personally seen a number of firings, and I've never seen a single issue arise. While I'm not going to claim that nobody ever sues or shoots up the place, I think the frequency with which this happens is grossly overestimated. Along the same lines as myth of the burglar who sues the homeowner, and masses of MBAs abusing a single court case to rationalize their sociopathic and short-sighted business decisions.
Considering that it costs 20% for a match by a recruitment company, there is enourmous ROI for a program like that. It would almost be as good as the ability to print money.

Not to mention the cost you could get for the unemployed to sign up ("It costs you on average 2k/month not to use our service").
Telling someone "we're sorry - we had 8 candidates apply for this position, and we ended up taking on someone with more experience in X, Y and Z compared to your experience level.

And what about the cases where your reasons are not "more experience in X, Y, Z"? Cultural fit is a biggie - one might turn down a candidate who is more qualified because his banking attitudes would go over badly at a startup, for example.
Battling over Internet domain names
Really? "The Mysterious Island" is one of my favorites, and I'd be curious to know what, exactly, is being elided in the Project Guttenberg edition. Is this something you noticed yourself, or something you read about?
When you have something worth submitting.
Agreed. There is a very real chance that being a for-profit company can propel to you making more money for both the company and for your beneficiaries since you can hire more talented individuals.

It's pretty well known that non-profits often starve for top talent simply because a lot of the top talent also wants to make more money than a poor college kid.

Making money doesn't have to be orthogonal to doing good things in the world. There are plenty of companies that manage to do both.
Why the Layoffs at Hewlett Packard Could Be Just the Beginning
One thing I've seen done that it interesting is a virtual basement. My favorite online forum is advrider.com. It a vbulletin for adventure motorcycle enthusiasts with over 200k users, 500k threads, and 17m posts. It works surprisingly well because it has a "basement" where anything goes. The understanding is upstairs is for constructive conversation, and the basement, especially "Jo mamma" is for time wasting, vitriolic, political/religious/Etc, posts. If you start a pointless thread, it gets banished to jo mamma.
LED screen teardown, driving LEDs with video
Meanwhile I've never had any of these problems. I block games that I feel my friends are spamming me with, or are just annoying and that I won't ever play. Mafia Wars is a good one, I blocked that at least 4 years ago, and it's still gone as of today.

So one of two things is true. First is that I am somehow special and Facebook works differently for me than anyone else. Short answer: No.

Secondly is that Facebook's privacy settings is a mess and confusing to the public at large. You could make a very, very good case for that.

Also, just because your friends are trying to get you to re-sign-up doesn't somehow indicate that Facebook is doing something untoward.
Nice work... Thanks for sharing.

The only question I have is if the playlist URL might become problematic with longer lists? That might mean you would have to persist something serverside, but otherwise, very slick!
I was hoping for some thermodynamics awesomeness.
Wow! Bang on time and strange too @colinwright - I have been thinking of timing our post on HN, and amazing that this is second time this week, that you've come to my rescue.
They aim to join the EU? They were given 4 billion euros or the equivalent for the last 20 years to fulfill the 35 requirements to join the EU. They haven't accomplished one, are still at war with one member (Cyprus) and at cold war with another one (Greek) and instead used the money to build 6.000 mosques in Europe via DITIB.
I too was recently looking for how someone with good machine learning experience could contribute. I signed up for the pharma, neurobiology and genomics coursera courses.

My research also pointed me to the following books. The first two I got because they were highly recommended and most fit my interests.

Genes, Proteins and Computers

A Practical Introduction to the Simulation of Molecular Systems

--------------------------

##Ungot

An Introduction to Bioinformatics Algorithms

Bioinformatics : Machine learning approaches

Computational Genome Analysis,

Understanding Bioinformatics by Marketa Zvelebil

Biological Sequence Analysis, Durbin et al

Bioinformatics by David Mount :

Statistical Methods in Bioinformatics Warren J. Ewens, Gregory R. Grant

Bioinformatics Basics: Applications in Biological Science and Medicine

Time Warps, String Edits, and Macromolecules: The Theory and Practice of Sequence Comparison

Understanding Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics for Dummies

Molecular Evolution

Bioinformatics and Molecular Evolution

Algorithms on Strings, Tree's and Sequences

Bioinformatics - A Practical Guide to the analysis of Genes and Protein

The Art of Molecular Dynamics Simulation

Protein Bioinformatics: An Algorithmic Approach to Sequence and Structure Analysis

'Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics
Maybe in theory, but I read a couple of posts on HN in just the last few days of people complaining that potential hires they were interviewing couldn't even rhyme off things like basic data structures.

If critical thinking was the skill being sought, rote memorization seems like it shouldn't have any emphasis at all. You can always look up data structures, or whatever, but that is often not good enough.
I didn't find how to customize short links in either the new design website or the new chrome extension. Very frustrating
All those you mentioned are highly configurable and accessible through the command line interface. For the target audience, they are highly usable. 'Traditional' (if we speak of the same thing) does not care if your users are general users or engineers.
Oh, I'm not disagreeing on the opportunity available. You are, to quote Hermes from Futurama, technically correct (the best kind).

I do think that this problem is up there with world peace.
I get what you mean, but colleges are probably the worst analogue for successful hiring practices given selection based on legacy status, wealth, minority status, athletic ability, etc