skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I don't disagree on your other points, lisp's parentheses aren't just for the convenience of the parser, they're also for the convenience of the programmer who uses macros. Homoiconicity is a huge boon there.

Try using another language which allows macros and you'll see what I mean. For example, Haxe allows macros, and while it's syntax for them has recently improved, it still has a ways to go. Here's an example macro which checks if its argument is a constant string, and if it is, reads the file it represents. http://haxe.org/manual/macros/#manipulating-expressions

edit:
The equivalent in clojure would be something like

(defmacro get-file-contents [s]
(if-not (string? s)
(throw (Exception. "Expected string"))
(slurp s)))

Which happens to look very similar to a function that does the same thing, but at runtime instead of at compile time.
Some thoughts,

Communicate the influencers more... most people follow leaders, and it would help set the tone for new members.

HN's guidelines should be turned into LightBox style documentation. Put it where it matters right next to the input boxes (and in the case of dupe-checking do it by AJAX and communicate it inline).

Guidelines should encourage the positive, and where something is negative then it should be pointed out that they should attack the argument and not the person.

Have a very small set of very clear rules that are enforced transparently, openly and brutally. The lines will only trip up the worst offenders. If you move these lines, only do so because you've listened to the community and they believe the lines are wrong. I use a system on one of my sites in which I track how much a thread is read, and if a post is flagged by more than a certain number of people then I know the community is saying something got through and the rules either aren't being enforced or might not be right.

Mostly: This is not a technical problem. It's a people problem.

There may be some tools you can build to help, but it is people who will use those tools and it is they that make them effective. Even then, there's only so much you can do without fully empowering others.

One ends up realising that a forum is a microcosm of society, and the owner/leader either chooses a form of government in which the citizens will be happiest and yet the aims of the government are achieved, or the owner/leader delays such a decision whilst the population grows and increasingly friction occurs.
I was a little disappointed that this wasn't sarcastic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal).
I use MariaDB on all of my websites these days, the largest of which tops out at around 5K queries a second. The biggest draw for me was the XtraDB engine (which is also found in Percona Server) which is a replacement for InnoDB. XtraDB performs much better on SSDs and I was able to get over 50% performance gains on some queries with the default settings. This may or may not be applicable to your specific environment, but it is a drop-in replacement so it's very easy to just install it on a test box and stress test it with your current code.
Given the risk/reward tradeoff for a YC investment, vetos are pretty worthless. Even if you were the most brilliant vetoer ever, there is very little upside for YC.

Instead you should ask to be able to green-light one applicant per batch. That way, it would be possible for your contribution to be very valuable.
Oh I would absolutely encourage anyone who wants to be involved in web to try their hand at either, but if worse comes to worse and they don't find themselves particularly cut out for them, design tends to be the one that they stick with because it's easy to look like you produced "something" and there's always somebody out there willing to buy "something" if the price is right.

Having watched a few people struggle to the point where they are switched off of projects regularly and haven't left a job on their own terms, I think it is worth acknowledging that the allure of working in this/any industry may outshine one's passion to do so and it may be healthier to find greener pastures than to settle on the one that's "good enough". There are also a lot of auxiliary roles to designers and developers that they may find a lot more fulfilling and that give them the opportunity to learn over time.
make. more. sense.
As an employee, you protect yourself in this case (where the company is failing) through having enough cash compensation, skills, and contacts to have a new job before the day is out.

It's upside cases (like the sale of Skype, Zynga IPO) where you protect yourself primarily by not working for dirtbags. Secondarily, a standard contract, reviewed by a lawyer, could work, but I'd trust Google, Facebook, almost any YC startup, Quora, etc. as employers based on the founders, even if I didn't review the documents. Realistically you're not going to be suing over $100k in compensation anyway.

The nice thing is, within Silicon Valley, the set of bad actor companies with respect to stock is pretty small. Zynga and Skype are the only ones I know of, although in some Acqui-Hire situations, current employees are favored above former employees or investors (like Slide -> Google, or in fact many Google acquisitions).
Possibly off topic, but when you title a post "A Modest Proposal" it signals satiric content to a lot of viewers (as the original Modest Proposal was to defeat famine with cannibalism")
I think the way to teach math is really the problem to be solved, the math itself is such hard to find motivation to learn for most students if not combining with orther subjects. Teachers may also be confused about that.
If you want hand holding and kudos? Then any public forum on the internet is the wrong place to come (go to your mommy for things like that - not the cruel world in which we live). Stop whining. Either use the criticism of your projects to improve them, moving you toward success or GTFO.

The internet is not a PC or hand-holding place. Most people are not really PC on the inside. They ace PC outwardly face to face because they fear physical confrontation or are afraid of social repercussions (in the real world)

Buck up
Just emailed... Will begin reporting bugs to feedback.coll. Thanks for the hard work.. Look forward to seeing this mature.
Onlive employees walking out the front door carrying boxes is pretty convincing to me..
The difference, if I could put it in as mild a way as possible, is that it has yet to be conclusively demonstrated that safe, reliable access to weapons of known quality is a net positive to public health and safety.
You are the second person to comment about this. I merely intended to humbly propose things, not allude to this historical work. I've changed it to avoid controversy (as that is not my aim).
We are working on an API, to allow developers to hook into our academic graph. We've thought about the use-case you are talking about, and may well try to handle it.
True, unfortunately. But the flipside of having more people on the site is that there is no longer any need to ensure that everyone's comments become public on every story. You can afford to be choosier about what actually shows up, you just have to come up with a proper filtering mechanism. I think karma can be adequate, there just needs to be a more effective system of distributing and using it than what HN uses currently.
We would need to know the distribution of incorrect answers. If it didn't give any other answer more than twice then you could trust the 13-time answer to be the correct output of the computation.
There are many bafflingly dumb laws. Hundreds of them. If I was smoking cannabis right now I might be thrown in jail for breaking the law. The problem is that there are so many stupid laws and so many state goons employed to enforce them.
yup. each fragment has an address that specifies it's location in the bitstream. we are lazy.
I'm guessing high, comments suggest involvement in the community.
Look at the techcrunch comments, someone claiming to be an employee stated that he was let go and lost all his equity.
This seems to work well. It'd be nice if you could filter out images that aren't travel related, e.g. for "china" I got http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4071/4429271873_cb6163e9e1_q.j....
Why isn't Madonna or these other outraged people protesting over the 32 miners killed in South Africa?

I understand 3 years (or is it 2?) is a tough punishment for what is basically vandalism by western standards (although I'm sure we can find examples or worse injustices in any of the western judicial systems). The organized and overblown reaction to all of this is much more about ruining Russia's reputation as a democratic nation than anything else. I've actually heard the nightly news-anchor here in Canada report on "International condemnation" of the sentencing. Are you fucking kidding me? Miners being gunned down for protesting in South Africa, Omahr Khadr still sitting in Guantanamo for something he might've been involved when he was 16, all the wikileaks shit from Iraq Afghanistan... and the Pussy Riot going for a 2 year stint for vandalism is causing "international condemnation"?! If anything's made me aware of how alive the cold war is, this is it.
Since it's Friday evening, a great book on creative executions is "The Executioner Always Chops Twice" -- fun and quick read.

http://amzn.to/OnxaU7
These skeumorphism-is-bad posts are pretty familiar with people who follow Apple blogs, it's been the darling of amateur design critics for years now.

The counter argument is pretty simple, even though it looks hideous and adds nothing to the app's functionality, it is supposed to encourage feelings of familiarity with people who wouldn't necessarily use an computer application. Whether it does or doesn't is up for debate, and I've never seen any stats to support either position.
Smartphone Addiction is Even Deeper and More Prevalent Than We Think
Does anyone have references to studies or data? I tried looking once, but couldn't even find a proper definition.
I wonder how this is going to affect Ouya, who just raised over 8M on kickstarter, and who was relying on Onlive to provide access to AAA titles from day 1.
Kind of funny that the most perfect sphere ever observed in nature was staring us in the face this whole time. :)

Also, how is it that this was only measured just recently? Astronomers suspected it was wider at the equator, like Jupiter, but never bothered to check?
Perhaps it's just been by a series of improbable coincidences that in the years I have read forums, IRC logs, books, and articles, I've only seen the term here on HN.
I'm an algorithm designer, so I don't know about all of these changes but I do have a mathematical solution to PG's vote value problem:

before edit: Value of vote = Log[base:TotalUserKarma](UserAvgKarmaPerComment)

after edit: Vote Value = (Log[base:TotalUserKarma](AvgUserKarma)) * (Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50Rank))

another edit: Vote Value = (Log[base:Median(AvgUserKarma)](AvgUserKarma)) * (Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50Rank + 1))

EDIT: added a +1 to prevent a 0 value for the #1 thread. (unless you actually want votes not to count for the number 1 thread, in that case you can just pull out that "+ 1")

This would reward contributors with higher relative average karma per comment. If you have 0 karma your vote isn't worth anything and if you do have karma but your average is only 1, once again your vote isn't worth anything. You have to consistently contribute useful material to have a say whether or not someone else's material is userful to the community.

This seems to be a decent reflection of social circles in real life.

Try it out on users you think contribute very little and see if it is effective. Naturally, I don't have that data so I can only speculate.
Thanks for voicing my thoughts. I agree completely. I never thought I would say this, but here goes: With the careful selection of subreddits i have at Reddit these days, my experience there is more pleasant than Hacker News. There are just so many snide remarks and so much hate in here.

It's the same problem I had with Reddit until I started being very selective with which subreddits I subscribed to. Like PG said, it is a growth problem. But I don't think a similar turnaround operation will be possible here. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
Yes.

Reading this I had a sudden flash why Apple might just be right.

The thing is that modern phones and computers are getting to the point where they can display texture to good effect.
Textures are very pleasant, comforting things to add to the UI of an application. Yet what other way is there to integrate texture effects besides using images of familiar physical materials? Images of physical materials leverages our intuitions of the physical world.

What alternative approach improves on this? I'm honestly curious here.
Some of us see it as, drugs being something that one inflicts to oneself, while weaponry, assassination, terrorism and manufacture of pedophile pornography is, in contrast, inflicted to others by force.
I love armchair experts.

So I guess if all of those clueless engineers at the world's most trafficked websites would have just listened to you they would never have picked MySQL. Have you ever thought of letting them know that they should switch over to PostgreSQL ?
Fair enough, but in this case, storage is very cheap.
Yeah, I think we'll see the power companies doing that themselves before too long, if they aren't already.
YC W13
When are applications for the next w13 round?
The concept of light table is very different than vim. Besides I believe chris is aiming his IDE for clojure users which in case it makes more sense for him to target it to emacs users.

Besides vim is all about modes, and memorizing commands.

That is exactly what light table is opposite off. Modes and Commands in vim is 'ancientness' when it comes to usability design.

But if you are still interested may be you should build a feature comparison matrix and track it.
I shudder at the ramifications of some of these suggestions. Users do what you pay them to do. For example, paying people to up vote/down vote from New would result in just that -- not in people clicking the links and thoughtfully evaluating the content. And denoting high karma users more visibly would result in more karma boost activities. The end result of that is National Enquirer style headlines.

There is a change that would probably help: allowing a difference in signaling between agree/disagree and signal/noise. The definition of up/down voting is closer to ham/spam than agree/disagree, but people tend to use the arrows for agreement instead. It's hard to behave otherwise, by up voting a well argued comment you think is wrong, for example. It would be easier to highlight quality if multiple axes were available.
Lots of people smoking weed right now would not shed a tear for you if you were arrested because you went looking for child pornography.
Maybe your approach is better for the advocacy of functional programming anyway, makes it less intimidating.
Actually no -- I've only recently taken up graphical input (for post-processing/touching up photos) -- and I've yet to invest in any new hardware for that. Your comment on using one for "normal" input is very welcome -- I would've thought they'd be pretty horrible for exactly the things you say they're good at. Moves a wacom tablet higher on my list of hardware to get.

Still, if I can afford it when it gets out, I'm considering getting a modbook:

http://www.modbook.com/modbookpro

I suspect we'll see more hardware along these lines as Microsoft push out w8 and touch input becomes more viable for the mainstream (or perhaps more marketed -- hence increasing the sales/production volume and dropping the price of parts).
Cool; There might be some interesting ways to plug it into the journal publishing software I work on (pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/).
slashdot has pretty much solved that problem. Although i have never looked at that Perl code...

And depending how you configure your filters you'd get Reddit or hacker news from the same bunch of comments.
My point wasn't that there isn't corruption in the US, or that there is a remedy for every bad act. Only that there is recourse here for the kind of graft the article describes, and that many in the US don't fully appreciate what a so-called 'free market' really looks like.
I'm someone else who refrains from commenting in order to protect my average karma.

The thing is, that it isn't as irrational as you are making it out to be. Posts from users with higher average karma are sorted higher. Presumably you are posting because you want your post to be read. Either you want it to influence people or you want your question answered, or whatever. If you didn't want it to be read, you wouldn't have posted it.

I'm pretty sure this has a 'rich get richer' effect. On a page full of a lot of comments, most people will only read the first few. Being at the top leads to more up-votes, leading to more posts at the top, and so on recursively.

I am totally guilty of gaming this system. I normally only post in threads where I think that I'll get up-votes, and I only post things that I think are worth posting. The latter effect is good. There are too many people on HN and it's a good thing to encourage us to maintain a high signal to noise ratio. But the former, the fear of posting in unpopular threads, or on comments near the bottom of the page, is awful.
I don't get it, I went to both the CNN and the BBC sites, and they talk about the most unimportant things, but there is nothing at all about this. And this is some big deal, it means the whole south america is going as a block against UK, letting US and Canada on a corner. Is the very international politics changing before our eyes, the whole region getting autonomous and slipping out of US hands.
I always thought it would be interesting if you're 'average karma' number was rounded (floor(avgK)) to the nearest int and then applied as an upvote (or down vote) if that would change things. It is always dangerous though to embed in the system a feedback mechanism like this.

I downloaded the source once again to see how hard it would be to implement my 'directional multi-root' sort of karma system in HN [1]. Its one of my 'spare time' projects.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3563430
The startups need TC to reach other publications, but maybe there's a market for a YC (or all major accelerator) focused journalist who does in depth interviews and analysis of each startup. I'd trust an entrepreneur or investor in that role, rather than a journalist.
Some things have a natural life then die.
I understand the motivation; that doesn't make it acceptable for all sites, especially sites that care about minimizing their vulnerability surface. And since browsers don't currently have any security model for third-party scripts other than "full capabilities of the site that loads them", third-party scripts significantly increase the vulnerability surface of a site.

If browsers had a way to let third-party scripts run in a sandbox separate from the site, so that (for instance) filepicker.io can help with file uploads without having the full permissions of the logged-in users on every site that uses it, I'd have much less objection to third-party scripts.
The video of T-10-1 is stunning:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyFF4cpMVag

That the people on that rocket escaped with "bruises" is amazing.
Yeah, sometime a few images slip in that are not travel related. It mostly happens because that image is tagged with one of the travel destinations in that search query. In this case, the image was tagged as 'Beijing'. Nevertheless, I will try to improve my search results.
The saddest aspect of this kind of discussion to me is to see how people argue in favor of their own oppression.

People seem to be increasingly conditioned by fear, and increasingly cowardly. What happened to sentiments like "Live free or die!" ?
I don't want to be misunderstood.. I'm in favour of Kasparov and the Pussy Riot doing what they're doing and fighting for a better government in Russia.. as anyone should be doing for their country! But I am just irritated by the "better than thou" indignations echoed in media channels of the equally unjust western world that tends to ignore massive wrongdoings that are too inconvenient to the larger narrative.
I actually quite like those suggestions. Subtle but I could see them working well.
I actually did read the entire article. Can you elaborate on why it matters what business they're in? I'm not sure you understood my original comment, or perhaps you replied to the wrong thread.
What about putting front page and "new" page together into a single homepage?
There is a hellban system in place.. your posts are hidden but you don't know it. You have to explicitly go to your options and enable "showdead" so these work.

Problem is it's not entirely clear what some people have done to get hellbanned sometimes.. I'm not sure what the requirements for getting it reversed are, either. I've seen some very constructive comments in that mess before..
It's certainly not the only way, people can demand these things when they sign up. They usually don't. More and more will start to though.

I hope these employees take everything they know about Onlive to a new competitor. Or Anonymous.
Clockwork Raven - MTurk framework from Twitter
I'd never noticed it before, but I'll be clicking on it now...
I do think the "New" page is a significant part of the problem, but I'm not sure I would focus primarily on how to reward users for browsing /newest. I think I would lean towards trying to figure out how to improve its mix of content first. The often-low-quality content is why many people (including myself) have dropped off from reading it as much, so the two are closely related. The content needs to get to the level where someone reading /newest can rationally believe that giving each link a fair shake, by clicking and actually reading it (not spending 10 seconds skimming it), is worth their time. If people did that, more quality content would be unearthed, as opposed to just stuff that's appealing from the title and a 10-second skim.

One part is just spam-filtering, which is a never-ending arms race. But it seems low-quality even past that. Something to lower the total volume of the firehose might help; some people who don't even really participate in the community submit 5+ articles daily, or more. And there is a lot of reblogged content as well.
I like his point about how bottom-up development is superior to top-down development.
So you missed my point exactly.

Would you not shed a tear for the OP then?
Some comments in this thread are hilarious. Light Table is a modern IDE meant to demonstrate some cool concepts that belong to this time. And people are asking can if they can have vim and emacs bindings.

If all you want is vim or emacs, then use vim or emacs. What is the whole point is asking Light Table to behave like them?

Light Table is supposed to bring in new ways of developing software. Dragging ancient usability concepts just because a few can't work with anything else isn't how you build a new product.