skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to agree that the "orange names" are ripe for potential abuse. As someone who has read HN for over a year now, and just signed up to actively participate, the "orange names" somehow feels like encouragement for me to not participate.

Maybe it's a self esteem issue (I blame my mother) but I suspect that some people will skip the "gray name" comments and only read the "orange name" comments. I know because I did, and I didn't even know what the orange was for until I dug. If I make a comment in the forest, and no one is there to hear me....

I understand what the goal was but, ultimately, I find myself longing for the old days.

By the way, I upvoted the OP, and I tried to post above the fold, but the OP was too darn long. <== Sarcasm there. How'd I do?
Well, wanting to accept it and having to accept it are two very different things.

The age of something is simply the measurement of elapsed time since something came into its present configuration. A 'war on aging' makes as much sense as a war on pi or a war on stone, aging is a simple fact, easily observed and unavoidable.
I wish companies would release the source code when they decide to kill their products. Now it is dead forever, and nobody can bring it back. If the source code was open, the dev team could try to revive it on their own dime. (If they were so inclined.)

Oh well, at least FlightGear is open source:

http://www.flightgear.org/
I used to get that up until a few weeks ago too. Try recompiling from the latest head, it's fixed for me.
You can send me an email to kiltec{a t}gmx.de
I agree with you that you are saying things without any serious content, and that you are in troll mode.

Please note that your accusations against me are covered under this, so can be safely disregarded.

No doubt you will complain that I am arguing pointlessly. But I think this is fun, and that my comment is true. It is logical that if you admit to posting badly, then your claims in that very post shouldn't be accepted.
What you'll get is the opposite, geriatrics with the vote making laws against 'newcomers'.
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is this the shortlist on how not to behave on HN ?
Counterpoint: I read the thread to which you refer, and while I didn't agree necessarily with some of what you said, or some of what the others said, it was insightful to me to see both sides of the argument spelled out in more detail.

I think this makes the comments more compelling, and helps us to get to know the other users a little better.
Hmm. If people take number 6 seriously enough we may be net ahead.
The article tells us a different story, but generally speaking, it's remarkable what you can get by simply asking.
I was kind of expecting that.

I think they will move the FS franchise to XBOX.
FS was not a casual game, and the player must be a sim fan.

I guess the gamers will have to buy new good (expensive) joysticks, and they will buy extra scenery as DLC. The latter puts much more money in MS' pocket than the retail system, and restricts piracy.

And you get to play on your 50" plasma screen.
On the contrary, I would (be calculating enough). I typically won't make a comment to a thread that is over two hours old, because shelf-life on here is so short, and because I don't think many people will see it, unless it's a super-active thread. Humans (at least this one) like to hear themselves speak, and like it even more when others hear them speak.

The new system actually encourages me NOT to comment on less active threads, because it's going to hurt my "average score."
design flaw.
Great posting, this is one of my pet peeves of user interface design.

I really liked the old-style focus method of just having the mouse hover over the window that input goes to, instead of having to click it or having the window steal the focus of whoever is currently having the focus. I figure if I didn't do it explicitly then the os should certainly not allow some application to do it for me.

Notable exceptions: start of a new application, the current application.

Other than that just limit your 'stealing' to coming to the top of the windows stack but leave the focus where it is.
Indeed - although Excel used to have a working flight simulator as an easter egg.

Shame to see Flight Simulator go - was really an amazing product a way back.
That being said, the ones in Taiwan are generally cheap, made of plastic, and have blades that will dull quickly. For how cheap they are it's not a big deal, but if you can have a quality peeler made of stainless steel with a good blade, I'd pay for it.
I'm not so sure about that. The deeper the thread, the fewer participants, and the less benefit there is to the site as a whole. If karma is considered a measurement of that benefit rather than simply a score (as it should be, but on most sites that use the term is not), then it makes sense that threads with less participation would accumulate less in the way of extrinsic reward.

Also, consider that people so concerned with karma that they would be dissuaded from participating in a worthwhile discussion are among the least likely to have worthwhile discussions.
Hmm. At the time we talked to PG about the idea and got funding it was a different variant in the same space. I am pretty sure we didn't tell PG about the current idea until after the other applications were decided.

I don't think you can read too much into Heyzap launching. Glad you like the idea though. Would love to hear your ideas on it if you would like to share.
I don't have much more to add to the other comments. I just wanted to say THANK YOU for doing this.
A blogger who burned bridges is taken to task
As I recall, an article I read recently outlined a few key principles for such a monetary deployment (which Lawrence Summers apparently supported until he became part of the administration):

1) Must be able to start very soon

2) Must have a clear horizon (i.e. a project with a final deadline, so that it doesn't keep costing money forever)

3) Must be useful

One example it gave of the best way to spend that money would be actually to repair existing roads. That's usually very easy to do right away, provides immediate short term benefits, and reduces your long term costs (unlike building roads, which increases them, as you then have to maintain all these new roads).
Anti-patterns
Several of these carries slightly different commentary or comment, so they're not all exact duplicates. However, I think I have the full set so far ...

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467084

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466368

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466089

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465549

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465494

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465474

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465458

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465359

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465276

You job, should you choose to accept it, is to find which one (or ones!) carry the HN comments.

I'm going to stop flagging duplicates - I very rarely get upmodded for it, occasionally get down modded for it, and my name will never turn orange. It's therefore obviously held in little or no regard by the community.
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I enjoy reading interesting (#6), serious (#7), and succinct (#8) comments. Hopefully this new system will encourage such behavior.
I agree with tptacek - if you're going to indicate that some commenters are better than others, make them darker rather than orange.

And here's a theoretical underpinning to explain so it doesn't come across as simply a subjective design choice: coloring objects darker or lighter with different shades of the same base color to show intensity is one of the few principles I remember from an Edward Tufte workshop from a few years ago. Varying levels of saturation indicate a shift in degree, whereas different colors altogether imply that the objects are of differing qualities.

Applied to the new commenting feature, darker colors would imply more "solid" feelings of trustworthiness, similar to how trolls already get washed out with the lighter shades.

Similarly, that explains another thing wrong with the highlighting - "alarm" colors like orange, red, yellow etc indicate that something's wrong, whereas bolding or darkening the names wouldn't imply that at all.

Trying to suss out good and bad comments reminds me of the 37signals Troll Cap and the "Good Comment" crown:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/introducing_the_troll...

http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/the_crown_of_royalty....
FWIW, here's a data point on how a new member of the community (i.e. me) is reacting to these changes.

I've been an avid reader of HN headlines for some time, but only started joining the comment conversations in the last week or so.

Discarding the top-karma comment, I've made 13 comments with an average karma of 3.08, ranging from 1 to 7.

Here's what I am observing about my instinctive, not particularly thought through reaction to the change in terms of future commenting behavior:

- I'll likely avoid what I think are low-value though not offensive comments, the throw-away chit-chat that is likely to just stay at 1, and which could be considered either acceptable pleasantries or distracting noise.

- I'll also be more likely to avoid commenting on threads with many comments already, for fear that even a high-value comment late to the conversation will get overlooked and drag down my average.

- I'll think twice about commenting on new submission, which I've found to be a good way to get in early on a conversation, but which will be more risky in future given that the submission may never get noticed, leaving me with an unnoticed 1-karma comment that brings down my average.

- As I scan comments, I will instinctively skip through to the orange users. As a new user, I provisionally assume these are the users who (1) have, on average, higher-value comments and (2) which collectively define the personality and social norms of the community which I'm seeking to be part of.

- I think I'll learn from the orange users in terms of community norms, but I don't think I'll actively conform my opinion to theirs. In fact, my assumption so far is that this is a community that values merit-based argument and substantive discussions, not just "I agree" or "I disgree" type discussions. I suspect I'll conform more to the style and approach of the orange users in making arguments, not to their opinions and views as such.

Are the behaviors above good or bad? Intended by the community or not? If they encourage me to seek out fresh, likely to be popular conversations and add to them in a way that meets the approval of the community old-timers without groupthink in terms of substance (which I'd like to think would not be particularly appreciated around here), I suspect that's a good thing. But I do have a concern about my hesitance to comment on older threads (a hesitance which may be acceptable, since perhaps those conversations are effectively over) and new submissions (a hesitance which may be detrimental).
Awesome initiative. If I had to teach physics on a shoestring budget I'd go back in time to the 1700's or so, take the methods and principles as discovered then and teach science as a method instead of physics specifically.

Use physics as an illustration of what goes in to good science with the relatively simple devices of that age and you're laying the foundation for more education later on.

For example, your '4', heat: I'd use a simplified Stirling engine for that, it wouldn't take more than a bunch of clothes hangers and tin cans to make a working heat engine, which gives you all the hooks you need to go from Boyle to Carnot.
Never had this problem with RISC OS. For an added bonus, if you are using a menu and you select an item with the right mouse button, the menu remained open so you could then make further choices if you wanted to.

Fantastic operating system. Shame it's dying.
I will attempt to summarize Vipassana as I understand it.

According to Vipassana, all misery comes from "Sankaras". A Sankara is either a craving or an aversion. In other words, wanting something badly, needing it emotionally. The feeling associated with addiction.

You have a lot of different little sankaras going on in your daily life. Vipassana is all about systematically eliminating them. It's a sort of ultra-rehab. But they deal directly with sensations: It doesn't matter what the object of the addiction is. They won't talk with you about cigarettes if you're addicted to smoking. They just teach you to feel yourself all over your body, and whenever you feel a sankara, you have to (gently but firmly) destroy it. You destroy it by simply observing it objectively. Over time, you notice that you have less and less sankaras.

Why is it intensive/hard?

The hard part is having to deal with your sankaras all the time. This is very hard.

The intensive part is because there is so much meditation. It's somewhere around 10 hours a day, if I remember correctly, with the biggest chunk being two hours long.
You wake up real early and start meditating right away. You have few hours to sleep. There is no dinner. (This is intentional: it's supposed to be better for meditation.) You aren't even allowed to exercise.

I think it's worth it though. I took it twice.

You can check out their site too:
http://www.dhamma.org/
I think you cannot keep a site with traffic like this running on AdSense (at least with a decent performance) and it's definitely not an environment for advertisers who pay top dollars.
Juicy Campus wouldn't have survived in any economy. The site is so repugnant that no legitimate advertiser wanted to be associated with the site.
Youtube has some really interesting material, let me know if you want me to make a course for 5) The Universe.
"All we know is that lots of companies made poor investments in the past. Letting them fail doesn't change that past, ..."

Those poor investments will wipe out equity owners (and bond holders in many cases) when they are honestly documented on the balance sheet.

No rational person will make a new investment until after such honesty develops.
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As a recent "idiot" (sarcasm) who has read HN for over a year now, and just signed up to participate, I have a thought. I chose to reply to this particular post of yours with my thought, because you're orange, so maybe I'll get noticed (also sarcasm), because, alas, I'm only gray, oh and also because it fits (loosely) in the context of your post.

Anyway, I have a suggestion for PG, not that he'll notice it this deep in the thread, but:

What if we could add certain users to a "favorites" list and then any posts they make would show up to us as orange. I've got certain favorite posters on here who I like to read and other people who I do not like to read. Some of my favorites are orange, but then again some are not. I know this may be hugely complex from a technical standpoint, but that's my big thought for the day.

Edit: On re-reading my post, I'm not trying to come across as an ass SwellJoe, I was just trying to be witty. I guess if I have to clarify that, it didn't work :-)
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As a reminder, downvoting should not occur to express disagreement with a commenter.

Source? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347

3 points by pg 57 days ago | link

Downvoting has always been used to express disagreement.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392267

1 point by palish 57 days ago | link

There's nothing wrong with using the arrows to express agreement or disagreement.
Get them to play with toys that demonstrate scientific principles. It's amazing how much they absorb. Then you will have a solid basis from which to say "How does this work? What do these have in common?"

I found this link some time ago here on HN:

http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/toys.html

Pick two or three, make the toys, play, then ask "What did you see?" and "Why is it so?"

I don't know your experience in teaching, but your willingness and enthusiasm are fantastic.

Good Luck!
That's a fair point. It wouldn't be much of a hacker site if we didn't run the experiment just to see what happens.

Sadly, I'm betting on "no measurable change."
I always loved this guy, julius sumner mills. I still love him and his enthusiasm for physics. I would definitely check out his experiments.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCcZyW-6-5o

Here's his one on heat energy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhQEVR_Tsiw&feature=relat...

Also, physics for future presidents is a cool video lecture series at berkely. The first lecture is on heat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ysbZ_j2xi0
Thats an awesome link! Exactly the kind of thing I was looking for.
Well, are any of the individual activities by themselves bad things to do? Most of them don't actively detract from the discussion, they're just a bit selfish and egotistical in aggregate.
Long comments take a much larger investment. If you consider karma/word, short comments are the way to go.
10% is a fairly significant number, when all is said and done. Meaning, 10% of all highlighted users could essentially just be good at making witty one line comments.

That being said, 90%/10% is a fantastic signal to noise ratio when compared to the rest of the internet. :-)
After I just spent time defending web layouts against desktop clients ... a little embarrassing.

But the problems is there, css rounded corners + multiple backgrounds would solve this in a second. this is an area where I think people can afford to use incompatible css to show decent looking buttons to supported browsers and ugly ones to ie, sadly firefox still doesnt support multiple bg's (safari introduced them 3? years ago)

The main disappointment in the article is that after all that, he still didnt provide final working solution.
I outline first, then turn the outline into the program. Items on the outline are 'actions' or 'data', data goes to the top of the outline, actions follow.

I hope that's clear and that it will work for you, it works like a charm for me, even for very large projects.

Outline editors are a dime a dozen, not sure which ones you could use on the mac though...
I guess his reasons for cringing at the 9-cell solution are so obvious to other web developers that he feels he doesn't need to state them. To me the 9-cell looks like an elegant and proven solution that doesn't need a 'better' way of rendering, and he just got caught up in the excitement of using some new technology to solve an non-existing problem.
As a high school physics student, the experiments that I feel would be most educational/enlightening are:
- Measuring gravity using a pendulum (using T=2.pi.sqrt(l/g))
- Measuring the resistivity of wire
- Measuring values for specific latent heats, specific heats of fusion etc

When doing experiments, I always found the ones where we were trying to calculate a known value experimentally (g, specific heats etc) to be the best.
Saturday morning science, experiments on the ISS

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/crew/exp6/spacechronicle...
They make the 'score' the goal, whereas the goal is to have meaninful discussion about stuff interesting to hackers (unless I got that wrong).

It's an inherent risk in any situation where a number is brought in to play, there will be people that are going to focus on maximizing that number, not on the original goal the number was supposed to help achieve.
I can think of two wicked experiments right now. I don't know if they're relevant to you, but I'll describe them and you can decide for yourself.

1.
You tie a string from the wall to a motor. Ideally you should be able to control the frequency of the motor, but if you don't have this equipment, it's okay. The string will vibrate rapidly. You then close the lights and put a stroboscope on the string. You tune it, by trial and error, to the same frequency of the motor. Then you see the string frozen in a wave form. You can change the freq slightly to make it move slowly. You can have the kids touch the string at the proper places to make standing waves.

2.
This one is really simple to do. You take a small object (like a soda can) and tie it with a string to the ceiling. (Let's say the string's length is about half the height of the ceiling.) You pull back the can and release it, making it swing from left to right (Without a circular swing.) Then you hand out "half-sunglasses" to the kids. It could just be a piece of dark film, or a partly opaque glass. As long as it's a bit dark and you can see through it. You put the film on one eye, you see the can going in a circle. You put it on the other eye, you see it going in a circle the opposite direction.

This happens because the eye with the dark film gets a lower refresh rate. The image on that eye is of the can in a slightly retarded position than the other eye. This messes with the 3D analysis that the brain does, and makes it look like the can is getting closer/farther from you.
What kinds of computer concepts will you be teaching to the kids (Word/Excel, basic programming, data structures and algorithms)? Do they have access to any computers outside of class, like in an Internet cafe, or even on a cell phone that can be hacked to accept code?
Someone here on HN has a GreaseMonkey script to do that. Stand by - I'll try to find it for you ...

(11 minutes later ...)

Here it is ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=431977
What makes a "User Experience expert"?
Caches don't get updated all-at-once. Some older comments will be updated before others.
I completely and wholeheartedly disagree. Here's why: it is uncertainty, pain and infirmity I am afraid of, not death.

We don't need a war on aging, we need a war on suffering. Not because of some wishy-washy feel-good philosophy, but simply because it is crucial for the survival of our species. Which currently depends as much on innovation as it does on adaptation (evolution). We need to improve overall quality of life so we can tackle the challenges ahead instead of worrying about food, shelter, resources, infirmity and old age.

I'd be even more ambitious and say we need a war on long-term, trans-generational suffering. Why? Because it seems like some of the problems we are facing today as a species cannot be solved in a single lifetime, not even an enhanced lifetime.

Let's solve the natural resources problem first, then tackle aging, maybe ... I'll concede this: the 'death problem' is worth solving, but who said it needs to be solved in your generation?