skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Karma system - some thoughts
It seems to me that there are a number of different things that are desirable here at HN.

Thoughtful posts
On-topic posts
Interesting posts
Informed discussion

It's clear that we want to reward people who provide thoughtful, on-topic (by some definition) contributions.

It's also, I think, desirable to have people generally do gnome-type work: finding cross-connections, remembering things that have gone for those who don't bother to search, flagging repeats, etc. (I tend to do that without thinking because I've spent a lot of time on specialist wikis, there such behavior is essential.)

It's also really useful to find those comments that are "good(tm)" in some sense. That doesn't just mean ones that one might agree with. It means contributions and comments that enrich one's knowledge and, sometimes, one's soul.

The "Karma" idea doesn't exactly meet any of these. It's obviously correlated, but it's one number trying to do more than one thing.

It's a well-known phenomenon that as soon as you start measuring somehitng, people adjust to make the measurements "better". If you measure the wrong thing, you will probably get unexpected, possibly undesirable results. This is especially true of the ICXX (Entrepreneur, Torturer, Inventor, Hacker) types that we get here. ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=443182 )

There are, I think, two fundamentals: "Value" and "Agreement". The single value of "Karma" is conflating the two, and always will. I can see no way to prevent that except via culture, and as HN grows, that won't work well.

Some measure of the rate of acquisition of karma might be useful, but there is still the risk that I'll only end up seeing the comment and submissions that the collective "agrees with" in some sense.

In short, usage will emerge, and all anyone can do is try to make the system - whatever it may be - simple, clear, and clearly correlated with those things that are desirable. The current system mostly works, and tinkering might simply make it brittle, and easier to game. Personally, I want to find comments by people I've come to trust, without necessarily agreeing with. My assessment won't necessarily agree with yours, so we end up with a system that has to record individual preferences. I think I know how to do that.

But is it worth it?
Precisely! I, for one, welcome our oppressive Orange overlords.
I think a problem with this is that it doesn't just highlight consistently good commenters, it does so at the time of moderation. When I'm deciding whether to upvote a comment, there's an indicator that appears to say everyone else thinks I should.
I think we need to take a break from all the meta-discussion and let the new changes sift through to see how they work out. If they have a detrimental effect, let's discuss again in a few weeks... until then, I would suggest not posting any more meta-discussion posts about the karma system.
Karma might not be the objective, but since it determines the ordering of comments, it has a big effect on how the comments of a particular article come off. Even if nobody initially posts with an eye towards gaining karma, the most visible posts will be those with the highest karma, and they will shape the discussion.

That said, karma alone cannot preserve whatever culture and social norms exist here. I like the orange names because they highlight (for better or for worse) the people that shape the discussions the most. Since it seems to be generally agreed upon that the current discussions are good, it makes sense to point out those people that have the most influence. As a way to shape social norms, it seems pretty effective.
No harm, no foul. The link you provide has more external comments, so is still of value. It's interesting to compare behavior here with that on, say, a wiki, where one could re-edit things to unify them.
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You seem to imply that people primarely comment to get an orange highlight. I don't think the majority of users are that stupid.
Bangalore. The state of govt. schools is pretty much the same in most parts of the country. You could always lend a helping hand irrespective of where you are. You could try approaching the school head master directly or you could go to the local rotary club and check if you can assist them in an way.
They "served" the French for a while, as they might serve the US in Iraq... for a while that is. But remember that just when the French thought they'd suppressed Algerian resistance, it erupted violently and the result was a long and extremely bloody civil war.
And it is even scarier with the 3D stuff :P

Fortunately there is some API refinement going on throughout the whole stack - Gallium3D, kernel modesetting and of course - companies finally releasing their chip specs (except Nvidia).
I would have thought about going the complete opposite direction... Hide the username until AFTER you've voted.

I think that in any society you tend to find people you agree with and disagree with, and then become biased in your opinion of anything they say/suggest.

Does it really matter who posted a comment? You either agree with it, or you don't.
Looks useful.

You might want to consider a means of flagging dangerous/mis-titled scripts. I see you've already got a destroy everything ("best line eva") and a fork bomb.
Somebody in the first thread mentioned that he suspected an influx of witty one-liners, since they're easy to read and quickly upvoted. I'm afraid that'll be the case: we'll see a decline in good posts in favor of easily digested posts.
Something that would probably help is using javascript to track how many people have actually had your comment viewable in their browser. Then take the ratio of views to votes.

Eventually you might also find that you can determine the average # of views of your comment purely based on the location of it on the page, in which case the javascript tracking would no longer be necessary. Although it's also possible that the characteristics of comment viewing are too complex to be able to simplify it to that.

Also, maybe instead of a fixed score required to be orange, take a distribution of all users and only make the top X percent qualify.
Well by "corrupt" I mean to alter it from its original form or intention. Probably not the best choice of words I must admit.

"Decoupling" is a very useful tool. I think Joel's point of view was that unit testing often takes it to an extreme where the work to manage it outweighs the benefits. I personally don't agree with him. I think the benefits are too great to ignore. But I can certainly empathize with where he's coming from.
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At least #6 is true.

Unfortunately, #7 is also true. I've noticed too many comments downvoted where the sarcasm was just too heavy for people to pick up on, apparently. Maybe it's just my personality and background, but I think HN veers too much on the side of serious.
You should clarify that saltwater is easy if your tank is FISH ONLY. Reef tanks ARE difficult.
The point is that -- given that you will in objective fact not exist tomorrow -- if you can find a reason to care about the impostor who tomorrow will take your place in society and pretend to be you, you should be able to apply the same reasoning to caring about your community as it might exist after you pretend to "die". That you are related to both is objectively confirmable.

In short: if you care about one, logically you should care about the other.
Apparently they're a very, very recent addition. I of course can't speak for you, but you might be able to tell them apart because the orange ones are very dark. Compare a comment made by pg to most of the comments in this thread.
And maybe not net ahead, if people take #1, #4, and #8 seriously enough.

2, 3, 5 and 7 are all fairly minor, I think.

But 1 and 4 are all about popularity, and number 8 leads to shallow discussion. It seems wrong to me, to assume that anything valuable must be stated within the first two or three exchanges.
Interesting. Thanks for that I've always thought about this but never really in that way. I'm keeping this.
Makes me think of game design:

http://lostgarden.com/2005/08/why-you-should-share-your-game...

Anyone can design a fun game, but there is a huge gap between an idea and a finished product.
Clojure has all the components necessary for an object system: multimethods, hierarchies and structs. It's not quite an object system, but it's not hard to roll your own from these pieces. Someone on the group has made a CLOS-inspired library called Spinoza (formally CLJOS) using these components, which you might want to look into if you're fussed about having proper objects.
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Clients make requests, servers carry them out.

* Rest of industry: apps are requested by little machines, and provided by big machines

* X: display is requested by big machines, and provided by little machines

Both 'app serving' and 'display serving' models are valid, however X just happens to have used display serving when every other piece of remote display software went for the other model.
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Before the orange names, I refrained from commenting if I thought it was likely my comment would end up being downvoted to 0 points or less. Now, I'm likely to refrain from commenting if I think my comment won't get upmodded to 5 points or more (4 upvotes), because anything less would be net-negative on my average karma target of 3.5.

I see this as having a similar effect as initializing each post to -3 points (or maybe -2.5). I'm afraid this may lead to fewer genuinely thoughtful comments that might lack a populist appeal because the poster thought twice about posting at all.
I don't understand what it's doing, or what the numbers mean. Maybe I need to spend more time, but I don't know whether it's worth it. I also can't see any way via the feedback (which at first glance I hadn't seen) to tell you this on the site.

I'm gone ...
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how about something like this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467739
I'm far more annoyed by navel-gazing posts about the karma system, than I have ever been by the quality of the comments attached to the posts. If there is a major drawback to the "orange name" phenomenon that I can see, it's that it has given people yet another reason to explicitly start discussions about karma.
Yes, more comment influence would be more useful than the orange.
Give people a status symbol and they invariably try to attain it.
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Or at least keep it all in the original thread ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181 ).
My name isn't in orange, and yet I'm actually pretty happy with the quality of my comments when I look back through my threads page. I have a bunch of comments that I posted either to thank someone or to encourage someone or whatever, that clearly have no value to anyone else but the person I'm responding to. Certainly eliminating those would up my average comment score, and yet I'm not entirely convinced it would make the community a more pleasant place to spend time in.
I see, but I assume(d) that it would be just as easy to skin the 9-slice table method through CSS. But then, I am not a web developer...
I don't know of any Internet community that was kept sane by coloring "good" commenters orange, but it sounds like a start. Is stricter moderation out of the question or just not in the cards yet?
We (the Plan 9 community) figure that not initially releasing it as open source cost us Linux's current place. As it stands, we didn't open source until 2000.

But we wouldn't have put it under the GNU license in any circumstances, we have grievances against GNU :)
Indeed; recall Feynman and parallel computer.
I often click on the username of someone whose comment I'm replying to, and glance at the age of their account, their karma, and sometimes click through for a look at their comments.

I don't know exactly why I do this -- just want to know a little bit about who I'm talking to.
Ugh. Count me out. I'm not a fan of how the trend online is towards algorithmic recommendation rather than on editorializing. I mean, I understand why a user-based moderation system is good. I like that content is pruned out a bit. At the same time, I think that public points mean ultimately ignoring complexities of a topic, thread, or person for the sake of easing consumption. I'm not a fan of that.

A recommendation system is even worse. That actively encourages people to look only at the path of least resistance for them. It means less emphasis on people who argue valid points that you don't want to hear and more emphasis on groupthink.

If anything, the trend should be reversed, and people should feel freer to give their opinion without a chance of whiplash.
this was posted yesterday, the thread is http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466243 , right now it is still on the front page.
Agreed. Looks useful. I am no command-line ninja and often struggle with the commands, so I can see myself using this. Having said that, I would not know something was dangerous till I executed it, which by then would be too late. Flagging something as dangerous is probably a good idea.

You allow users to click on the command and it turns into this text box. Is there a way to get a single click - copy this to clipboard option? It doesn't make that much of a difference to me, but I figured it would be a nice feature to have.

Good job, will look out for you on twitter
I'm amazed that you would have a karma system, special colored status indicators, and yet people would still claim that it doesn't affect user behavior.

That's the point, guys. If the karma/colored system didn't affect user behavior, it wouldn't be there
Its STM support, persistant types and syntax sugar for vectors and maps seem pretty novel.
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I dare say they have a bunch of licensed code in there that they'd have to find and remove; why would they invest the resources? By keeping it closed they also leave open the possibility of them bringing it back at some point in the future without creating a competitor to their own product.

I note X-Plane is going cheap in response to this:

http://www.x-plane.com/order.html
The funny thing is just the other day I was thinking that one of the best parts of HN is that comments and submissions are evaluated on their merit. Since a users name is relatively obscure and not as identifiable as forums with avatars I never really remember names or associate them with good or bad submissions.

To me this seems to be contradictory to the way HN is supposed to work.

Maybe (probably) I am reading too much into this but it just seems to be reinforcing a kind of Ad Hominem discrediting of submissions.

In fact I think it would probably be more interesting if it went the other way, don't show names at all on submissions. Maybe revel the name only after say 30 minutes from submission time.

If HN's goal is to avoid becoming redit/digg... why implement the same ideas as they have?
That's pretty interesting... Does mono have a native image generator like ngen? You might be able to get some performance improvements if it does.
I see this as evidence that no matter what change you make to a community website, some people are going to react against it.

I half expect to see a facebook group: "One Million Strong Against The New HN!"
If a desktop client is an option, so is "use [Firefox|Safari|IE7+] is access this app, or live with slightly less polished UI. kthxbye."
I want to be able to share some stuff with group A (e.g. old friends), other stuff group B (e.g. project collaborators), with the option of having stuff I post to group A being invisible to group B (and vice-versa).

I don't think FriendFeed can do this, but I'd be interested to learn if I'm wrong.

[edit:

related thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=451491

]
Ask HN: Does the new comment system encourage preferential attachment?
I actually like the new comment coloring, but I gotta ask!! This is HN and preferential attachment is a very important principle for the web and social sites such as this one.
Isn't money just a medium of exchange...used to convert one type of good into another?

I'm tempted to answer "no". Money has properties -- the very ones that prompted its design -- that make an exchange of money quite different from an exchange of goods or services.

The important property for this discussion is: an exchange of services doesn't offer you a reliable medium of savings. If I offer to shingle your house in exchange for you shoveling my snow, but it's January and I can't shingle the house until May, we're stuck. You can shovel the snow first and have me owe you the shingling, but what if I flee the state, or injure myself? Or what if May comes around and you have decided that you'd rather have the lawn redone than the shingles replaced? I don't know lawns! I only do shingles!

But money solves this problem because you can put it in the bank (or a piggy bank, for that matter) and decide later what to trade it for and with whom.

Which leads directly to the problem we're worried about: deflation. Right now is a very bad time to hire someone to reshingle my house for $75 an hour, because in six months another 3-5 million people will be out of work and there will be a lot more unemployed people with building skills, some of whom might be willing to reshingle my house for $50 an hour. But, of course, at that point I might be out of work myself, and $50 might seem like a lot of money, but no problem, because if I wait another six months the price might be down to $25 an hour...

In a depression people hoard their money, because there isn't a lot coming in and because it's worth more the longer you wait. That's the phenomenon which Keynesian stimulus seeks to prevent. You have to offer folks $50 an hour (or whatever) to do anything -- twiddle their thumbs, if necessary -- to keep money flowing into and through the system and to fight the universal tendency toward deflationary deadlock: The situation where everyone sits on their cash and their labor, waiting.

(Since the 1930s, we've prevented our economy from falling into this terrible state by using monetary policy. But you can't use monetary policy to maintain equilibrium once the real interest rate is zero. Which it apparently now is.)

Unfortunately, a depression is one of those nonlinear, non-equilibrium, black-swan situations that relatively few living Americans have experienced, and we're seeing the very real danger that people will refuse to recognize the possibility this time until it's too late. You have to anticipate these things, because economies have a lot of momentum.
The thing that you are talking about is already in place in a very famous social bookmarking site - stumbleupon.com. It works on exact same principal - "Personally, I want to find comments by people I've come to trust, without necessarily agreeing with. My assessment won't necessarily agree with yours, so we end up with a system that has to record individual preferences."

It categorizes all the links marked and over a period of time it will show your surfing preferences. Every user has a profile and you can visit their profiles and view their preferences and subscribe to their 'stumbles' - links they liked.

The thing that's missing on stumbleupon is the discussion culture that present on HN.
The lack of tail call optimization sucks-- I agree. Any language that wants to be thriving in 2015 is going to have to facilitate the full spectrum of functional programming, much of which requires TCO.

Regarding Clojure's object system, people tend to build their own. The tools are there. Within 12-24 months, there'll probably be a "default" object system. Right now, there isn't one because the language is still molten hot right now.

Most Clojure code I've written hasn't been that un-Lispy. Usually the first thing I do is build helper functions to abstract away all the Java classes.
Easy for you to say - you've got an orange name. ;-)

I agree with you. There's no point to starting new threads about this that are essentially glorified comments. You're allowed to write a good long comment, you know. It actually makes commenting a bit better for all of us.
Found that ironic, and for "spite" used it to post to my FaceBook
Isn't Michael Lopp the guy who writes Randsonrands? Is it the same person?
I think there's also something in place to prevent your massively downvoting a single person. It seems to me that if I downvote somebody twice or thrice, I'll find that other comments of theirs become off-limits.
I bet you have a computer though. I also didn't have a TV for about 6 months, I never bothered to buy a new one after my last one broke. But I would guess that anyone that doesn't have a computer already is VERY likely to own a TV.
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#1 and #9 seem really important. (Managers must be given actual control over a project, contractors must be allowed to test the work they do.)

I've seen how destructive not having those two policies in play can be, even in a small organization. You have to give the people on charge the authority and ability to get things done, and you have to make sure the people who do the work get the chance to see firsthand whether or not the work "flies" in the real world.
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Minor nitpick... the color scheme hurts my eyes.
I'm sorry, but I didn't find anything in this article that highlighted the differences between a Pre and, say, a Blackberry or iPhone...
Along those lines, I find myself increasingly impatient with the verbosity of spoken English. Many times someone will ask me something, and before I even start explaining my reasoning, I think: "is accomplishing this worth the time commitment of explaining it?" ... sometimes it is not, so I simply just say "nevermind".

When it comes to responding to questions, I'm pretty sure this just makes me look rude. When asked about the salad or museum, I'd just reply "No." About the phone number: "Yes" (then I'd look it up in my phone). For the gloves: "Yes" (I tend to remember stuff like that). All the rest just seems extraneous and time-consuming to say, especially when it can be inferred by the listener if they would just think it through.
Ouch. Then the question this hypothesis brings to mind is, why didn't they have Immad and Jude build a different product?
We've seen the Arc code for this site and know you didn't need to spend all day in the repl. More likely you spent all day in a comfortable chair with a hot cup of tea thinking about how the feature should work.