skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, you believe you should judge the quality of comments, and put a stop to the ones you deem to have low quality, even if the participants disagree with you. And further, you think it is your role to protect people from "wasting time" by voluntarily reading comments of their choosing.

You further ridicule the comments you disapprove of as "yes-i-did-no-you-didn't" style comments, knowing that isn't literally true in some cases.
Most high-scoring comments are long, not short. Of the top 30 recent comments, only 3 are one sentence or less.
Actually as much as I hate CSS, from trying to implement the same subsystem of an application using flash and then reimplementing it in javascript + CSS I came to appreciate the flexibility of CSS when you want to adapt your widget to both mobile phones and computers....

You might want to look at http://cappuccino.org/ for a javascript library doing what you describe (disclaimer: also I've planned for some time to take a look at it, I haven't got around to it yet)
Except that getting karma points is more difficult for people who comment/post in offpeak times (like on the other side of the world), so this system can essentially penalise them.
How Jonathan Coulton Became An Internet Rock Star On The Cheap
Yeah I have been coming and participating in this community for a very long time, but I am just not that incredibly active. I don't post many stories, and I don't comment very often.

It is funny how many times the HN community it trying to protect themselves from 'noobs', I feel like they push the more casual users a bit further away.
Do you mean deeply nested comment threads? I don't think many users would be calculating enough to resist replying to something just because their comment wouldn't get attention. After all, most people who make a comment they really believe in will sit and watch it get modded down rather than delete it.

But if there does start to be a problem, it will certainly be visible.
It looks to me like DarrenStuart was being overtly melodramatic and got asked to stop. "Filling up" refers to visual space as well; people looking for conversation would get diverted by nonsense like that. You're not making the best case: I'd rather PG try and stop stuff like that and encourage more rational discourse.
You still haven't shown a good counterexample. Until then, I'm inclined to take him at his word, since I've never seen anything of the sort myself.
"The programming isn't child's play" - no good anymore!
Ask HN: How do you think about programs?
I've been trying to learn Apple's Cocoa libraries for a few weeks now. I found that writing small applications is a piece of cake, but when I start writing larger apps I tend to get lost in the complexity of my own creation.

My question is this: how do you think about your applications while you're writing code?

Hillegass uses object diagrams (is that what they're called?) to represent relationships between objects in his apps. How do you do it? More importantly, do you use a pen and paper to design your programs up-front (my preferred method) or do you jump right into the code? Do you use diagramming tools to create your object diagrams? Do you write specs? Do you write notes to yourself?

What I'm trying to find out here is an effective method for creating a high level overview of the app I'm working on so that I can tape it to the wall and look at it to figure out what I have to do next. My usual method of writing down TODOs in random notebooks and losing them at college doesn't seem to be working out that well.
If you think he should do it, fine, but he still did it...

You can't maintain he's fully supportive of long threads, and also wants to avoid noise and clutter.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by a version 1. Basically, you've been hosed by the time-zone problem froo mentioned (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466967). I need to figure out some way to normalize.
What about the parenting thread I linked?

PS YC and searchyc are both very slow for me. It's hard to find anything. If I could just search for posts by pg with certain keywords then I would give you better links, but I can't.
The comment which I am replying to by tptacek currently demonstrates undesigned behavior which I have seen on other pages: to the best of my understanding, highlighting is done on a per-poster not per-comment basis, yet highlighting behavior is inconsistently applied to highlighted posters. You can see tptacek's comment earlier in the thread which is highlighted, while the parent comment of this comment is not. (Further, the parent comment is actually highlighted on the reply-to screen.)

Not too important but, to quote our house dev motto, "behavior contrary to specification mandates a bug report no matter how minor the deviation is".

[Edit: I refresh this page and am seeing it sometimes highlighted and sometimes not highlighted, so I'm not sure if my bug report is accurate or not. Apparently the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies to bugs: attempting to describe one changes its behavior.]
Designing Web Interfaces Book - O'Reilly Webcast
Omni Graffle and Mindmaps. Pen and Paper works too.
234, which turns out to be almost exactly 1% of the number of unique visitors the site gets on a weekday.
True. I was kinda looking at it from my own perspective. My blog usually gets hits from people looking for "college education india". I can retarget my content towards college students, put up a few AdSense ads and make some cash. Of course I wouldn't do that, since my blog is strictly personal, but I think it's a viable strategy to drive more content towards your site.
In case you miss the (non-obvious) link in the article (or do not want to read it), the final buttons (v3.1, created without using any images) are...

http://stopdesign.com/eg/buttons/3.1/code.html
I tried both median and average, but ultimately went with average on the "judge talent at its best" principle. I do throw out the highest score though.
Civilization (out of print)
Industria
Carcassonne
Pueto Rico
Its one of the first things I thought of, after thinking "The Rich Get Richer" as I predict there will be accelerated upvoting towards those that are orange.

However, as you note, I decided "ehhh" and still replied to you right here anyway ;).
There are drugs in development that reverse [glycation]. [...]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alagebrium

Alagebrium only reverses a minor type of glycation. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16706655

Known crosslink breakers (e.g., alagebrium, of the thiazolium halide family) are only partly effective because they break only a subset of AGE crosslink structures (sugar-derived alpha-diketone bridges). So far, no agent has been found that breaks the prevalent glucosepane and K2P crosslink structures. Enzymes that would be able to recognize and disassemble glycation products may be too big to migrate into the ECM and repair collagen or elastin in vivo.

Meanwhile, over the next decade, glycation -- that might otherwise have been largely-inhibited by simple and inexpensive glycation-inhibition regimens -- will turn today's:

* 20-year-olds into further-degraded 30-year-olds,
* 30-year-olds into further-degraded 40-year-olds,
* 40-year-olds into further-degraded 50-year-olds,
* etc.
Sony Ericsson W890I Black Walkman Unlocked 
Sony Ericsson launched the W890i, a device that shares many of the original's traits yet provides a number of technology upgrades. While it still lacks auto-focus, the W890i steps up things to a 3.2 megapixel camera while still providing the same thin-profile look that W880 owners appreciate so much.
Oh, sorry, didn't see it. Thanks.
Contrasts In Style (choice-based vs rule-based)
When browsing with mobile it's annoying to scroll all the way to the top to be able to click on 'New' link.

Could you put 'up' or 'top' link at the bottom, next to 'More'?
Agreed. It'd be nice to foster more of a community of users with real identities & relationships.
Seems like such a waste to see a popular website just die without anyone to keep it alive.

EDIT: I was just reading the gossip on my campus. Good riddance.
I encourage every architect in the world to design custom light switches for every building and position them in locations unique to each building. That way, everyone who enters any building has to first figure out how to identify and operate the light switches.

Sorry I'm so crabby about this. But, by golly, Google's new "button" really calls out for the question "Why?" And to think on top of it all, Google has to go through a lot of trouble (probably Javascript trouble, though I haven't studied the code) to make these silly "buttons" tabbable. Pretty soon, every Web 7.0 kiddie will try to replicate Google's "buttons" and fail to make them tabbable.

Agree: "Desktop clients still have a bright future thanks to stuff like this."
I do a minimal version of what you suggest: I discard the highest score, which amounts to discarding the highest 2%.
Well, I'm not orange either, FWIW. So don't worry about it.

I do think though that this is basically going to result in the "orangemen" being upvoted into the stratosphere simply for being that colour, regardless of what they say. I don't think an overt display of what is essentially "I'm pg and I approve this message" is really the right way to go, but I applaud his effort.
How to Attract Twitterers You Want in Your Network
I started with post-it notes, but kept losing them too. Now I use Freemind, and have a really big whiteboard (of the manual variety) on the wall in my office.

You mentioned you're having a problem with big apps. I'm the same way. At the risk of sounding condescending (which I'm not) break the big app down into a bunch of small apps (features). I find this works for me in two ways. 1.) I can code the small apps easier (and then ideally put them together into the big app). and 2.) If I find I'm getting feature creep, it's easier to dump 1 or 2 "small" apps rather than rethinking the whole project.
Funny about a week ago I heard directly from someone using one of the Fusion-io cards and let's just say the real world performance was rather impressive. I definitely wanted to invest in them right then and there. I'm not sure I can quote numbers (without permission that is) but let's just say many very busy physical DB servers were consolidated onto far fewer servers (all servers had the same specs except the Fusion-io SSD) and even with fewer servers the load/utilization was reduced.
There is also now a trend to mix button and hyperlink styles - usually where one has emphasis - e.g. (Save) _cancel_

This works visually, but I think it really tramples on a lot of UI metaphor.
A store like this in Orlando FL is Skycraft http://www.skycraftsurplus.com/

And a once a month during the summer electronic flea market
http://w1mx.mit.edu/flea-at-mit
I have always been surprised by how much Woz is still just a hacker at heart. He justs wants to tinker with stuff and doesn't care much about business. The world on the other hand expects him to always have his eye on revolutionary, world changing projects. That's why he raised $200m at WoZ Inc.'s IPO, before he announced he was doing GPS tags.
It'd be cool if it was = topcolor*0.8 or something so it fits in to everyones prefs. Each time I see orange I think I must have accidently logged out :)
Funny, but still a very opaque policy. As far as I could tell, qqq was for criticizing your comments related to Israel, and xlnt was either for what qqq did or for having a new account. Is that right?
Sorry if I am coming over as offensive, but I just need to share that it feels kind of weird when you submit a business idea like that, get rejected and than 5 months later read about how yc chose somebody else (who had already in the program before) to create a business - which is just your idea - and he had it like 3 to 4 months ago.

Of course the idea for such a thing will always be born in many heads at the same time so it was probably just choosing the better team - and this happens probably a lot of times.
And of course if you believe in a thing you don't need someone like yc to approve it when you can just go out and build it on your own.
Still I feel kind of bad right now. I don't want to blame anybody of misbehavour or s.th., but it would have been nice to at least get a rejection mail that says s.th. like "We already have another team for a similar product" so you don't end up like me wondering about the timing of things later.

Anyway all the best of luck with this thing - I truly believe it's a great idea.
I agree. I reply to comments because I feel the overwhelming urge illustrated by http://xkcd.com/386/ , not because I think the comment will be seen or ignored.

I for one think this is a good move, though the best part of the recent change is not so much the username highlighting, but the capping of negative karma at -8.

Referring to the recent thread where I was being seriously downmodded, with this cap I probably wouldn't bother defending myself (and creating all that "waste of space"), because -8 or -16 is not all that much karma.

Thanks!
Given your comment, this comment is simply a test.
Old age and treachery will beat youth and skill every time
There are small differencies between my Emacs setup for Mac OS X & for Linux.
You can find my configuration at http://xtalk.msk.su/~ott/common/emacs/_emacs.html, and macosx-specific configurations at http://xtalk.msk.su/~ott/common/emacs/rc/emacs-rc-local-flas...
Taken from here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467141
I'm already ambivalent about karma, but I think the highlighting is wholly a Bad Idea:

* it strongly encourages gaming and groupthink, already the biggest problem with social news sites, especially karma-based ones, while discouraging controversial opinions

* it makes those without highlighting feel less welcome
or that their contributions are less worthwhile

* it adds excessive weight to the opinions of popular members, and as noted elsewhere this causes a feedback loop

IMHO karma should be a subtle thing, used gently. Shoving it in users' faces is the worst possible thing to do with it.

I don't like sounding so negative, because I appreciate the work and thought that has gone into making HN the great site that it is. But I'd like to keep it great, and I think this is not a good way to go about it, and a bad road to go down.
Every now and then a really new thing comes along, and Plan 9 is one of those things. It's been quietly waiting in the wings for its moment to shine. There are days I wished that Plan 9 had been released as GNU licensed open source back in the days when Linux first got going, or something more along the lines of QnX, lots of things are unnecessarily hard the way they are now.
It would have been because you used the same ip address as both curi and one or both of them.

Edit: Usually that's how the software catches multiple accounts belonging to the same person, but I went back and looked, and in this case you (as qqq) outed yourself as curi.
I remember a company in Australia called Platypus Technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus_Technology) came up with something similar whereby they loaded up a full-size PCI card with 4-8Gb of RAM and then this would appear as a 4Gb hard-drive to the OS. Then you just place the DB files or swap files onto this drive and Boom! instant speed upgrade for DB or OS doing disk-work... Apparently they are no longer around.
Anyone else see the irony in this thread becoming a "yes-i-did-no-you-didn't" thread?
Google give some good results for "interactive physics" http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=interactive+physics

For example:

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_edu/physites.html
Wait... what guy? ;-)
http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/5822/cyltank.jpg
It would be cool to have this feature on a per-submission basis. Like someone consistently making good arguments in a submission vs someone trying to de-rail the thread.
Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works were responsible for some of the most innovative aircraft designs from WWII. These were the 14 rules put in place at the birth of the Skunk Works.

Looking past the military stuff, some of them are quite applicable to startups even to this day.
I think when people say "tables are evil" they really mean "HTML-table markup used for purely presentational purposes are not ideal." But maybe you are right.

Anyway, I agree we are in agreement, except I don't think the quote from CSS2 you mention is normative. (It says can be used, not must be used or should be used) It is just an example. There is nothing normative in CSS about when to use the different styles.
I've had the analytics tag on our sites for about 6 weeks, so this is based on limited data.

To date there have not been any instances of slow page loading that I could pin on the analytics tag.

- it loads pretty quick according to my own measurements, much faster than the pages that it is on

- it is placed at the end of the page, so almost all other elements on the page get precedence in the browsers fetch queue

- if it should load slow that will only result in the browsers 'loading' indicator to be active a bit longer, the actual content will be on the page already
I'm a little confused. I did not reset my modem or anything when making this account. I don't see why it wouldn't have triggered the same thing. And also, wouldn't the accounts get banned right away, not at a random time later? Did my ISP one day just happen to give me the same IP I had months ago?

edit: Oh. I've outed myself lots of times...
My first real thought when reading this thread was, "Hmm...strange that he's not orange" about a few different usernames I recognized.

I think I have to come down on the side of not liking the feature, but I'm not sure I'm right about my reasons for not liking it. I've always thought one of the great things about reddit and HN is that identity of the poster is understated. It's not anonymous, but it's possible to read comments without seeing the user who posted them. Every comment thus stands alone and is judged on its own merits. "Bad" users get a fresh start with every post, and "good" users have to say something interesting or not at all. Now, I have some sort of stamp of approval the moment I post.

Then again, most people are idiots, and if software can make it more apparent who the idiots are, maybe it'll make it easier to tolerate them when they start showing up here in larger numbers.
What makes you think it is one? I think you are illustrating why that is a bad criterion.
I believe they can try to find a job in some other group at MS.
I'm not quite sure what you would want to do for experiments, but Walter Lewin has a pretty good set of introductory physics video lectures on Open Course Ware. He's somewhat famous for his physics demonstrations.

MIT link: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-02Electricity-and-Magnet...

Youtube Link for promo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zc9Nuoe2Ow
Great will check it out, thanks!
As a reminder, downvoting should not occur to express disagreement with a commenter. It's a collective form of moderation for inappropriate comments.
> the tagline is intended as humour.

I see.. :p

Could you explain the joke to me?
Cool, I'll contact you soon, thanks!
Somehow this does not have me too worried, if they'd fire the entire Office dev team, now that would be a shocker.
Gaming HN for an Orange Name - A Warning
My name, at the time of posting, is orange. It's kind of nice to be recognized for being upvoted on average, even if I don't make a huge number of comments and will never be on the leaderboard.

However, it just feels wrong. I've been unconsciously working on getting a high average for a while, and this will only encourage my unproductive behavior. I sometimes refrain from posting when I know my comment won’t be read or won’t be upvoted.

In the spirit of pointing out the full effects of this change, I will now offer a simple list of guidelines so that you too can get your name in orange and feel like a real man/woman/entrepreneur.

As for me, I’m with tptacek—opt me out of a colored name.

1. Only post in threads that are on the front page or look sure to get on the front page. If no one will see your comment, no one will upvote you.

2. Don’t post on a front page post that already has more than a full page of text. Your comment will appear at the bottom and no one will scroll all the way down there. You’re just yelling into the void.

3. When possible, reply to a highly rated comment that doesn’t already have replies. Particularly focus on getting your comment to appear "above the fold" when it is posted. This will ensure that your comment is read and enjoyed.

4. Don't post against the prevailing mood of a post. If the mood of that article is pro-libertarian, beware critiquing that philosophy! On the other hand, when the population is more balanced in that individual thread, feel free. In general someone who agrees is more likely to upvote than someone who disagrees, so you should get be ahead on balance.

5. As soon as you make a comment, upvote the article and all of the parents to your comment. This will put your article closer to the public eye. If you want to truly join the dark side, vote down the other comments on the thread or other replies. I’ve never done this, but it’s an option.

6. Say something interesting. Without this, you’ve got nothing!

7. If you’re trying to be funny or sarcastic, make it incredibly obvious. If it’s not incredibly obvious what you’re trying to say, don’t bother posting.

8. Don't get involved in a long discussion! This will only end with a bunch of 1 point posts that drag your average down.

Let me say in closing that HN is one of the best discussions on the net and I’ve been privileged to be here with you all. pg, thanks for all the work you put in.

Still, we should be realistic about the behavior that we are promoting. Goodnight and good luck!
According to http://www.futuregpu.org/2009/01/end-of-era-aces-studio-and-... some got fired and some have 60 days to find a new job within MS:

There was an all-hands meeting, then people got 1 of 2 emails from HR:

1) your last day is Jan 23 ( 24 hrs notice ) and your badge and email will stop working at 7:00 pm on the 23rd.

2) you have 60 days to find a job, your badge and email will work until Mar 23. If you find a job great, if not that is your last day.

In any case, "You can try to find another job at MS" in no way guarantees that they will find a job.
> SBCL's lack of up-to-date libraries can be frustrating.

But on the flip-side, Clojure's lack of a real object system can be frustrating. It is also annoying that you have to actively work around the JVM (for example, when making tail calls). Generally it is a beta-quality languages with some issues that need to be worked out. (I stick with Haskell for now when I want to write in a functional style, and CL for everything else.)

Also, while having Java libraries is better than having no libraries at all, the code that uses Java libraries becomes very un-lispy. It is a reasonable compromise, but certainly not ideal.
Because your response makes me want to respond in kind...tit for tat. And, it's apparent that you're in that mode, as well, having to have the last word with every reply from pg and others. Neither one of us is saying anything, at this point, except, "It is" or "No, it isn't".

That's the kind of thing that pg is talking about.
For those interested in the final gradient technique, it looks like they're just using a div with a background color of #f9f9f9 and a bottom border of #eee, then sticking it (absolutely positioned) at the top of the box that also contains the text div for the button.

Not sure why he was trying use <b> rather than a <div> or why he stuck it on the bottom instead of hanging it from the top, but the latter approach intuitively seems like it would work cross-browser.
Wanna hear a Microsoft joke?

"What do you call it when the entire Flight Simulator Dev Team gets fired? A tragedy."

"What do you call it when the entire MS Office dev team gets fired? A good start."

(loosely based on a lawyer joke)