skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it just me, or is this not active on older threads?
It's not that I hate this feature. It makes me a bit sad. I've been coming here almost everyday for just under 2 years. I'm not orange. And that makes me wonder if I really should be here? Am I, actually, one of those people that HN doesn't want?
The mineshaft example isn't silly. He makes his point about deflation while also getting a jab in at those arguing for a return to the gold standard. People spend a lot of time digging gold out of the ground and no-one blinks an eye.

Keynes proved his point, and made the sort of people who would join the Austrian school today look like idiots in the process.
That's not the same sort of deep conversation. PG asks a lot about not getting into bickerfests, and that's certainly fair. On the other hand, gravitycop and I got into a discussion about artificial intelligence a day or two ago, which went on for quite a while. Since it's not a big center-of-discussions, all our posts remained at one or two points each.

In the end I don't think it matters much either way - the really fun conversations you do for the sake of talking, not for the karma. But this system still subtly discourages those sorts of exchanges, which is a pity.
He has several times asked people to stop posting in deeply nested threads. e.g. a recent thread about parenting. And he has sometimes disabled accounts for participating in deeply nested threads he didn't like.
You should not be using average: you should be using median (or perhaps average, using comment scores capped at 8 or 10) as the strategy you're using now will overly reward comments which hit a community sweet spot and garner 100 or so points, and discourage comments on stories which have been unwisely ignored [both of which tendencies are somewhat too pronounced on the site already]).
The worst part is the new button styles don't add anything, except a jarring sense that something has changed.

(further bringing to attention that there are now too many buttons)
I've seen that work really well on a couple sites. I played a certain MMO for a while (I know, I know) and the overall maturity level was, shall we say...low. Anyway, one of the popular database sites implemented that feature for it's threaded comments and if you compared the tone of the discourse their to the tone on the regular forums, it was night and day. The trolls simply branched off into threads that where below a certain threshold and were autocollapsed. You could still see the parent thread title inline and click through to the full thread if you wanted, but the signal to noise was much improved.
i'd say the line is minimally important. flag might be crucial, though i've never personally had to use it. the link and parent links, as well as time, are convenient.

i bet discussion interestingness improves by removing the username and points.
There are people in the top 50 on the leaderboard that won't be orange, either, for what it's worth.
I don't care about the karma, I care about being asked to stop having perfectly interesting discussions.
You would need a lot of real-world analysis to make this work right. Consider the case of 10 annoying dialog boxes that pop up in sequence, which the user presses enter to close. The no-focus-stealing OS thinks the user can't possibly respond to a new window in less than 180 ms, and redirects input to some irrelevant parent window. Yet in this case, the user is already in a beat pattern with the annoying dialog boxes, and is responding in < 50 ms.

There are probably a bunch of other special cases that are hard to imagine unless you're a full-time window-manager developer (I'm not.)
Really anal suggestion for a nonexistent feature: square instead of circle. That maintains the compact feel, while giving the visual metaphor of putting a hold on your vote.

Somewhat related, I would really like an abstain feature not just because I like the idea of hiding votes, but because if I see an arrow I feel the need to click it until all the arrows disappear. An abstain button would help when I don't want to upvote and don't have a downvote.
I'm orange because I posted a 50 point comment the other day. pg replied to it saying my comment violated the site guidelines (which it did) and calling it superficial (which was an unfair insult). So, that's how my name got pretty. Now does life seem fair? ;-)
You say that there are several features, and that the orange username is only the most conspicuous. Which other hard-to-find features have appeared?
:)

(I probably just lowered my post-karma average, but that comment was way too funny not to react to.)
Collapsable threads might be a good idea, but I'd prefer having the system make its values explicit via descriptors for comments (think Slashdot or Plastic). My top two would be "insightful" and "uncharitable". The former encourages what's best about this community, the latter strongly discourages what's worst. A lot of deep and pointless threads are caused by commenters reacting to their own hasty interpretations of what someone said rather than even-handedly responding to them.

Also, no "Funny".
You mean like this one? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=140170
For me the process goes something like, "Hey! That's a really good point. Does this person have a high karma? If so, perhaps I've seen them before but haven't seen the name around." Other times it's, "Wow, this person sounds snotty and wretched. I hope they've got a low karma score to compensate. Perhaps even a negative. Oh, damn, they've got 24,000, I'm arguing with nickb again." Once every few months, it's "Look, this person's disagreeing with this 'unalone' bloke, they click the name, and - look! - he can't possibly be wrong with that karma score." I like to delude myself.
Something that's really impressed me about Steve Wozniak is how reserved he is. On the one hand you have a man like Steve Jobs who has confidence and fanfare abound, and then you have Wozniak who has a much quieter type of confidence. For example, when Wozniak returned to Apple in 1983, according to his biography he wanting nothing more than an engineering position. I wouldn't be watching for crazy media attention or dramatic press releases, but I wouldn't be surprised if Wozniak and this start-up come out with something revolutionary in a few years.
It's quite interesting to see two kinds of technical guys arguing against each other. On one side, we have the product guy, on the other, we've got the consulting guy.

You've got Joel, Jeff, Paul Bucheit on the product side saying that "Yes, automated testing and some of the OOP principles are great, but let's not go as far as Uncle Bob"

Check out the SOLID principles. Some of the principles are alright, but when Uncle Bob explained that Rectangle class thing, I don't know what to say other than I just changed my mind leaning toward not to buy his "Clean Code" book.

On the other side, you've got Kent Beck, GoF, Uncle Bob, Martin Fowler, etc. (and possibly Gilles Bowkett). They're what you would consider "war-proven": they've done numerous "IT projects", leading a team of corporate developers, probably making a website for clients, and etc.

I don't mean to be rude (and perhaps this is an overgeneralisation), but I haven't heard any software product made by the consulting group. Yes, they wrote code, but the code is based on requirements given by some clients that:

1) Change the requirements frequently
2) Keep cutting costs
3) Ask for more
4) Cut more time

There's a huge different between writing code for commercial software that you steer versus writing code driven by someone else who knows almost nothing about software development but knows a lot how to save money.

Would you TDD-ed your UI code?

If you wrote API, yes, I can understand you do heavy unit-tests.

A side note for having your own unit-test framework:
1) Developers shouldn't write them
2) Developers should provide minimal to enough unit-tests
3) Go hire your own test team to do the rest

Developers aren't meant to be full-time testers. Testers aren't mean to be a full-time developers.

What I'd like to see is a team like this:
1) Joel becomes the product manager
2) Paul Bucheit becomes the software architect
3) Jeff, Kent Beck and Martin Fowler do the coding
4) Robert Martin and those infested TDD people can build a full-blown suite of unit-test frameworks, acceptance test and etc.

Microsoft has a category for the people in (4), it is "SDET". For those of you who think developers must write a comprehensive TDD (not just a minimum or "just to pass"), here's a challenge to you: why don't you try and be SDET. You'll see some of the serious full-blown test code, black-box, UI test code, UI automation and a serious CI process. I'm sure the experience will make your TDD and unit-test code look pale in comparison.

Google seems going to that (MS) direction slowly.
But has he ever asked that in a case where it wasn't a heated argument? I got asked to stop because a guy was swearing and I was calling him pathetic, but that was because we were generating a flamefest. Do people get told off just for talking at length?
I use facebook for keeping in touch with the weak links in my network ... the strong ones you will (hopefully) be in touch with in "real life"
i was just having a similar thought: won't this "flaunting" of karma create more social unrest (defensiveness, ego-grabbing, immature or strategic conversations)?

when i first came here i loved seeing my karma grow. it gave me a feeling of acceptance that reddit's meanness never could. (i found the content more interesting, too, and of course hope that i'm part of that, just as you do.)

i say karma should stay private. it is useful for personal gratification. the path to good discussion is humility and insight.
No, not that one :)

So, anyway, why did you ban xlnt and qqq, but not this account?
Actually the highest-scoring comment gets thrown out in the calculation of the average.
I think if you are self-aware enough to be worried about your impact on the community, you are exactly the type of user HN wants.
It's not quite a class system if it's based on your 50 most recent comments. 3.5 karma points a comment is a pretty low barrier of entry, after all, which means that a, it's easier to get the highlight, and b, it's not worth as much because it's easier to get, meaning people won't jump to try and achieve the highlighted title.
So that's why I couldn't downvote even though I have 69 karma!
Here's a Mac example. Sometimes I keep an iCal alarm alert dialog box open for long periods of time -- I know, not a great habit, but when I'm focused on programming, I just kind of push it off to the side. At a regular interval (every 10 minutes perhaps? just a guess), it steals the focus and moves to the top of the window stack. If the purpose is to re-remind me of an overdue alarm, shaking the dialog box or playing a sound would be better because I can mentally make note of it and keep working vs. having to re-click in my editor, for example, and retype whichever keystrokes disappeared into the iCal alarm abyss.
Just out of curiosity, how many users (currently) receive the grayish-orange distinction?
I don't think pg has ever disabled accounts for having a long discussion. I've also have never read the idea of long conversations being discouraged by anyone here.
Aww, but they were going someplace good with that!

Out of curiosity, have you ever stopped a conversation just because it was getting exceptionally long? At a certain point does that mess up the table layout?
I think we have too many wars going on right now: The war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on teenage pregnancy, the war on illiteracy. Plus the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And they all seem to have Czar's, you know? But the thing about wars is that they're black & white. Us against them. Good vs. bad. And aging just isn't like that. I mean it's cool having a war to go after Osama Bin Laden. I think most of us can get behind that one. But I don't think that most of us can get all motivated and suited up to fight, claw, struggle and sacrifice so that baby boomers can have a few more years in charge. So Sylvester Stallone can make Rambo 18. So tenured professors can keep their jobs forever. Or so that a bunch of dirty hippies can sit around in their nanotechnology enhanced 150 year old bodies telling kids about how awesome the 60's were and how lucky those kids are to have all that debt.
word. i'm one of the standard slashdot->proggit->hn users. slashdot's comment system rocks (ui and concept). it's a very strange worse-is-better effect that reddit and hn have both meant losing features in exchange for the advantages of being part of smaller communities.
Don't take juicycampus as the norm -- the site was very controversial. Because of this, google pulled them from adsense, they received legal challenges, and im sure they had difficulties getting funded after the initial round.
Google Video Searches Lead to Malicious Site
About 400,000 search queries on the popular video search site recently redirected to a malicious website that leads to malware download and execution, Jamz Yaneza, threat research manager at Trend Micro, told SCMagazineUS.com.
Mine was 2.98 before this comment, and assuming it stays at 1 will be 2.94. (edit: learned more about it, actually 2.6, see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467290 )

I know what I have to do to game it (reload /newest and look for stuff that is generally interesting and I understand, contribute a neutrally toned slightly technical comment and not follow up or reply to questions), but I will not be doing it (much) because it it goes against two things that I value about comments here:

1) It's a friendly place to converse and ask legitimate questions without getting RTFM or LMGTFY (unless your question is reeeealllly dumb)

2) I value contributions that are presented later, even if they're not as highly scored (this, of course, the reason that comments aren't sorted by raw score), and I don't mind tagging something onto an article, even if I'm joining in late, provided I think it's a net contribution to the site.
Could someone with more business experience than I elaborate on this? Is it really just because ad revenue is down, or was the company mismanaged? My impression of this site was that it was widely successful. I know that it had definitely broken into the mainstream (known among the average college population), which is a huge milestone.
Legitimate question. From http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html: "Your 'use case' should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?"

Ah, but if he's prone to computer addiction, the software needs to shove him outside to interact with real people, or shove him out of his chair to enjoy his girlfriend/boyfriend/pet(?!) in the next room. Perhaps Facebook needs the various noprocrast features HN has.
Here is what happens to the UI:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117118
the default 1 point you get from commenting no longer adds to your karma. that is, the comment is 'worth' 1 point, but your karma doesn't change. i think it used to...though now im not so sure...
American Idol Top 36 Allison Iraheta
No, 1 is considered the base value. Your karma gets modified based on upvoting/downvoting. (So if you get voted down to a zero, you've lost a karma point.)
A class system may be extreme, but there is now a visual distinction between users and comments will likely be skewed by that.
Quà du lịch - chọn thế nào?
Basically it'd be nice if you could distinguish between instances where iteration order is important and not important. A separate datatype would do that (at the expense of other things, obviously)
Evolution is still happening. It's not weeding out what you call the weak and the stupid, but that's not its job - it only selects those who are best adapted to their environment, whatever that may be.

Some people are still having 8 kids, some are having 2, and some are having none. This is not randomly distributed across genotypes, so some are being selected.
I actually didn't know about search YC, thanks for mentioning it again, seems like a great utility.
One positive thing about XUL is that it makes the GWT/pyjamas (pyjs.org) approach seem reasonable if not downright natural.
I agree. I think the algorithm should take comment depth into account.

Make it take thread age/traffic into account too. I don't want to worry about posting in dead or near-dead threads.

Overall, though, if we can figure out how to implement this without discouraging good commenting, it could be a pretty nice change.

My biggest problem with the system as it stands is this: there are two HN posters who I think of as exceptionally insightful, prolific, and committed to the maintenance of the community, and one of them doesn't have a highlighted name -- I assume because he's posted a lot in low traffic areas. That's a major bug.
Mexico Real Estate
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=416933
Inc case study: the reluctant entrepreneur
Amazon FPS exits beta and announces limited time free payment processing
I've been really looking forward to this mostly because of how bad ActiveSupport's implementation of this is. For instance, lookups require a linear scan. Definitely a welcome change.
Yeah, but a visual distinction that constantly shifts, with no high entry point, isn't much of one at all. Even if you do have it, you have no advantage over keeping it than somebody who's just joined yesterday.

I don't know if it's a useful feature - I'll give it a few days and see if it starts looking natural - but it's not one that's creating any more of a skew than the leaderboard is currently.
This is incredibly cool. I hope the schematics he designs here become publicly available some day; nothing created by an engineer of Woz's caliber ought to be lost to posterity.

That's an alarming photograph though. I see now where Steve Jobs' weight went.
Why Yahoo’s announcement today won’t get as much hype as Google’s
Anxiety Attacks and Disorders
Anxiety is the body’s initial reaction and response to danger. But when anxiety cannot be controlled even with the situations that don’t warrant such an alarm and reaction and when it is alreadyinterfering with your daily activities and relationship with other people, then you may be dealing with a case of anxiety disorder.
Can't even spam properly. Wonder if this is a bot or a real person.
Not everyone that deserves to be made an example of gets the privilege, nor does everyone that deserves to be marginalized so treated. It doesn't imply you aren't in either group if you aren't singled out; it just means the stage isn't that large. :-)

The problem is that gauging worthiness of something is a very difficult, even -- or especially -- when human judges are involved. I think of this as a first stab at a very complicated problem; making sense of votes made for a variety of motivations, not all of them what this algorithm is trying to isolate and encourage. I suspect several iterations will follow.
OK Robert Scoble makes a point or two here but you can't help feeling that the sub-text is "If I can't have the shiny new toy on the first day then the toy is not worth having."
Use the "Feature Requests" link at the bottom of the listing page, please.
Not username. That would make it harder to know when you're having a back-and-forth, and that changes the nature of the discussion. Removing points would be a good idea, though - is there any advantage to having that visible beforehand?
From the article, it seems he was part of their advisory board, and then asked them to take a more active role.

So they are building a flash drive that communicates over pci-e. Brilliant idea, and I want one as soon as prices descend from the stratosphere.
Seed Salon: Albert-Laszlo Barabasi + James Fowler
There aren't any other ones besides the ones I describe in that post: orange usernames, welcome links for new users, and limiting downvotes. Maybe it would have been more accurate to call them changes rather than features.
Collaborative Decision-Making Software?
I live in Australia - we might be getting a bigger firewall than China's - I know all about Nanny States.

When I have kids, one of my aims as a parent will be to try and err on the side of freedom. (Although I can see that will be a hard choice to make at points). Also - this was a good link I picked up off here/reddit recently: http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/
"Would you please stop filling up comment threads with this kind of thing?" -- pg

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=138275

What he was replying to is deleted. But it doesn't matter what it was. pg objected to "filling up comment threads". I didn't know they could get full...
ClearCam Is The Rapid-Fire Way To Clearer iPhone Pictures
Opera comes out with new JavaScript engine in Carakan, new hardware API in Vega
In Houston there is a place called Electronic Parts Outlet (EPO) that does something similar. It's an awesome place to stroll around and poke if you have some time to kill.

The closest thing I can find in Seattle is Vetco on the east side. If anyone has any other suggestions, I'd be very interested.
Some economists have proposed imposing a tax on cash holdings, which would theoretically push nominal interest rates negative... this would really give people an incentive to hold assets instead of cash.
Some economists have proposed imposing a tax on cash holdings, which would theoretically push nominal interest rates negative... this would really give people an incentive to hold assets instead of cash.

http://blogs.ft.com/wolfforum/2008/11/the-case-for-negative-...
In the worst case, nanobots.

I don't expect them to be ready in time to immortalize anybody reading this, certainly not codgers like de Gray and Kurzweil. When my 5-year-old asks me what the world will be like in 100 years, I tell him we'll most likely all be dead. But it's theoretically possible.

You don't even need them to reduce glycosylation. There are drugs in development that reverse it. Here's one that looked promising, but the company ran out of money before they ran out of red tape:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alagebrium

ISTR that there are supposedly better medications that do the same thing in the works.
This is a great aspect of the culture there that has helped Amazon maintain its technical competitive edge.
No, of course not. I sometimes ask people to stop when they reach the yes-i-did-no-you-didn't stage, but because it's wasting everyone's time, not because it's messing up the page.
Converting to git from svn
Hmm, I'm not entirely sure if colouring someone's name is the best of ideas since you have now created an artificial class system within HN.

While people will argue that it's only a colour, it is still a line in the sand that has been drawn and it will (if even slightly) penalise people that access the site primarily in offpeak times as their comments may go unnoticed when people scan threads for orange names.
So Opera catches up with Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, while IE lags even further behind.
Amazon.com under investigation by the U.S. Postal Service
There is one more here in Silicon valley, almost walking distance from Yahoo. Its called "WeirdStuff" (http://www.weirdstuff.com) - great fun scavenging there!
Summary/paraphrasing/my version:

a) If you can't see how to make this work, quit.

b) Beware of rationalizations for quitting when you're just in a local trough emotionally. My heuristic: I don't stop doing this until I find something better to do. That forces me to find a constructive reason to quit.

c) The worst possible outcome isn't failure and quitting but ongoing mediocrity. Either because you lack the courage to quit, or because you get just enough feedback to keep you interested. This can be arbitrarily hard to detect, but for starters keep monitoring your metrics and looking for opportunities to revise.
Here's the screen for new accounts: http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/6818/hackernewswelcomevl8.jpg

I think it's a great idea over all. I think it would be better though if all new account were automatically redirected to the welcome screen upon registration. That would make sure it's read. Right now it seems to be a little too easy to miss.