skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SEO Traffic Spider | Article Submission | How Article Submission Works | Our Packages
Article Submission is an ethical SEO strategy that is generally used to promote a website and also gain a steady flow of quality one way links. It&rsquo;s a powerful technique which involves submitting articles in various article directories to gain quick ...
Working from Home Part 2: Now about how it doesn't suck
I think I might want to upvote your comment, but the math takes too long to think about. Can you rewrite it as a witty one-liner?
Digital Pirates Winning Battle With Studios
I'm sure Graham & co are on the level (I've never met him/them), but I was warned that there are vc who are scum. The advice I received was to document everything. Make sure you document who is at any meeting, and what info is passed along. Keep careful track.
Good idea. From a design standpoint I have seen successful designs use the black/green pallet, but the white border on your site makes it too difficult to pay attention to the text.

Green and black is bold, white and black is bolder so it is pulling the eye to an element that should be a background element.

Other than that, nice idea. How about providing a bookmarklet people can drag to their browser bars?
Norway consumer advocate drops iTunes complaint
U.S. jobless claims surge to 26-year high (highest since October 1982)
If you're trying to normalise by the number of potential upvoters then a crude method would be: upvotes/(total thread views - thread views at time of posting)

Doesn't factor in a bunch of things, but it does also cover posts on unpopular threads as well as bad times.
While I agree that this is divisive, having a gradient would just defeat the purpose of the feature, which is to highlight those whose examples you should be following.

Making it a gradient makes it really hard to tell who is setting a good example and who isn't.

Rather than a gradient, I'd just like the option to turn it off, even if that option is only available after 50 karma or something. To me it is visual noise.

Even better if it was visible to a user up to X karma and then disappeared past that. Then it would serve its training purpose without leading to a long-term two-tier culture here.
Children innate dualists; god delusion may be hard wired
Yeah, the first thing I noticed when I opened the page was the harsh colors.
Ultimately, I think the biggest issue with the commenting system is that it's too easy to get lost. For example, this post now has 181 comments, and I barely have time to read 20. Maybe comment 84 has a really good point to be made? Don't know...I'll never see it. Not that this is unique to HN. Any community that gets above a certain size is going to have an issue where only those dedicated enough to read through entire 181 comment threads can really participate fully. Anyone who is pressed for time, or only interested in being a casual community member gets punished by the legions of 12 hours-a-day staring at comment threads dedicated fanatics.

Anyway, this is not a rant, but a suggestion. What about not showing some comments? I mean, I sort of already do this on my own, but why not choose a random subset of comments (and their corresponding threads) to display. Make the frequency dependent on the score. At the very least, would it be too much to ask for disclosure arrows? For example, the first thread on this page was entertaining for the first 4-5 comments. After that, I just wished it would go away, but instead it continued for another 3-4 pages.

Anyhow, for the time being I'm kind of curious how a community run by self professed geeks, with the express intention of remaining a community for said self professed geeks, fares in the long run...

...should be a fun ride
To quote my boss (it's almost like a mantra) - "whatever's easier." I'm sort of a student of management (and in academic terms actually more than "sort of") so this stuff fascinates me. It's easy to point to companies that don't do whatever's easier, but actually do whatever's correct (Google would be a good example) but day to day, the message doesn't get executed.
Actually, for me, the most interesting thing about this article was the short comment about the high-school to college transition. The classification is very simplistic indeed.
The comments that get the highest ratings are usually snappy one-liners or the guy who posted first on the thread.

Speaking as someone who, from the available evidence, can't clear his throat in print without a five-paragraph running start [1]: What exactly is wrong with one-liners? They are mercifully short!

Yes, it's possible for a social news site to be completely taken over by short-form snark. But HN has resisted that pretty well so far. I mean, I haven't given up yet. And, frankly, it's far better for half the posts to be one line long than for half of them to be four-page harangues.

I will also note that my tendency to leave multi-paragraph monoliths in the comments hasn't hurt my ratings any.

As for the tendency of people to get upmodded farther if they post sooner, or if they respond to things that they also upvote: Last month everyone was complaining that too many submissions fall off the /newest page without receiving any upvotes or comments. What's wrong with having an incentive that prompts people to analyze the new submissions as soon as they come through the door? That's valuable work!

---

[1] To quote Pascal: "I would not have made this so long except that I do not have the leisure to make it shorter."
Maybe we lose some awesome comments.

Maybe if people are thinking more about what they write, we might gain an awesome comment instead of a trivial one.

Maybe we might get far less comments, making it easier to notice awesome comments.

Maybe awesome people get more interested in a more interesting site and start making additional awesome comments.

----

The orange name system fundamentally rewards quality over quantity. That is a step in the right direction for a system that has always been stupidly simple. Well, the commenting system was so simple that this change is quite large in the scheme of things.
The Exploratorium Cookbooks are expensive, but full of lots of great ideas:
http://store.exploratorium.edu/browse.cfm/4,19.html

The Exploratorium Snackbooks are also very good.

The Exploratorium Quarterly magazine was also great. Although it is not published any more, I see that you can buy copies at abebooks. You should search for anything with Exploratorium in the title. It is probably worth buying.
As I understand it, VCs routinely refuse to sign NDAs, because (as mentioned elsewhere) it's very common for two teams to independently come up with the same idea, and the VCs don't want to be in a situation where they have to convince a jury that they didn't reject a certain team's proposal and then leak the underlying idea to someone else. (And yeah, I'm cynical enough to assume that once in a while that's exactly what happens.) So in this respect YC is no worse than anyone else.
Any Statups From Montreal Out Here?
If so, let me know as my blog specializes in startup founder interviews
Ask HN: Would you pay $5/yr for HN?
I know what I am going to say is borderline hubris in this web 2.0 world we live in, but bear with me.

A lot of problems this site faces are due to the large influx of new, anonymous users. So I was wondering, how would this website be different if there was a small (say $5/yr) subscription needed, at least for posting. For one thing, it would have less (active) users, but we know that the sweet spot for social news sites is when they have a relatively small amount of users. Also, these users would be easier to identify and perminently ban if necessary. Finally, these users would most likely be those who are more positive in their interaction with the community. I find it hard to imagine a troll paying.

There are of course negative side-effects, not least of which is the locking out (from posting) of hackers who may not have a paypal account/credit card. Also, some may feel a sense of entitlement, an expectation of service-level. On the plus side, if there is anything left after the transaction processing, it may go towards covering server costs and whatnot. Even if pg/YC was to make some money off of this, I doubt us raging capitalists would mind, given the value we get out of HN. It might also go some way towards proving (if successful of course) that users will pay for quality and that ad-supported/freeminum is not the only way.

So, do you think such an alternative-reality HN would be desirable?
Bill Gates releases mosquitoes into audience
Sorry, I wasn't responding directly to your specific suggestion. I agree that a tax stimulus to small companies is at least somewhat more likely to be useful than a stimulus to large companies. A general tax cut, the kind that's more likely to be politically successful, would certainly channel a lot of money into large corporations as well as small corporations.

It's not PC to say this on HN, but I think that startups are also a mixed bag. Exit events are probably as bad for the economy as bonuses at large companies. If you would assume that a company is worth the expected present discounted value of all future earnings, I bet many companies are bought for much more than their value, and the money is then used with the same lack of efficiency as huge bonuses at a big corporation.
There was an unofficial 15th rule: Don't work with the Navy.
(From the book Skunk Works by Ben Rich who succeeded Kelly. Great book. Read it.)
Actually, that is a very good point. Probably, YC should at least tell you, that they have accepted a team with a similar idea. Of course, they might simply have no time to write that sort of personal reply to everyone, but I see no business reason to hide this information.
1, 2, 3 and 8 are harmful to the community. There should be some sort of reward for deep conversations, commenting on unpopular stories (which would then promote them) and not simply replying to a highly rated comment so it will be "above the fold".

None of this is rocket science, so I don't fault tptaceck but I hope most of this advice is not taken (except for 6+7).

I always thought Digg needed a new category called "Stories that get no respect" which are picked by editors or highly rated members as quality stories and put on a special page to promote going deep on HN.
Amazon FPS out of beta - adds limited-time free payment processing (90 days)
TED.com should be posting the talk at some point.
If any of you have not Visited TED(.com) and checked out the collection of videos from past conferences I highly recommended it! They are perfect ways to recapture some time while doing chores around the house. I pop one on, crank up the volume and learn something new while doing the dishes.
My favorite part of the story was "However, despite over 700 attempts by local authorities to contact her and obtain payment during that time, she failed to meet any of the charges." Here in the United States they put on tire locks and eventually tow the car, is that not the case in Austria? They said the civil servant racked these up over the course of two years.
God knows there are things about the pg-cult that irritate me, but the point of this site is that it has an opinion on what its culture should be. I'm the other half of the thread you're pointing to, and when the site's "curator" said "please stop", it didn't take much thought to figure out the right response.

What's weird is, why are you still thinking about this? It was weeks ago. Life is very short.
Ad Market Down, Innovate to Increase Value
You know, "The Road Ahead" I think I would rank up there with "The Selfish Gene" as being among the most influential books in my life. So I have huge respect for Mr. Gates. But I wonder if he might be going a little too far with this foundation thing. Releasing live mosquitos into an audience? Sort of up there with another talented person I could mention jumping on Oprah's couch. Sad, really.
I'm viewing it in Firefox, and the content area at the top is blank, while the sidebars ("What's this" etc.) appear. The content area (Command-line-fu alpha) appears all the way at the bottom, once all the sidebars finish.
Fired exec: 'Starbucks saved my life'
Indeed, as Hugh MacLeod said, "Only talented people fret about mediocrity."
Everyone agrees that excessive pumping of money into the system will cause inflation. The problem is figuring how how much is, in fact, excessive. And in a recession, you can't just say "let's err on the side of conservatism and not pump anything in" because there's the risk of deflation on the other side.

"We stand today at a crossroads: One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice." —Woody Allen
Dude, you have to still go for it. YC isn't the "end all be all" of success. Yes, it does suck that you see your idea being implemented by somebody else and that they are getting the spotlight. But on the flip-side, this merely enforces the fact that you are thinking in the right direction. I would also keep an eye on Heyzap to see how successful they become, because that shines a clear light on the potential of what could be for you.

I would also encourage you to look at all the other startups that succeeded after others proved the concept before them...

iFilm vs. YouTube

Snapshot vs. flickr

Friendster vs. Facebook

(anybody else feel free to add to this list please)

Plow ahead...if you truly believe it's a great idea, then make it so but in your own way.
happened to me too until I made the window bigger, You need to wrap the two columns in a div that has min-width set or whatever the that property is called...
Of course I would pay $5/year for HN. I lose more money than that every time I compose a new comment. Time is money, after all.

That doesn't mean it's a good idea, though. I think it almost certainly isn't. It sends entirely the wrong message, it's a much bigger pain to implement than it's worth, it might work all too well at cutting the volume of submissions and comments (if you think a crowded HN is bad, fork HN -- the code is open source! -- put it up on your server, and see how exciting that is)... and it won't work. You really think a troll won't pay five bucks a year? I think you severely underestimate the entertainment value that a troll derives from trolling.

If, in fact, HN eventually declines to the Reddit level, the solution will be the same as ever: Some of us will head off into small invite-only groups (note that invite-only is distinct from for pay), and the rest of us will migrate to a handful of other new social news sites which will thrive for a while until they succumb to the same problem, or to an entirely new problem, after which the cycle begins anew. As someone has said in the past, it's like restaurants, or music clubs. They flare up, grow, shrink, and die out all the time.
If I may make a suggestion: When I signed up in 2007, I don't recall seeing a welcome page like you have now (or I forgot about it). My impression of the site, based on the title and the popular submitted content on the front page was that it was about programming, startups, and other technology-related topics. Would it be possible to add to the orange bar, right after "Hacker News", the line of text you have above? So, all readers (old and new) see the following:

Hacker News: Stuff that's interesting to the intellectually curious

I think it will help make the purpose of this site clear to everyone, and hopefully have a positive impact on the comments as well by reminding people that the discussions should have an intellectual component.
Ironically, I was about to upvote this, when I realized that the only reason was because it was witty (and one line).

So I just want to say thanks for slapping me in the face with your witty self-referential one liner. I have learned my lesson.
Sipser's book is great for understanding this stuff, IMHO: http://books.google.com/books?id=eRYFAAAACAAJ&dq=sipser+...
The Keynesian prescription, AIUI, actually has two sides: the government should run a deficit (when necessary) during a recession and run a surplus during a recovery.

It's a damn shame that the Bush Administration didn't follow the second half of this advice for the past eight years, but that's no reason to ignore the first half now.
"14. Because only a few people will be used in engineering and most other areas, ways must be provided to reward good performance by pay not based on the number of personnel supervised."

This is something large corporations struggle with today. The prevalence of of startups seems to indicate that there isn't a good alternative to the track of promoting good engineers to management. Engineers who want to do design work don't want to be managers.

I'm reminded of a charter school I read about in the NYT(don't have the link sorry) that was unusual for paying its best teachers more than the principal. They had a principal who understood that even though he was the teachers boss he needed to attract good teachers with high salary.
No.

Basically, part of the value (most?) of HN is that there are other people here. Charging $5 would mean less content submitted and fewer comments. If the NYTimes or WSJ tries to charge, it doesn't significantly change the content of their sites since they're both created top-down by paid writers and editors.

When you're trying to monetize user-generated content, you can't try to do so in a way that will mean less user-generated content. This is the same problem that Facebook has - their value is that you have so many users and content from those users, but if they start charging they won't have so many users and people will find another site to replace Facebook with. Sure, one could make the argument that here a $5 fee could keep out some of the less desirable people, but it would also eliminate many of those who make the site desirable. It's not that the content doesn't have enough value to be worth $5 to me, it's that once you start charging money, the value of the content drops as many won't pay for it.
the problem is that a lot of people refuse to pay on principle. To many people it doesn't matter if its $.01 or $99, the whole process of paying is a barrier to them
I did a similar thing. I haven't IM'd in... well currently I've been in Canada for almost a year, and I stopped like 95% of my IM's over a year before I first came to Canada, so I'm thinking like 3 years with near complete IM silence.

I've also cut out TV before, I found it quite liberating as it allowed me to focus my time more. However, the TV has crept back in, but it'll probably go the way of my IM when my wife finally gets a laptop so we don't have to share one... it's quite hard to sit doing something when she tries to steal it off my lap every 30 seconds.

I have recently joint up to Facebook, but I already feel I'm neglecting it. I sign on like every 2-3 days because quite honestly I don't have any friends. I ditched 80% of my friends after I graduated, because I realised they were all immature losers, I then lost the other 10% when I started spending more time out of the country than in it and the last 10% are here in Canada.

One thing I find quite strange is that I'm perfectly happy having no friends. I do have a few friends, but they're also my wifes so she does 90% of the non-hanging-out talking, where as I usually do an unequal share of the talking when everyones together and I'm not sure how as I usually only talk when asked a question.
What is offpeak? Until a month ago, I was staying up until 6 in the morning Eastern Time, and there was never a lull in activity. Stories stay up for 24 hours very often, so even if you post while nobody's on, they still eventually come across your comment.
A little off topic... but every time I hear Microsoft Flight Simulator, it reminds me how hardware vendors used to use the game to test the hardware compatibility.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible
"At first, few "compatibles" other than Compaq's models offered compatibility beyond the DOS/BIOS level. Reviewers and users developed suites of programs to test compatibility; the ability to run Lotus 1-2-3 or Microsoft Flight Simulator became one of the most significant "stress tests"."
You know, I think the opposite: who cares about the score on one comment? But the orange name thing follows you around.

But there is way too much drama about this stuff now, so the thing to do is probably to let it go and see how it plays out over a few months.
I don't know your idea, but I think "simultaneous invention" is quite common. Smart people looking at the same data and same context frequently reach similar conclusions.

In my experience, I've found this is a more common explanation for your situation than outright maliciousness.
"This site has temporarily exceeded its connection limit. Please try again in a few minutes."

Dang.
Metafilter has a one-time $5 fee http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi
I think the idea of self organizing user groups is the only thing that can stop the eternal September.

In addition to highlighting their user names, I'd love to see their submissions highlighted.

Have you ever looked at the submissions of a user and thought, wow that's way better then the HN frontage right now?
Ask HN: Location-based social nets need mass adoption to be useful. Can aggregation help?
If it was possible to view geotagged data from any one of the several location-based services (loopt, brightkite, etc.) all in one place, it could help all of them get over that user adoption/value curve and speed adoption of new users. -does anything like this exist? Should it?
I don't think i can truly fork HN. HN is not only the code, it's also pg's leadership and the community that has gathered around it. (if you can give me the code for that, i'd love to fork :P ) Anyone else than pg making this work is much more difficult, as HN already exists and critical mass will be hard to acheive.

The reason I think trolls won't post as much is that while trolling is based on impulse decisions, making a payment is a much more elaborate procedure and I don't think the impulse to troll would usually be enough to overcome that threshold. But even if it does, blocking that account, noting the payment details and blocking further re-registration with them raises the re-registration barrier even higher.
Because YC isn't obliged to force teams to change the project ideas that they bring to the table based on any of the hundreds of applications they didn't accept?
exactly. good comments filter up, bad comments filter down. recent comments need to be evaluated (and responded to, which are then evaluated themselves) to get placed. the orange is an unnecessary distraction.

the previous commenter makes a good point about mental state. I was pointing out the same effect. if everyone here was mature and not-defensive and self-confident, then we probably wouldn't have so much trouble with moderating discussions. most people here will skip over the orange fine, but i believe it may exacerbate karma trolling and feelings of ill-will.
2010: The year Windows Mobile 7 makes contact
"This site has temporarily exceeded its connection limit. Please try again in a few minutes."

I'd move it from nearlyfreespeech.net to linode/slicehost/etc to start with. The bandwidth pricing on nearlyfreespeech is tons ($1/GB) compared to linode ($0.10/GB).

Once I got in, very cool, bookmarked :)
No.

Hasn't experience over the past 10+ years answered this question been already?

1. Audience shrinkage — less readers and posters would mean less garbage, but it would also denote less of everything, including quality…

2. Less of an attraction even to one subscribed with the subtraction of public visibility (outside search engine scope).

3. Already a tried and failed proposition — look at NY Times, WSJ, etc.…

The genie is out of the bottle and their really is no way to stuff it back in and cap it again…
Yes, because what Hacker News needs most right now is a bigger sense of entitlement among its users.