skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've tried a lot of systems (omni* and a few others), but here are what stick with me:

Emacs Org-Mode for the day-to-day stuff that I want to keep in front of me when I'm writing code. It's essentially perfect for it. Using the tables with pasted-in code is utterly fantastic (hint: replace-regex '^' with '|> ' and it'll keep your indentation before you hit tab and tablify the code).

Org mode does tables, outlines, todo lists, agendas, mostly everything a programmer's going to want day to day.

For higher-level planning, I leave the workstation. Get a cup of coffee/soda/juice/who-are-we-kidding-its-coffee and a table away from computers. A moleskine (the squared one, with the grid layout) and a good pen (I like these $4 pilot extra-fine vballs) is what I use. Relaxing music in noise-canceling headphones FTW.

Do yourself a favor and begin with the habit of writing the date on a page when you start writing on it. It's useful for you to see your progress over time, and it can be helpful later in patent disputes.

As for the thinking process itself, here's my heuristic:

- Small apps are mostly driven by a framework you just use (probably some MFC/DI garbage). Keep your code clean & organized, and work a little to keep the expected chaos from working with always-mysterious frameworks contained. E.g. don't ever trust the framework to handle your model code for you. Use proxy classes, multiple inheritance, whatever to firewall yourself from that chaos.

- Medium apps have enough internal structure to get past the cognitive mass of the framework. There, you end up with a top-level abstraction that structures the app. Be it a pipeline, a set of command objects, or a data structure you maintain, there's one big one and the app is structured by it.

- Large apps have a few of these. They're independent subsystems and you firewall their interactions the best you can. Unless you've got the time/labor for large-scale refactoring, you generally just try to keep the abstractional dams from breaking. In those cases, I usually try to get some middleware in there, so I can easily handle stubs, testing, and interactive use with each. If you've got a REPL, you can avoid it, but in C++/Java, it can really help.
I worry about this division between users but kudos to pg for trying an worthwhile test. It's an example where I wish there was some content analysis with karma to illustrate spheres of influence. But I just don't think we can ever get there with such small samples of text, as is typical of the vast majority of comments.

If you don't like the current "division" between users, then please offer some alternatives. I'm stumped. I recognize the need but I'm not sure it fits. Rather than be outed as an Orange, I might prefer some increased weight on comment upvotes but behind the scenes. At least then there could still be some behavior modification, but it would be mostly without division between the haves and have-nots.

EDIT: Maybe it's just my latent fear of getting beat up as soon as we walk out of the room?
That's awesome. Problem is I use Chrome, or I'd jump on it in a heartbeat. Thanks though.
When it happens to me it is because I have replied to that comment. I assume that it is because if you replied to a comment you DO think it is worth reading it, and it surely contributed to the discussion, therefore no sense in downmodding it
>> The age of something is simply the measurement of elapsed time

>now you're changing the terms.

Ambiguous use of terminology (e.g. age defined one way vs. age defined another way) is equivocation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation_fallacy

May I suggest the term senescence, or biological senescence, be used instead of the term age? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence
Erlang Conference in SF
You can't downmod a response to your own comment. That's the only anomaly I've seen.
Hey, you've got it easy, you're orange :)

Ok, that's an attempt at humor, which I understand is risky in and of itself. But seriously, orange or not is really not relevant, what you have to say is. The more visible distinctions there are between users the more people will be given an incentive to try to game the system.

My 'alternative' would be the exact opposite, remove all distinctions between users in the layout, including the visibility of the 'points', use the points system out of sight to give/remove functionality and to influence the order in which comments and submissions are sorted.
I've wondered for a long time whether the following system would work:

Everyone can vote posts up or down if they like. There is a feature which statistically analyses how your votes correlate with other votes, and you can choose to see votes that the analysis predicts you will find interesting and worthwhile based on what you have liked seeing in the past.
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As Dasil says you cant down mod replies to your comments (for obvious reasons :D).

I find I can vote on comments I reply to... (it doesnt, to me, appear to be logical that if your replying you agree with the post).
Testability as a design metric didn't seem to be mentioned in all this.

When I started looking into Unit testing & TDD, I was surprised I didn't see any sort of style guide for it. Lots of stuff like that available for OO, C++ templates, etc. But I wasn't satisfied with what I saw in this area.

It's only now that I really appreciate a REPL for this purpose. Some sort of way for a developer to interact with live running code, without having to trace it in a debugger, is very, very useful.

But, REPLs aren't available for many languages. Instead, you end up designing code that's easy to test. I'll test every class with logic in it, but only the methods with real code in them (+ a little extra, b/c I don't trust my ego on this).

The code tends to feel dumber, but the development process becomes more linear, as I get it more right at the time of that initial test development than I would otherwise. E.g. I don't have to go back to it to fix bugs later, which is more painful as I've already forgotten my thinking on some of that stuff.
Putting my graduate student hat on, it seems like what HN is faced with is a problem of mechanism design. If we can agree that the goal of HN is good news and discussion (and defer to pg on the details of exactly how those resolve), then the question is how to design comment/karma features so that the best interest of the community aligns with the best interest of the individual poster.

pg doesn't mention the implications of gaming (in this context, flaws in the mechanism) in the newsnews announcement. I haven't had time to read the entire primary thread, but if anyone has pointers, send them my way.

Also, if any game theory type people are around know more about mechanism, would be interested in what you think of the new commenting features.
Anything that doesn't segregate the users? Has nobody read The Sneetches?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Stories

I liked neilk's idea a lot better:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466155

And jacquesm's idea best:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467573

Why do we need to show points?
That is interesting... (you get my upvote :D)

You could take that farther and create a "pool" of good users who vote and comment in keeping with the HN style (a pool that could, of course, grow over time) and if your voting habits correlated to them your vote began to be worth more.
Brains, Brains, Brains, Brains: different flavors of genius
This has radically altered my thinking about my launch. I'm going for the web "old-school", not for the the early adopters, but why should I deliberately lock them out. I can provide a couple of shiny things for the EA to find, use, hack and adapt.

The ground swell propagation of usage is probably best accomplished by getting an EA excited, so help them to help you, even if they're not your intended actual market.
Well I cannot downmod comments I have already replied to. Up/downmodding does NOT mean you agree or disagree with that comment, it means you find it useful/interesting or that it has added something/contributed to the discussion
A few minutes of research turned up this. Not very nice.
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/tutorials/javascript/domstylesh...
Okay - this is exactly the problem that occurred to me within 2 seconds of learning how this feature works. If it's going to work any way, it should at least be a GRADIENT from grey to orange. This way of doing suddenly splits your whole user community into two groups, the Greys and the Oranges.

Anyone remember what happened to the Blues and Greens in Rome? To the Eagles and the Rattlers in the Robbers' Cave Experiment? If not, see here: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/01/the-two-party-s.html

There's a huge difference in human psychology between a gradient and a divider. Not that this is necessarily a good idea anyway - it encourages people not to post on old threads, or even not to post too far off the top of the page, etc. But in any case - if you're going to do it at all, make it a gradient!
The article says why: to make it more easily skinnable by simply referencing a different style file. Skinning tables takes more work.
Thanks! I think you're right, that in order to avoid fragmenting the site into a lot of different subclasses with different tastes that there could be a pool of "good" users who determine what the default "good" story and "good" post are.
It feels kind of weird when.. you get rejected and than 5 months later read about.. your idea
> The age of something is simply the measurement of elapsed time since something came into its present configuration. A 'war on aging' makes as much sense as

You are committing the fallacy of equivocation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation_fallacy

The war under discussion is a war on aging, definable as biologically senescencing, rather than a war on simply existing-over-time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence

Please also see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466749
I guess the entire group could be hired by a company trying to build a competing product.
Boy, that didn't take long even by my standards.
Why? Creating cross-platform non-native custom widgets on the desktop isn't much easier.
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#3 almost sounds like the definition of a startup:

The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people (10% to 25% compared to the so-called normal systems).
You cannot downmod comments that are older than 24 hours.
So, how much does it cost to work there?

Is there a cheaper package that covers just hanging around?

;-)
"Location of work is Bangalore" (last line)
Right, I agree. Content matters. But without some really powerful content analysis, points may be the best that can be done.

Isn't there something useful in having some feedback measure of things you've contributed? If anything, without points, I'd worry that the devaluation of comments would get much worse. At least now there is some valuation.
OK, here's my alternative:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467574
Shouldn't you be off changing diapers?:-)
That's an interesting point that I shall explore. However, it's not the whole story. Although I wouldn't want to, I cannot downmod your comment. That might be explained by the fact that it's a response to mine.

I'm still not completely clear on the logic, but some of the factors involved are surfacing.

Is there a complete explanation somewhere, rather than just some reverse engineering?
Visible distinction between users creates an upperclass and an underclass, if there is no very good reason for doing so I am very much against it.

Use the 'karma' counters as an internal mechanism to reward users with extra features or to remove those features if their karma drops below the thresholds again because of misbehviour. Use it to sort the submissions and the comments possibly using some kind of weighting system so that the 'good' content (content by long established users) bubbles to the top, it gives newcomers something to strive for.

But don't make it visible, remove the points from the header of the site, keep it under water. Why?

This is why:

- good 'karma' need not be shown, it comes across in every posting you make, because you are supposedly showing good judgement in your writing, not in the 'colour of your name'

- there will be no timidity for rookies to speak out against 'old timers', similar bs happens on ./ where your UID number seems to be the arbitrator of the discussion

- karma has some meaning outside of HN, and if I take that meaning correctly then you're not going to get any for showing it

- karma tends to self-reinforce enough when used as an underwater feature, it will self-reinforce out of control as soon as you make it into a distinct mark

- this feature to create a distinction between the 'top group', the 'incrowd' of those who are 'better' and 'the rest' (the unwashed masses or whatever you wish to call them) will be an incentive to game the system, if it is underwater such an incentive is not present.
I've yet to see it being used in any other way.
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Speed up your JavaScript, Part 3
People in the top 10, for that matter. I guess some of us just post a lot with only the occasional valuable comment;-)
I think you're subconsciously reinventing k-means clustering with random starting points.

Subclasses might not be such a bad idea at all actually, after all there are different coffee shops for different tastes as well. If a site could be made to automatically appear as a place that caters to your 'taste' that would be a pretty awesome development. Everybody would feel right at home.
I dunno... Those 4-8 GB of RAM would be better used on the motherboard as disk cache.
Of this feature, yes. See under 4 August at the bottom of the page:

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

I don't know about in general though. There are a "mythical" things about this site that sort of just happen, and you get used to. I don't know if there's a full explanation somewhere!
Indeed. Train on the Oranges, test on the Greys.
I don't think his idea is to remove points completely - they would still determine where the comment gets placed on a page, they just wouldn't be displayed as prominently.

This would really change the UX of the site, actually - I find myself scanning over just points/names after having read the first few posts in a long thread.
Orange names? I'm almost color blind and my LCD screen doesn't display the color in the right way, I never noticed the colors. :°(
I know very little about statistics so I wouldn't have much of a clue about the right algorithm to use, but I do have a good idea of the behaviour I would like.

I think the behaviour I want is exactly that required by the Netflix Prize:

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

although rather than rating comments 1 to 5 I think I'd probably just have three levels (don't appreciate, neutral, appreciate).
Initially this struck me as a counter-productive and elitist measure, but it didn't take me long to swing to a positive reaction.

Really, I want less crappy comments and more good ones. I've been skimming comments for months now, for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I am simply not that interested anymore.

Hopefully people do hesitate and refrain from submitting a comment, because that is probably a comment I don't want to see. In the end, if someone really cares, they will post a comment anyway, and that should give the 1 point comments more perceived worth (maybe I will no longer treat them so harshly during my skimming?).
Because you posted the 'original story', you can't downvote direct replies to it.
Well, it looks like I was looking at comments older than 24hrs (can downmod comments I have replied to, in the last few minutes): so I am wrong on this :-)
What confuses me is that there is not a man page that explains the workings of news.yc
Parts of it can be pieced together in SEARCHING - or in articles like the Feb 4 newsnews on new comment/color-highlighting feature.
Nor have I seen an explanation of why no man page (e.g., "if you dont' understand how it works you're too noob a hacker for these pages" or "we don't explain it all because we don't want it to be too easy to hack the site" (i.e., beat the system) ).
As an admitted noob, I remain... puzzled.
I strongly disagree that desktop clients have a bright future.

1. If you've ever tried to do cross-platform desktop client GUI work you'd know that getting it to look good on every platform is a nightmare. It's really no different from where we are with RIA.

2. Right now there's a large amount of work going into js frameworks that means that we'll see these techniques become standardized over time.

3. If you look at desktop clients there's actually a lot of innovation in terms of small UI components (see most things that Apple is doing) and so desktop clients are by no means static.

4. As js and the frameworks improve we'll see more and more applications move into the browser. At my current startup we are working on a very rich application and there was no question of doing a native desktop client, there was just no point tying ourselves to a specific OS.
Which area of India does this school belong to? Your initiative looks interesting
I'm not entirely sure why this is worth posting up on the front page...

Ideas are everywhere. Even groundbreaking, "hard" ideas (e.g. Calculus) can occur in several places at once. Certainly, a flash game widget is not a new idea and is being implemented by dozens of start-ups at this point in time. The fact that two of them were connected with YCombinator is neither surprising nor inappropriate.

This is a good example of why VCs never sign NDAs, basically. The chances of this stuff happening by chance (rather than malice) is way too high.

It sounds trite, perhaps, but it's worth repeating that ideas are just one ingredient in a successful start-up. Execution, timing, people, choice of technology, marketing... all those are just as important, if not more.
how do you mean by already ?

I can still down mod the comments in this thread that I have replied to.

EDIT: wait NOW I see :) I cant down the above comment. Ignore me :)
Try not to get involved in a long discussion, because this will only end with a whole lot of, 1 point posts, which will probably drag your personal average down. Lastly, I just had a brain freeze about something. If I can remember, I try to check my comments regularly, to see if anyone has commented on my submission. I'm very serious, personally, in that of making more of an effort to not only comments like this with someone Else's submissions, but to really listen in, if you will, and take genuine notice to the comments presented to me, by others, relative to their view point, about said Article, and take the helpful hints from those admonishments, and eventually become good enough at this journalism stuff, and who know's what may become of it. Rob!
One day with Palm Pre (a fantasy)
This is a fair point.

Some people are here for startup stuff. Some people for codign/programming stuff. Yet others (though probably a smaller demographic) are here for social stuff. And more.

Plus others are here for a mix.

Some way to tailor what you see would be awesome! not too much that each "genre" is different but enough that the posts or articles you want to see are at the top :D
If they're all trollbait, the least offensive wins?
Here I was, just days away from being able to down-mod people and they double the karma requirements.

Don't be silly pistoriusp, after being here for two years I'm not surprised your last 50 average comments karma is not 3.5 less than your last 25 average comments karma. Your definitely leveling off, which should be fine. Although there have been many more users lately, so perhaps there is karma inflation that should boost your average karma over time.
OMG! I totally had this idea, too!
Google Latitude shows what’s wrong with Nokia’s social location (SoLo) strategy
I guess many people around here would agree that ideas are a dime-a-dozen and often times change during execution. However, I completely understand that you're feeling bummed, I would be too...

And even though others are working on it, that doesn't mean you shouldn't! What is keeping you from going ahead as planned, even if it's without YC?
Solving a different problem
OMG! YouTube for games! That was my idea, and you all stole it!

But seriously, this is an idea that's 100% execution, with tons of little things to get right.
I'm upvoting this because it's worth discussion and I know how you feel.

True story: I knew a webmaster running a popular, static site that was bringing in $2k/month near pure passive for him, but he'd stopped updating his site and seemed to be losing interest. I decided I'd offer him $20,000 for his site since it was really related to the company I was with, and I thought I could make a decent return on it. I was willing to go as high as $30,000 if I went through the books and they looked good.

So I meet the guy, and we went bowling together. I start talking, and a competitor I knew had just bought the site a couple months ago - for $30,000.

Meh, I saw a little bit of red for a while, but this competitor was one of my most respected. He and I would go out to lunch from time to time and share ideas, but I'd never even insinuated at anything like my plan.

Great ideas will be came up with independently of each other. If you're seeing a pattern of ideas you've got being created, then great job - it means you're thinking intelligently about market needs and possibilities. Just keep hustling, move fast when you do have a great idea, execute, and you'll get yours. Cheers man, I know the feeling - it sucks - but keep it up and you'll get yours.
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Without tying to be harsh I'd say 'get over it'.

Many people come up with the same idea around the same time (take a look at Newton and Leibniz). Also, it wouldn't be a great surprise if information leaked inside YC. I bet PG isn't willing to sign an NDA when you come to see him (and no VC will sign an NDA). That's not to say that PG is being malicious, it's just the nature of being exposed to thousands of business plans that they'll be leakage between them.
New rule: screw the comments where you're trying to help one person understand anything. It'll just lower your comment average. Better to post generally agreeable and interesting but mostly forgettable nuggets that impact a larger group.
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