skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I dislike the invention, the "boot" does put an end to this sort of behavior long before one racks up 700 parking tickets. Here in Denver, cars get booted usually on the 3rd offence.

Meter maids in Denver get dinged if they issue less than 79 tickets in an 8 hour shift (for some shifts):
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2009/jan/30/city-no-bu...
This is what MeFi and Kevin Smith's forums do. I believe Smith donates the money to charity, but his aim is to keep the crap out.

I'd pay $5/yr for this. Hell, I'd pay $10 if it went to a tech charity.
Metafilter has a one-time, $5 signup fee, plus restrictions on new users to post content:

http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi

Unfortunately, by raising the bar to participation, a lot of people who would be an asset to the community are prematurely excluded.

My suggestion for dealing with trolls and flames is applying a "three strikes" rule: If a new user's average comment rating drops below negative two, their account gets frozen for a set period of time. Or, you could apply some sort of "three strikes" rule (three comments -4 or below result in a freezing).
knowing you're having a back and forth with the same person is one cause of long flame wars. not knowing who you're talking to keeps things less emotional and more polite. i think.

the advantage of seeing points is the same as seeing orange usernames. it allows people to decide which comments they want to read.
Facebook lets you communicate with people from about five arm-lengths and everyone stays satisfactorily content with the arrangement.

However, with your good friends it does help organise things as you can discuss things like in a BB forum, where everyone in the thread is involved. My friends and I are currently arranging a possible quadruple-date for valentines. It would probably be quicker to arrange over the phone, but how do you involved 8+ people in the decision making in one phone call?

Simply: Facebook will not get you laid. It will not get you good friends; you may communicate with good friends through facebook but you'll find a way to do that through 2 paper cups and a length of string! It does work as a delaying tactic so that you don't loose acquaintances, however I have little compunction against ditching acquaintances so this doesn't really help me.
Definitely love the usefulness of this so far. I've already implemented the grep for stuff script ignored .svn directories. Been looking for how to do that for months.

I would make it totally non-registration necessary. For example, I'd like to upvote some scripts but I don't like that I have to be signed in to do so. Its a great idea for a site, but I don't see it becoming a huge community where people trade scripts, rather a place where someone posts a small script they find. Thus, I'd like to be able to post scripts and vote on them without being a member. Or, make it only possible to downvote scripts by being a member.

I'll definitely be using this to learn some new command line stuff. Great idea!
Keeping careful track of who you tell what does not sell widgets to customers.
Do you have any idea how much billable time is lost/spent with a group of highly skilled hackers sitting around commenting? Millions of dollars? Tens of millions?

HN is a bunch of bits. Worth about as much as any other bunch of bits. Without the people's investment of time and effort in submitting and commenting the site is worthless.
No, but I'd pay a $20 one-time fee. The reason for this is that I find recurring costs to be a hassle to worry about.
That's with trouble with being on the frontpage of both reddit and hacker news. My hosts, NearlyFreeSpeech reckon their systems can handle the surge. But apparently not.
I have mixed feelings about the orange highlighting.

Yes, I think it will help improve the quality and perhaps brevity of comments, and I think it sets up a visual caste system.

Writing and getting comments upmodded make me feel a little better - a little recognition but reading comments (or listening to them via TextAloud) is why I read News.YC.

I comment frequently but sometimes sporadically, and I comment to try to add value to a discussion (e.g. point out something I've read before) or sometimes for the heck of it. I think it's good to express opinions.

I remember at one point making it onto the top 100 'Leaders' in News.YC and it felt great. I felt like I was competing with swombat for the bottom 5 spots. I think this was around when swombat had 1300 or so karma. He now has 4924! Amazing. Consistency. It is nice to be recognized but it is fine with me to just be a small fractional part of this community, and it is hard to be consistently be a quality contributor (like swombat and others).

I fired up a Google spreadsheet to see why I wasn't orange (3.04 with highest thrown out vs 3.64 included).
I might pay 5$ a week for HN as it i now, but I think you would lose a lot of users at 5$/year. At which point the site might not be worth 5$/year. If you want to make money off of a website the most proven method is to use advertising or to have a basic free site and then add a premium tier.

This means finding a feature that adds 5$ a year in value but is not needed for the rest of the site. Which is not as hard as you might assume. One obvious option for HN would be the ability to bookmark and follow users. Even a simple table with timestamps of last post, and the numbers of posts in the last hour, day, week, and lifetime might do it.
Make it $5 per HOUR. That would be the perfect noprocrast.
"Time is money, after all."

A wise old man once told me: "Time is more important than money; I can always make back any money I lose, but time is gone forever."
> Death is the fundamental strength of all species.

I hope you increase the fundamental strength of our species really soon.
Already on NFS but still having these problems
No, and not because I can't afford it but because I think that any site that charges $5 for people to contribute content is misunderstanding the beauty of the web.

Everybody can contribute, even those for who $5 would be a very large expense, and you'd be surprised how big a portion of the world that would be.

Some Indian, Latin American, Chinese or Russian hacker would - even if capable of paying - find themselves locked out because they can't pay by card, either because they don't have them or because the IPSP won't allow them to use it.
The number now is (karma - 3.5)/word. So the optimal length is probably not "as little as possible", but perhaps a two-sentence paragraph.
The problem is that in most of the cases you can't tell whether a service/website is worth this one-time $5 fee. I myself have to use a service for a while to decide whether I want to pay for it or not.
The "you" now shares a common history with the "you" a second ago. Other individuals do not. Your conclusion only follows if there is no objective difference between your past self and other individuals, and there clearly is.
What I mean by wiping out is that the company ceases to exist, its stock is deregistered, and a successor company is created by the bankruptcy receiver. Stockholders in most financial companies have not experienced this, because the government regulators have decided to prop the banks up as zombies.

Suppose a consortium of Arab investors decided to believe Citi's current published balance sheet, and bought $500M of newly-issued Citi common stock at US$2.00/share, a nice discount from its $3.40/share market price. They would most likely lose every penny of that investment when Citi fesses up to the true losses.

Of course the big money investors are no longer that foolish, having been burned several times by U.S. bank "recapitalization investments" in 2007/2008. Everybody is waiting on the sidelines for honesty to develop. This flight of capital has been billed as a liquidity crisis by the Wall Street hucksters, and used to justify mammoth bailouts, but in reality it is a solvency crisis and there is an ocean of hot money itching to be spent on honest companies.
Vim Plugins You Should Know About, Part III: matchit.vim
Only if it would stop posts like this.

We're not in charge of HN, we can't set up a billing system; we can't make Paul's decisions for him and he asks for input when he wants it. As such, these musings are just killing time and taking up space on the front page where actual hacker news could be.
Create a game, and people will play it as a game. Put a number next to someone or a color and people will change behavior to change the color/number. Especially hacker/gamer/competitive males, which are clearly represented pretty well here at HN.
Ask HN: Financial Sector Shrinkage Good?
I will try to state this as succinctly as possible:

Over the past ten or more years, the percentage of the S&P500 that financial service firms occupied, as I understand it, rose from ~5 to ~20.

My opinion is that these firms (IBanks, Hedge Funds, etc.) don't really add useful innovation (even if they do add jobs), but rather they skim money from the system in the form of fees, at their most legitimate, and CDOs and CDSs at the more shady end of the spectrum.

What do you think? Will we be better off after these organizations get beat down, and there is not so much money out trying to make a quick buck, but instead is spent trying to add real value to our lives?
>"I think downmodding comments that people disagree with needs to be discouraged."

i completely agree. it might explain this in the guidelines, but it needs to be written right where people evaluate. maybe the first time someone votes they get a pop-up with the vote guidelines, kind of like sudo. it pops again once every two months as a reminder.

it's really hard not to see voting as opinion tallying rather than comment goodness. that's what voting is used for everywhere else.
On $_GET and $_POST
The orange/not orange experiment
I didn't think that this new Orange Name feature, which is currently the talk of HN, was a big deal until I read this comment in a completely unrelated thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467657

Without trying to be harsh, and given your 'orange' status I realize I'm walking on thin ice here ;)

[Note how, unprompted, the responder bows and scrapes!]

... and suddenly I realized that I've seen this Frontline documentary before. It's the legendary blue-eyed/brown-eyed experiment:

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

"On that day, a Friday, she decided to make the brown-eyed children the superior first, giving them extra privileges like second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym and five minutes extra at recess. She would not allow blue-eyed and brown-eyed children to drink from the same water fountain. She would offer them praise for being hard-working and intelligent. The “blueys” on the other hand, would be disparaged. She even made the blue-eyed children wear crepe paper armbands.

"At first, there was resistance to the idea that blue-eyed children were not the equals of brown-eyed children. To counter this, she used a pseudo-scientific explanation for her actions by stating that the melanin responsible for making brown-eyed children… also was linked to intelligence and ability, therefore the “blueys” lack of pigmentation would result in lack of these qualities. Shortly thereafter, this initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed “superior” became arrogant, bossy and otherwise unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades also improved, doing mathematical and reading tasks that seemed outside their ability before. The “inferior” classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children’s academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.

"The following Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the blue-eyed children superior. While the blue-eyed children did taunt the brown-eyed in ways similar to what had occurred the previous Friday, Elliott reports it was much less intense. At 2:30 on that Monday, Elliott told the brown-eyed children to take off their armbands and the children cried and hugged each other."

I'm not sure what to conclude about this. Except that I want to issue a desperate plea: Please don't go on to reinvent the Stanford Prison Experiment!
Sometimes, writing your own is the best way to understand the problem.

Side note: I think people said the same thing about Google developing v8. After a few months, people will accept the new engine (if it works) and it will go on to the next engine.
I'll give you one data point that you may want to consider:

When I was a high school student, it would have been difficult for me to participate in HN. $5/yr was a significant amount of money for me then ($5 = INR240). And I wasn't even poor.

Many people I know totally couldn't have afforded $5/yr when they were students. I am sure there are countries where US$5 is even more unthinkable.
Already posted:

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466613

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466533
kuro5hin.org did more or less exactly this and it pretty much killed the site. Growth reversed, and the trolls and spammers turned out to be willing to pay. Personally I'm in favour of enforcing strong identity so that folks reputations follow them around.

That being said, it does seem to have worked for Something Awful.
As someone who often bills hourly, I'll go with $0. Your time isn't fungible; it only commands a bill rate if you can commit to a start time, milestones, and a delivery date. Very few businesses want to pay for your spare cycles.
Technical Presentations: Be Prepared for Absolute Chaos
I would definitely pay (whether $5 or $50 doesnt matter) a year but feel that paying just to post/comment would merely serve to limit the number of people committed to quality contribution without offering added value to the core community. Essentially you would have to pay to help other HN users. What if the stories remained public but viewing/participating in the discussion required membership (at a cost)?
Zee goggles, Zey do noting.
If you oppose anti-aging treatments, refuse to take them. But of course, you want to decide for the rest of us. Well, death lovers: you first! How about right now? For the good of the species! What, no takers? I smell rancid hypocrisy.

Anyone opposing anti-aging research should be seen as trying to kill you and treated accordingly.

On a different note, "war" is very much the wrong metaphor to use when promoting a research effort: http://yarchive.net/med/conspiracies.html
Like others have been mentioning here, Metafilter has a fee like this, and from what I hear, it works really well for them. Thinking about it more, though, I can see how it would could really prevent new users from wanting to join. I'm not sure exactly what would happen. I'd be willing to support an experiment and try it, though.
Really? http://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_Where_did_Eclipse_come_from%3F
If I may try to put together a response..
1 - Remembr that what many refer to as the 'golden age of HN quality' is when it had less users.

2 - I am not sure I understand this, can you clarify?

3 - HN is not a newspaper, it is (among other things) a filter and a community. While people may not pay for content, they might pay for these two.
The point of monetary deployment should be balance sheet repair. Only when people's balance sheet's are repaired can normal spending resume and the layoffs stop. The point of an intervention now should not be to get the unemployment rate back down to 4%, but to prevent it from going to 15%. Therefore, the thing to do is to repair balance sheets by printing money. If you only give money to people repairing roads then consumer spending still drops off a cliff, and millions of people still lose their jobs.
Something Awful Forums charges a $10 one-time fee (plus add-ons), and it doesn't seem to impede people from doing truly stupid things, as you can see with a simple glance at their Lepers Colony: http://forums.somethingawful.com/banlist.php
The actual # of unemployed is most likely higher than the reported #s. They stop counting a person as unemployed after they stop receiving the unemployment checks, no matter if they found a job or ran out of time
When I first heard about this I wondered what a 10$ laptop could be. I pictured a TI-86 graphing calculator with network access, and a VGA or TV out. Thinking back on what I did with my graphing calculator in high school I pictured a whole new generation of software hackers vs code monkeys that might start coming out of India and other developing nations.

The problem is from the picture it's missing the keys. So it's hard to think of someone hacking a way on the thing when there is no way to input new data while waiting for a bus. If we are thinking about a cheep computer then a commodore 64 for 10$ could be easy to build but that's not what they are doing.
A suitable response to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=447904

The problem is, if you abstract any amazing person into one word, it is usually "genius." Which elicits the natural tendency to find patterns and make comparisons (since we are comparing "apples" to "apples" now, aren't we!?). Amongst the different flavors of humans, there is a common flavor of romanticism and bias.
You can say that again!

We did a game as part of Startup Weekend and then decided to pursue it after. Hopefully it will go into beta this week, but holy smokes it turned out to be a lot more nuanced than I ever imagined.

Really fun code to write though.
Fully Automated Advertising Software Just For Twitter
So an hour with Bill Gates where you sit around chatting is basically worth nothing since he's not being directly paid by Microsoft at the time and his time is non-fungible?
It might discourage drive-by trolling, but it does nothing to stop the more determined griefer. If anything they'll see it as a challenge.
Apparently Chrome is getting (or already has?) GreaseMonkey support:

http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/18/google-chrome-adds-greasemo...

http://mashable.com/2008/12/15/google-chrome-greasemonkey-sc...
I am glad that the author(s) revisited this topic, and acknowledged a few of the benefits.

The earlier "Working from home: Why it sucks" link and discussion (including many benefits) is here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=450408
a lot of people who would be an _asshat_ to the community are prematurely excluded

FTFY.

The problem with staying free and censoring unpopular opinions is that sometimes those opinions turn out to be right.
I love the community here at HN, but I don't want to discourage new users from joining this environment. I do believe that good moderation by long-term users will keep the environment stable, but eventually HN is likely to burn out like an old candle and charging any amount of money is just hurrying up the process that will lead to the end of HN.
My first thought was absolutely yes but then I began to wonder whether that would do anything for the quality of submissions. $5 isn't very much; why would that discourage low-value comments any more than high-value ones? I assume you mean that reading would still be free but you would have to have a paid account to post?

Counter-proposal: make it easier to tie someone's HN name to a real identity. Perhaps require email address confirmation and a waiting period for new accounts before allowing a first post?

On the high-ratio orange-username thing: neat idea but comment karma depends so much on how early in the life of the thread a comment is posted. Readers who check in less frequently and respond to longer threads are less likely to score high regardless of comment quality. (Also, I'm sad to not be orange.)
No one method works all the time, this depends on the paradigm of the target language. At least i can't use one method.

One thing that makes it much easier (at least for me) is trying to use dependency injection, otherwise i get lost.

Misko Hevery said it better.
http://misko.hevery.com/2008/11/11/clean-code-talks-dependen...
Quick. The 15 seconds it took you to write that comment? Go sell it, and tell us how much you get.
# 1.5% + $0.01 for Amazon Payments balance transfers.

# 2.0% + $0.05 for bank account debits.

# 2.9% + $0.30 for credit card for transactions above $10

# 5%+$0.05 for credit card for transactions below $10.
I dusted off my previous experiments with Drupal and started messing around. I pretty quickly ran into barriers with the 'out of the box' snap together model, but I see what you mean, the infrastructure could work with some customization.

But, the 'stinking morass' thing gets to me -- maybe better to start closer to scratch w/ e.g. Rails or Django? Why did you decide to go the 'customize Drupal' route?

(for my own notekeeping: brought this idea up again, here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466673)
I don't agree with the idea, but if it was required, i would definitely pay this amount to stay in the community. I dont visit Digg anymore since i know HN! For me it's an evolutionary step.

HN means a lot to me.
what if the people with similar ideas were told about each other so that they might collaborate. the startup i founded with my husband is very community based, and we try to make use of everyone who is interested in contributing. on the tech side i work hard to keep a well document code base and interesting modules with minimal ramp up.

we've contacted every organization we hear about (more than 50; maybe more than 100) to talk about collaboration and partnering. it's not just about sharing resources like fund-raising or development, sometimes just sharing data, or strategically working on different things is useful. almost no one wants to do this. that kind of closedness is a shame. we've been working with a UK group and Finnish group for a while now, which has been going great.
The flaw in your argument here is that in both of your examples there is nothing that the people could do to change their status via behavior.

I think the hope here is that posters who have proven themselves to be valuable to the community will have a tiny bit more perceived authority and thus help preserve the tone of discourse we have all come to enjoy. If anyone feels the desire to see there user name in orange, it seems fairly easy to accomplish that goal whereas in your examples there is no such opportunity.

I think the majority of regulars here aren't going to care too much one way or the other about the color of their name and will continue to post as they always have, and newcomers will have a goal to reach for that will encourage behavior that is in line with what we have had up to this point.
Anyone can read MeFi, but you need to be a member to post. I'm sure a similar model could apply here if wanted.
Can you add something to the user-stats page (http://news.ycombinator.com/user? ) to show the ratio? Now it shows the numerator (karma) but not the denominator (comment quantity). I'd like to know how close I am to being orange.
A little anecdote about ideas:

A few years ago, I was talking to some members of my family who had a product idea they wanted to develop. The idea was to sell travel toothbrushes with toothpaste pumps in the handle of the toothbrush, so that the paste could be stored in the toothbrush and dispensed through the head of the brush.

A few months later, I came across another couple, 5000 miles away in another country discussing the exact same idea and speaking of investing their life savings into the development.

Just last week, I heard someone speaking at a startup event about developing and working on the exact same product

The point is, somewhere right now, someone is having the EXACT SAME IDEA as you. Scratch that, 5 people are thinking about the same idea. A good idea is important, but an idea is meaningless.

Design it. Build it. Sell it. Ideas won't make you any money, and nor will complaining.