skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Though I've never been able to find the results and complete study methodology online (can anyone?), Mayer is a CS grad from Stanford, as well as head of the UI team at Google. I'm guessing she and her group know what they are doing.

I'd be more than willing to bet that they controlled for these variables you mention, else the test would be useless. Sure, it's right to be skeptical, but they do this for a living.

Given Google's stake in having accurate data, they probably bothered to do it correctly.

(And I am not usually a defender of Google.)
tables have their place and uses.

css has its place and uses.

who cares about the ideological warfare. if css is the future, things will evolve towards it naturally. if not, it won't.
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"don't downvote things you disagree with, only things which detract from the conversation"

Maybe it's time to make the functionality different, make the mechanisms easier to not get wrong with respect to the guidelines.

Perhaps you hit the downvote button and you are given two choices "off topic / detracts" or "I disagree" and the latter is a no-op with respect to karma.
"After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable."

I guess that means they controlled for the other variables.
I'm tired of hearing about a better battery. Yes it would be useful and lucrative, but it's a very hard problem that has been worked on by lots of people for a long time.
> That's not the point of CSS.

Really? If that's true then either 1) CSS is useless for dynamic content or 2) you have to dynamically generate your CSS to match your dynamic content. Which is it?
Presumably because there are more users now, so if the direction hasn't changed the values of the community shouldn't have changed either.
Each of your comments detracted from the conversation, so I downmodded them all, if that makes you feel better.
India's "$10 Laptop" is Vaporware, So Far
Microsoft: Windows 7 UAC is fine, don't worry, we don't want to talk about it, OK?
Sure, $25,000 is a lot for 9 weeks. But TED, where SU was officially announced, costs $6,000 for 4 days.

Also, maybe they'll use exponential progress to halve their fees every year. It'll cost under $1000 in 5 years, and under $1 in 15!
I wonder how these scores were affected by their placement on the thread.

I've observed that many good HN comments that are added relatively late often fail to get any additional positive votes -- my guess is that people can't be bothered to scroll down, and/or assume that anything with a low score is not worth reading especially when there are other comments in the same thread with high ratings.
McKinsey suggests and practices a rule about growth: don't grow more than 25% per year if you want to preserve your culture. I think once HN started having self-reflective posts it passed into "Shirky Completeness", a stage in communities where the old hats become preoccupied with preserving the culture and cannot keep up with training new users to fit their mould. Sub groups fork off to the point that the several concurrent streams stop interacting. My friend and I realized we were reading completely different aspects of HN.

Karma is (or should be) a proxy for quality. But there are no mechanisms except social ones.

I also suspect that there are certain commercial "reputation" companies that have HN in their sights now. Not spammers per se, but father along the continuum to PR. There have been quite a lot of activity geared toward "whipping the froth" and post-storms around specific topics.

It may be time to fork HN. I actually also suspect PG has already forked HN for private YCombinator use. I haven't seen a post from RTM or TLB for over a year.
I think the magnitude of impact might be due to the search engine market. Results of different search engines are usually indistinguishable (to most web users), so the most important factors become design and speed. In other markets the balance may be different.

I'm not saying that speed isn't important for everyone, but having that killer feature, even if it slows down your site, might be what sets you apart from your competitors.
Did you miss the part about the $25,000? Best as I can tell from the TED website, that's the admission to twelve TED conferences. Or two to three years of state university tuition (depending on your home state). Or a very very large book collection. Or one hell of a lot of plane tickets to see the lectures that every "famous futurist" gives for free, or for a relatively modest conference fee, multiple times per year. (If they didn't give public talks all the time these people wouldn't be famous futurists! And I assure you that the more obscure futurists, toiling away in academia, are almost certainly available to chat with you at a personal one-on-one lunch for a lot less than $25,000, or even $2000.)

But, you know, one of the side effects of population growth is that there's now more than one sucker born every minute.

UPDATE: Someone else in the thread says TED costs $6000 for four days. So, only four TED conferences. Or something. If you have to ask you probably can't afford it. ;)
You are doing "karma inflation" for various abilities given to users, but what about for post and comment ranking?
Summary: Object oriented beats monkey patching.
Agreed. Perhaps it would help stem the groupthink if points on individual comments were hidden? That way, one would need to judge the comment based on its own merit, rather than going with the crowd.
Your post is on the front page. This means we are still actively introspecting as a community. That's a very healthy sign in my opinion, so I wouldn't worry so much.
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Ask HN: What's yours?
downvote <- disagree

flag <- detract

how about using it that way? May be PG can have some logic to screen all flagged conversation on flag score than a semantic scan or abusive content.
People vote their emotion. Can't change it.

You can pretend that people vote based on value of the article, whether it should appear lower or higher on the page, etc. But you're just fooling yourself.

So the karma system rewards people who make the most people feel the best. You can call that cleverness, schmoozing, politics, or bullshit. Because of this, it promotes people thinking of like mind, not necessarily interesting things. It's "let's say happy, slightly interesting things to each other about information that doesn't challenge our worldview"

Known bug.
Didn't it start off as a dating site? I thought that was why the name was what it was.
Just a nit: Greenspun is wrong about food production technology. Food scarcity is no longer a problem: we have enough to feed everyone in the world, and make some of them fat.

Distribution is an issue in some places, but production is a solved problem.
I think the issue here is not that the DMCA has been abused, but that it has been circumvented entirely. Under the DMCA, the copyright holder would have to identify relevant works, decide if they think their copyright has been violated, then issue a takedown request (which can later be challenged by the work's author, at which point the work is reinstated and there is a court case).

Under YouTube's scheme, the copyright holder merely hands over a set of audio "signatures" and all works matching them are muted -- even if they may turn out to be fair use. The copyright holder never identifies infringing works directly, and there is presumably no chance to challenge the decision. That's not how the DMCA is supposed to work.

While YouTube's scheme is probably catching mostly copyright violations, it's kind of scary that they have equated "algorithmic signature matches" with "copyright violations". The reason "fair use" is such a gray area is because it's really hard to define what is free speech and what is a copyright violation. Handing the decision to an algorithm isn't a good solution.
Personally, I write a lot of tests. It dominates my development process. I'm always thinking about structuring the code I'm writing in such a way that it can be tested.

I didn't always. I think a project has to grow past a certain size, to the point where you can't immediately remember what all the parts do, before the need for tests becomes painfully apparent.
I enjoyed the story thanks for sharing, a couple things I didnt get is why the author "was trying to avoid this.." and why "after some exchanges its best to share"

- I bet he feels some ownership, over the product.

- The 2nd option is this is a resume` play, but probably not likely.

either way great story; although short - good luck with your other endeavors
It is a very well substantiated attack on these ills.
Can you give examples of how to make loading perceived as faster? All I know is progress indicators.
U.S. Plans $500,000 Cap on Executive Pay in Bailouts
I'm pretty sure the $25k is for those who Google and/or other sponsors don't give a scholarship to. Its a nice way of saying if we haven't invited you, you can come; but BYOB (bring your own bank)
Then can you explain what his reasons are for hating design patterns, Larry Wall and Unix to the point of calling them criminal?
There may be a psychological effect too. I've noticed that once people think of a piece of software as fast, they're more likely to think of it as good in other respects, even unrelated ones.
"I'd be interested in hearing what made you consider this article nonsense." And what would you do to change it?

(I couldn't resist.)

The article was a reminder that team building is the underlying success of projects. Bringing people together and getting them to have a stake in the project is at least 60% of the success of a project. (The 60% is derived from a study written up in either CACM or IEEE's Computer that successful projects had the common characteristic of weighting people at 60, process at 20, and technology at 20. If anyone remembers which periodical and when it was published I'd love to reread it.)
I'm not sure I understand your experiment. You expressed the same thing three ways, so people clearly aren't voting differently according to whether they agree or disagree. They're voting on how you expressed yourself.

Personally, I don't disagree with the votes much. The witty sarcasm has been up-modded too much, which is a problem on all sites, but it was the most concise and least agressive post.
Why should anyone be penalized in any way for disagreeing? Is well thought out disagreement any less valuable than the opinion of someone who agrees with you?

Why would we as a community even want people to know which opinion is more popular (provided both opinions are intelligent and well thought out)?
I think you're right here. Also depends on the timing.

If you're the first commenter, and you're 'kinda' right, you'll get far more upvotes than if you're late to the party and very right.

I think the reason the 3rd comment got upvoted was that it wasn't a direct comment, but a response to someone else.

Having said that, I think we're reading way too much into this.
A pair of links about Ira Glass
I upvote things that I think are more important for other people to read -- that is, if I think it should be displayed higher on the page.

I downvote things that I don't think other people should bother reading -- that is, if they're uninsightful, irrelevant, or somehow distasteful.

The vast majority of things I just leave alone.

I think the word karma itself is partly to blame. It makes you think you're rating whether the comment is good or bad, but the effect of the up/down arrows is merely to sort comments based on relative quality/value for people who view the thread after you. For a while, I've toyed with the idea of suggesting a new interface that asks users to sort comments, rather than upvote or downvote, but I haven't thoroughly thought about it.
SaaS vs Shrinkwrap or Never trust a company not on Twitter
> don't downvote things you disagree with, only things which detract from the conversation

True, we shouldn't downvote something just because we disagree with it, but it's more difficult to define what's detracting from the conversation.

Some may disagree with a comment, but since they "can't" just downvote because of that, they deem it "detracting" and maybe even say so. I think we should only downvote comments that are clearly inappropriate, not those that are somewhat off-topic. Everyone has their way of trying to contribute to conversations, and the conversations don't have to fall strictly under whatever topic is in the headline.
I created a tool for exactly this purpose. http://www.peerviewr.com. It is very early and very rough, but the goal is to solve the problem you mention. It allows you to post links, youtube links, upload files and pictures, and create blog posts. You can share within your group only or it can be made public. It is basically a combination between Google Groups and Wordpress. I would love to make it grow with your feedback. I call it Glogger, but the only domain I had available was at: http://www.peerviewr.com Again pls let me know what you think I believe it is useful and would be fun to make it grow.

If you have any feedback feel free to email me at: support@skuttlefish.com or just post here to HN.
I suppose if there is no market it does not matter how great the product is. Take the laser disc. It was pretty cool, but it just never really penetrated the market. So maybe one does not have to "begin marketing" before developing, but one at least needs to research the market enough to make sure there is a market for the product being developed.
How does it not make more sense that traffic dropped because the average user only wants to see 30 results and saw them all on a single page instead of navigating to three separate pages. Revenue dropped because they showed 1/3 the amount of adwords. Did I miss something here?
Apple is an interesting example and I can see why you think that, but I think Apple does do marketing before they make the product. I don't have an inside source at Apple, but I am sure they are taking feedback from current products as well as researching competition when they are deciding what to make next.

I think they are constantly trying to listen to their customers, and then wow. Sometimes they even try and show customers what they really want even when they haven't asked for it. That is why I think they are successful. They do their research to find out the real problem and not just the symptom of the problem.

Some might not call that marketing but I do.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216071
We are very test focused, but I wouldn't claim we are TDD. We also have layers of testing which I consider important.

We have a quick set of unit tests that we run before very check in (10 seconds).

Next our CI kicks off after check in and runs 10 minutes worth of full system tests, booting up opensource software and running it against the system, destroying DBs and recreating them from scratch and running again, etc.

* Finally we have nightly test which run for a few hours, at this point we have 15 projects run against our system. We run projects over and over to test stability, we do security testing against the current code. We have multiple simulated users running against the system checking for performance bottle necks. This phase doesn't catch new issues that often, but helps us to assure we don't regress in performance, security, or overall compatibility support.
It sounds like the programming equivalent would be: Release early and often.
I think that's the point of this example. If technology is improving at an exponentially accelerating rate, how come we have all these technologies sitting around that aren't improving at all, despite lots and lots of effort?

Sterling makes a similar point in his hilarious deconstruction of the Singularity, which IMHO is required listening for students of this topic:

http://media.longnow.org/seminars/salt-0200406-sterling/salt...

He points out that Singularitarians go on and on about the spectacular technology improvements in data networks, but manage to ignore all the other networks -- plumbing, railroads, highways -- that are much more important to our lives but which haven't changed technologically since the 1950s or before.
MOTOROLA KRZR K1 COSMIC ROSE RED UNLOCKED
Motorola KRZR K1 is a phone built for the fashion minded individual. While looks it has in spades thanks to the thin frame and reflective body paint it certainly doesn’t lack in the features department. Quad Band phone is only 16mm deep and the cool blue exterior.
Yeah many times when you are 'spiking' and idea you can work through a simple small example fastest without testing. I agree when you are quickly just trying to see if something is possible testing will slow you down, and isn't worth the benefits of TDD.

Then when I start to integrate that solution into real production code I go back and add some tests. (mostly integration tests)
It looks similar to the CSS we generate from s-expressions in Lisp (even has : before keywords). We're in the process of dumping it altogether, though, and doing everything in Javascript.

Misleading title, by the way. Even if you generate CSS from (slightly) higher-level source, you're still using CSS for layout.
And of course, if you find that these rituals are not working for you, then you "obviously" are not doing them properly.
As a member of a household that has become the de facto PC repair shop for our circle of friends, I'm glad Vista's UAC is extra paranoid. Sure, it's annoying at first and it hasn't saved my PC from anything (yet), but for casual users it will save them from self-inflicted problems down the road.
Handing Out Money To Advertise Website...
A guy in NYC is handing out money to everyone if they wait in line. Seems like a decent way to advertise a website. He must have a lot of extra money.
carbon-emacs. It's my first emacs ( I never used emacs on unix or NT). Carbon-Emacs seemed to keep more with emacs' UI guidelines compared to aquamacs. Note I think I'm running carbon emacs, I run the one with the purple logo.

I have the option key (windows key on this keyboard) mapped to Hyper. I use Hyper to navigate around emacs.
H-(n|p|b|f) move up, down, left, or right one window in a frame

H-(N|P|B|F) change the size of the current window height/width

other hyper bindings open apps that I use regularly (shell, anything, sql)
I'm enjoying working through http://www.amazon.com/Illustrating-Evolutionary-Computation-... .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTHvs3V8DBA

That link is a talk on YSlow, a tool you can use to lower download speed, render time, and perceived load time. It's awesome.
The author is well known for being a troll in some IRC channels as well.
Hofstadter has an article about traffic and the benefit of defection. A Universally Optimal (UO) path isn't necessarily Individually Optimal (IO) if everyone else is obeying the laws of UO. So if I know that everyone is going to obey UO laws, there's an increased incentive to defect to an IO route and save substantial time off my travel. However, if everyone follows the IO route, travel is slower for me than the UO route is for me.

The underlying theme of cooperation v. defection reappears through time, from the Ring of Gyges to the Prisoner's Dilemma to experiments with splitting money. I'd be all for a computerized traffic system if everyone had to follow it.

Experiments where n units are divided between two people where one person can split the money, and the other person can approve/disapprove of the split. If the second person approves, both walk away with the money, if they disapprove, nobody gets anything. I'm sure someone has links to experimental results, but if the divide is too large ($9 / $1), even though it's a gain for the second person, they reject the offer.
I'm having a hard time seeing how using the search page (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23groupname) doesn't solve that issue.
(defun remove-distractions ()
(set-frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen 'fullboth))
http://murthyforum.atinfopop.com/4/OpenTopic?a=cfrm&s=10... is good for Visa and Immigration related topics.
Terminal > Preferences > Settings > Keyboard > select the 'Use option as meta key' checkbox
I'm by any standard an absolute rookie here and I realize that gives me 0 standing on how things 'used to be', but as compared to how things are elsewhere HN is a very large improvement.

That might be reflective of how small the site still is but at the same time it seems that the quality of the discussion is well above most tech oriented subcultures out there.

More users will mean more submissions, eventually the 'new' queue will go by so fast it will be harder to pick out the good stuff, hopefully enough eyeballs on the new submissions will keep the spam and the astroturfing down to a minimum.

And keep in mind that even a user with huge 'karma' can have a bad day, it's an average, not an instantaneous measurement of quality.

There is clear evidence of what you classify as 'whipping the froth' (beautiful metaphor):

For instance there have been many attempts to get the google friend tracking feature listed, at some point I saw three submissions on the 'new' page at the same time and a whole bunch of them that had already passed by, clearly that is not helping at all but it does not seem like anybody cares enough to do something about it. The more that gets a foothold the harder it will be to get rid of it.

Outright spam could be easily handled by making it impossible to submit links until you've crossed some karma threshold, linkfilter.net has used that method fairly sucessfully for years.
I use GNU Cocoa Emacs built from source. This port does the most common cmd-x,c,v,q etc, which helps me transition. I'm typing on an IBM Model M attached to my Mac, so I've mapped CAPS to Command to maintain that key. I'm fine with the placement of the ctrl and option keys.

My config is at http://www.github.com/marten/emacs.d/ It contains a couple of useful fixes (such as Cocoa apps not getting the PATH var from the shell). It's got plenty comments. I should try turning more stuff into autoloads, I'm finding it on the slow side to start up right now.
Wow, that dude gets around... I recognized him as a troll from comp.lang.lisp
Blockquote Indent
You know what I'm tired of? WYSIWYG editors using an indent icon to represent what ultimately becomes a blockquote in the markup.
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tlb
You need to know both to be a web developer. Tables are a requirement for email templates. It doesn't matter which is better as long as proficiency in both skills are required.
Google Offers "Latitude" To Track People
Oh yes, we've made extensive use of Souders' work. But I was asking about something different: what things (besides progress bars and loading animations) have the psychological effect of making software feel faster?
Past attempts to fork it with newmogul.com (nickb) and nonhackernews.com (mattmaroon) didn't work:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/ycombinator.com+newmogul.co...
I also stumbled upon this yesterday, for making the rest of OS X more like emacs (or VI). OS X already has emacs keybindings for all text areas, but it is missing some functionality (backward|forward-word). OS X has a concept called input managers, which allow you to plumb in your own custom behaviour.

http://subtlegradient.com/articles/2005/12/27/gus-mueller-fl...

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/02/04/vi-input-manager/