skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not suggesting that the "sky will fall", I'm suggesting that it is inevitable that this site will change if it continues to grow, user count wise. To suggest it hasn't evolved and changed from it's original state is disingenuous really. (Not that you are doing that, specifically)

Digg and reddit have turned into a glorified dorm room because that's what their average user is, a male college kid. Clearly, many people do feel the user base of this site changing - we wouldn't be commenting on this thread were this not the case.

It's not a good/bad thing, as it means you've chosen to broaden your base as opposed to remain niche. There's nothing wrong with that. But at some point, you hit the magical land where the average user demographic has changed so much that the tipping point is passed.
I know. So maybe some tweets are interesting, they usually contain links to blog posts worth checking out. I'll get to them through Reddit or HN, maybe I just don't like to be so connected.
I guess it's ironic that I've tried to watch "Waking Life" three different times and fell asleep midway each and every time. I still haven't fully watched it but I'm keeping it as my personal antidote for insomnia.
I am http://twitter.com/jeffbarr - a combination of news about the Amazon Web Services (70%) and my own stuff (30%).
FWIW, I think Jodorowsky's films could be more accurately categorized as mindrape movies.
I wonder how much equity the founders have now.
Just when I thought it couldn't become any more ludicrous...
www.twitter.com/nickleung
www.twitter.com/feedbackjar
"Perhaps give an actual, real IQ test to use a site. There are several 10- or 20-question tests that have a .85 or higher correlation to full-length tests, and that is probably good enough for internet work."

Suggesting a short-form IQ test as a way to cure the problem of site degradation suggests the author hasn't read many sites populated by people who have scored high on IQ tests. They can be appalling too. Rationality and IQ are orthogonal

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/reviews.asp?isbn=97803001...

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/papers/aij-cnt.pdf

and there are plenty of people with high IQ scores who don't know how to behave themselves in online discussion. For some really pathetic examples of IQ tests identifying high-scoring ne'er-do-wells, see

http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/

and especially

http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/history.html

for what really happens when high-IQ people get together. (Sometimes those unusual IQ tests are not validated, but then again validation is just another problem with IQ tests. )

To light a candle rather than curse the darkness, I would suggest that the way to keep an online forum on-task, civil, and useful is simply (difficultly) to moderate it well. As I recall, Reddit's "no censorship" policy has been manifested with very minimal moderation. Deal with the user's overt behavior on the site, and don't worry about the user's IQ score. Smart is as smart does.
I already have an outlet for shallow conversation: IRC.
http://www.twitter.com/swombat (duh)
I can't speak to DB2, but I am really sick of the weird complexity of Oracle. It's power comes at a fairly high cost of complexity, whatever the pricing structure looks like.
Originally, HN was actually called "startup news". The niche was much tighter than what it is now, but it's still relatively tight.

I feel that this is only a matter of time though.
Philosophically HN is different than reddit and Digg in that the person who runs the site is active in shaping the ongoing conversation. Reddit and Digg ultimately became for-profit companies and in doing so, embraced the democratic method of policing their sites.

HN on the other hand is somewhere between an oligarchy and meritocracy; and can only work that way because pg doesn't appear to want to monetize it.

My point is that reddit and Digg are far more similar than reddit and HN or Digg and HN.
You could try using the quadtree culling algorithms (seen here: http://lab.polygonal.de/2007/09/09/quadtree-demonstration/) used in collision detection. Just treat each chicken as a circle that's as big as the distance at which it stops considering other chickens its neighbor.

I am admittedly bad with this sort of thing, so it might really be the R-tree in disguise.

On another note, it's good to see someone on HN get interested in game development. The road is long, hard, and littered with half-finished projects, but also the occasional finished one. The sense of accomplishment and fun factor is several magnitudes higher than coding 'normal' stuff.
http://twitter.com/binarypie
So send every subscriber a free Kindle.

(Seriously... or at least a Kindle like device that hooks into NYTimes content. It's a business move that News organizations should have made a long time ago.)
Sending Authenticated Data to the Twitter API
Ask HN: does raising convertible debt preclude applying to YC?
I'm wondering if raising any other smaller seed rounds or convertible debt effectively precludes your startup from applying to YC? The application page says that they "can probably help any startup that hasn't already raised a series A round from VCs" - does that mean everyone that got accepted built out their first versions on the side without any funds?

I recently started a promising side project with two others and I think it'd make a compelling application to the next YC round. However, the team member that had the initial idea has already taken on a bit of funding ($25k) while he was building the prototype by himself before the other two of us joined, plus he was planning on taking on about $100k in convertible debt so we could all spend more time working on it (the three of us currently rotate hours while we pay rent with consulting) and he thought that would preclude joining YC because it would mess with later valuations. For example, if the YC valuation is really low, then the investors that provided the convertible debt would get way more than the 10% or so that we were all probably expecting, more like 40-50%. I don't care about valuations but giving away half the company for such a small amount of funding sounds insane.

So has anyone else raised seed money before getting into YC, especially convertible debt? Or does that pretty much rule you out and is YC geared only towards funding those where YC is the first and only round of seed funding?
A more interesting question would be: why shouldn't HN revert to the mean?

EDIT #1: The speed at which I'm being down-voted warrants some further explanation...

The article headline raises a question about the potential decline of HN as a "quality community". The fact of the matter is that with all things being equal, HN is just as susceptible to decline just as much as Digg or reddit - HN follows the same "social news" principle after all.

So then why shouldn't it follow the same principle?

In attempting to answer this question I'm hoping that members will forward ideas to counter this principle in general, given that all things are equal in this space.

EDIT #2 [on a separate note]: I should add that the future of HN (or Digg or reddit) ultimately depends on the demand of the community. If we get an influx of users that want to discuss:

Ruby vs. Python

Emacs vs. Vim

Bootstrapping vs. Funding

Or whatever else comes to mind, then so be it. Btw, we've been good as a community in avoiding religious discussions, so I'm pretty happy to be insulated from the whole Mac OSX vs. Vista debate!

The bottom line is that we can draw parallels to other communities that have risen/fallen based on the whim of the dominant memes that come and go, but eventually the fate of this place relies upon what memes we choose to propagate.
I think HN has a few advantages that give it a fighting chance:

1. It's not a business, or at least a direct one, so the site owners are not focused on growing the audience infinitely.
2. It is not dependent on advertising revenue, so there is no pressure to go "mainstream" to attract bigger advertisers.
3. The members are passionately self policing. Seems like every other day there is a thread about HN going off the deep end.
I sincerely doubt that Google fears Twitter, but twitter search can and does provide something very powerful that, at this point, Google does not. That "something" is real time info.

Some examples:

1. Some Saturday Night around midnight try searching Twitter for SNL. (You don't really have to search, it's usually a trending topic). You will instantly find out who the guest is, if there is anything particularly funny, if the monologue bombed, etc. Go ahead and say "SNL is never funny," but it is just an example of real time feedback. You can do the same thing during awards shows or sporting events.

2. Since silicon valley has a relatively high density of Twitter users, I will sometimes find myself doing a twitter search for the road I'm about to take if I'm concerned about traffic. Sure, I can see traffic on Google maps on my iPhone but it only covers freeways and is not as fast or granular as people complaining that they aren't moving for whatever reason at a paricular intersection.

3. Speaking of iPhones, Twitter search was AWESOME for figuring out where lines were long or short. On the days following the 3G launch, doing a search for 'iPhone line' would produce results like "About 200 people in iPhone line at Valley Fair - 10 minutes ago" or "iPhone line was only about 30 minutes in Palo Alto - 1 hour ago." Quickly getting a sense of the crowds before driving all over town is VERY useful.

Google, while definitely not threatened, has no way to provide me that kind of real time info, and until they do, Twitter has an important place in search.
Naturally, the blogosphere is seeing things through a blogo-spherical lense, and to them it's huge, no point in debating that.

But the world is a lot larger than blogs and I think that's why they miss the point entirely. 99% of all the blogs out there is rubbish anyway, or at a minimum has very limited applicability. A 'rating' system for blogs would actually be a useful thing but I see it very much as a niche application.

And don't forget that the rss stats from the google bought 'feedburner' also tell you a lot about blog popularity without having access to 'twitters goldmine', same goes for analytics. Google has a lot more when it comes to datasources than just the search box.
And then they'll nuke it like Dodgeball and Jaiku?

Maybe the article has a point...
Google Japan Apologizes For Awkward PR Campaign, Gets Punished With PageRank Reduction
I know very few people (that I follow or care about), who tweet all their thoughts.

With search tools and things like Tweetdeck, following is not even that important. You follow a keyword, and it works wonders.
It sure is mired in complexity. I am an Oracle programmer by day and once you put it under load there are some pile of bugs that start to show up! That said, Oracle can do so e amazing work, if you have people on hand who can make it do it!
This is easily the most disgusting corruption I've ever heard of being practiced in modern America. So many lives ruined for so little.
Thank you for posting these videos of Ira Glass. They are very inspirational.

I don't consider myself a creative person, and didn't immediately see how it applied to me. I think the underlying principle is that doing good work is hard, and that you only get better at it by doing it.
What Microsoft can learn about retail from Apple and Best Buy
Worth adding that my tweets are of course, by far, the most interesting here, and everyone should follow me right now so that they get the benefit of my infinite wisdom and mansuetude.

Don't listen to the others! I am the one true prophet.
I love the look but it doesn't help me get beer!
Can anyone explain what it does? I spent 5 minutes reading the link but I'm still confused. Thanks.
Would discussions of top ten movie lists, politics and excessive meta-discussion qualify as starting down a "slippery slope"?
I understand Digg has this problem and I stopped being a regular user there over two years ago. However, with reddit, it's pretty much a la carte. You subscribe to the subreddits you find interesting and your home page will only show those. I do not subscribe to the most popular subreddits like politics, pics, business etc. and instead subscribe to smaller, niche subreddits like wikipedia, long-text, and space. My wife subscribes to funny, cute, and health subreddits and reddit has material customized for both of us.

Yes, it is more work to make sure I get to keep seeing interesting things and it does take some time to find more interesting subreddits to follow but it is much better than seeing typical mainstream news on it all day.
why dystopian? this would free up billions in taxpayer dollars.
Call me naive, but I have always doubted the mathematics significance of rearranging the digits of an integer. When you rearrange 1234 to be 3241, you have lost all meaning.

What real mathematical operation involves rearranging digits in an integer?
What happens if new value is added to the economy?

Perhaps I've just discovered a cure for the common cold.
The same amount of money is now chasing a bigger pot.

Suppose lots of people pay me for my cure, and I just save all the money, what happens to the restaurant down the road?

Also fiat currencies predate Nixon, the paper contracts between members of the Hanseatic League can be thought of as a form of fiat currency.
There's a very simple fix for this that has been proven to work: charge for admission and moderate incredibly heavily. Charging some small sum, say $10, weeds out lots of younger people (no credit card). Moderating heavily deters people from joining and causing a fuss because they will quickly lose their investment.

Content (and members) need to be pruned constantly. Comments with too low a karma rating should disappear; they're just noise. Submissions that are turning this place into "Economic News" should be removed before they get to the front page and get random up-votes to create even more noise (if I have to flag something on the front page, that's wrong).

I have moderated many forums and though I've never modded a for-pay community, I know strict moderation works. Some people will complain, but the people who come for good content and good camaraderie will thank you for taking out the trash on a daily basis.
I just bought a C64, an Atari 130XE, a TI99/4A, and an original Gameboy on eBay. I've been tinkering with chiptunes lately, and wanted to use the Real Thing. My first five or six computers were Commodore 8 bit machines...it's amusing to go back to that world.

I just read a code analysis for one of Rob Hubbard's music routines, and that was pretty interesting. The size of software back then is mind-blowing today. And what's interesting is that I couldn't even use a very high level language (like Ruby or Perl or Python) to write a music player, plus the music, in the same number of lines, without resorting to loading libraries that are comparatively very large. The move away from specialized chips to very powerful generic processors has interesting repercussions.

I guess a lot of kids of the 80's are reaching the point where they get to feeling nostalgic, because I've seen a lot of 8-bit retro related activities of late. Chiptunes are bigger than ever (_why just released a chiptune library, for instance), someone just made a Haskell library for writing BASIC programs, and pixel art is also showing up everywhere. Weird how that happens. I guess the 70s and 80s had their 50s and 60s flashback with Happy Days and such, so it shouldn't be surprising that our generation is doing the same.
What? Guilty in Scheme? And now I realise this wasn't a Lisp article!

I should start to skim the subjects more carefully.
That's OK, I guess, but I can't brand my application with it's own url and still have SSL.
Digg and Reddit also make no attempt to welcome new users and to bring them up to the standards of the site.

The people who've been here for longer than a few months all try to get new users up-to-speed. As a result, HN's wavered once or twice after really big traffic hits, but I haven't seen noticeable lowering of quality yet - that may be a sign that things will still stand.

(I will note, however, that a lot more disagreeable trends have shown up over time: OS-bashing, obsession over one or two services in a given field. It's not awful, and it can always be avoided, but it's present now.)
If there's a Satan, he's waiting for these judges to die with a huge hard-on.
news.ycombinator is successful because it's first the web forum for YCombinator program participants. "Trimming" works (civility and killing fluff stories) because what remains is a community of vetted YCombinator members and their friends.
http://twitter.com/iamdanw/
But if you never declutter, you'll never be able to move in a smaller place. It has to start somewhere.

Also, lots of useless clutter isn't usually very good for your sanity.. :)
Google Android Starts Accepting Paid Apps for Sales in US and UK
Scary Bailout Money Info Graphic - Historical Comparison
Who ever thought that x^3 transformed into 2x^2 would be useful one day? Of course I'm being facetious in this example, but the simple rearrangement of the mathematical expression above has profound implications for how we interact with the world.

Yes I know that there is a whole derivation to the simple derivative example I've given, but who is to say that the 6174 transformation might have preceded an actual use?

Who's to say that this odd mathematical transformation actually leads to something useful one day?
On Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’
No matter how hard I think, I can't come up with a reason that would make HN uniquely immune.

Perhaps the only solution is, as pointed out by one of the comments in the article, to continually start new sites.
I'll add 'I Heart Huckabees'.
english / español / "spanglish": http://twitter.com/gcollazo
The boy so set on getting to Cambridge he got 22 A-levels
Wow, fascinating links.

I've never understood people older than, say, 15 who still insist on things like IQ tests. I've never noticed a correlation between IQ and observable intelligence: in many cases, quite the opposite. Many bright people don't apply their intelligence and learn to use it, and then their insistence on their mind belies their ignorance, much to the irritation of everybody else. There's more to intelligence than testing.
One important difference is that you need 100 karma to start downvoting people. It makes HN more resistant to invasion, though not entirely so. Perhaps people could be required to have been members for a month before upvoting stories or something as well.

Unfortunately, this requirement is less effective if people cheapen karma by not being judicious with their upvotes, as I try to be here much more so than on reddit. Upvotes effectively shape HN; upvoting witty one liners and puns, etc, is the path to becoming reddit.
Mensa forums are actually notoriously trollish, so your point is good.
You might have had a point if you knew what goal the Cubans were trying to accomplish before you were all "rah rah Linux".

Choose the right tool for the job.
Dating seems like a good way to make use of having a NYT article written about you.

The thing is, if you just get out and hang out with fun people (girls) you won't need the NYT coverage.

On the other hand, if fame is your primary attractant, you might not like what gets attracted.
It's not as niche-focused as many people (including myself, until last week) think it is.

pg has said the focus of the site is "stuff that's interesting to the intellectually curious."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466881
Netbooks, competition slow Nvidia's business
I don't really see the connection. Your example is the derivative of a function, and what I am saying is that rearranging 1234 to 3421 doesn't mean anything to me.

Now you have some new number who's only relationship to the old number is that it's one of (432)-1 possible permutations of it. Other than that, what's the significance?
I thought VC money was funding to build your idea before you had enough revenue from your users. Twitter is built, has millions of users and still need funding to continue? When is the honeymoon over?

Apparently never for the chosen few.
http://twitter.com/entelarust
This reminds me I need to make my donation and go about getting my EFF stickers for my laptop!

The EFF is an amazing organization and it is one of the few organizations I make annual donations to. They do great work and are one of the few fighters protecting against complete corporate and government takeover of technology.
But isn't the constant dribbling of information distracting?
Wouldn't you be able to find the same valuable information, when you need it, by googleing?
Tell HN: Great software craftsmanship group
I just discovered the software craftsmanship group and the discussions are great.
yeah, you could cache it in the db until you get a new rating.

It would still slow you down a little though.

And yes, it was a joke :-)
The same amount of money chasing fewer goods leads to deflation - each unit of currency can buy more goods. When this occurs due to an increase in productivity, such as in the example you describe, deflation can accompany economic growth.

Deflation was paired with economic growth in the United States under the gold standard for about 30 years at the end of the 19th century.

This was a good recent article on a related topic. Selgin is a well-known monetary economist:

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/feb/09/00014/
Interesting.

Feels like a more mysterious version of Collatz conjecture :) which is - start with a positive integer, iterate as such:

x = (x & 1) ? (3*x + 1) : (x/2);

and you will eventually end up at 1.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture
Researcher calls on Asus, Lenovo and Toshiba to stop using facial biometrics in laptops
Ask HN: Next Step for Monetizing our Site
Dear HN: I'd apprehiate some feedback on taking our site in a new direction.

http://www.ecalc.com

We have a great online scientific calculator called eCalc (been around for about 1 year). We have a steady amount of users each day (around 10k) and recently released a new version of the calculator with a downloadable version for Windows and Mac ($15).

However, the conversion of the download product is very low and most people are not downloading the product from our site at all, instead they just use the free online version (but who wouldn't right?)

We'd like to make a monetization model from this product.

1.) Should we handicap the online version with a nag screen to encourage downloads?

2.) Should we try to sell ads on the site(note: average user is on page for 5-6minutes)

3.) Should we create a subscription model for say ($10 a year to use the calculator).

4.) Lower the price of the product to say $5

5.) Add more features (graphing, variables, sharing)

Any advice is much apprehiated...
The numbers in the article aren't rearranged arbitrarily, they're sorted to ascending and descending order.