skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the problem at a digg or reddit is that everyone's vote is considered equal. Yet, why should someone who's just arrived have as much say as someone who's been there for over a year? In real-life communities, voices take a while to accumulate. Why should online communities be any different?

I'd argue we expect that implicit hierarchy to provide a trustworthiness. If someone's submissions aren't being up-voted, they have the choice to either conform or find a community better suited to their interests. To the extent they match the community principles is the extent to which their own voice becomes heard and amplified.
You hit the nail on the head. The next "big thing" for social news will be an implementation of an "editors" concept. Social sites don't have the lock-in they like to think. Users moved from friendster to my space and now from my space to facebook.

Social news is where search was before Google came along. A social news site that solves the editing problem (designed to naturally implement "star editors", perhaps) can still win big here by virtue of having better content, being less game-able, and not degrading over time. Someone do this, and send me an invite, please!
Both digg and reddit have karma systems so that each vote is not equal. I think that as a social news site grows (or any community), you have to subdivide the community somehow - essentially create a collection of niche sites.
Is this a joke? PageRank (academic paper, right?)... Flash (what kind of ace in the hole for closed source is that??)... And closed development is not necessarily closed source! And the iPhone running Linux would not make it a worse (or necessarily better) product. They would have to release their modified kernel code but that is it. How would this effect the final product? This has to be a joke article, or this guy is truly ignorant. Yet, he claims to support open source at times...
Then we have eliminated 1 design variable; you certainly want to use a microprocessor with usb support and lcd display capability. The ARM based at91sam9260 has that functionality and runs linux. Low priced ($6 in volume), it seems like a good place to start for you.
One dimension of the problem is that misleading, attention-whoring headlines work. (Maybe the sites even like these, because they generate traffic in discussion threads.)

Headlines could be rated separately from the link; perhaps a smaller group of trusted editors, or a random panel of unassociated readers, could approve/edit headlines. Further, votes without having visited the target article could be deweighted.

Another dimension is vote-gaming, including outright fraud. Increasing the cost of votes, with captchas or even registration/poll fees, might help.

Actually making vote-mobs explicit, as in the 'Uberfact' idea [+], I also think has potential. That is, rather than making recommendations/correlations for every user account, let users create their own named cliques. (Let the founders of such cliques have ultimate say on who else can join as voters.) Then, every article gets a different score per clique, and you can view the 'top' items from any clique's (or combination of cliques') perspective, whether you share their views or not.

Some cliques could be ideological, others by membership in some external community, others purely automated (perhaps mirroring some external scoring, like PageRank or Digg-score). Then you channel a lot of the gaming into a more productive and filterable expression of passion; the default view of the site might degrade, but even slightly savvy users can extract a elite, useful view.

[+] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/uberfac...
I disagree. Critism of college in terms of what it proclaims to be and what it is, I think, is as healthy as self criticism. You could argue that criticising college is a form of hyper-intellectualism, in which case the person criticising makes the observation that it does not live up to it's ideal in many cases.
y'know what would be great? a rails plugin to facilitate a/b testing.
A karma weighted neural network. A variant of pagerank. The only thing to worry about is if the karma based penalty function is a good gauge of quality or just activity.
I wasn't thinking about this regarding YC news's quality. It's remained amazingly stable since I've been using it. I was thinking about this regarding Reddit, and how the signal to noise ration seems to be degrading even more recently. The main reddit is fairly unusable for me now, although I like the science and programming sub-reddits.

I was asking for ideas for future reference regarding sites with social components. It seems to be a common problem online: how to avoid the troll issue and signal to noise degradation issue.

I was thinking that votes could be weighted based on length of stay, or karma or both. Users who've been around longer and who had higher karma are obviously more invested in the site than hoards of users that just started.

@PG: I really hadn't thought of weighting everyone's votes similar to the editors. A nice, elegant solution I think.
The One Thing In Life You Can Control - Effort
Nicely done. I'd like it better if the data was centered instead of left justified.
> This has been asked before, a lot of the comments seem to revolve around the idea that it is unpreventable.

It's a hard problem, but not impossible. The structure and function of the site itself plays a large part in governing group behavior.

Reddit worked for a long time because it had smart people, and a voting system that responded to whatever its userbase wanted. Now it's in rapid decline because it has a growing majority of not-so-smart people, and the voting system still responds to whatever the userbase wants. Reddit also suffered from being known as the site where smart people hang out, which brought lots of Digg refugees over to it (thereby destroying the quality they were looking for).

I'd be very interested in seeing a list of reddit headlines with votes weighted by seniority on the site. It might resemble classic reddit.
yeah, noaa.gov has tons of great stuff to play with. we're going to be using a bunch of it in creating new tools for homeowners.
Feature request: let me give you my email address and my zip code so you can send me an email in case it's likely to rain in my area that day. I check my email every morning over breakfast so it could work out nicely.

If you want to put some advertisements (that aren't obnoxious) along with the data, I really don't care. I am a moderately affluent college-aged male who enjoys buying electronics, games, and other goods online on a frequent basis.
From what I can tell, this guy is a stoner who never actually does anything.

His webpage is ugly as shit (he has no taste, which you have to have if you're a do-nothing spectating whiner), too.

His arguments are bullshit. Nearly all implementations of advanced programming languages are open source and Google's core Internet-scale infrastructure is built on customized open source software.
Bug report: It's not -2147483648 degrees here, nor is that even possible in this universe...

Edit: It appears to be fixed now. :-)
George Dyson: Von Neuman's Universe
No, the tabloid posters' karma would go up (presumably) and so their postings would get stronger. (I reason that if tabloid stuff got voted down, people would post less of it, so it must be finding an audience.)

My personal tactic is to be nasty to posters of crap. It has more impact than some mere 'point', and gives them guidance as to what's wrong.
But you might frustrate newbies ("I can't get links onto the front page! Too snobby for me, I'm going elsewhere!"). And users are ultimately ad-bait at places like Reddit. If Reddit could get Digg's traffic by losing whatever quality they have, they would in a heartbeat (or Conde-Nast would make them), whatever regret the original developers might feel about it.
I've always thought it would be cool for there to be a site that just looks at your IP and gives you the local weather and time and links to other relevant info.
Shouldn't it be the highest common denominator? In the metaphor, I prefer a number compatible with me first, and a higher one second. The highest common denominator is the highest number compatible with everyone.
Pretty cool.

So, what are your TOS? Can I scrape your data for a home automation/monitoring project I've been working on?
That's why you need to use the weather network.
College may or may not "live up to it's ideal" [sic] for some people, but it's still the most efficient way for the vast majority of the population to learn. Regardless of what you may feel about particular schools, courses or professors, if you value knowledge as a virtue, I don't see how you can be hostile toward an institution that exists to advance education.

Also, it's not a formal argument, but look at the moderation on the posts: everything that dares to defend higher education is voted down, and everything that bashes it is voted up, regardless of content. The same will happen to this post, despite the fact that I've done nothing more than express my (entirely reasonable) opinion in as rational and thoughtful manner as I know how. That's anti-intellectualism.

(Finally, I think I need to add the following disclaimer: I'm not talking about the people who have minor gripes with college, or who look back in retrospect, and make critical judgments about the experience. You're right -- that's "healthy self-criticism". I'm referring to the people who insist that college is a waste of time, and who insinuate that formal education is some kind of trap. You may think that's a cartoonish generalization, but I see it all the time, here and elsewhere.)
Weather for: Toronto [Go]

Weather for Toronto, Kansas

Right now it is 45XF.

Hmm.
An honest empiricist must conclude that while the open approach has been able to create lovely, polished copies, it hasn't been so good at creating notable originals.

Hmm. http://www.well.com/~jaron seems to be running Apache, which I think has always been notable open source software.

As for being "original", its only predecessors are
NCSA's httpd and Tim Berners-Lee's original httpd.

Apache is much more "original" than the iPhone, which seems to me a "polished copy".
Pretty nice, these guys: http://www.simpleweather.com have done a pretty good job at it too. You should put your minds together.
"alternative"? Like outsiders have the choice of using BigTable?
no radar? booo
Good intentions aren't good enough. Schooling has a tradition of imparting some knowledge, but also some irrationalities. Primarily it is coming under attack because it has trouble changing as fast as modern life changes, so the knowledge being imparted is less accurately what people want.

But also, one can make very serious criticisms of schools, including colleges, based on the irrationalities they cause in students, and their lack of understanding of how learning works.

For example, schools have heavy components of forcing students to do things "for their own good". That's the point of graded assignments and tests -- they help teachers monitor which students are doing as they were told, and help to exert pressure on those that don't.
For my kind of "news", I like

- http://lambda-the-ultimate.org

- http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.announce

- http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers

- http://www.freshnews.org
Google could be the exception that proves the rule though? How many banks still use proprietary stuff?
It seems we have nickb to thank for reposting just the good stuff from reddit here.
Mainly people I follow on tumblr and twitter.

I've found that checking news sites and RSS only once a week makes me far more productive and I don't miss out on much
What does this guy do other than write articles where he name-drops?
Economist: Best and worst of a prime year for business news
http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/businessview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10317959

My favorite: Alan Greenspan (Mr.create money out of thin air again and again) offering odds on a recession again and again
I'm hostile to colleges (and recruiters), though I don't think I count as anti-intellectual (my job is basic research).

My reason for opposing colleges (and recruiters) is simple: colleges/recruiters are middlemen sitting between you and the job you want. They may add some value, although in my view it is minimal (and certainly not worth the cost). But the main reason most people go to college/recruiters is simply because it is difficult to get a job without them. And if you can bypass them, you are probably better off.

Colleges (unlike recruiters) also suck vast amounts of money from the countries scientific infrastructure, but that's a different issue.
Um... I didn't write the example. I took it from a site that encouraged developers familiar with a language to submit solutions.

The developer of the Java solution posted something I'd consider reasonably representative of the Java I would likely encounter from most Java programmers and I while I have almost no personal experience with Ruby, I have the feeling the Ruby solution is reasonably close to what Ruby programmers write.

While you can write concise code in any language, it seems few Java programmers bother to.

Perhaps you should submit your solution to the original site: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
Rob Malda and the Slashdot crowd deserve kudos for blazing a trail and for sticking to their guns. they seem to have weathered Digg and the like just fine and will most likely outlast them all. I still stop by Slashdot regularly, but haven't visited reddit for almost a year now.

Slashdot seems to have found at least a local minima in balancing editorial selection and audience participation. Firehose, a nod to Digg, is an interesting spin on democratized story selection.
Journal of Noncommutative Geometry
Interesting article, but if the timestamp is to be believed I wouldn't call it new: 09:15 28 April 2002
> I worship at the resolution shrine.

Same here, and opted fr a Dell D830 with a WUXGA screen to get the 15.4 1920x1200.

Smaller would have been to annoying.

However, for a few years I did use a Toshiba Portege with smaller screen (and lower res) and it had two big advantages: battery life was really quite good (I used an additional battery) and you could use it on a plane without special yoga techniques, even if the seat in front was reclined.

For my most recent purchase I weighed the value of various features under the most common operating environments.
I'd say that installing ruby is probably way easier on windows than linux. Hell, even ImageMagick worked seamlessly on Windows for me - not exactly the same story on linux :-\
Having worked there, I can confirm that 12345 is a valid zip code -- it's technically the zip code for the GE plant in Schenectady. It was at one point, large enough to warrant its own zip code...
Hmm, the first time I've ever been able to use Octopart for something:

http://octopart.com/search?q=at91sam9260

Worked pretty well.
You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Every established institution has trouble being nimble; every established institution can be accused of certain "irrationalities".

No offense, but your comment doesn't pass my smell test: you're quick to launch into an attack on grades, tests and authority, but you're slow to acknowledge that those grades, tests and authority are actually helpful to most students. I'm as curious and hard-working as anyone you'll meet, but there are still tons of things that I never would have learned, had I not had exams and grades to prod me along (and for the record, no, I didn't have the smoothest possible educational experience).

Bottom line: it doesn't take super-human effort to get through an undergraduate degree in a subject that you enjoy. If one can't summon the basic discipline to put up with the (minor) bullshit associated with a undergraduate education, then they're very likely going to be disappointed by the world outside of the ivory tower. The "real world" isn't exactly known for a lack of bullshit; dealing with it (i.e. having discipline and tenacity) is as marketable a skill as knowing how to code.
"Can I scrape your data"

You might want to just scrape it from wherever he's scraping it from.

.................

Also, I found a bug:

Sorry, we couldn't find a result for "new york city".
Indeed, watch Evan's talk at RubyConf 2007.

http://rubyconf2007.confreaks.com/d2t1p3_rubinius.html
Simpleweather did one odd thing: when I typed my city in the search box, it showed one result. Since it didn't have a line beath it I didn't even realize it was a hyperlink.

If there's one result, take them to it.

One good thing tho: it knew that that Celsius is used everywhere outside the US.
Same thing: I typed Melbourne and ended up on some city in Florida with two old guys, rather than the city with 4 million people.
"Google's core Internet-scale infrastructure is built on customized open source software."

Yes, but Google infrastructure isn't considered as innovative as Pagerank, which is proprietary.

I personally disagree that ranking pages by the amount of sites that link to them is properly patentable in terms of being non-obvious to an engineer skilled in the area, but that's off topic.

PS. Your whole post should be:
"Nearly all implementations of advanced programming languages are open source and Google's core Internet-scale infrastructure is built on customized open source software."
Everything else is playing the man.
They are a definite improvement over digikey. I'll pass this around.
Great!

I hate how on weather.com if I type in Dallas, TX it takes me to another page where it asks me if I meant Dallas, TX, United States. SO ANNOYING
And a YC company, too!
nickb
The vast bulk of software is proprietary.

Some software is very generic and has a 1:100,000,000 ratio between itself and potential deployments. The same linux distro can work for billions of people. This kind of wild efficiency allows free software to be viable in a bottom-line sort of way--selling books, consultations, support, etc.

Most software has a ratio like 1:1 (custom software) or 1:10000 (industry-specific stuff). Open source is just completely impossible here. People need to make money, like it or not.
"Flash (what kind of ace in the hole for closed source is that??)"

It's by far the most successful (read: ubiquitous) VM and video platform.

Some would say the only successful VM, as much as it annoys Java folks to admit that.
I think there's enough of a need for 'just the forecast' to build this app.

Feature creep is exactly why weather.com sucks (well, that and ads).

That being said -- a replacement feature that's more in line with simplicity and 'just the data' would be an hour by hour forecast. That's what most people use the radar for anyway. Well, except when there's a severe storm. For that, you could add . . . . [hours later] . . . and then you just have to secure the rights to www.weather.com!
Another way to think about whether closed-source sometimes has a place:

What if, by law, all software had to be open-source? Do you expect there would be more, or less, innovation? More, or less, diversity of implementation?

(I love open source but think the prospect of outsized returns from secret/proprietary codebases attracts some innovation and diversity we wouldn't otherwise have, especially in places where software creates a core competitive advantage -- investing, Google-scale cluster operations, domain-specific expert systems, etc.)
Works great if you live in the US. It' s broken for the rest of the world. :)
An update from Opera CTO on the EU complaint against Microsoft
98 Bugs in MSIE 7 for Windows
I think they received an investment from YC, but didn't do the whole summer camp thing. According to Wikipedia they are a YC company, though.
Choosing a Distributed Version Control System
Only to the extent that the community appreciates (and up-votes) what you think of as tabloid postings. Karma is a function of every submission (and comment). If the submissions aren't appreciated, neither will be the user. If a community mind has already set in, it should, in theory, be hard to shake free of that standard.
All the newbie has to do is submit content that resonates with the community. Think of it as a game that they can play by choice. Sooner or later they'll figure out what fits. And I'd venture that people do this anyways. It's just that the power of the original community voice got watered down by treating every vote equally.
Googling "temperature berkeley, CA" works just as well, and it's built into your Firefox search bar.
The difference as I see it is that the important things that appeal to the Slashdot crowd appear there about a day after it shows up on Reddit. On the social aggregators, you get stories a day early, but you have to filter through so much more stuff to get at interesting articles. Of the interesting stuff on social news sites like reddit, you tend to find more interesting things that never would make it onto slashdot.
It needn't be as complicated as a neural net. Just calculate the difference between the editor-based points to each story and the karma-weighted points. I bet that's a closer match than the current no-weight version. If you played with the function, you could even try to approximate the editors from the users.

And the beauty here of karma is that it inherently isn't just activity. Fundamentally it is a gauge of quality because people make informed decisions on what to value when they vote. For instance, you could submit every story, every day, from digg's front page and this community won't reward you (much). Better to make more informed decisions about what to submit, if you value your time. The goal isn't submission - it's submission to a community standard.
aswanson said it very well. Criticism of college does not equate to anti-intellectualism.

The "real world" isn't exactly known for a lack of bullshit; dealing with it (i.e. having discipline and tenacity) is as marketable a skill as knowing how to code.

A number of us here are young, ambitious, and have grand visions for "changing the world." Our only reasons for obedience to the university system is to achieve our goals. I call bullshit on the world. I want to change the world, not adapt to it. But cheers to you mate.
news.bbc.co.uk (the UK edition as they cover things a bit differently than for their international edition)

http://news.myway.com/ - a number of the standard news sources through a fairly clean interface.
5 Reasons You Shouldn't Take Your Business Idea and "Throw It Out There"
Will Apple Upset the Rental Cart?
It's as if the entire article is one long troll.
Yes, anti-intellectualism exists in the US (Canada? Other Americas? I don't know). It always has.

That doesn't mean it's the prevalent thought. But intellectualism is hard, anti-intellectualism, as in hiding behind a doctrine that has been "thought out" for you (say by a church or a political party) is far easier. If you adopt what others say, you immediately belong to a social network and have all the "answers" to the hard questions. If you have to think for yourself, the road is much more lonely and difficult.
Indeed other traditions have flaws as well. I did not say schooling should be immediately abolished, or throw anything out. But schooling should definitely be reformed, and people are right to criticize it.

The anecdote about your personal experience is, of course, irrelevant. It seemed to help you, but we don't know if it did or not compared to alternatives you did not experience.

I agree that being able to deal with bullshit is a marketable skill. But surely it is not a path everyone should take. And it is a way of life we should wish to become less common and less useful.
PageRank is indeed proprietary, but it's proprietary more like a trade secret rather than proprietary like proprietary software that gets put on your computer and you have no idea whether, e.g., it's calling home and violating your privacy.

The guy is pretty annoying and I can't resist taking cheap shots at him, sorry.
C/F would be nice.