skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I mentioned one way of dealing with lame submissions when we switched news.yc to Hacker News: have human editors who mark good and bad submissions, and weight people's future votes depending on which they predict. That would probably be enough.

There are other possible solutions. For example, the reddit guys tried to solve the problem of all the political crap on the frontpage by creating a subreddit for it. But of course this is what happened:

http://reddit.com/info/2n2tu/comments/c2n5ls

There are also mechanical solutions along the lines of the type used to defeat SEO. I.e. if a group of the same people always upvote the same stories, count their votes less. If people vote on something without reading it first, count their votes less. Etc.
> I'm not convinced. What if the upvoting really is representative of a large number of the users?

My bet is that up voting is definitely representative of a large number of the users, but that many are voting out of support for Ron Paul instead of because they read and liked the linked article. You could argue this not necessarily a problem. I guess it becomes one if it hijacks the focus of the site for the remainder (or majority?) of users.
Judging by the kneejerk pattern of the voting on the comment thread, it's largely zealots.
ESPN Founder Launches CollegeFanz
The editorial solution is interesting. It's just a way to scale out the tastes of a group of editors beyond the articles they can look at themselves. If it works well then eventually the only users who would stick around would be people with similar taste to the editors.

The subreddit did not work because they did it backwards. You don't ask users you don't want to move somewhere else. You leave the bad users where they are and move yourself to a new site. Sounds familiar.
27 Workspace Desks of Bloggers Explored
I was seriously considering getting some kratom ... but I refuse to do business with those who make such comments. Good day to you, sir!
The phrase "artificial life" has a long (in tech terms) history, referring to digital systems. For example, http://alife.org

Regarding hand-crafted systems of chemicals, I don't see that the word "artificial" is even appropriate. The stuff is alive or it isn't.
Phones don't really have GPS though, right? And there's no easy way to write software that uses it even if it is there.
It's been killed. Another characteristic is the need to compartmentalize and control the flow of information on a "kneed to know" basis.
Joshua Schachter: Elevator camera obscura
Equity investors still generally won't let the founders say "Okay, it turns out we were wrong, let's go back to square-one and find a new product idea." They certainly aren't going to say "no", but they probably won't put up more money either - and if you're burning money in accordance with the cash you have from investments, that effectively means death.

"Screwed" is with respect to this present venture. I have no doubt that the Xobni founders will be successful with something, I just would bet against it being with Xobni.

And investors are smart - individually. Groups of investors, however, are generally dumber than the individuals that make up the group, hence my use of the plural. There are also a few conflating factors that may affect their assessment of Xobni's prospects, namely that VCs are pretty close to an ideal market for Xobni's product (inflating their estimate of its usefulness to other markets) and that their risk tolerance is higher. 5% odds of success isn't too bad for a VC, but it's terrible for an entrepreneur.
paul> I'm not convinced. What if the upvoting really is representative of a large number of the users?

pg> What if the upvoting really is representative of a large number of the users?

What if most of the users on reddit are, at this point, zealots, due to the effects of crowding out more moderate users?
Databases: Partitioning vs. Federation vs. Sharding
Arguable how?

To my mind they are nothing but revenue generation.

A visible speed trap is far more defensible. Not vague warnings but highly visible specific identification.

Even better put these speed traps where they are most likely to save lives not in locations were they are most likely to catch excess speed. e.g. put them outside schools not on the freeway, put them at the entrance to towns not a mile outside.

The speed trap should ticket everyone in excess of the limit. Currently the police use them and discard enormous amount of minor infringements concentrating on the relatively few high speed infringements. This is masking the true nature of the data i.e. the speed limit is too low. Teh correct course of action is to raise the speed limits in certain areas e.g. freeways and rural.

Lastly, tickets by camera should not be part of a police forces performance reviews, they should be noted but not used to justify or discredit anything about the forces performance.
Lisp and Persistent Data - "relational databases are some kind of sinister death cult"
That's hilariously off topic. "Where to get a trim?" Answer: At home, before you go to the airport.

It does remind me that anybody who would pay over 50 dollars for a haircut deserves a complimentary bullet put in their head to balance out their stupidity-exceeding-intelligence problem.
Subversion Merge Tracking: The Basics
MySpace: How To Devalue a Platform in Three Easy Steps
:) Like you, I don't mean everything I say on the internet.

Send me an email if you're interested, I'll give you a discount to make it up to you.
As far as I'm concerned, something like this would definitely pass the "free press" test. Free press being an important component of democracy, which is where the "arguably" in "arguably good for us" is actually put to use.
How can you tell when people upvote a story without reading it?
Would you sell your startup to Microsoft? Why? Why not? (I am not sure).
At the very least reddit can tell when people upvote without clicking through as they hijack the link and then redirect to it.
It took more than a day. I think Google just happened to be spidering here last time around.
Kevin Kelly is not his broham. Kurzweil tries to distinguish himself from KK and others like him by being more scientific, where KK just seems to make observations. (I loved his book Out Of Control by the way). Kurzweil has been making predictions for a while, and he has been sticking to them, not keeping them 20 years away.
I've been a Ron Paul zealot since years before Reddit existed, but I'm not one of the people voting up the Ron Paul stories. (It's a rarity that I use my up arrow on Reddit any more at all.) My one data point does not make a trend, but I think it's pretty plausible that the sort of people who support Ron Paul are just the same sort of people who find their way over to Reddit. Ron Paul is a libertarian, and it's nothing unique to Reddit that tech-oriented internet forums tend to be populated disproportionately by libertarians.
Absolutely, given the right terms of course.
I dunno. I'm beginning to hear Ron Paul evangelism from RL friends, mostly over FaceBook. I'm pretty sure they didn't get it from Reddit.

I suspect it's mostly because people are so fed up with everything connected to the current Washington establishment that they'll vote for anyone who sets himself up as an outsider. Ron Paul's been one of the few candidates that's consistently against the Iraq war; many people will vote for him on that basis alone, regardless of the rest of his positions.

I think it's telling that the friend who's been trying hardest to convince me to vote for RP is a pro-choice Green Party atheist. When I showed him Ron Paul's recent voting record (which included a bill to eliminate all federal laws on abortion, a bill to privatize a large federal wildlife refuge, and a bill to prevent laws on school prayer), he said "It doesn't matter. He's against the Iraq war, and that outweighs everything else." He's willing to set aside every other political belief he has for that one issue. I suspect a decent-sized portion of the American electorate is the same.
Entrepreneurs, please help - How do you get an audience and customers?
if you are a web entrepreneur, do you write "Top 10 ways..." posts for reddit or digg, and get friends to vote for them? or youtube videos? or adwords? any tip appreciated. we are about to launch a web application but we all have tech backgrounds and clueless about web marketing.
I found the sentiment condescending, actually. That the overwhelming online success of a candidate who appeals to people who actually care what a prospective candidate thinks about important issues can all be attributed to simple bad design.
I'm not sure If I'm a counter example to this or not. I never voted on any stories on reddit. So that would make me part of the non-voting majority. But recently I felt the urge to upvote all Ron Paul stories to help his campaign.
Yes I would. Y = for money.
That's a start. It's easy to game, but implementing a filter like that won't make the results any worse.
So theory aside, multi-core processors should be good for at least 20 years? And that's if we don't come up with anything better.
Wow - is there anything that escapes the analytical prowess of Mr. Graham? Yes. People who like Ron Paul because he seems to be the only person who seems to actually know what he's talking about, takes a personal intellectual interest in complex matters that are outside of his field of expertise, and has promised to do away with the IRS and income taxes completely are just marginal, over-zealous nuts who conspire to skew the whole internet to make him appear more popular than he really is. That must be it. It's a well managed conspiracy by a small group of Ron Paul supporters who have intimate familiarity with the shortcomings of social news networks and exploit them tirelessly. It couldn't possibly be because the prospect of keeping your entire salary without having to pay taxes at all is a very popular sentiment across the board of political beliefs. No. It can't be because more and more conservatives are shunning the "neo" terminology and adapting the term "Reaganite Conservative", and Ron Paul was one of the original 3 behind-the-scenes power brokers who got Reagan Elected. It's not that he's the only member in congress in memory to actually give back parts of his salary that he doesn't use. Or that he's the only Republican candidate like, ever to appeal to more young voters than the democratic counterpart. No it's all just a design screw-up. Because Paul says so.
What is your Web application? What do you want people to do--just visit your site; try it out; blog about it? What niches are most likely to do what you want? Let's start there.
never thought i'd see the day where a pg comment gets voted negative :)
the app is a mix between twitter and backpackit. you use it to for your upcoming tasks, but the principle is that everything is public, so your social circle can see what you are currently working on. you can view the "social" as either peer pressure (so you get stuff done), or simply just keep in touch with friends or colleagues.

obviously, we want as much people as possible to try it, use it, and add their friends.

the niche might be the GTD people, although it's not a 100% implementation of the book. the app is very simple (a la 37Signals) and obviously it's not for people who want MS project or even elaborate solutions like Zoho Projects.
facebook platform
The problem with social news isn't the zealots. It's that people vote for stories they think would be good for other people to read instead of for stories they find interesting themselves.

That's why Reddit ends up having the personality of John Kerry.

(And yes, I realize that this view is not mutually exclusive with the original pg comment.)
looks like a nice site. well done
Encourage people to write blog posts about your software.
Note that reddit comment voting is very kneejerk because it doesn't count for anything. It isn't associated with your karma score.
Disqus Blog &gt;&gt; Geez, when are you guys launching already?
That's what I mean by zealots.
The phone network can locate your phone - so your phone can also know its location even without GPS. If your phone knows your location, and is connected to the web, it can work.
And this is supposed to refute what I said? Single-issue voters are the ultimate zealots.
I don't think too much should be read into the recent activity on Reddit. Ron Paul has actively promoted his campaign on the internet and has been a large proponent of internet freedoms. So users' behaviour on reddit probably isn't representative of the average American but actually quite representative of the average Internet user. In other words reddit's ranking system hasn't been abused in this sense.
To be fair, you never seemed terribly upset about the Paul Graham zealots.
This article was posted a day ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=51081

and only got 2 upvotes. Maybe a time of day difference? Maybe a better headline?
It seems to be a different kind of upvoting. When I write something new it generally shows up on both reddit and del.icio.us/popular. Stuff about Ron Paul only shows up on reddit. What that implies is that people are upvoting it because they want other people to read it, rather than because they found it interesting themselves.

The reddit guys actually worried about this problem from the very beginning. That was why initially there was such an emphasis on voting as a way of training filters: if you voted for dumb stuff, you'd be punished by having to read dumb stuff. But the filter-training message never got through, perhaps because the filtering worked so badly for so long.
Maybe Ron Paul proliferation is due to the man's ideas and his honesty?! And his popularity on reddit and other sites is due to the fact that he resonates well with what people think? Maybe people are sick of candidates that lie to you all the time. You know... just stating the obvious.
> recently I felt the urge to upvote all Ron Paul stories to help his campaign.

This is exactly what I mean about a design flaw. It only takes a hundred people who do this, on a site with hundreds of thousands of readers.
"Stuff about Ron Paul only shows up on reddit."

And Technorati.
And because the average user is now 15.
In theory it seems like del.icio.us should have much better content for this reason. But in practice making the front page of Reddit is good for 5-10k pageviews, whereas making the front page of del.icio.us is good for 1,000 at most. This raises the question as to whether the zealotry actually helps make Reddit more popular, or whether the low traffic of del.icio.us is due to bad design or some other factor.
My take on switching to News.YC is that as there is no down vote, its not an "agreement" vote for me, its more that its just want I want to read. Because there is no down (unless its hidden?) my up has more value, I am more careful what I give it to then on reddit. Probably upvote half as much.
Or maybe reddit is working just fine and the front page reflecting the views of the majority of reddit users. They like Ron Paul, lolcats and xkcd.
A video site HAS to have sound (unless you're watching Charlie Chaplin). A dating site with sound has immediately lost half its market.

(Most important skill of the 21st century: speed of your alt-tab)
The disagree&downvote pattern on comments is definitely a problem, but I think it's a different problem and it seems to happen on a wide variety of stories. (which isn't to say that there's not zealotry involved, just that I don't think that's the only thing driving the RP stories)

It could also be argued that your comment was completely off topic for the link, kind of like the guy who always complains about the xkcd links on reddit. Would you argue that xkcd is driven by zealotry, or are there just a lot of reddit users who who actually like seeing xkcd? (and again, I'm one of the people who occasionally upvotes the xkcd comics)
match.com couldn't be bothered with i'm in like with you. match.com pulls in 300 million dollars in subscriptions a year from frustrated middle aged people. ilwy is clearly meant for a much much younger audience. college kids certainly won't pay a cent for it and i doubt twenty-somethings would either. it would make the whole thing too creepy.

but, i think the ilwy team has done a good job avoiding creepyness. (that is their primary focus, i think.) but, i can't imagine a great deal of young people using this (or any other web application for dating).

the web is simply not a great medium for this sort of human interaction. there is a lot of crucial physical, chemical and social data that is not communicated through pictures and fragments of text. further, what information is communicated is unreliable. clearly the picture selection will not be without bias and the text is highly premeditated, which confuses the sexual selection for verbal acuity and mental quickness. there isn't enough bandwidth if you will.

i think this is only useful for sex addicts and predatory men (and who wants to compete with craigslist?). clearly everyone involved would be better off just going outside.

although i suspect (some) girls may use this, but only for their egos. this may even skew the female participation towards the more attractive. this would of course attract men who want to 'interact' with them. but, i don't see these attractive young girls actually following through however. so i think the system would be fraudulent and unsustainable.

but that doesn't mean there isn't money to be made.
This is reflection. In a similar camera, "view camera" http://www.answers.com/topic/view-camera?cat=technology the image is upside-down.
You don't seem to grasp that we're talking about a completely orthogonal issue. Ron Paul could be the best presidential candidate in history. The problem I'm talking about is simply a structural one: because such a small proportion of visitors on social news sites vote, 100 of his vocal supporters can dictate the stories for a site with 100,000 users.

Man is politics a tar baby. I wish I'd never made that comment on reddit. Nothing personal (I mean this more about the reddit commenters than you), but it's a topic that brings out the dumbest in everyone.
Google Research: Videos of the Year
Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run? - "You and Your Research"
No. It's supposed to point out that nothing you've said refutes what Paul said. Ron Paul's supporters may be zealots and yet still be representative of a large number of voters.
And FaceBook.
I've thought a lot about this. The answer is that there are several senses of better. The stuff on del.icio.us/popular is "better" in the sense that people only bookmark stuff that means a lot to them. But lightweight stuff [PIC] is easier to click on and thus "better" in the sense of generating more page views.
I don't think that is the case. Your essays are fundamentally different than the Ron Paul news stories. They have a limited shelf life. I don't really feel a need to bookmark the latest Fox News injustice towards Ron Paul or clips of his last debate or news that the s&p dropped 7% or news that Sarkozy won. I want to read about it; I think it is important; but I don't need to read about it 3 years from now.

But Ron Paul does end up on Digg and Technorati. Ron Paul posters are all over my campus. There are packed rallies and meet ups. I think that Ron Paul is important news right now. A lot of young, technically proficient people seem to agree. (These are a lot of the same people who like you by the way.)

It would make good business sense to implement some sort of clustering method. So, a great number of minority groups could happily use the site and view the ads.

But, if you were the editor of reddit, I would hope you would not censor Ron Paul's stories. The community would if it wanted to; if you search for Ron Paul on reddit, you will find that the vast majority of his stories have 0 points. This invisible hand of the reddit market would surely please Ron Paul.

edit: My god does that last sentience sound dirty...
I agree, and this also shows that you don't need any kind of hierarchy, status or conspiracy for a user-driven media outlet to gain a feeling that some kind of cabal is running things.

I mean, Reddit makes contribution (including filtering) about as easy as possible, there is no user class with special status, and not a whole lot of editorial discussion, and yet still people can complain that the output is disproportionately controlled by a minority with particular interests.

I think this is more of an enduring pattern showing up again than a particular weakness in Reddit.
I seriously doubt that the sound will lose them half (or even 1%) of the market (I don't think the sound is required, it just makes the site nicer). If sound is a big problem for you, why not keep your computer muted?
Ron Paul for America
(Although he would definitely approve of Paul Graham censoring him as an act of private enterprise.)
Also, the Starcraft CPU player doesn't cheat.
That makes sense. Similar to that, a while back I posted a theory about why Reddit discourages insightful content:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566

It seems like the ideal social site would use a del.icio.us-like mechanism for promoting resources and reference type stuff, a techmeme-like system for promoting insightful and intellectually interesting stuff (based partly on the amount of discussion), and a Reddit-like system for promoting Lightweight Digital Refreshment. Right now each social site uses one algorithm for all types of content, which is why they're all broken.
I'm a big fan of Kurzeil's ideas but my goodness how boring are his speaches! I've seen about 5 speaches like this all with the same graphs etc.. And whats with the constant yawning. It almost seems that he is bored repeating the same content.
People have given millions of dollars to Ron Paul. That's an ungame-able vote. If Paul is getting 1-2 percent of real support among voters, then there should be no shortage of Guiliani and McCain and Romney fans to quickly downmod any stories they don't like.

But evidently, Paul is the only Republican candidate with fans on reddit. If there's a "flaw" that's the only one.

By the way, LBJ was much, much worse than Bush.
Web Hosting Beginner Guide
Does it ever get lonely up there on your pedestal? Why don't 100 guliani supporters do likewise? Why does he raise so much money from peanut online contributions while others with deep corporate connections can barely keep up? Whatever the design issues with reddit or what-have-you, let's say there are 100 amateur supporters who do manipulate things - that's 100 more than care to dedicate their free time to do so for all other candidates combined. That says just as much about the kind of enthusiasm he generates as it does any design shortcomings which could just as easily be exploited by opponents. For crying out loud it can't just be one guy with the name "Paul" that has all the spotlight all the time - stop being a fifth column and let him get his fair share.
Research Shows ADHD Increased by Food Additives
A Neighborhood of Infinity: Tries and their Derivatives
Is there any data that shows this?
Storm worm botnet more powerful than top supercomputers (good problem for a startup to solve)
Don't forget the advanced recommendation engine.
Task-Centered User Interface Design (full ebook)
The Best Synchronization Is No Synchronization
We've got a hundred people here. Maybe we should start a voting cabal to upvote all of our startups.
Don't make my life difficult. I have other stuff I need to work on. Don't make me spend hours babysitting news.yc and implementing countermeasures against abuse.
Oh, no, startups do very well here without any gaming. We all really like talking about our startups and discussing other people's startups.

I like this site to much to game it anyways. I'm talking about gaming reddit.
I normally do. Today I goofed. Should have seen the prairie dogs when I clicked on that link!
And in debate polls and straw poll votes.
Paul Graham wishes he hadn't made the comment about Ron Paul