skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A while ago an article was posted on Kuro5hin about this: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000. It may have been posted here.

One thing I found interesting, and what may be very effective, is something like robot9k. The gist of it is that no comment that has previously been posted can be posted again. I've spent some time in the #XKCD-Signal IRC channel (Where Robot9000 came from), and it forces rather lengthy and interesting discussion. While it would have to have some modifications to work in a commenting situation rather than a IRC situation, I think it largely helps with the amount of trash posts.

Note that while it removes all the "First post" and "Wow. That sucks" posts, it does nothing about post attitude. It doesn't fight against trolling, but at least it has to be original trolling, and you will thus have to have some sort of moderation to beat that.
I have a technological solution. I wrote something for my company which can automatically determine if comments are coherent or incoherent. It's an incomplete technological solution, but a technological solution all the same. We use it to automatically screen out inane comments in our analysis and screen-scraping of particular social media web sites that I can't reveal for various reasons.

We're probably going to expose this as a Web service or release it as open source. When we do, the smart move will be to use this tech to automate the moderation process. The advantage is that this tech requires complex sentences before it considers a sentence valid. It can't screen out negativity but it can screen out simplistic sentences, and if you screen out simplistic sentences, you're going to automatically screen out a lot of simplistic thinking in the process.

If we do set this up as a business, we would of course be thrilled to have Hacker News as a customer. Not just because of the exposure and prestige, but also because we read the site. I personally have zero self-control when it comes to these matters, and would love it if HN just automatically only posted my comments when they were well thought-out and carefully reasoned. I would appear much smarter on average than I actually am.
Interesting opinion regarding my style. Thanks for explaining.
There are many things in the CL spec that are very contentious. Arguably too many. Dan Weinreb pointed this out earlier in the week(http://ilc2009.scheming.org/node/7) which inspired a response from me(http://jng.imagine27.com/articles/2009-04-07-135246_cl_hard_...) although not directly related to the "too many concepts, irregular" argument but then again this may effect how per formant/stable code can be written in a language.

Yes tail-recursion is not part of the spec along with many other implementation aspects that probably should be.
I was wondering where I could find this stuff...
Paul, thanks for the great review and kind words. We've got lots to improve and these posts really help. For example, threading is very high on the list of things to do (we knew HN users especially would notice its absence). Looking fwd to hearing more feedback both on your blog and hacker news.
A year ago when this was conceived, no, not really, but it looks like the price has indeed come down sufficiently to make this viable. http://interstore.com/product/139-1460/348348-001+LCD+KIT+R/... is one I found.
If this submission is OK, there's a neverending geyser of dross behind it. Who gives a shit?
Yeah I can vouch for the threading. My load averages went up a good bit when I first started using it and it was importing comments..
> I was unaware of any other non-mechanical* method for generating electricity.

What about electrochemistry (i.e. batteries and fuel cells)?

Trying to think of others, I guess I would include triboelectricity and the piezo effect among the mechanical methods. A thermocouple isn't mechanical though unless you are going to argue that it relies on kinetic energy of atoms. Alpha and beta decay are non-mechanical; also, there are some schemes for direct conversion of energy radiated from a (hypothetical) fusion reactor in the form of charged particles into electric current without a thermal/mechanical intermediate step.

Does the EMP from a nuclear weapon count as 'generated electricity'? (Would that be considered mechanical?)

(several edits: I thought of more.)
I like the identifying people idea but don't think it will have the preservation affect. If the preservation of the "Hacker News" is the goal then moving to "class" system would be more efficient then identifying people.

As hacker news grows, there would come a time when a new news.news.ycombinator.com would be created taking with it a certain group of people that would form a more tight knit community similar to the way it was in the beginning. The stories and comments would flow up to news.ycombinator.com but not the other way.

Then repeated...
Integration usually means symbolic integration. Numerical integration of the definite integral is usually referred to as Quadrature, or Numerical Integration:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_integration
They have this in New Hampshire, too. The big stores near the border have the best prices in the northeast and are a tourist attraction for visitors from other states.

There are advantages and disadvantages, but it can work just fine.
why wouldnt you use a tiny url and kill 2 birds with one stone?
Good on you taking criticism so well jgrant27, testament to a mature mind.

Also, absence of tail-call elimination in the spec doesn't have to stop you from using it, if your compiler supports it. We all love Common Lisp, but usually not "warts and all"; we all end up using our personally "attractive" subset. I personally code in Dylan with s-exp notation that happens to compile under SBCL :-)
Thanks for the link, Skolor, it's very interesting, and I hadn't read it before.

I used to be a regular reader of Kuro5hin, but I've fallen away as I've had less time to read general interest articles of late.

The article seems to focus on several suggestions all of which presupposing the idea that user accounts can't be the same as the list of members, so you see an increase in trolling. I suppose I'm not sure I agree.

I'd be interested to find out if people would be as willing to troll, or even just be vindictive, if the had more at stake than simply a disposable username. There would always be some, I suppose, but my hypothesis is that it would greatly diminish.
"I'd say the startup MBA is starting one".

Extending that principle sideways, a hacker should be someone who has written (and can show) a decent code base. A designer someone who has made some good designs, an entrepreneur someone who has made money running a business , a grad student applicant someone who has a significant research result and so on.

I am sure it sounds very obvious when I write it down like that but I am surprised at how often substitutes are demanded - a CS degree, years of experience, an MBA, GRE/GPA scores.

If I were interviewing a hacker for a startup my only demand would be send me (a url to) some code you wrote and are proud of. The cv can come later (if at all).
"what incentive do I have, other than common decency?"

It's a shame that 'common decency' has to be enforced in some way.

I post under a screen name (obviously), and while my real name is in my profile now, even before it was I never felt the urge to push someone else's buttons just for the fun of it. I realize I'm being a bit optimistic when I say this, but I think people rise to the standard to which they are held.

We have a bit of a reputation here at HN for being stodgy and humorless. While I don't think that is true, I'm fine with that reputation if it means newcomers think twice before posting their witty one liners and meme-of-the-week. Eventually the culture initiates the newcomers and they don't have to think twice... they will know what the community values and what it does not, and they will contribute accordingly.

In short, I don't think we need any technical solution to solve what someone's innate desire to be valuable will accomplish for us. What we do need is for existing members to set the tone, and so far they have done so admirably.
No, they're not yet participating here.
My elderly (my parents) follow me on Twitter and were using Skype two years before I was. My dad uses Facebook more than I do. Whatever the problem is with elderly people and technology, it's not been a problem for my parents at all.

I don't think I have any useful lesson for the mass market here, just a personal observation, although I definitely have seen loads of people stymied by usability fail, both old and young, and I think any company which successfully grabbed the senior market would have to rock at usability. There's a whole language of UI idioms which is so transparent to us we don't even realize we're using it, and it's very confusing to those who aren't fluent.
I think that's been the approach that Reddit.com has taken with subreddits- Note their refrain that "Subreddits aren't tags".
I believe they're attempting to manually and intentionally fracture their community to such that each subreddit might stay small enough to be manageable.

I think it's worked, to a degree, but it's somewhat at odds with the purpose- If X people want to be members of a community, I'd prefer to find a way to work together and ensure we all behave ourselves, rather splitting into small groups.

I'm honest curious- Would you agree that under ideal conditions, if everyone behaved, it would be better to be a larger group such that you could share disucssions, or would it be better to remain small, so that you know all the posters?

If you did want to remain small, how do you ensure the communities are of sufficient size to be viable even with people leaving?

Personally, I'd rather find ways of encouraging people to be on good behavior all of the time- That's something I liked about the applicants knowing their posts might be used as part of their YC application, and something that might work well if they posted under their real name.
All imports are done in the background using wp-cron so they shouldn't be directly affecting page load. But if you turned off any caching, given the traffic your blog sees, that's understandable.
If I had a content site I would most certainly put frame busting code on it. To not do so seems foolish.

Screw digg.
It would be like real-life; anonymity is the third pillar necessary for The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

HN is the first "community" I have ever given my real name to.
Interesting idea, but I have neither a face book id nor a Linked In id. I wouldn't want to create either just to participate in HN. Perhaps I could link to my webpage and/or blog, but I use distinctive "tones" for each, so I'll have to think about how that works.
This came up in a poker game yesterday. I pointed out to someone who thought Twitter peaked:
- They grew close to 100% last month
- I've gotten more business contacts over twitter than LinkedIn & Facebook combined
- Twitter is much more conversational than Facebook when between strangers. That makes the business & celeb side of it stronger.

I expect Facebook to do more to let companies better engage with their users. One problem is the privacy. Facebook conversations are largely hidden from the public eye. How will my wall-to-wall comment about shitty Comcast service get picked up by them?

I do think the celeb hype around twitter is just insane. Multiple talk show hosts spend a lot of time begging people to sign up. You really can't pay for that kind of PR.
Robot9000 might lead to "intellectually stimulating" trolling, but I agree it doesn't do much about post attitude.

A deep strength of hacker news is that when someone goes to the trouble of responding to a troll in a factual rather than inflammatory way, it is supported with upvotes. Responding like this can be difficult, but it's very effective - and good for the soul.

A weakness of HN is that intelligent, articulate writing is sometimes used with harsh attitude and connotations. That is, it's just as nasty as elsewhere online, just elegantly phrased. This is accepted, because HN favours intelligence over attitude (could just be my perception).

Eliezer posted an article on denotations vs. connotations recently, which gave me a new perspective on this old idea: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4h/when_truth_isnt_enough/
A question and answer that might be relevant: http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/8ba5g/my_objection_to_...
When Truth Isn't Enough
I'm more impressed by the diagrams explaining what's going on with each html tag and its CSS attributes.
Why does HN selectively mark links as rel=nofollow?
Jessica, your blog has amazing insights. Don't listen to these people, you've been successful since an early age. I bookmarked your blog (keep them coming).

By far my favorite part of the post...
"[..] I cried my brains out from thoughts of being a failure [..]"
I think everyone in the YC Rejects thread went through this step........and they don't have vagina's.
<nitpicking>It can be argued that the wrapper div is not semantically relevant.</nitpicking>
Nick Adenhart dies by drunk driver car crash
Twitter is great when used for its intended purpose (bitching, ego inflation, finding parties at SXSW). Many of the newer use cases - marketing over Twitter, customer support over Twitter, payments over Twitter, technical debate over Twitter, IP over Twitter, etc. - appear very cumbersome and inefficient compared to the old ways.

We have been here before. I remember a company in 2001 that built some sort of business app that routed all its traffic over the public Gnutella network - just because. When I see people doing something over Twitter just because, that's overhyped.
I would like to hear a great public speaker put that in to the right words.

It seems perfectly natural to hear currently successful people recall the learning experience of running a business early in life. It's seems perfectly natural that if you meet a 21 year old that has been running a business for some time, you will expect future success from them. This is obviously due to the (a)educational value of these activities & (b) what personality traits these suggest (It is usually not because this business is especially successful). You can speculate about which one is dominant, but (a) is unlikely to be insignificant. Already this sounds like a discussion about the value of going to a top Uni.

Like I said, I think a good speaker could take a friendly audience through something like this thought process & come to the conclusions that spending time & money running a business early on is valuable.

But if it comes to making a practical decision based on the above it quickly starts to feel radical. A proactical decision could be to take the time & money it takes to attend University & spend it creating a business. If the educational & associated benefits are similar to a University education, there are two outcomes. (1) The business fails - Education is acquired (2) The business succeeds - Education is acquired + the business can be sold or operated.

The risk doesn't seem that big.

Where I live (Australia) International Undergraduates typical need are: 20k-30k USD * 3-5 years. Students are often from Malaysia, Indonesia, China & India.

60k - 150k buys you a fairly substantial education business experience in these countries. But even some place like England, it is substantial.

In essays, PG implies "risking" about a year and little or nothing out-of-pocket. That is an order of magnitude less "risky" then University typically is.

The logical case is there. What's needed is the emotional resonance. I don't think it applies only to startups in the YC sense.
5 point threshold.
I worked for a large web company where the busiest traffic day of the year was 20x a normal day. And, the busiest hour of that busy day was 100x normal. So, they had a whole bunch of excess data center capacity hanging around to handle just a handful of days a year. For them, the value of not owning the cloud (along with on-demand provisioning) is that they can significantly reduce hardware usage.
I have to chime in just to say that there are people here who for various reasons (e.g. bootstrapping/moonlighting) would not publicly disclose who they are. I know those people would be thousands upon thousands of karma points less helpful to other hackers if they were forced to identify themselves publicly simply to provide their insight.

Look around your LinkedIn and Facebook communities. How many of those groups are thriving in the way Hacker News is with useful, helpful information? How many of you read them every single day and contribute to them in the way you do here?

I, for one, would rather pay large monthly fees before making it trivially obvious to the rest of the world, Google, future investors, etc, what I contribute here on HN.

(This isn't my primary account, so consider this post even more "anonymous" than usual.)
"I think people rise to the standard to which they are held."

Perhaps you're right- An extension of the Broken Windows theory, if you will. But so far it might seem that evidence is against you.

Look back, not just at HN, but Reddit, Digg, Kuro5hin, and even Slashdot have people who say how nice it was before the trolls arrived, before the site became as popular.

I certainly don't want to come across as a wistful elderly man looking back with nostalgia at his youth- I think that there's more to it than hazy memories of the past.

Communities evolve and change- I love Reddit, and my Alien Bobblehead is amoung my prized possessions.. But at the same time, I know that the level of discourse has fallen sharply over the few years. Pun threads are common, and people attack one another frequently.

I once read someone mention the "4chanization" of reddit, and unfortunately, I worry that that is the natural state of all communities, if they aren't tended.

The level of discourse on HN, while still exemplary has been declining of late, and I've seen more personal attacks and discussions of identity politics.

I wish I had your optimism, Andrew, and I hope you're right.
I've been reading through The Objective Caml Tutorial, http://www.ocaml-tutorial.org/, but I've yet had an opportunity to implement anything with OCaml.

I've actually that essay already about how OCaml is good for compilers, but it really struck me with this example.
A cloud user can't reduce latency. He can reduce the number of round trips, but the network latency is basically out of his control.
What's the difference between that and a Windows Tablet (apart from the price)?
Journalist goes undercover at Walmart
doesn't frame busting code get invoked too late? i.e. digg already got the search engine love by the time you bust out of the frame?
What about granting voting and posting rights to only those people who have been invited to join? Give the members who have the highest karma a set number of invitations and they invite people they trust. To prevent people from gaming the system you could even display the user who "vouched" for a troll to join. This is essnetially the strategy private clubs and organizations have used to preserve their identifies for years. I'm not suggesting we turn HN into a social network or anything, but I do think we can use the notion of personal relationships to act as an anchor. It's less egalitarian (and I would probably not have enough karma to qualify) but it would certainly be effective at preventing the community from being overtaken.
Sorting algorithms compared and animated
Main = interact (unlines . List.sort . lines)
That's a very fair criticism, Horatio.
Perhaps it may be best to encourage people to post under their names, but not enforce it in any technological way.

Keep in mind, however, that "making it trivially obvious to the rest of the world, Google, future investors" is exactly the point of the proposal!

People are unlikely to engage in disruptive behavior if they're "being judged" on what they say- Instead, they have far more incentive to contribute, in order to increase their reputation.
It does to a certain extent. However anyone re-sharing it will not share the digg URL.

Furthermore they're not prompted at the top of the page before your content to leave your site.

Digg even sticks ads on the bar when you click on something. Very un-cool.
Others copy and paste the url and send it around - or just use the bar to send it, which does the same.
I'd consider the issue of latency to be a switching cost vs. lock-in. You could move all your stuff over to the new, shiny cloud. Of course, if Cloud A is good for some stuff and Cloud B is good for other stuff, then you're stuck in the middle (without low-latency peering as some commenters have mentioned).

In general, I don't see why people are scared of Amazon EC2 lock-in. You're still writing a regular 'ol app that runs on RedHat (or whatever). How does switching over to your own datacenter require any re-writes (other than config changes, etc.)?

I understand the S3 issue, but you ought to be abstracting away the S3 details anyway with a code layer. So, you could implement some sort of hybrid scheme (S3 + new way abstracted away) easily enough if you must avoid downtime Or, if you don't have that much data, just write a script to move it all over.

Queuing: If you're relying on some specific feature of SQS, you're doing it wrong.

Payments: Ok, this gets interesting. But, it's low volume compared to most computing activity, so you can afford the latency. It's not like your DB is at Amazon and your app servers are somewhere else.

I'm more sympathetic to Google AppEngine lock-in. However, I don't think it's too hard for someone to implement the limited set of interfaces provided by the cloud (at least in the Java case -- I haven't examined the Python one), so it's easily broken.

As Clouds become more abstracted away from hardware and the current ways of doing things, I think lock-in will become a real concern. But, it doesn't matter right now.
Q: What's the difference between Twitter and setting your status on a XMPP client?
A: XMPP scales.
It's not so much the specifics of linking real world accounts to HN accounts, but increasing the investment cost of accounts, such that people want to be on their best behavior.

Even charging money for an account wouldn't do that, because it's easy enough to write off the account, and get a new one later.

But for example, look at my user account, e1ven. If you Google it, you'll see work I've done with Zimbra, Freenet, SQ7, and a dozen other projects.. The username certainly has a great deal of weight on it's own, without needing to link it to my resume.

How else do you think people could be encouraged to have "weighty" reputations, so they don't want to give them up?
Absolutely- One of the things I enjoy about the HN community is that is is, most of the time, much more like spending time at a school lounge, than it is like an internet forum.

Being more like real-life isn't such a bad thing ;)
If thats the case, you should have updated the post saying "seeing as how the photos are now everywhere, Im putting the pictures back up."
Colin, I appreciate your signing your name, but the guidelines suggest using your profile for this (presumably because sigs take up comment space):

Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already signed
with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click
on it to see your profile.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Happiness is ... your own business
Apple has more than a little experience with moving between CPU architectures, and with distributing multi-architecture binaries. Plus, they control the application distribution channel. I doubt they'd have too much trouble switching. Well, other than the likelyhood that ARM is going to hold a performance per miliwatt edge on Atom for a while still.
One day left to apply for Shotput Ventures summer 2009
oh i meant actual server load via top
Very few people talk about themselves in the third person. And the only one that I can think of at this time is Bob Dole.