skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN Meta: Can we quit it with the downmods already
Ok, Apologies for the meta topic. I hate these types of posts, but I've noticed a trend lately and don't like the direction.

The comment downmod arrow is being used far too often in my opinion, and as a result discussion is starting to be diluted into reddit or digg like banter.

Comments like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=649561
and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=651149 should never be downmodded on this site.

They are not spam. They are legitimate opinions that are perhaps unpopular, perhaps wrong, but are part of the discussion.

We've always had good discussion here, and it would be a shame to see it ruined by people using downvote arrows to silence alternative views.

As a suggested modification, I would like to see the downvote on comments removed and replaced with the flag link, thoughts?
Ask HN: What is With The Glorified Footer?
I really like these new footers that I see on sites everywhere like wsj.com or seomoz.org. http://bit.ly/14jgKF (Screenshot). I see them all over the place now.

I think they are easy to use, and I have even seen people include a contact form in one. Are there any studies on the usability of these footers, such as a Jakob Nielsen study or any other study? Also what are they called?

Do any of you have these on your site currently, and how might they have helped your site?

I also wanted to know if these are mainly for SEO, such as to help increase indexing on large sites. Or are there other more important reasons?
Blog post introducing add-on collections: http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/06/10/introducing-add-on...
Looks very useful.

How about some real world stats, showing that a particular app on a local machine takes X secs to run tests, while with devver it now only takes X

I've just started a new project and am really digging into test for the first time. Tests do seem overly slow, but I'm never sure if its something I'm doing wrong or what. Devver might not help me though as I'm on a horrendously slow connection.
Like to see the HNsearch button (in footer) replaced by a Search box.
Maybe it's an intentional flaw to keep people from those "other" sites from flocking here? I'm not 100% serious but sometimes I wonder if in certain cases, ease of usability hinders the maintenance of a community because the barrier to entry is really low?
Transparency: The Largest Bankruptcies in History
> that had a real, legitimate excuse attached to them

So, in your opinion you believe that you as a TA have the right to know the personal details of students' lives if they need extensions? What if the matter is private?
> higher numbers of women make a greater contribution to overpopulation.

"Overpopulation" is a phrase used by folks who see humanity as a problem.

The more people we have, the more minds we have.

The resources of the solar system are infinite, in any sense that matters.

The more minds we have working on our problems, the better.
Well we sorta already have that with the HN Search on the bottom. Granted it would work better as a text box, or at least by linking to ycsearch
Supposedly it is still easier to convert a free model into a paid one than vice versa. People hate seeing something they place real value on be given away to others.

I would suggest keeping the core of what you have now free, and reserving some of the bells and whistles for paid accounts. Then to lure the free users (who are not completely disgruntled at this point) over to the paid side, add a great new feature or two.
OK, great, but can we please avoid the "Bing API for X" flurry from here on out? Yes, I'm sure there will soon be Bing APIs for Clojure, Haskell, Perl, PHP, C, C++, and so on and so forth.

If I want them, I'll Google for them.
I guess the simplest solution would be to use metadata to identify a package as being a package and not a folder? That way it wouldn't matter what software was installed, etc?
The headline is deceptive, the point of the article is interrupted and insufficient sleep leaves you tired.
Universities will be 'irrelevant' by 2020, Brigham Young professor says
just as a community crafting thought, i'd like to see two types of flags, one that is for fact (for lack of a better word) and the other is for opinion.

so, the idea would be that you can use the factual up/down to keep spam or garbage posts in check and punish/reward the submitter for quality posts. and you can use the opinion one to up/down vote a comment based on how you agree with it, and it doesn't affect the submitter (and maybe helps suggest things for you). just something i've been thinking about lately.
I made "wunbar" recently, which allows you to use searchyc from your firefox toolbar (or from wunbar.com) along with many other sites (google, etc.)
TED: Joachim de Posada says, Don't eat the marshmallow yet
-- Haven't you ever come out of a situation and, at the end, when it was all said and done, realized that you had talked/fooled yourself into it?

No. Before I ever enter a situation I already know whether or not I need to convince myself. I'm pretty aware of my own intuition, and the more I need to "talk myself" into doing something the more I'll question myself before I skip over my gut instinct.

It's been extremely rare when I've come out of a situation where I trusted my intuition and been unhappy with the result. On the other hand, I've had many times where I overrode my intuition and thought "damn, should have trusted myself"

-- It's important to not get high on your own supply.

I don't. It's called being proactive and is functionally similar to the techniques of mindfulness. Steven Covey writes about it in his first chapter of "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People". And please, entrepreneurs ignore reality more than most people I've ever known. Start up a business against all odds... convincing yourself to keep going with an idea even though you haven't succeeded after years? How is that NOT being high on your own supply?

-- If you question your own intentions and observations, you can avoid making big mistakes.

This is the big fallacy of questioning your every thought and intention. If only I could just monitor every thought, every motive, question my every step, then I could do it perfectly -- I would avoid the big mistakes. Wrong. You might have perfectly reasoned every thought, justified every intention, and still fail simply because you didn't have all the information.

So with that in mind, that's why it's much better to simply DO. Ensure one's intuition is in agreement and then DO, don't think into it. Mistakes are going to happen anyway, and that's when you'll do the reflecting.
A Manifesto for Scholarly Publishing
The resources of the solar system are infinite, in any sense that matters.

The resources of our planet, however, are not. Do you see a significant number of humans moving off our planet within a couple generations? I admit it's possible, but are you willing to gamble on that?
Note that the presenter responded to many questions and comments on the site.
Thanks for the review, Matt. I had consciously avoided reading news about the Pre b/c of the painful ride that the iPhone speculation news was. I was waiting for a review from someone I trust and didn't want to wait until 2011 when David Pogue picked one up.

It sounds really great, I'll have to give it a look.
they are also usability improvements. when you're done reading an article, you're at the bottom of the page. for the average user, having a nice set of options right in front of your face is more convenient than having to click a "to the top" button, or scroll back up, or whatever.
Not hard at all (see my "wunbar" comment above).
You are assuming that there are even menial jobs available that would allow her to support herself, given the sheer number of other people who are looking for those same jobs that may not be true.

And as for the lifestyle choice part of your criticism, this site is very much a glass house in which to throw that particular brick; if you're working on a startup and doing your work in a popular scripting language, that's a lifestyle choice; a more financially rational decision would be to go and fix someone's J2EE monstrosity of an accounting/ERP project too big to fail.

And if some clever person comes up with a machine that can crank out code to spec, better and with fewer errors than human programmers... Some of us will adapt to the new situation and carry on as Dev/PM dealing with AI instead of coworkers, but some percentage will be left high and dry.
http://github.com/zacharydanger/greasemonkey-searchyc/tree/m... -- Github seems to be erroring out, but you can

git clone git@github.com:zacharydanger/greasemonkey-searchyc.git

for a peak at a search box that hits searchyc.com
That's true, and my point isn't that EDH is bad; it's that there are cases where you don't want it used, like when you own the servers and operationally want the ability to monitor connections from other vantage points that would also have the server's private key.
That caused the number of new (but not necessarily good) programmers each year to explode.

Your implication is exactly backwards, from what I've observed. People who learned programming as a kid for the joy of it are much more likely to be good programmers. People who went into it for job training are much more likely to suck.
I've watched several previous employers firing the "great" programmers because they "cost too much."

Never underestimate the stupidity and shortsightedness of a bad manager.
Analytics for a Front Page Item on HN
Hey, Ben -

I'm no developer (actually an interactive copywriter), but I know enough about Ruby to hold a decent conversation.

I agree with timmah - you adequately convey what Devver does, but you're not really giving enough of a value proposition. It just needs a little more "sizzle" to show them why they really NEED to use Devver.

I'm sure some more coder-types will chime in here, but overall, I think it describes the service very well. Good luck!

Kipp
Is there really an open question about it?

There's TechCrunch with an anonymous source making a claim they've already had to walk back, and haven't posted any formal retraction of.

Then there's Last.fm and CBS categorically denying the claim, signing people's actual names to the denials.
How about this radical idea: Once in a while, a moderator marks a comment which is reasonable but contains an unpopular opinion as a 'trap'. Anyone who mods it down gets a zap of -100 karma. Will make people think about their downmoding before doing it.
I've thought about that too. But --- on top of the usability issues --- if people are misusing the current up/down voting control, why would they correctly use a dual up/down voting control? What's the incentive for people not to mark comments they disagree with on a point of opinion as being factually wrong?
Why not add OpenSearch?

http://jon.ursenba.ch/code/hn-search.xml
Typo?

"When employees were offered a choice of 2 funds, roughly 75% signed up for a retirement program. When the number of funds was increased to 59%, even though qualitatively this was a better deal for employees, only 60% decided to sign up."
How do you know he wasn't a shill planted in the audience by the festival's promoters?

</devil's_advocate>
A lot of blank sheets of paper and a sharpie. I keep them in a manila folder to look at later, but usually there's only one or two important pages that are worth keeping because the ideas change a lot as I write.

Use what comes natural and helps get your thoughts out as fast as possible.
Augmented Reality is the killer app for the iPhone 3GS
it won't inherently stop anyone, no, but it would give someone a decision point before they vote, instead of just clicking the down button for the comment making them grumpy. they'd have to make the choice, which is not an option now.

plus, an opinion vote would tie into other features, so it would behoove someone to use it properly.
Meta is fine, but this meta topic is actually in the guidelines as something we don't want to be talking about.
Well, I down-voted the first comment you linked. I can tell you it's been substantially edited since I down-voted it.

It started out as a vacuous comment that did nothing for the conversation and looked suspiciously like the start of a reddit pun thread.

People get up arrows and down arrows; sometimes comments are well received and sometimes they aren't. Trying to corral people into not down-voting because someone asked them not to isn't going to work.

I think it's interesting that these types of submissions always come after the poster has been recently sent into negative territory on one of their comments.
> "Overpopulation" is a phrase used by folks who see humanity as a problem.

No, no, no. The rest of humanity is a problem. I'm perfectly fine.
European Entrepreneurs Meet Scott McNealy of Sun
I completely agree that the downmod thing has gotten a bit out of hand as of late (Disclaimer: I'm the author of the first comment listed as an example). The up and down votes are not meant to be a sign of your personal support or distaste for a comment.

The modification proposed here is questionable to me though. If a comment is flagged, does it automatically fade? What if its flagged multiple times? Is there a way to un-flag it? This whole issue could lead to a whole other discussion on the karma system, but I think we really do need to come up with a better way to treat the negative votes.
That was 2 years ago. I would welcome messaging and search, and I think if he put it to a vote now he would be pleasantly surprised to get a different answer than he did then.
No, I think downvote is good. It's an important part of the punish/reward element of instrumental conditioning to encourage insightful or intelligent remarks, and discourage comments that aren't well thought out or add nothing to the conversation (or even take away).
I'm not implying that it caused there to be more bad programmers, just that it caused the number of programmers overall to explode, and that probably adds a lot of noise to any observations about older vs. younger programmers.

I agree with you, but I also started learning to program with a Commodore 64 when I was six, so I'm probably a bit biased. :)
The total area of all cars and people in the world is much greater than the total area of all aircraft.

Ah, I see. It hadn't occurred to me that they were speaking collectively. In any case, it primarily matters to me whether the plane I'm in is in more or less danger from meteorites than the car I'm in (or would be, if either danger were worth considering). The relative chances of a hit object being a car or person rather than a plane are much less relevant to my interests, and there's nothing that I could do about it if I cared.
Problems are solved by sleeping
Not to downplay the severity of people's health problems when it comes to certain sleep conditions, but I've observed a basic principle in life: When you try to work in ways that go against the basic design of your body you have to resort to a lot of complicated things to coddle and cajole your body into going along with it. 300 dollar sleep devices, mattresses, alarm clocks et al.

At the end of the day, I wonder how many sleep issues would go away if we ate correctly, stayed active, turned the lights out at dusk and kept the blinds open for when dawn peeks through the curtains. When we operate outside our design parameters we can function, but we function as visitors. Encumbered with our mass of tools, plans, pills and procedures designed to enable us to survive outside the envelope. Necessarily? Sometimes yes. Elegant? Almost never.
Good point! If I update the post to indicate that the length is also checked in secvfy.c: http://www.koders.com/c/fid7EBD6C04C1D001D6410ED86171294E237...

and link to the matasano series, would that better address your concern?
Health Care Spending Disparities Stir a Fight
If posters have good opinions that they don't want downmodded, they should learn to communicate better. People shouldn't be punished for disliking your opinion.
You're right. My original comment was made as I was just waking up that morning, and it certainly did not facilitate the conversation well. Interestingly enough, the majority of the downmods were after I edited it.

The bottom line is yes, "sometimes comments are well received and sometimes they aren't." Life goes on.

And as for the poster's "negative territory," I truly don't think they should have been downmodded for asking a question on ethics. As I understand, HN is not a community to judge the morality of an individual.
My post was not in agreement with the idea it proposed (or with the parent's suggestion).
The time flies paradox
What if one person's idea of 'reasonable' isn't the same as someone elses'? They could be 'zapped' for downmodding not because the disagree, but becasue they don't believe the comment adds anything to the discussion. That's exactly why we have modding in the first place: so all of us can benefit from the collective filtering of the good comments. If it was a completely unsubjective judgment then having a single moderator would be the solution.
Agreed.

As for the actual api it's here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd251056.aspx
Bootstrap startup looking for Rails developers ...
Startup looking for Ruby on Rails developers to help build additional features for our soon-to-be-available beta product. Must be willing to work for equity. Developers will help build new features and extend/enhance existing services based on user/client feedback.

Interested in working at a startup looking to change the way people look for and find work? We are looking for talented individuals to help us accomplish this goal. If interested, send an email with your resume to jarlath@jobspeaker.com.
Thanks for the feedback! We've been meaning to add some real-world comparisons, but haven't gotten to it yet. Good to know that they would be valuable.
Awesome feedback. We'll work on adding more info to really make the value proposition clear.
Swiftmailer for sale? Look at comments
Nope, IMHO the first comment was an example of someone not reading/understanding the article, and ridiculous overreaction - that's why they were downmodded.

For me, it didn't add anything at all to the conversation and would have been more suited to digg/reddit.

The second is at +1, but IMHO the article itself should probably be flagged... However, "Societies with more men than women are violent, and start wars." isn't something you can really calmly respond to. Again, it's overreaction that belongs on digg/reddit. If there.

The downmod works well IMHO.

Another example would be in response to the last.fm / techcrunch rumor, if someone responded with "I just closed my last.fm account and will be urging all my friends to do the same". I'd downmod that also. It's overreaction, and does not add anything to the discussion.
Hacker News Toolkit puts a search box on every HN page, among other things.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
Of course, people confuse fact and opinion all the time, particularly when they have a bias about something. Even where there's not confusion, "fact" downvotes would certainly be abused.
>"Overpopulation" is a phrase used by folks who see humanity as a problem.

We're not talking about overpopulation of the planet; we're talking about a limited geographic area with finite amount of resources. Who cares that Jupiter has valuable hyrdocarbons when your village is starving?
Here's an idea. Allow searching of your "saved" items. Then people will be doubly encouraged not to upvote pointless crap.
Absolutely.

A standard emerged in websites many years back:

* logo in in the upper left (which is also a link to the home page)

* search is a text box in the upper right.

If you're not doing it this way, you're imposing an unnecessary cognitive load on your users.
A common theme here (which I agree with) is to use paper (whiteboard, sketch book). Paper allows two-dimensional organization of text, whereas computers force text to be one-dimensional. This linearity, which allows only two branches on a single idea, is too constraining for my creative thinking, during which two ideas branching out from a single original idea. You can of course use lines to implement two dimensions in plaintext, but I find this clumsy.
This is how the sex ratio got to 50% in the first place, evolutionarily. If there's an excess of women, men will find it relatively easier to find a mate, and so women whose genes cause them to bear an excess of sons will pass more of those genes down into the third generation. If there's an excess of men, men will find it relatively hard to find a mate, and so women whose genes cause them to bear an excess of daughters will pass more genes onto the third generation. It balances out at a 50/50 steady-state.

Curiously, the sex ratio can get skewed by environmental conditions, in a manner similar to what you describe. Men have more reproductive variability than women - the number of children a woman can bear is largely limited by her uterus, while the number of children a man can bear is limited by the number of women he can convince to sleep with him. So when times are good, or if a mother is high-status within her particular group, she tends to bear more sons to take advantage of their reproductive success. While when times are lean, mothers tend to bear more daughters.

A similar effect occurs on the level of individual traits. Couple who carry genes that disproportionately affect the reproductive success of one sex tend to have more children of that sex. For example, someone did a study of Hollywood actors, and found out that 60% of their children are daughters - presumably because Hollywood actors are better-looking than average, and beauty benefits girls more than boys. Taller and more muscular parents tend to have more sons, etc.

And what's the mechanism for this, since everyone knows sex is carried on the male's Y-chromosome, and women shouldn't be able to influence it? Sex-selective abortion. Apparently, females of most mammalian species will absorb the blastocyst into the womb (or otherwise abort very-early-stage fetuses) if environmental conditions aren't right for a child of that sex. So China and India are just using technology to do what biology has done for tens of millions of years.
Very good info here, thanks for the submit. The huge font kinda hurts my eyes though.

The point about how giving away a product causes it to lose perceived value and seem less desirable is a good one: I wonder though how this translates to web-based products since so much of this ecosystem is defined by free services.
...that should read: "hardly seems practical"
At least from the Inc article it was in context of working at Yahoo after getting bought.
Ask HN: What are the iPhone 3G S hardware improvements?
Besides being 3 grams heavier, I am not sure what hardware improvements have been made to the 3G S to give it faster user experience. Does anyone have more information on this?
I'm not a Ruby developer so I can't say how well it speaks to that market... but in terms of communicating the idea quickly/clearly and seeming credible - it scores very well. The design is good, not exceptional or super Web styling.
To me, this site is about consistently seeing well thought out and educated comments, not a place to let everybody express their viewpoint or opinion just because they have one. I never hesitate to upvote comments which are not in line with my thinking if they are insightful or well constructed or come from an authority on the subject matter or most importantly clearly have more than 2 minutes educated thought behind them. I will always downvote comments which are shallow, reactional, blatantly wrong, or of the 'my opinion matters' type. Most people know very little about everything, and I like how this site and the voting tends to value those who can bring something of value to the table over those who feel like they should be heard but only have shallow (if any) knowledge. Because of this, I will continue to downvote comments which I believe do not belong here, even if the comment presents an alternative view.