skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
pvg said -> "It would be a little difficult to have an exchange with someone if you can't tell who is who."

cperciva said "Knowing who wrote a comment often provides very useful context"

You are both completely right. My suggestion doesn't make sense.

It was just a "spur of the moment" suggestion to provoke thought (de Bono's PO mental operator). I dind't think it through at all.
Recruiters are spammers (or more accurately marketeers, but that is the same thing), treat them as such.

If you need Viagra you go to Pfizer; if you need a job you go to the companies that you wan't to work with, no through some middle men.
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"I believe people have gotten jobs from Hacker News too based on their reputation."

Whoa! Nice :-). Any concrete examples?
Bad joke for me, maybe. People who get it will read your message, laugh, then read the explanation (maybe).
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Vortex_cooler
Odd sort of "improvement"

Hacker News -- now with less information?

I would imagine that the more readers become engaged with the site the more information about the site they would want to consume, no?
It's a community, not an attempt to promote "ideal" discussions. Removing names might help the latter, but it would hurt the former.
The bandwagon effect (which is just ridiculous on reddit) occurs because top-rated comments stay at the top. Typical reddit comment at the top of a thread:

reddit_user 622 points

Glenn Beck is a wanker! He sniffs arses!

Everyone agrees with this, needless to say, but they only upmod it because it's at the top of the pile. Otherwise, it's a worthless comment. I find the lack of mod points distracting to an unexpected degree. Bad quantification is better than no quantification...
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The problem with Groveshark is that I can't seem to find one legal piece of music on it. Other than that it is definitely better (that is easy though, Pandora doesn't work at all.

Keep up the good work.
Interesting psychological side effect I just noticed: I wasn't previously aware of my tendency to scan a long thread for comments that stand out because of their high comment scores but I just did it when I opened this thread and felt like I didn't have my usual bearings. In one sense it levels the playing field. In another sense, though, it removes some key information that helps us to prioritize where we direct our attention.
I bet that would lead a lot of people to start using signatures. No thanks.
I find the biggest time sucks are: A cashier who can't take payments fast, and a customer who can't pay fast. Someone who doesn't know how to work their credit card adds a lot of time.

Based on just being observant, I've got a general intuitive sense of when the people in front of me might take a long time to pay. I look for people who seem unaware, in a zombie-like trance, shuffling their feet along the floor with their eyes blurred off into nothing. It's a pretty decent judge. For cashiers, just waiting in the line a moment usually gives a good idea, and I'll move lines if I'm in a hurry and the cashier appears new or particularly slow.
You could give everyone a unique identifier per thread.
Any bets on when the patch arrives that "accidentally" makes the Chrome plugin 4 times slower?
Ask HN: Any tutorials on forming a Delaware LLC?
I'm looking to form a Delaware LLC on my own, what's the most inexpensive way to do so?
What matters is the quality of the information, not the amount. One of my goals has always been to decrease the amount of stupid information flowing through the system. That's why there are no downvotes on submissions: my observations of Reddit suggested that downvotes were more often reflexive than upvotes.
"Odd sort of "improvement" "

I don't see this as odd at all.

Greater amounts of Information widely dispersed == "good/better" and less/restricted information == "bad/worse" is a very dominant underlying assumption - sometimes so embedded in our intuition that we see restricting information as counter-intuitive.

If this experiment succeeds, then it might show that in some situations, the opposite is true?

As a thought experiment, suppose you could know the exact moment of your death. This is more information than you have today. Is this good or bad? (I can see arguments for both sides)

Suppose everyone knew. Would this be good or bad? (I can see arguments for both sides here too)
This may be the only board on the internet where a person would ever state apologies. Long live HN.
"The problem with Grooveshark is that I can't seem to find one legal piece of music on it."

You're very casually making a serious accusation. Can you offer any evidence that Grooveshark is doing something illegal?
I'd try out rounded percentage scores.

Out of the total comment Karma alloted to all comments for an item, what proportion of this amount is contained within each comment?

The issue here is that upon voting, you couldn't change all displayed comment percentages at once, it'd have to change on page reload.

Also, it could be a rounded 1-10 scale.

--
edit: would be good to reveal any comment score upon voting: gives an incentive to vote and remain critical. It's also like a marker as to what comments interest you for future recall -- that's something new.
About a year ago, I mentioned the problem of "bandwagon upvoting"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217822

So I'm really glad to see this and hopeful it works out. I think hiding the votes is better than a hard upper vote limit, as it is more organic. I'm really curious to know after the experiment how this affects the voting behavior (more votes, less votes, more for lead, less, etc)
I'm glad they're responding to people's reactions to compact florescent bulbs. A lot of people could be saving money with them, but aren't. My father, for instance, refuses to switch. I asked him, and he said he doesn't know why. Even after I made sure he knew they weren't that expensive, and would save him money over the medium-term, he won't consider them. Maybe if LED bulbs have more bugs ironed out when they're introduced, they'll be more accepted.
Old but good. I've had this in my bookmarks for years but I can't not upvote this. A really valuable reference resource.
You can still see the votes on your comments by looking at your comments history.
But then a breach in your OpenID account would mean access to every other site right?

However I do agree it would make it a little more secure than using one password at every site. However for smaller sites that I care less about, I generally use a special password anyways, and it seems it's really smaller, less ambitious sites are the ones that will adopt OpenID anyways. I don't think Yahoo, Google, or Facebook will start taking OpenID logins any time soon right?
From their point of view, if someone can read the database on their mainframe, that's already doomsday. They put all their security outside that perimeter, but no further layers like encrypting table columns inside.

They store passwords the same way they've always stored PIN codes (where encrypting would be pointless): there's a ALPHA(8) field right next to the NUMERIC(4) field for your PIN. Those design decisions are from an era where adding an extra VARCHAR(64) to store a MD5 password times 100 million accounts cost real money. It was probably the right decision.

Rather than sneer at the older generation, try to see the constraints they worked within. It opens your mind to imagine what "right decisions" now will seem silly to later generations. Non-GC languages with threads kludged in? Program syntax limited to ASCII? Silicon? IPv4 & NATs?
There are features I do not use. Therefore, new features will be of no use to me.

This line of reasoning seems rather lacking.
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How hard do you work on low paying freelance projects?
I'm with you on your motives, and it'll be interesting to see how the site reacts.

It just clashes with the idea that sites should be very simple to use, but engaging in detail over time -- that as users spend more time on a site they become interested in more details, whatever those details are. I think you see this in the number of HN mining apps posted. People who are engaged want more stuff from what they're engaged in.

I'm definitely not for information for information's sake, just find your tweaking counter-intuitive. Seems like shooting all of the animals to prevent them from escaping the barn.

I look forward to somebody telling us how the experiment went.
I think it is complicated in that you are put in front of so many buttons and choices, whereas before it was one way: username and password.

This is probably the main user friendliness issues with openID. It's made worse by the fact that your Google/yahoo openid is some long URL and that typing in your yahoo/gmail in an openID 1.0 box doesn't redirect you to the login page like an openid 2.0 box.
If this experiment succeeds, then it might show that in some situations, the opposite is true?

Yes -- it's a very interesting experiment and I'm really curious as to how it will play out. There's obviously a bit of mob rule mentality on HN and something should be done about it. Perhaps this is it?

I've always thought that in making a web site you make it completely intuitive and engaging -- then you incrementally add more detail and complexity to satisfy power users. Sort of like the qualities of a good game where it's easy to learn but hard to master.

But I'm probably off-base. As you said, there are a lot of underlying assumptions here -- on both sides. The beauty of experimenting is that you can move from talking about things to actually seeing what works.
. . . and I thought vi(m) was awesome before!

I will never look at the king of all editors quite the same way. You have my thanks, mkramlich. May your life be long and prosperous.

(I totally didn't mean that to sound like a Vulcan blessing, I swear.)
All Circuits Aren’t Busy
This is good -- I really want to read threads without scores. If the experiment ends at some point, I would like to see it as an option checkbox.

I often read comments with highest scores first while often there are good comments forgotten and sandwiched between a few übercomments. Or the übercomment is so conclusive that there's nowhere to take the discussion to. Hiding scores allows me to approach the discussion more objectively.
I think your previous guidance helped create the "vote toward a target score" behavior. You've spoken against piling-on voting, and your clipping of the negative range advances the idea: once a signal is 'far enough' in one direction, people should hold off.

I can see ways hidden scores may work for or against extreme totals. On the one hand, without the satisfaction of seeing a vote take immediate effect, overall voting may go down. But on the other, without the indication that a comment is already 'far enough' in a desired direction, charged comments may rack up unprecedented positive or negative values. I hope you can share info about which effect predominates.

I will miss the chance to quickly 'rescue' slightly-downvoted comments I don't particularly like or agree with, but feel have been unfairly squelched into nether-ratings by hair-trigger down-voters.
Ahhh.. And I thought my browser was acting up again.
My preference is to use things like cd and ls to browse the filesystem. When I'm feeling really fancy, I might use tree.
I was looking for something like this the other day and couldn't find it.

This is awesome.
I never bothered to learn that stuff before I started using Vimperator. I tend to prefer buffers over tabs for dealing with multiple files in a single Vim instance, so I never had much use for tab-related keybindings until I started using a vi-like interface for a tabbed browser.

Maybe that's just me, though.
It may be nice to add scrollbars (with CSS, probably) to longer comments, so that "popular" threads take up less space. Or, just have a collapse mechanism.

This makes it easier to scroll past the end of the indented thread to find the next top-level comment.
Can you explain why Vimperator is a good idea. As a vim user myself, I understand vim was designed first and foremost to input and edit text using the keyboard, is bringing those key bindings to browsing the web is a good idea?

For the best navigating experience, I feel
Opera does really well. You keep one hand on the keyboard (nearing 1, 2 to switch tab; and z, x to move back & forth in history) and one hand on the mouse to click around & do gestures.
I'd like to suggest it's cheaper overall to hire a competent lawyer.
. . . or source code formatting, or adding comment characters to multiple lines, or in any other way making an identical change to several adjacent lines at the same time.
Now when I upmod a story on the main page, the score of the story doesn't change :/

BTW Cool experiment, think it might get rid of some of the group-think
> What RMS did invent is a clever license that allowed companies to contribute to open-source projects with no risk of their contributions being taken by their competitors.

Actually the first big donation to open-source by a corporation is Netscape's Mozilla. It was distributed under their own license (MPL) following the definition of "open-source" ... a definition set forth because the term "free software" had ideological connotations.

Of course the FSF did valuable legal work prior to that, and they had a model to follow when defining what "open-source" is, but it was innevitable anyway.

The "open source" movement is not RMS's. Linux may have never been so popular without the work of Miguel, or without the folks at the Apache Foundation, or without Netscape's contribution, or without the contribution of so many others.

People have different goals, motivators and ideals. We will never get rid of proprietary software unless a business model is born that is better than selling copies of software. And that won't happen soon.

So instead of spreading the "free software virus" by brute force and activism, why not invite the corporations to contribute, such that at least the development tools and platforms become more open? And that's exactly what people like Miguel are doing.

I mean, I've worked on a couple of smallish projects in dotNet, and the landscape outside Microsoft is a waistland ... the majority of third party tools and libraries are proprietary. But more and more open-source tools are starting to come out of the Mono community or from CodePlex. The dotNet community is really warming up to "open-source". And I think that's really something.
New releases create common topics to talk about in social situations. There's something to be said for the value of shared experiences, and that's probably a large part of why I watch movies or TV at all.
Make the up and down arrows slightly further apart, or make the up arrow bigger. I still worry that I might accidentally down-vote someone, which is made worse by the fact that the arrow disappears once it's done (and is thus not undoable).
I wish Adobe would just create a single program I buy ONCE for $499 instead of every couple years, then allow me to buy only the add-ons that I need at $40 each (for example).

I guess I can't win against corporate greed, and since they have no REAL competition after buying Macromedia, they will keep getting away with these outrageous prices for upgrades.
Err.. Offtopic: I can't see how many points the parent comment has. That's weird. I see the uparrow, followed by "by mikeyur 8 hours ago", but the "N points" part is missing.
I just use gtalk on my android phone with twitterspy: http://dustin.github.com/twitterspy/
While I generally reserve enough time for shopping groceries so that I never need to hurry, I do exercise some preference between cashiers. It, however, isn't necessarily for the fastest route but the most pleasurable route.

My highly scientific method (=i.e. where chemistry kicks in) to ensure this goes like this:

- Prefer younger cashiers to older cashiers: I empirically know that middle-aged and older people can be unbearably slow. Note that I don't mind queueing as long as I see some progress: unbearably slow is slower than that.

- Prefer women to men: they're not necessarily faster but I find it more pleasurable to spend my time queueing while observing a female cashier.

- Prefer attractive women to others. They're not necessarily faster but I find it much more pleasurable to watch them while standing in the queue. Moreover, given the (speed-wise) age range from the first bullet, the woman's age doesn't really matter. General looks and vibes matter most. Breasts do play a part.

Yeah, I'm a man.
Maybe scientists can account for that and adjust the models accordingly.
It is also very useful to learn the code-folding commands ("z*"). Rather than repeat them here, just say ":help fold".
Yea I remember the days of obscure hacks and fixes for windows. The good thing is that lots of people use windows, so eventually you'll find it. But I can honestly say I've never had to do any weird hacks since I've switched to mac.
^[ - Same as Esc (I prefer not reaching so far to Esc)

W - move forward a Word

B - move backward a Word
What makes this better than the previously released www.spreeder.com?
To me the article displayed a typical revisionism trait: picking one small aspect, proving it wrong and thereby claiming to disprove the whole theory. It is like the creationists who think finding some obscure bone somewhere that falls outside of the predictions of some obscure application of evolution theory somehow disproves evolution theory.

While I can imagine a lot of things, I very much doubt that the whole climate debate rests on one unobtainable data set.
That would be potentially neat if you were only interested in raw argument. But HN is a place for people to meet as well.

Also, credibility matters. Some people are known for their expertise in certain areas, like Matt Maroon and poker.
My understanding is they were breaking regulation by not. The company I work for does customer opinion surveys. We occasionally do some for a large national bank. When we send data, of any form to the bank we are required to encrypt the email before we send it. This is just for something like random customer surveys not even at the level of actual account data.
I find it frustrating that there are 3 major credit card companies but every store has a different procedure for accepting credit cards. I can never remember if it is 3 screens I need to tap yes on, or 5.
This decision is very good for improving quality of content of comments.

Maybe it is good idea to display author's karma instead.

People love to see magic numbers. =)
I don't need karma either, but the time of submission is important to know whether the poster is likely to read a reply.
But now I cant quickly skim off information from a thread. There are 87 comments in this thread at this moment. I am not interested in reading 87 comments about this experiment. I am however very much interested in seeing what the top few most insightful comments in this thread are. That feedback is very important. Right now I am feeling blind as a bat...
Waiting in line at the grocery store is one of my greatest pet peeves. To avoid this I usually do one of 3 things:

1) Move to the lines further from the store exit. I've noticed that people tend to queue up in lines close to the exit (this is usually where the express lines are, too).

2) Use the self-checkout. At least this way I feel like the process is going as efficiently as possible because I am in control of it (plus barcode scanners fascinate me). I will only do this if there is an immediately available self-checkout station. Otherwise, it's guaranteed to take 10x longer than just waiting in a normal line (only being slightly sarcastic).

3) Go to the 24hr grocery store at 2am. No lines! (This only works because I am usually up really late coding, and it serves as a nice break.)
Then can AT&T offer a cheaper 'AT&T Voice' long-distance, that opts out of 'common-carrier' requirements and doesn't connect to the expensive rural numbers?

If "the point" is that Google can choose to offer phone functionality that's less-than-common-carrier-compliant, why can't AT&T be allowed to offer a cheaper service, too?
In fact I will go as far as to say that the ideal interface would be one that let me specify what the ideal score of every comment should be and my vote should be counted as an upvote if its below that value and a downvote if its above that...
Ones near the top are some kind of product of age (more recent) and score (higher).

By the way, the kind of skimming you're describing is what leads to mob voting :) People skim for the highest rated stuff, read it, then rate it up more. Plenty of good comments never get rated up, and people who say the most inflammatory stuff (or just make stupid jokes) get the votes early on and stay in the "lead" as it were, the system having been made into a game.
turn off voting at 50 points.
It's difficult to have a dialog if you don't know who is the same person and who is someone else. You could do it by assigning a random per thread ID to each participant in a thread.
A simple number next to a post doesn't necessarily tell you much about whether or not you want to read it.
If you had a Likert-type scale, this wouldn't be a problem. I would rate a post 7/10 regardless of what everyone else had rated it. But we just have ups and downs. I think we've all established a sense of what the "right" score is for a given comment. For example, a thoughtful, on-topic post probably has no upper limit for how many points it deserves, while a funny but off-topic post won't get an upvote if it's already got enough points.

Won't this lead us towards a bimodal distribution? Without the crucial knowledge of where the comment's score is, the votes will tend towards extremes: we can't collectively decide when the target comment is near the range that we find appropriate.
I feel your pain. I don't think I like the new system that much. At least so far.

I'm used to scanning comments as a way to determine which articles to read. Postings with a lot of comment action usually indicate something emotionally appealing.

Once I go to the comments section, then I filter by score, only looking at comments above a certain threshold (depending on how much time I have). I usually try not to comment, unless some comment has been upvoted to a high level and doesn't make sense to me.

Alas, there are a huge number of comments that I disagree with or fail to understand, and only by knowing the score am I able to determine whether or not my adding to the discussion will help the other readers.

That don't work no more. Now I'm just blindly poking around in the comments section, not really feeling connected to the discussion at all...
The worst interviewee answers
That would only solve one of the problems. Some of the users here are skilled enough that the average user doesn't know enough to keep up a disagreement. It's easier if the user names stay.

For instance, the ggp is a security professional. I give more credence to his opinions than others.
"to join in to the conversation that's already happening all around us."

Of course, while the conversation is happening all around us, it would be impossible to join it without the help of a high paid PR consultant.