skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After hacking on the netflix contest it was fun to sign up for netflix and give the recommendation system a try. After putting in several hundred movies I now typically only choose recommendations that it thinks I would rate a 4 or 5. Most are good and rank about what they think I will. This includes plenty of older movies including some silent films which I absolutely loved after seeing them where before I would have never even considered watching them. On the flip side the brand new movie of the month that I _must see_ and added to the top of my que I end up ranking much lower on average. So I would very much agree, on a given week I don't want to watch the new dvd/movie that just came out as it probably isn't that good compared to the top 500 of the last 100 years which I have only started going through.
I think this is very nice because karma isn't really worth anything and comments that are popular still get to be seen without the mob mentality to vote them up
Nice. I wondered why things were changing quickly but there were never any page load errors.

I don't trust myself not to kill my app with a live REPL :)
I think karma was an incentive for people to contribute comments. You might not be getting sex or money, but you are getting that feeling of creating something other people like.

Now you don't really know if people like your work or not, so why bother contributing?

(I know why: "because someone is wrong on the Internet!" But it is nice to get some karma too, :)
ctrl+c is much better than esc :) but I use emacs more than vi[m]
Patients Know Best are going to be massive.
I like Pandora a lot but a couple of months ago I switched to last.fm because it gave me more variety. Maybe it's time to check out Pandora again -- though last.fm is still 100% free.
Ah, I love change! Though a smart hacker can make a model that takes into time and position of a comment to predict the comment score?
I didn't realize how much I was affected by the comment ratings until they went away. Commencing cognitive restructuring.
/popcorn
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Wow, $0.99 per service is cheap. I was planning a similar service for Android, and decided that I would not have made money even charging several dollars a month.

Maybe I should reconsider...
"Commencing cognitive restructuring."

Indeed. Interesting how fast the brain adapts. I just caught myself looking at the total score and trying to predict which comment is getting upvoted (since I see the total increasing). And I don't even care about comment score!
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The longer a movie's been out, the more likely it is that you've already seen it. The global production rate of quality movies is much less than 3 per week. Once you've exhausted* the catalogue then you're either stuck waiting for new releases or you resign to watching movies you're not that interested in. It's laudable that Netflix is trying to hip people to obscure movies that they'll hopefully like (and make money at it, because obscure movies are cheap) but more often than not the movie just sucks. There's a lot of crap out there. Wasting 2 hours on a shit movie burns bad enough that I don't gamble my time on it anymore.

(* I know this sounds ridiculous but some people just don't enjoy movies made before they were born. Most movies are not timeless, and the timeless ones you're likely to have already seen.)
i have to admit that i would equally like to see this happen for content submissions.
I can handle 1000 wpm but it gets very lumpy for me - I get the sense of what I'm reading OK but my brain is constantly going 'wait, what?' and I can't really think about what I'm reading. Plus I hate it :-)

~600 wpm seems most comfortable. I wonder if it should (or already does) slightly lengthen the time for longer words, as it does for words with a period; other punctuation pauses would be good too. The period pause helps comprehension a lot. It's really quite amazing that our brains can read that fast.

It would be an interesting neurological comparison to know how this works for a non-alphabetical language like Chinese, too.
Does anyone else find their eyes constantly scanning to try and find the score for each comment? I wonder if this means that I rely too heavily on the comment score? It's amazing how such a subtle change can reveal something more profound.
Which brings us to an interesting point: Shouldn't comment threads be sorted by the total votes for all comments in that thread???
Alas, I think you may be right. I haven't been using it very long.

Once I actually buckled down and started learning how to use it, I was surprised by how quickly and easily a natural feeling of "this is how it should be" developed while using Vimperator. Of course, there's a lot of positive transference of knowledge from my heavy use of Vim itself, but still -- I didn't expect to find it this easy.

I think part of the reason may be that every single keyboard-driven browser I have ever used before (Lynx, W3m, Links, et cetera, ad infinitum) was so awful as a Web interface that I became convinced Web browsers were a uniquely GUI-suited type of application. Vimperator is definitely changing my mind.

Thank goodness.
I think it is very poor form of Twitter to be leveraging its power to hurt media outlets it doesn't like. I agree with Arrington: press likely to cover Twitter on a frequent basis should not be on the SUL.
I had no idea this feature existed. I was still using the View Source With extension to open Vim in a terminal emulator window when editing text in a text area, even though I have Vimperator. Now I can do away with the extra extension.

Thank you.
. . . but Vimperator also Vimperates the entire browser, instead of just the text areas. Unless you're an Emacs zealot, I don't see the downside.
Wow, this interferes with key elements of my system for voting/commenting on HN. Here are some things that don't work now:

* If a comment is sitting at 1 or 0, I'll try to avoid downvoting it unless I really think the comment subtracts value from the site.

* If a child is attracting more votes than the parent, and I think this is because the child commenter didn't comprehend what the parent was saying, I vote to level out the comments.

* If I see a comment sitting in negative territory that I feel should only be a 0 or 1 because it wasn't that bad, I'll upvote it even if I otherwise wouldn't have.

* If a thread is already dominated by a couple of high-scoring comments, relative to its age, I'm less likely to post a new top level comment. My feeling is that if a good comment just sits at the bottom because it arrived slightly too late, I've only added noise to the thread. The lack of visible points makes it much harder to gauge how a new comment will 'compete' on the thread.

* If the scores indicate that something is being widely misunderstood, I might comment where I otherwise would not have to try to restore sanity.

Of course, if this change were to stick, it would alter the character of the site, and we would all develop new voting and commenting systems. I can already tell that this change magnifies my tendency to vote with an eye toward reordering comments rather than voting on each comment in relative isolation.
Weird suggestion: now hide the contributor too, avoiding the "vote pg up anyway"category of upvotes.

Then there's just a list of comments and one can vote them up or down on the content of the comment. Ok I did say it was weird.

EDIT: Some great counterpoints below. I agree with them. This is a bad idea.
It's hard, but necessary. My cofounder and I just hammered out our Operating Agreement, which contains special language for exactly this scenario. Amid such tragedy, it's best to have the legal framework 'on rails' so that you don't really have to think about it. Anybody dealing with the death of a friend and business partner has enough on their plate already.

Here's our solution, in case other people are interested:

In event of the death of a member (we're an LLC), that member's economic interests revert to their estate, but the inheritors lose all power to vote or make decisions.

Within 180 days, the surviving member can elect to buy out the deceased member's interest at a reasonable valuation. There's some legalese in determining "reasonable valuation", but the upshot is that the surviving members may take complete control of the company so long as the inheritors of the deceased are properly compensated.

If a buyout doesn't occur, then the inheritors of the estate become silent partners unless there's a mutual agreement to instate them as a full partner.

Despite what some people say, vesting is not always the answer. A lot of vesting mechanisms leave the door open for somebody to get screwed out of their rightful share. Personally, I'd rather see someone undeserving get rewarded, rather than see a deserving person get shafted.

One more thing: To Rex (the OP), my sincerest condolences. Losing a business partner is hard, losing a close friend is orders of magnitude harder. I think I can speak for the whole HN community in saying that you have our sympathy and understanding.
Why not hide the usernames as well then and let the comments be judged purely based on their content ?
Then he's probably got a valuable perspective.
Well done. But, at what point of amazement do Adobe engineers have to worry about being burned as witches?
This also works with Vimperator. I'm now thinking about installing that Firefox extension that gives all the tabs numbers, for ease of reference. Alas, I don't remember what it was called -- but I'm sure I'll find it again.
Interestingly enough, comments voted below zero still show up as gray. Helps to decide whether to upvote an "unjustly downvoted" comment.
If this improves the site, should it be applied to submission scores too? Showing submission scores can create the same sort of mob mentality in voting. The only potential downside that I see is people voting less often.
What is that heretical "g" doing in front of "vimrc"?
I'm not a statistician, but I found the following juxtaposition rather contradictory:

>* Confidence intervals for the main results should always be included, but 90% rather than 95% levels should be used

>* When there is a meaningful null hypothesis, the strength of evidence against it should be indexed by the P value. The smaller the P value, the stronger is the evidence

This sounded to me like "You shouldn't use P-values to decide, except when you do." (For non-mathy types, P values is 1-confidence, so they measure the same quantity).

I think some of this stems from their strong voiced preference for Bayesian statistics (there's something of a civil war among statisticians between bayesian and classical statistics). I've never been able to swallow the Bayesian theories; they're just too weird for my feeble mind to grasp.
I think you can remove the word "by"
"arc ftw"

REPL ftw?
Movie Review: Bright Star (2009) - Gvke
I've been following and waiting for the release of Boxcar 2.0 since it was mentioned on TechCrunch several weeks ago, glad to see it finally launched. I'm finally happy that I can have push Gmail, Twitter @replies, and Facebook updates. I'm even happy to pay the extra $1 for Facebook updates even though I know they are coming from the Facebook app in an update in a month or two.
Will comments still change tone til they fade to nothing as they are down voted?
> I use one of the Japanese analogs to Netflix

Out of interest, what do you use? Tsutaya? I'd be interested to know of any Netflix-like services here in Japan.
Microsoft Getting Cleverer and Cleverer With New Multitouch Screen Keyboard
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Interesting. I still see some comments a light gray.

Also, like some others , I like know if something I've posted was particularly liked (or not).

And I've been skimming pages looking for the high-karma comments to try to dig out what are likely to be the most worthwhile comments. I suppose there's some feedback effect in place there, as popular comments simply get more attention (and so likely garner more up-votes votes), but there's pragmatic value in having a metric to selectively peruse a post with so much to read. (And, no, ZapRead isn't the answer :) )
Voting patterns showed a lot of users voted to get a comment to what they felt was an appropriate score: they wouldn't up- or downvote something unless they felt its current score was too low or high respectively. But if comment scores aren't displayed, you won't need to anymore.
Great story. Recruiters are annoying.
I use dmm.com/rental (DMM.com オンライン月額DVDレンタル)

I can't remember why I picked it over Tsutaya. However, they work fine (and have been good to me over the years with my infrequent CS needs), so I've got no real reason to switch. (I must be one of their favorite customers considering how often I go three months without renting anything. Speaking of which...)
The original RSVP, as I recall, had a car metaphor as the interface. An analog, infinitely variable accelerator would, I think, make this much more friendly --- in addition to the other remarks (combine short words, etc).

If it simultaneously scrolled through a gently greyed-out version of the text, perhaps one could pause and review a more challenging excerpt before continuing at the higher speed?
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Just as an example, my karma just jumped a bunch of points. Was it because of the above post, or was it due to europe waking up to some posts made a few hours ago?

Perhaps my sense of dislocation will pass in a while.
ARPA?
I was thinking something similar when I saw this change. I know I am affected by by the comments score when I vote, but I think it's more of a moderating effect. I might vote down a smart ass one line remark if it has lots of points, or vote up something that is so-so if it's been voted down.

Interesting to experiment.
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I gave it:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6130/6130-8.txt

And it gave me:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 47 bytes) in /var/www/vhosts/rickyspears.com/httpdocs/wwwzr/reader/index.php on line 68
One PLUS of karma scores next to comments is that I know when to stop reading :)

If my personal interest + the comment score < arbitrary threshold, i quit
I notice that nobody here is playing devil's advocate, so allow me. What was wrong with the site beforehand? Sure the comments have a mob feel to them sometimes, but that's just something a social anything app has to deal with.

Over all, I like the comments on HN much more than say reddit or digg by far. Plus, I've never seen a community that responds so well to criticism as this one does.
Dude, pointing out grammatical mistakes won't make your words echo louder. Rather it will expose your very sensible thought process about the topic.

Your statement shows your ignorance about IITs and students. Please note, I din't say all IITians are "GOD", and can do any damn thing. Still, most(yeah even with rank > 4000) are better than top students from rest engineering colleges.

PS: I satisfy your rank < 800 requirement, and I am not bragging about that :P
I love it. Keeps comment voting honest it seems.
Ok, now there should be scores next to your own comments. Better?
You don't think that this is a good thing?
If you click on "threads" to see your comments it still shows your scores per comment.
I just added that.
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I feel similarly, actually. It's okay if others' scores don't show up for me, but I don't think scores will serve as effective (dis)incentives for behavior if they're too abstracted from the immediate cause, as is the case with having to try to guess which of my last thirty comments resulted in the upticks in my overall karma score. In fact, if anything, I think linking it to overall karma score may tend to increase obsession with karma, because now I have to watch my overall karma like a hawk and spend time thinking about the likely source of change to determine whether I've stepped on my dick somewhere.

I say bring back the ability to see one's own karma, perhaps with a preferences option to turn it off, regardless of what happens with the visibility of others' comment scores.

In fact, if anything about one's own karma would be hidden, I think the overall score would be a better choice to hide than the scores of (one's own) individual comments.
Definitely split into two categories, one of startups and potential startups cultivating ideas.., other with enterprises that have "fringe projects" where time and budget are a factor
Good programmer FTW.
Hmmm... I always considered that a feature rather than a bug. Only voting when the scores looked "wrong" was an optimization. How do I decide when to vote now? I have a feeling I'm going to settle into a pattern of voting to reorder comments and that I'm going to vote less overall.
Yes. I misunderstood you. Sorry :-(
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"I just added that."

This is great. So now I can see which of my comments are getting voted up/down and so have feedback for my writing, but I have to vote other comments up or down based on content (and author sometimes I guess).
I generally sign emails "Founder / author", which feels a bit kludgy but is at least somewhat clear. What titles do other HNers use (creative or otherwise)?
I think only showing votes for comments and links once you've voted would be a better solution. It's what I'm trying with a side-project of mine.
Oh yeah, you def need to implement that. Thing is, that most people will search for a song that fits the type they want. So letting the genre wander, just delivers them wrong results.

i.e. you start out with Hip Hop, then eventually you'll hit a song that is Hip Hop/Country, then you'll hit a song that's Country/Country, and then you are stuck listening for 3 hours to country music. Until you hit Country/Hip-Hop and get out of the loop.

You could probably expand the options a little bit by making a few mutually exclusive lists. For example someone whose initial search was a country music song, probably doesn't want to ever hear gangsta rap. And vice versa.

As far as trying to figure out the mood, I don't think that's plausible. The whole like/dislike/forward thing isn't going to get you the results you want. For example, I might "like" a song, but it doesn't mean I want to start hearing more songs like that at the moment. The dislike/forward is mostly used to skip past the songs that don't fit my initial criteria.

I think it's something that you are better off leaving for your users to do manually. If they want to start hearing new types of music, they'll just search for a new song. There is no real reason to try to guesstimate their mood, since chances are you'll just get it wrong and will ruin the user experience.

Oh and here is another suggestion for auto-play, let users use it without searching for the initial song. Use it as a "Play me a random song" button. This way users can discover new music.
Just curious... why author? Why not just content?
Am I the only one who misparsed the title as referring to a machine that is learning?

Are those slogans or jokes?

"Bayesians against discrimination!"

"Our sets, our axiom of choice."
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Sorry, I stopped reading at "It's my DaVinci code."
Knowing who wrote a comment often provides very useful context (especially when there is back-and-forth discussion going on).
You're discounting the effect of the age factor -- I don't downvote high-position low-score comments for reordering purposes because I know it'll probably decay down anyway.

I don't want to be the asshat to drop a comment below 1, just because there's a better comment that's currently below it (but probably with more karma). At least from my usage, you'll see a net gain in karma inflation.
If you gave me the option to switch karma on/off for submissions and comments, I would likely leave both off.

Leaving karma off somehow gives me confidence to contribute more.

Another idea is to remove the (time 'ago). Good comments are timeless :) and old comments seem like nobody is watching anymore, so the dialog seems over.

Thank you Paul
"Just curious... why author? Why not just content?"

Oh i was just referring to the "vote pg up anyway" trend.

If the author is someone you know (and I've made many friends from YC) there is a minor incentive to upvote a comment even if it doesn't read well because you know the person and can guess at what he was trying to say. So instead of judge(content), the subroutine becomes judge(content, person). It sort of feels like "voice tone" is added to a comment if you know the person. The "tone" and (perceived) intent with which something is said makes a huge difference

This could lead to a known troll getting a downvote and a known "good guy" getting an upvote for the same comment.

And that is probably a good thing.
It would be a little difficult to have an exchange with someone (fairly common in threaded discussion) if you can't tell who is who. Also invites abuse - I reply to your comment, someone replies to my reply, pretending to be you.
Okay, so I came back finally and checked again to see if I could get in.

My thought, now, is that a functional approach to making square a "subclass" (by stretching the term "subclass" out of the confines of its traditional Java-style OOP usage) of rectangle.

(define (square s)
(rectangle s s))

Simple. Yes?
People are far enough removed from each other on the internet. Knowing who posted something tells a lot. For example, I've been browsing HN about 3 months and I already know to pay extra attention to what tptacek on security. I believe people have gotten jobs from Hacker News too based on their reputation. I think HN is a great community and implementing this would just weaken it.
In long threads I skim based on scores. I try to give low comments at the bottom a quick read to vote on them, but one thing I definitely look for are long threads like this:

+5
-3
+4
-2
+4
0

That means someone is being generally rude or uninsightful, but the replies are good, so I'll just read the replies. If there's a long thread of a bunch of 1's, then two people are talking at each other both uninsightfully. If both people are voted up a bit, that means it's a good discussion and the whole thing is worth reading.

I'll give this a good trying out before forming an opinion either way, but the loss of skim-by-score ability is slowing me down just a touch right now. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out.
That would be a good feature to be able to turn off/on in your site preferences. I would likely leave 'view usernames for comments' off.

Good idea.
You know, if there's one thing programmers should appreciate, it's making it easy to see which information you don't want to read.