skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do a lot of foreign travel as well - but that is the only time I ever send snail mail! People love getting email from other countries. I always send letters and postcards to not only family/friends, but all of my best clients as well. In fact, one of my clients has all of the postcards I send them up on their office refrigerator. Talk about good for business - every time they go to get out the creamer, they are reminded of me. And though it's a little more expensive than domestic mail, an extra couple of bucks is worth the thanks I get in return.

Making people feel special is worth a couple of bucks.
This is a very HN-focused point. No reason he can't just post it directly, in this case.
Maybe you were. I was talking about how comments contain inexplicit information, and drawing an analogy to the computer security field (which I figured is more on topic).

It's also a field which, IIRC, you know a lot more about than I do. Perhaps you can improve the analogy.
If someone posts something that is negative, detracts from the discussion, or is generally of negative value, the way to provide feedback is to downmod. If there is value to be had from doing so, a followup comment is indicated.

Many people downmod simply because they disagree, and I think that's wrong. But that's my opinion. Personally, if a comment is of positive value I'll upmod it, even if I don't agree with it.
The Shocking State of Contemporary "Mathematics"
Both, however, are instances of expressing disapproval without in turn adding something valuable. It was a ridiculous simile, but I understood his feeling because it's one I have also. When I take time and effort to argue something and get voted down, the message I'm given in liu of an actual counterpoint is that my effort in a community has not been appreciated. It's not as drastic as my being hit by a rock, but it's still something that engenders an emotional response on my part.

Of course, I then go on to contribute to the pool of negativity by downvoting people without responding to them, so it's not like I'm blaming everybody who's ever downvoted. But I do understand where he's coming from.
I normally like individual paintings rather than artists. I do like Rothko though - so nice and blobby.

For objects though, I especially like Le Corbusier.

I gravitate toward modernism a bit, and I kinda think it was the last interesting art movement that captured the public's imagination. Something about the space age, square things and stuff. Lichtenstein, Mondrian and Pollock are interesting in that respect.

As for music, the list is just absolutely endless. I'd say I like more than 50% of the music that I've heard. Right now I have a funk & soul radio show on, earlier I was listening to old New Order, and before that I had a Lupe Fiasco CD on.

No art in my house or office - but one day there absolutely will be. Probably starting with the furniture.
"What if we knew who downvoted whom, what would be the result?"

I love that idea, but extend it also to upvoting, and use it to create a killer social network and/or dating site.

If you and I love the same ideas and hate the same ideas, than we should meet. We may not enrich each others worldview, but that's what HN is for. You and I, in such a scenario would probably get along really well and be great friends. A great way to find that out is a "similarity heuristic" in voting patterns on a site such as this one.
The possibility of downvotes creates an element of risk in posting a comment. Without that element of risk the only deterrent to trolling or violating community standards is deleting or banning by the moderators. Moderating a site like this is an awful lot of work. The down vote arrow allows the community to police itself.

It's certainly not perfect, people have been down voted to oblivion. Pg has put in safeguards so people can only get down voted 5-10 points. I think that it's helped keep the community on track.

People take their karma very seriously for some reason. Notice the amount of angry posts when someone gets downvoted. :)
Thanks, Miles!

Miles & I were moderators of NewMogul, and over the past few weeks we have been talking about setting up a community with the same intention. I say intention since NM had an awesome community with folks with different backgrounds and experiences, very much like the early HN days.

I played around with setting up reddit on a separate hostname, around the time I got invited to viewsflow.com and then to markenomics.com -- those are the 2 sites I use these days.

hope that helps.
This article is interesting in that it shows the minimum amount of information required for something to be called an "article". Any less, and it would actually start to suck in nearby information and eventually explode.
"very interested Typinator. I might have to check that out soon."

This is the program I've always wanted but didn't realize I want. I already bought it.
i have no earthly idea what point this post is trying to convey. if it's a reactionary post to the anti-seo sentiments expressed by developers, it fails. is the future of SEO in user-experience? is this post aimed at seo practitioners? regardless, i call bullshit.
My first account is 804 days old, plus I lurked a few months. Do you not remember the Rand-friendly threads of the past? I remember a number of long front page ones.

> Anyway, I don't get the anti-socialism arguments. Thanks to socialism, the US has a road network that allows anyone to drive from any one point in the country to any other.

Do you want to get them? Capitalism agrees that road networks are good. It says there are different methods of building them. Some are cheaper and more efficient, in particular voluntary methods. Capitalism claims that a less socialist road network (other things being equal) would have a better quality to cost ratio.

This claim isn't easy to evaluate, and the current state of our road networks and the current amount of socialism is in Government is largely irrelevant to evaluating it.

> We didn't get that because of everyone looking to make a quick buck for their own personal gain

This isn't what capitalists in general, or Rand, advocates. (e.g., drop the quick). If you genuinely want to understand the other side you'll have to try harder.
I completely agree. And I suggested that the down vote be removed and replaced with something like a flag. Flagging would be reserved for inappropriate comments. Upvoting can be used to sort and rank the "better" comments.

Frankly if you disagree with a comment, reply, don't down vote.
Idea HN: HTML5 Development Environment
I want to start a project to make an HTML5 development environment, similar to the Flash development environment available for desktops. The project would be online, using <canvas> and html. For revenue, it would have a sort of marketplace where developers can swap code and multimedia, perhaps tying in with stock multimedia sites. I would really like being able to also have a font database available to users, since HTML5 allows embedding fonts.

The interface would be capable of vector drawing not unlike Inkscape or the Flash IDE. It would have simple animation support and such. It would also have a basic code editor and some server-side storage for your web pages.

It would be capable of producing an HTML page along with javascript files and folder hierarchy.

This seems a bit complicated, but most of these technologies are either already implemented or straightforward to create.

Would you use it? Do you think it's a worthwhile project?
Yup, it worked for my test comment. So that's a (terribly minor) bug in HN.
Paul Klee. I believe his name is pronounced "clay." Check out "Twittering Machine" and "Ancient Sound" in particular. Without thinking too much about it I'd say I like his work because it tends to feel childlike and joyful to me.

And obviously "Twittering Machine" has a new relevance today given the recent emergence and mass acceptance of a particular social communication technology.

Another guy I really like is Alexander Calder. In particular I admire and enjoy climbing his stabiles.
Looks slick. Minor issue with Safari/Webkit's resizable text area feature though: you can resize a text area beyond the fancy border surrounding it.
I enjoy the Bauhaus school - Wassily Kandinsky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee, etc.

Art has obviously moved on, but their writings and work are still interesting, especially if you're into digital art and design with it's inherent "Modernist" grid. And the formalism appeals to the computer geek in me.
Pinocchio -- extensions for the 'nose' unit testing framework
I'd guess Google wants to offer it for free. After all, it's going to be free on all Android 2.0 devices and (overall) they haven't shown much Android vs iPhone favoritism: except where Apple has not let them (e.g. Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Voice).

Overall, I think I'm beginning to understand Google's mobile application strategy better. They want their apps to win (or at least be popular enough to be a strong beachhead). Viewed from that perspective, Android is as much insurance (that they don't get cut off from an important application area by an OS/device vendor) as it is something they want to have adopted.
I don't think that most people downmod for just disagreement, but rather for stupidity, noise, trolling. Sure, some people vote a comment down to express disagreement, but their votes are often cancelled out. And it's not so unusual to see two HN'ers having an argument and both gaining karma from it if their arguments are well-formed, respectful, and informative.

On the other hand, comments such as 'more like CLOWNvote, amirite???' don't really improve the quality of the discussion, do they?
If being covered by software patents made something proprietary, the entire world would be proprietary, nearly every single open source project included.
One observation: Mellel (see www.redlers.com ; the keyboard shortcut from within Mellel is command-option-s) can do the same thing, but also has tons of other features as well.

Considering how much love WriteRoom gets for full-screen editing, I'm surprised Redlers doesn't crow more about this feature.
I vote (up|down) to manipulate the way a thread is displayed.
Even if you do not care about karma, a down vote is still symbol of negativity, just as is someone who doesn't care about earthly possessions being robbed.

The sorting algorithm can probably work fine with just an upvote button.

I don't think you really help sort comments when you down-vote if you personally think the person is wrong. You should reply and correct them if they are wrong. Comments that aren't wrong and contribute > 0 should be upvoted.
Does anyone know what happened to nickb?
This reminds me of a story.

A couple years ago, some university friends and I went to an engineering competition in Ontario. It was an event spread over four or five days, and on the last night a dance was held. This information was given to the participants a couple of weeks in advance.

The DJ for the dance had set up a website to allow people to request songs from off of a giant list. Each person got five or six "votes", and the system stopped them from voting any more after that. It was a cookie-based system. (It didn't bother with IP stuff).

One of my friends ended up using the macro system on his Macbook to vote for the song he wanted until he ran out of votes, delete his cookies, refresh the page, and repeat. He ran this macro overnight for a couple of days.

By the time we got to the competition, "Never Going to Give You Up" had three or four thousand votes. There were about two hundred people attending.
Respectfully, I doubt downvoting is a deterrent to any troll. Trolls are already determined to anger the community. Downvoting is more of a deterrent to people who care what the community thinks of them--they might refrain from posting their contrary opinions as a result.

That said, I still think downvoting is a useful function, because the point is to filter discussion.
I'm a huge fan of impressionism (Van Gogh, Monet), but that's like saying you like puppies.

A little more off the beaten path is Zdzislaw Beksinski:
http://coilhouse.net/2007/12/the-beautiful-nightmares-of-zdz...

His artwork haunts me, even years after being exposed to it. The fact that he uses wood as a canvas makes it all the more fascinating.
Here I agree with the sentiment (swearing is OK and not what the downvote button should be used for) but dislike the comment (a one line personal attack).

Which is why there should be "agree/disagree" and "good/bad contribution" buttons.
It's just behavioural reinforcement. Upvote the positive but on the few occasions someone acts out of line with the spirit of the community, there's got to be a way to deal with them. Imagine a troll running rampant on HN with no downvoting; it'd be hard to get them to stop, since there is no consequence for their actions.

As it is, behaviour that acts out of the norm - lame jokes, empty-but-offensive remarks and entirely pointless trivia - all tends to be rewarded negatively, reinforcing the community values nicely. If you get downvoted, it's usually simple enough to figure out why - and if it really is a disagreement of opinion then the downvoters are doing it wrong, or there's also something about the way you express your opinion that is repellant.
Rodin, Noguchi, Sargent, and Muchas. Diego Rivera for his colors. I suppose this makes me backward, but I enjoy pictures of recognizable human beings engaging in recognizable activities. Also, pretty females.
My downmodding protocol (I rarely downvote): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=361390
How does one consistently get a new IP in [time interval smaller than creating a login takes]?
Graffiti in general is underrated.
Both can be threatening. So certain types of comments that may be not accepted, but may not necessarily be wrong, have the risk of being censored by the mob via this social means. And so this risk in censorship by social degradation can be powerful enough to sway certain viewpoints from gaining traction here.

It may not happen all the time, but it certainly does happen. And since the "ranking algorithm" that is the voting can be achieved with just an up vote (at least in theory), I do believe the risks associated with a down vote outweigh any possible efficiency increase to the sorting algorithm.
Check out the HTML source:
<img id="logo" width="320" height="138" border="0" onload="window.lol&&lol()" title="Click or treat!" alt="Click or treat!" src="/logos/clickortreat4.gif"/>
Don't use weird headlines, use the actual ones. This one should have been named "Sahara Solar-Power Consortium's Plans Advance".
Motorola's Droid May Be a Boon for iPhone Owners
Google is the company that's going to lose market share and consumer loyalty as people move to the iPhone?
I know that in all big cities in Germany bikes are widely used. (We use bikes to go to places, we don’t go to places to use our bikes :) Many don’t even own a car. I cannot imagine that the bike infrastructure in Europe is really all that bad. Such rental services are only a extra. And I have read other articles that seem to indicate that such services work quite well. Nothing about the service in France, per se, but about other services.
I usually downvote intentional bad or wrong answers (of course, I don't think others opinion are wrong answers). It's more to inform the poster that he/she generated 'noise'.
I was there recently and it didn't sound anywhere near as bad as the article. And I could see people riding the bikes everywhere
An interesting extension to the snail mail services would be to snap/upload a photo, use geolocation to find the user's current location and automatically send postcards "from" anywhere in the world.

I always send my postcards the last day and then hunt for the stamps and post box/office where I can send them from. I'd really find this service useful :) Although, arguably a big part of receiving a postcard is the stamp which you wouldn't have here.
US government opens $9m cyber security center
Health care and the complications of the US tax code.
Then we would care [a little?] more about the person commenting and less about the content of the comments. Perhaps content would still win but people would be influenced with decisions like "he downvoted me" or "she believes Y" (where Y is orthogonal to the issue) or dimiss salient point based on past arguments.

Which is fine if that's what you're after.
In some countries it is normal to get a new IP each time your router re-connects or even every 24 hours.
Can HN experiment with this...show the users who have downvoted one particular comment or ..make the commenter name invisible until you up/down vote a comment in a particular thread...
That video is a little frightening. However I wonder how Scott introduced himself. "I'm from Google, do you know what a browser is?" may be a slightly leading question if the audience is already unsure.

We often live in happy little techie bubbles where perhaps the only clueless intruder is our grandma or uncle, this video does remind us we should get out once in a while and talk to real people who use AOL broadband and have never heard of Google Crown.

Unfortunately, the rest of the article is pretty obvious once you've realised not everyone's as clued up as you are. Lowest common denominator. Next!
If people only down-vote fairly (ie. to suppress a comment that contains a factual error that has been explained by another comment) then the net effect of allowing down-votes is to give users relatively more influence over the ranking of posts. The issue of whether to allow down-votes ultimately is a trade-off between stronger and faster filtering of comments, and fewer opportunities for abuse.
Hivelogic - Top Programming Fonts
One of the problems is that people don't down vote for the same reasons. Some down because they disagree, others to resort topics, others because they don't like the person's comment, tone, bias, etc...

Without a consistent use of the down vote, the effect is undesired by most.
I have your tastes + Chopin
I agree that it enforces the spirit of the community. One of my first comments was a joke and it was down-modded hard (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=684509). This quickly taught me the community's expectations in terms of quality of comments.
Facebook | Authorize yoono?
This is how commercial detection in MythTV and others worked for a time; I think it uses something a little more sophisticated now due to some sort of arms race type of deal.
I love graffiti (artists)!

disclosure: linking to my own site

KAWS - http://www.limitemagazine.com/2008/09/interview-with-kaws-a-...

Neckface - http://www.limitemagazine.com/2009/10/neckface-the-devils-di...

Chivitz - http://www.limitemagazine.com/2008/10/limite-introduces-chiv...

Banksy - http://www.limitemagazine.com/2008/10/banksy%E2%80%99s-busin...
No. Scores remain secret, even if you are hired.
"Why did you switch to Firefox?"

"My friend came over to my house, deleted all my other browsers, and said "You're using Firefox now"

Classic! That's a good friend. How often have I wanted to do the same thing!
Well, back in the day DEC was an MIT startup, wasn't it? And these days there are a lot of ex-DEC, ex-Data General, etc. startups. That being said, I guess my upbringing is coming through - I care more about tech-heavy than startup-heavy.
So what action do you propose for a situation where some person writes an incorrect post and is then corrected, but the whole thread doesn't deserve to be upvoted?

If you just upvote the correction, you mark it as significant in some way. But if it's only correcting a flamebait, why would you? It seems to be better to leave the correction there (so that people who read it get more information), but force the whole thread to go down by downvoting the first incorrect post. I think it's a good protection against flamewars which may contain a lot of "correct" posts, but you may want to push them down anyways.

The problem of course is: what is correct / true and how sure are you about it.
On the other hand Apple's going to get a lot of bad press if they reject it. How will they spin it? They already have similar apps approved.
There's an interesting argument in favor of downvoting here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/

For context, the author is someone who posts on HN and was (at the time) trying to launch a new community.
Which shows that not every article you read in the press is accurate.

It's easy to use a bunch of misleading statistics, put them out of context, and paint a situation that sounds much worse than it really is.

What I can say for sure is that I know many people in Paris who love the program. You must understand that it's a much better alternative than owning a bike. You can really pick up the bike only on the segment you need them for. Normally, you move around Paris by metro, but there is often some distance ("the last mile") that a bike can do best. But you certainly wouldn't want to do your entire trip by bike...

I think the article exaggerates the cost per bike ($3,500) and the 10,000 bikes/day under repair sounds plain bogus. And then there is no accounting for how long the program has been in place, when they say that 80% of the original bikes have been damaged.
From the video, it appears that this loom has been specially constructed to keep the carbon fiber ribbon properly oriented as the spools move around.
Sol Lewitt, http://images.google.com/images?q=sol+lewitt
for the illogical followed to a logical end

Vittore Carpaccio, http://images.google.com/images?q=painting+vittore+carpaccio...
...

Agnes Martin, http://images.google.com/images?q=agnes+martin
for the pursuit of perfection

Emma Kunz, http://images.google.com/images?q=emma+kunz
for the combination of abstraction and spirituality

Unica Zürn, http://images.google.com/images?q=unica+zurn
for it's pure subjectivity

Stan Vanderbeek, http://images.google.com/images?q=stan+vanderbeek
for his films and seeing the artistic potential of the computer

and many others...
What's different now is that there are plenty of people in MA (like MassTLC) that are now actively trying to turn things in a better direction (as opposed to the 80s and 90s complacency). I'm hopeful something good will come out of that (even if it ends up being as small as catching up to California on non-competes).
The data would be pretty confusing, without analysis. I'm also assuming people with enough of a life that they wouldn't try.

Instead of (or in addition to) raw upvote/downvote data, you get a "compatibility score", where 100 means you're soul mates, and -100 means you're mortal enemies!
> The problem of course is: what is correct / true and how sure are you about it.

Exactly. So rather than try to determine "correctness" because sometimes it is subjective, just try to determine what's clearly "better."

Up voting better comments will have the side effect of pushing down comments that are not as deserving.
Homepage of Berkshire Hathaway, 17th biggest company in the world
Yes, this is the real issue. Even for a healthy entrepreneur, health insurance costs more than hosting.
I've found openID to be far more painful. I decided that I just can't risk making my Google account more powerful in case it gets suspended (for whatever reason, valid or not). So, what a pain to research how to make it work, what implications there will be, etc. I was very excited to try Stack Overflow's software, but it requires an openID and I just haven't gotten around to deciding what to do.
That's incredible. I have a small crush on those pieces. Thanks for sharing!
Your assumption that downvotes occur mostly as a result of disagreement may be flawed. (I don't know myself, obviously, but it's not how I personally tend to use the feature.)

The rest of your question/opinion is based on your perceived truth of your initial assumption. I think we cannot proceed with any of that until we know the first answer.
Have to love Warren Buffett's frugality.