jflatow

The permissions are a lot to ask, but I found it worth the price.

I agree with you. I'm just suggesting that the amount of good content at any given time might be a little bit larger than 30 links. The community has grown a lot, but we still focus on the same number of links, I think that means that a lot of otherwise good content is getting missed, because if people are anything like me, they usually don't go past the front page.

I've seen some of them, always happy to learn about alternatives. Personally I like the HN interface though, which is why I'm proposing something that otherwise preserves it.

The issue for me with the alternative interfaces is that they seem to discourage voting / propagating points back to HN. I might be wrong about this but I've never fully understood how they all work.

I believe you that #30 < #5. Partly because if you ever hit #5 the total amount of time you spent on front page is greater.

I'm really curious about the jump from #30 -> #31 though.

a) what's the total drop in activity? b) how much has this changed in the past year? c) is there a 'better' cutoff to choose?

Yeah, maybe, but that's also a much bigger change.

I guess it depends if HN is still growing much bigger or if it's somehow bounded. If it's bounded, then just increasing the size of pages might be good enough because you won't have to keep doing it to keep up.

I guess it depends how the collusion actually occurs. The more 'sophisticated' voting rings can easily beat the referrer trick.

Flagging is good for demoting bad content, but not for promoting unseen stuff.

The idea here is to change very little, just relieve a little pressure - I've seen a number of posts recently about how to game HN, so it seems anecdotally to be getting worse.

I've always wondered why there doesn't seem to be a Palo Alto HN 'meetup', so I created one. It's just an experiment, feel free to suggest other events...

I created a Meetup, let's see how it goes :)

http://www.meetup.com/Palo-Alto-Hacker-News-Meetup/events/16...

If there's some other time / venue that works better, let me know. Perhaps I should repost in a separate thread.

Similar also to DiscoDB, which does support compression, and uses perfect hashing for constant time-lookup with minimal disk access.

Not only that but it provides lightning-fast conjunctive normal form queries, a.k.a logical combinations of primitive keys. Plus it has Python / Erlang bindings.

http://discodb.rtfd.org

https://github.com/jflatow/discodb

Great read, but I wish he hadn't glossed over the part about not being something the free market can fix; and explained why only strong government will can.

He admits that governments are partaking in the frenzy at least as much as are companies, but doesn't explain why it would be easier to get a government to change, than to change a company, or start a new one.

The problem is people who would have the experience / knowledge to really make it better, are not tempted to go in and fix it, because there's so much political / non-technical work involved in doing that. If someone wants to solve hard computational problems, they might as well go into another field. If they really care about doing biology, chances have been that they aren't the greatest programmers (I understand this may be changing, but still seemed to be the case 4 years ago when I left bioinformatics). This leaves the people who are happy with the status quo, staying in bioinformatics, and the people who are dissatisfied, going to other fields where they feel their work can have more of an impact.

In my experience, what happens is that biologists define the science, and they depend on the computer scientists / engineers to implement solutions to their computational problems. The computational people depend on the biologists to validate whatever results they produce. The iteration cycle can be painfully slow, especially for people used to telling machines what they want them to do, and getting results immediately. The proposition of changing that dynamic is not alluring to most people, but I still hope there will be some who try.

Go here and sort by 'points': http://jflatow.github.com/popdots/

Clickable links:

https://bitdeli.com

http://bl.ocks.org/2009621

http://bl.ocks.org/1983818

It might be that things never change and all attempts to bring back the good ol' culture are just reactionary, but that doesn't mean people shouldn't speak up when they feel disgusted by what's going on around them.

Fear(s) motivate(s) people pretty well to do just about anything, including to keep silent (as you recommend), but I'm glad that people are brave enough, or stupid enough, to say what they think is right, even in the face of such fears. It might also turn out that the people who agree with the dissenters outnumber the powerful incumbents who they oppose.

Even if Google could determine which businesses, products, and services were 'best', it wouldn't matter to spammers. Presumably most of the participants in Blackhat SEO don't offer the 'best'. The driving motive is that they want their stuff to appear in people's search results, not some altruistic goal of providing people access to their high quality offerings.

It's not specific to Python, it seems to happen in every topic. On a related note, it would be nice to finally see that new posts of the same link would be tied to the other instances (or rejected).

I feel the same way. I've found excuses to use relatively 'obscure' Python features (e.g. metaclasses) in the past, but for some reason coroutines have never seemed like the right solution to any problem I have faced. This might be because I don't fully understand them, or perhaps I am using them all the time and have no idea. But if that's the case I think that means they are either too difficult a concept to be of practical use, or an unintuitive way of thinking about what they are actually doing.

Rice has been supporting democratized higher education for a long time, for instance with the Connexions project (http://cnx.org). They also have a history of getting interesting speakers, such as John Doerr (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zi-ThMfM4I). Not so surprising that they picked up Salman Khan this year.

The part that interests me about this one is not that I necessarily want to run a faster Tornado server, but that I have often been wondering how much speedup I can get from switching e.g. Python to PyPy in general.

Granted, it generally makes sense to do your own benchmarking for a particular application, but its also nice to see other people's results like these from time to time, especially against a rapidly evolving project like PyPy.

It's not necessarily a bad idea to take on Android and iOS as distinct challenges. Splitting resources is a necessary duty; it should be done in an appropriate way.

Nokia dumped Symbian for Windows, not MeeGo (although MeeGo was also heart-broken by the announcement). If the N9 does well enough, there will certainly be more where it came from.

why this restriction?

It would be really great to have the ability to sort by hotness (i.e. get the top K hottest results (for a given search or not)).

I'm not sure why, but I've noticed that sometimes the points field is null, even though it shouldn't be. See for example the second result here:

http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?q=sky...

Hmm, works for me, but I wonder if my MacBook has wider than average screen. What resolution are you using?

A simple graph showing the popularity (as determined by the HN community via points) of whatever 'topic' you search for. This is nothing fancy, all on the client side (so it's hosted statically on github).

I didn't want to spend too much time on it, but feedback is more than welcome (there's still some time before the submission deadline :)