

Programming Is Like Sex - catalinist
http://codesnipers.com/?q=node/440

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ghiotion
Wow. Add a few puns and one C-C-C-C-Combo Breaker, this could be a comment
thread on reddit. That ain't a good thing.

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pg
Yeah, this is worrying. A crap link and a crap thread, and it's number 2.

The fundamental problem on any site like this is that it's so easy to upvote
lightweight stuff. When a link sounds like it's going to take a while to read,
people say "maybe I'll read it later," and never do. And since they haven't
read it, they don't upvote it. Whereas e.g. a cartoon people know will only
take a few seconds, so they click on it. And if they like it, they upvote it.
Sounds harmless enough, right? And yet repeat and the result is a disaster.

What is the solution? The Right Thing would be to somehow scale votes by how
easy/hard it is to vote on something. Or I could add a downarrow on stories
for users over a certain karma threshold.

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ghiotion
The downarrow is a good idea, until you start to consider the cabal of
greasmonkey jerks auto-downvoting everything on the new page that wasn't
submitted by one of their cretin brethren. Perhaps there could be some kind of
difficulty weight a user inputs when they submit a story. More demanding
stories get a 10. Cartoons get a 1. Then give more weight to upvotes on the
more complex stories. Obviously, this has the potential for abuse with folks
misrepresenting the complexity of their article. But that wouldn't be hard to
spot.

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pg
Another variant would be to have the weight be voted on. Weights only matter
for a fraction of submissions, so I wouldn't want to complicate submission by
making everyone (especially new users) come up with a weight for what they're
submitting.

Maybe it would even be a good idea to have the votes on weights be public, so
no one would be tempted to use that as a way of censoring stories.

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Xichekolas
Maybe have the HN software go pull the page that is submitted, and assign it a
weight based on number of tokens on the page. Obviously you'd remove stop
words and HTML tags.

This would assign lower weights to shorter fluff, and lower weights to
articles that are split up over a lot of pages (which in my experience tend to
be fluff too, with a 4:1 ad to content ratio). It'd be kind of like Bayesian
filtering for post importance.

This was actually one of my ideas for submitting to YC, but I rather like HN,
so maybe you could experiment with it here.

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motoko
No, it's not.

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ptn
you wouldn't show your mom your latest trick

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Prrometheus
It’s hard to find a good partner outside the bay area

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Prrometheus
The results are messy

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Prrometheus
You’re usually not sure which language to use

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Prrometheus
You’d guess Danica McKellar is good at it

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boucher
Although this thread is ridiculous, You get 1 point for a Danica McKellar
reference.

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Prrometheus
It gives you hand cramps

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Prrometheus
It's procedural knowledge

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ken
It's what the internet was created for.

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Prrometheus
I’ll take your word for it.

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TheTarquin
Not a perfect analogy though.

For example, I really do prefer to program alone . . .

