2008-11-23 front | Hacker News

Stories from November 23, 2008

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1.		The 'broken windows' theory of crime is tested and seems correct (economist.com)
		108 points by robg on Nov 23, 2008 \| 35 comments
2.		LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer (oestrem.com)
		95 points by moxy on Nov 23, 2008 \| 54 comments
		I'd like that. I'd like the exclusivity and want to keep up the quality of the front page.
		89 points \| parent
		pg on Nov 23, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: Poll: How do you feel about making HN invite only? Seems like the site is growing by leaps and bounds...and slowly losing the quality we've all grown to rely on. People have been saying that for most of News.YC's life. Certainly for longer than you've been a user. And your proposed solution is also one that's been discussed since before you joined. So ironically this submission appears to be an instance of the type it seeks to prevent. Incidentally, your second option is impossible. There's no downvote on submissions. The way to push a story down is to upvote other stories. Or if it's really lame to flag it for deletion.
5.		10 Totally Stupid Online Business Ideas That Made Someone Rich (nichegeek.com)
		49 points by jasonlbaptiste on Nov 23, 2008 \| 24 comments
6.		Amazon Web Services Hosted Public Data Sets (amazon.com)
		44 points by danw on Nov 23, 2008 \| 3 comments
7.		Poll: How do you feel about making HN invite only?
		43 points by vaksel on Nov 23, 2008 \| 80 comments
8.		Rice Paddies And Math Tests (gladwell.com)
		41 points by cellis on Nov 23, 2008 \| 36 comments
		makecheck on Nov 23, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: Poll: How do you feel about making HN invite only? I think it would help if a user's first few karma points could only be obtained through upvoted comments, and not submissions. Submissions should be disallowed until you reach a certain karma value, ensuring that you've contributed meaningfully to discussions for awhile before you can add your own. (This would avoid the all-too-common 1-karma-user posts of spam or stuff from Reddit that isn't even related to us.) I don't think invite-only is a good thing. It probably would have prevented me from ever being here.
10.		FeedbackArmy.com - simple, cheap usability testing for your site (feedbackarmy.com)
		37 points by raffi on Nov 23, 2008 \| 24 comments
11.		ReCAPTCHA: simultaneously protecting against bots and digitizing books (recaptcha.net)
		37 points by parenthesis on Nov 23, 2008 \| 14 comments
12.		If I Started A Company Today (andrewhyde.net)
		35 points by sanjayparekh on Nov 23, 2008 \| 7 comments
13.		Watching the Times struggle (and what you can learn) (sethgodin.typepad.com)
		34 points by bdfh42 on Nov 23, 2008 \| 13 comments
14.		Typealyzer - Find Your Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (typealyzer.com)
		33 points by tortilla on Nov 23, 2008 \| 47 comments
		pg on Nov 23, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: Ask HN: Do you tell other people about HN? Yes, I tell smart people. If their friends' friends submit stuff that's offtopic, the editors just kill it. Though in fact I think our strongest defense against idiots is to look boring to them. Incidentally, the broken windows story isn't offtopic. News.YC isn't just about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking.
		pg on Nov 23, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: The 'broken windows' theory of crime is tested and... I'm a big believer in the broken windows theory. I was living in NYC when Giuliani took over. I was also a Reddit user when it was overrun by trolls. It was clear there was a correlation between trolling and other types of badness. That's why News.YC not only bans trolls, but also does things that seem unrelated, like fixing spelling mistakes and typographical abuses in story titles.
		scott_s on Nov 23, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer The cost of learning how to write Latex documents becomes amortized over the number of times you use it. I'm at the point now where it would take me longer to produce equivalent documents in Word than using Latex. (And in the case of articles fit for print, an order of magnitude longer.)
		strlen on Nov 23, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: The 'broken windows' theory of crime is tested and... I wonder how that translates into online communities - both in terms of wrongful behaviour (spiteful and illiterate comments, trolling) and in terms of user experience impacting quality of user generated content (wow lot of user- related buzzwords in the last sentence). An interesting experiment would be a video/music/file sharing site which specifically prohibits (and removes) copyrighted content and one that doesn't -- and how that affects other interactions (e.g. comments, forums).
19.		Why CouchDB Sucks (eflorenzano.com)
		29 points by nickb on Nov 23, 2008 \| 12 comments
20.		Global warming predictions are overestimated, suggests study on black carbon (cornell.edu)
		29 points by rugger on Nov 23, 2008 \| 38 comments
21.		Ask HN: Web Frameworks for Perl
		29 points by aneesh on Nov 23, 2008 \| 29 comments
		pg on Nov 23, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: Ask HN: On building a Social News site and its to... Rapid banning of trolls seems to be an effective troll guard. It also works well with spam. Trolling and spam are both self-perpetuating problems. Users are ruder on sites where everyone else is rude, and spammers are more likely to submit links to sites they get traffic from. So you can prevent both problems by never letting them get a foothold. Deletion doesn't have to be manual, especially in the case of spam. Spammers smart enough to measure the traffic they get from HN quickly give up. And the dumb ones obligingly continue to post from banned accounts and IP addresses. So currently 80-90% of spam is killed by software rather than humans. Flagging turns out to be a feature that saves a lot of work. So does rate-limiting submissions from newly created accounts (and, obviously, the IP addresses they use). One general approach I've found very useful is not to protect against a certain type of abuse till it arises. Aside from obvious things like not letting people vote more than once, you don't need much protection when you first launch.
23.		An Infinite Loop in the Brain (spiegel.de)
		25 points by nreece on Nov 23, 2008 \| 8 comments
24.		Second Life bank crash foretold financial crisis (msn.com)
		24 points by tlrobinson on Nov 23, 2008 \| 21 comments
25.		Git the fsck out (aisleten.com)
		24 points by tortilla on Nov 23, 2008 \| 38 comments
26.		IBM to build brain-like computers (bbc.co.uk)
		21 points by timtrueman on Nov 23, 2008 \| 28 comments
		robg on Nov 23, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: The 'broken windows' theory of crime is tested and... I really think there's something to that - broken "windows" in online communities. A wakeup for me was how trolls are dealt with here and comments on other sites. Different communities appear to take on the conditions of their founding and then that DNA spreads as it replicates. However, any mutations along the way left unchecked become cancerous.
28.		A short history of the bagel (slate.com)
		20 points by pg on Nov 23, 2008 \| 8 comments
		divia on Nov 23, 2008 \| parent \| context \| on: Rice Paddies And Math Tests I'd be interested to see some data on how children learning math in Hindi do, because the numbers are even less regular, enough so that even though there's a pattern, you still have to learn all the numbers from 1-100 individually. There are also more specific words for different fractions, such as a word for 3/4 that sounds nothing like the word for 1/4. http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/language/number/hindi.html http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/jishnu/101/numbersfractions/d... (My apologies if any of this is wrong. I'm not a native speaker, just took a few years of Hindi in college.)
30.		Ask HN: On building a Social News site and its tools for moderation
		19 points by iamelgringo on Nov 23, 2008 \| 10 comments
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