A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others - <AUTHOR> https://www.argoledo.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm really glad that people are experimenting with commenting systems. There have been better systems in the past than Reddit or HN (such as Slashdot & Kuro5hin). Some ideas which could be explored again:

* Whether you should be allowed to both post comments and vote on a single article.

* Whether you should have a limited or unlimited number of votes per day or per article.

* Whether established users can apply multiple up/down votes to a comment.

* Should votes happen along other axes than up/down (eg. "Funny", "Interesting", "Relevant"<->"Off-topic").

* How could meta-moderation be made to work without it seeming like a slog to review other people's voting?

* Can we see who voted on a comment?

* Can we display comments in a more relevant order? At the moment the highest voted top comments are spread down the page, mixed in with lower voted replies.

* Should there be a limited or unlimited range of voting? Is a -15 comment substantively different from a -20 comment, probably not.

<comment><USER3> Slashdot is the grim reaper of commenting.

<comment><USER2> > Slashdot is the grim reaper of commenting.

I've no idea what it's like now, but in its heyday you could set your comment threshold to +3 or +5 to read the dozen or so most insightful comments on each topic. That was a great reader-friendly time-saving device. As far as I know that's not possible on HN.

<comment><USER4> Even better, they had custom multipliers for different kinds of upvote reason. This let you do things like set "Funny" to -1 if you didn't like Slashdot's sense of humour.

<comment><USER5> You can also tag people, and have their score weighted accordingly (and they can see how you tag them in their profile)...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, what is the ranking based on? It would be refreshing for a platform to be completely transparent about how post rankings are established, but then I guess you'd have spammers gaming it to get their crap at the top. The alternative is you have spammers paying money to get their crap at the top.

</comment><comment><USER7> Damn, that is one hell of a condensed font. Nigh-illegible on the 72dpi monitor I use at my desk.

<comment><USER8> It is surprising how much discomfort a badly-chosen font can create.

Also, their ads currently look rather intrusive. I wish them well in this "off the beaten path" endeavor. Maybe they'll try out other fonts and better ad placement strategies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So posts get "to the top" based on time posted? Maybe the submitted title should be changed into something less click-baity, like "A message board"

</comment><comment><USER10> can't pronounce the name easily; maybe/probably noneglish based?

reading one of the posts about ads, the admin writes:

> We are going to have to implement ads at some point anyway

oh that sounds like a fun rollercoaster to ride again.

> I know ads can be annoying, that's why we try to use them in an non > intrusive way that can benefit both us and the users.

total wanker. ads do not benefit users, and saying they do means they take users as idiots; or are able to lie to themselves.

So, that right there kills any interest; let alone the site itself being in no way novel or interesting. There isn't an interesting community of folks, or a meaningful platform to engage across.

Actually, this post, and entire posting history of this user(24 days old), are just marketing efforts for the site.

<comment><USER11> > total wanker. ads do not benefit users

So would you be prepared to pay for every site you visit? I visit dozens of sites a day (e.g. by following links to new articles). If you had to pay for all of them it would quickly come up to a hefty bill.

One alternative could be micropayments, so you don't have to pay a monthly bill for the site, you'd only pay for the pages you visit. But until there is no generally accepted solution for this yet, ads are the only way to keep the net free.

<comment><USER12> > ads are the only way to keep the net free.

Do we really believe this? My understanding from people who were around back in the day say the web was far better before the web was a giant shopping mall and ad supported sites took over everything.

I don't know if it's the usual "back in my day things were better" thing happening or whether they're correct, but a web full of content produced by people who are hobbyists and do so because they enjoy sharing their passion sounds way better than a web full of garbage that is clickbaited solely to maximize the amount of money coming in from ad support. In my experience hobbyists sharing a passion is almost always more enjoyable and of a higher quality.

I do recognize there is a middle ground in there somewhere, but I'm not at all convinced the web would somehow disappear without obnoxious ads. People would still create content just like they did before ads and before tracking had infested everything.

<comment><USER13> For most people the web is "better" now, because they can use it. Back in the _good old days_ it was mostly enthusiasts and academics. To people in those groups the old web was a wonderful place gone forever. For regular folks, it bypassed them and the current state of affairs; walled gardens, huge centralised behemoths and adverts everywhere is the norm and has been since the early 2000's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A website about reading things with a font choice that discourages it.

</comment><comment><USER15> How does it get to the top then?

<comment><USER16> It looks like its just chronological, could be wrong though.

Also, I'm not sure it's a scalable solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There is an easy alternative to voting system. Rating=Number of comments - C*hours passed since post. where C is some site-specific activity variable.

Same could be applied for comments without time factor: Rating=Number of replies/posts in subthread tree spawned by post

<comment><USER18> Incentivizing number of comments puts flame wars and chain letters at the top.

<comment><USER19> There should be a dictionary of common scoring systems and their flaws. So

\- Scoring on comment count :: Flame wars.

\- Scoring on forwards :: Chain letters.

\- Scoring on sum of "likes" :: Memes and simple jokes.

\- Scoring on five-star ratings :: hides important issues.

And so on. This way, we can make an informed business decision on what kind of junk we can best defend againt.

<comment> aaron-santos I feel like there's a connection to Goodhart's Law lurking behind the scenes.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How about just showing comments sequentially by post date :V

<comment><USER21> Metafilter has been organizing their parts this way forever!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> My eyes are bleeding, please use a non-condensed font.

</comment><comment><USER23> The font hurts my eye.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is it ironic that the site didn't survive the "slashdot effect", showing the 500 error now.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is how we do it on [http://www.rubyflow.com/](http://www.rubyflow.com/) \- a Ruby community link site. No voting, just in order and we delete/edit the items if they're not any good. Basically took the whole idea from MetaFilter.

</comment><comment><USER26> I like the spirit of the discussions. Good luck to you with your site.

</comment><comment><USER27> The old joelonsoftware boards were like that as I recall.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've thought a bit about this recently, since HN and Reddit in particular are prone to have the posts sorted by how much it appeals to the average user.

Other systems such as Twitter and Facebook limit you extremely in the fact that you only converse with likeminded people, and when you don't, you'll most likely never end up in a constructive discussion, just in a flamewar since everyone is dead set on their opinion already, and because of the limitations in the commentning system discourages it.

What about a system based on NLP / ML where users can flag the truthfulness or speculation? (For the UI part, I'm thinking something similar to Medium, where you can select a favorite passage from a blog-post)

If you rank posts by how objectively true they are, and the amount of truth/false-votes they get, you should be able to bootstrap posts in, while also dynamically adjust to the popularity of it (number of votes received).

I know this is still a stretch with current machine learning technology, but I think we (the internet) really need a place where we can more easily filter out the bullshit, and discuss the things that really matter with people who don't already agree.

<comment><USER4> This is an absolutely terrible idea, because truth is not something that can be inferred from the text alone; epistemology is hard enough for humans, let alone for machines. The approach of decoding human text into statements in propositional logic has been tried, it was the first 70s "AI wave", but ultimately it broke down on the complexity of the problem. Modern "ML" can only give you a stochastic truthiness.

The only people who haven't given up on the approach of a massive symbolic reasoning database to work out what's true and false are Cyc. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc)

You _might_ be able to have a system which auto-flags known bullshit statements, but people _will_ get outraged by that.

<comment><USER28> Hi pjc, you are probably correct! :)

However, I think although this system might not be able to infer truth, it would at least be possible to infer "effort put into the post" or "well structured post" vs the obvious low effort things we see every day. Which might be enough for a better system.

Any suggestions for what you would train on to get a model which could rank more objectively than an upvote/downvote system can?

I think we should be vary of being bound by everything that happened in the 70s due to the differences in resources for solving the problem, although I'm not in any way saying this is easily solvable or even solvable in our time. I do think it's not provable that we can't achieve this at some point.

<comment><USER4> Some sort of minimum-effort or relevance filtering may be possible; after all, that's what spambayes achieves. You could probably feed it a human-approved list of "good" and "bad" posts and get a first cut at removing simple spam.

But really you have to define "good" "objective" and "structured" first. Or even "effort". Is the system good if it promotes high-effort well-structured calls for genocide?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


MacOS Finder Shows Zero-Size Folders, Dangerous If Unaware - <AUTHOR> https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2019/20190220_1030-macOS-AppleCoreRot-Finder-ZeroSizeFolder.html <comment><USER2> Is this actually a bug? I'd rather say that's kind of expected behaviour.

<comment><USER3> It's certainly expected that it can take a long time to find the size (in fact it might literally never finish), but saner file managers don't report anything until they've actually finished calculating the size.</comment></comment>


Pathfinding for Tower Defense - <AUTHOR> http://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/tower-defense/

<comment><USER2>
        > It's a relatively simple algorithm, and useful for all
        > sorts of things, including AI. There are three main ways I use it:
        >
        > * Mark all reachable nodes. This is useful if your map isn't
        >   completely connected, and you want to know what's reachable.
        >   That's what we did above, with the visited field.

Throughout my career, my main two interests in software have been games and programming languages. Lately, I've been delighted how much overlap I see between them. Here, breadth-first search is both a bread-and-butter algorithm for pathfinding in games. It's also the exact same process you use in a mark- sweep garbage collector.

I used to not be that interested in many of the algorithms you learn in school. I thought they were a lot of CS navel gazing and rarely useful outside of publishing papers. I was more into software architecture at a high level and concrete APIs and algorithms that actually put interesting stuff on screen.

But, at least when it comes to graphs, over the past several years, I've been truly astonished at how many real-world programs I've had to write that have a core component that is best expressed as a graph and then solved using one of the well-known graph traversal algorithms.

I've done a version resolver for a package manager, a data processing pipeline, a roguelike, a couple of garbage collectors, and other stuff I'm forgetting, and they all use graphs. DFS, BFS, topological sorting, and transitive closures are my trusty secret weapons.

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember Amit's blog from my Realm of the Mad God days. Glad to see him on HN. He has a very interesting series about procedural map generation: [http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/...](http://www- cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/polygon-map-generation/)

</comment><comment><USER4> If you are interested in pathfinding and these kind of problems, I suggest to check out [http://www.pathery.com/](http://www.pathery.com/) \- NP complete K-Most-Vital-Node problem.</comment>


Ask HN: Does the contract rate rule of thumb still apply? - <AUTHOR> The rule of thumb when I started contracting was that your hourly rate was your annual salary divided by 1000. For example, a $150k/year salary would translate to a contracting rate of $150/hour.<p>After seeing a post[0] saying that some leaked Microsoft developer salaries were between $40k and $320k, I am curious how many people are billing $150-320/hour for software development work, and what skills you provide that make companies value your work at that rate.<p>[0] https://onezero.medium.com/leak-of-microsoft-salaries-shows-fight-for-higher-compensation-3010c589b41e <comment><USER2> Generally yes. I see rates between 100-250/hr and I know (in person) a number of developers with higher rates.

However, hardly anyone will talk about them publicly, especially online. Part of the reason is there's almost no value to gain from discussing rates in public and a lot to lose.

To answer the second part of your question, I have a large and varied skillset covering nearly every part of starting, growing, and operating small and medium sized businesses on top of twenty years of software development experience and (most recently) a significant body of practical machine learning experience. I can comfortably step in for mid to senior level UX, marketing, strategy, development, and ML roles.

In turn, clients simply describe business problems to me and I deliver entire solutions for them, employing a mix of those skills.

These problem definitions generally reduce down to something like "make me $1,000,000 with 100 hours of work and a 25% chance of success". When you look at it from that vantage, it's not difficult to see how high hourly rates can be justified. I can charge $250/hr and be a highly efficient choice compared to alternatives.

Obviously I also use those skills on my own products as well. But consulting provides interesting experiences and additional streams of revenue.

<comment><USER3> I'm looking at rates in my part of the US lately (Austin, TX) - mind sharing what part of the world you're reporting from?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Consulting rates have nothing to do with annual salaries unless you're strictly doing commoditized staff augmentation type of work.

From what I've experienced, the difference in rates is more dependent on soft skills and positioning than tech chops. There are exceptions (FAANG engineers, popular open source authors), but generally it's folks with sales and marketing skills coupled with coding capabilities that rake it in.

When you charge a straight up hourly rate it's very difficult to get lawyer rates ($200+ p/h). If you do project or retainer pricing, your effective hourly rate can be quite high if you're experienced and efficient.

The other thing is company type, and whether you're close to revenue- generating activities. Large companies will shell out for tools that help with sales, lead gen, marketing automation, etc. Much more so than saving them money behind the scenes with HR systems or whatever.

I've been consulting a long time and have learned a lot of this the hard way. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> I've always gone with the maxim, a product shouldn't be priced at what it's worth, it should be priced at what people will pay for it. In development this is best seen in Fortran salaries.

<comment><USER6> > product shouldn't be priced at what it's worth

I think you mean "at what it costs". At least, I've always understood "worth" to be defined as what people are willing to pay for it. "Cost" is what refers to the amount of work that it took to make it or otherwise obtain it.

So, what you probably meant to say is that a product shouldn't be priced at what it costs, it should be priced at what it's worth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My rule of thumb is closer to 2x-4x full time salary. Partly because full time jobs tend to come with a lot of opportunity costs and few benefits. If you're in a world where company health insurance is very valuable, or get good working conditions and lots of paid leave, the multiples should be much higher.

Also if you're considering quitting a comfy Microsoft job to freelance, you better be charging a lot.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been charging $300/hour as my going rate for a number of years now, so yes, it still applies AFAICT. As another poster mentioned, getting to this level requires a mix of good salesmanship, references, and actual coding ability to back it up.

</comment><comment><USER9> Never heard of this "annual salary divided by 1000" rule but I calculated and it works out about right for me.

I am in a third-world country though, so rates are much, much lower than $150-320/hour</comment>


Geospatial Search Engine for Library of Congress - <AUTHOR>

Library of Congress has a solicitation request out for a geospatial search engine that will crawl books, images, etc and extract geographic info even if it is not apparent. This appears to be setup for Google and is the link between their search engine, Google Books, and Google Maps. ESRI  (ArcGIS) would love to have the contract, but it looks like Google is better positioned. Original solicitation is here: http://1.usa.gov/1qgXdAW <comment><USER2> I'd have loved to send in a response to this but it looks like the time window closed on Aug 25.

Does Google even bid for government work?

<comment><AUTHOR> They have done work in the past for National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) [http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/04/google-earth- bu...](http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/04/google-earth-builder- supports-nga.html)</comment></comment>


Media Genre More Basic Than Politics or Personality? - <AUTHOR> http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/10/media-genre-more-basic-than-politics-or-personality.html <comment><USER2> Damnit. I read a whole Hanson article and nobody was able to explain what my preference for mecha anime says about my politics.

 _Even though there 's a strong connection._</comment>


Ask HN: How to stop feeling underachieving? - <AUTHOR> I'm a software engineer in my mid twenties in the bay area.  Lately I find myself constantly stressed out because everyday I see so many people around my age or even younger than me that are so much more successful. I know rationally that those people are the exceptions and that I might be able to get there one day too, but I still can't help but feel underachieving and stressed.<p>I would appreciate any advice or perspectives that would help me achieve some sort of inner peace.  Would love book recommendations too. <comment><USER2> 1\. Spend some time with normal people. You're in a very highly paid profession in a very rich but highly unequal society. You're better off than most of the planet. You're better off than most of people in US.

But if you only hang out with people who are in your income bracket or higher, you will quickly lose touch with that reality.

2\. You say "more successful", but successful in what way? Is getting VC funding so you can work 100 hours a week "success"? Some people think so, I very definitely don't, because we have different definitions of success. Is having a 100 million dollars success? I would say "no" if you're less happy as a result.

You need to come up with a set of goals that you care about, and goals that aren't about comparing yourself to other people, but goals that are about what you feel is important.

As long as you are comparing yourself to others as a measure of success you will never be happy. There will always be someone richer/younger/cooler/more accomplished.

3\. My personal measure of success, which is _mine_ and will likely not match yours, but which at least gives me a path that isn't driven by envy:

\- Doing useful things ([https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/08/07/do-something- useful/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/08/07/do-something-useful/))

\- Continual learning, or I get really unhappy.

\- Having a job that doesn't take over my life, so I have time for other things. This is... not a popular view in the bay area AFAICT (e.g. [https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/09/18/when-startups-pay- le...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/09/18/when-startups-pay-less/)).

<comment><USER2> Oh, and a story:

Nasreddin was walking in the bazaar with a large group of followers. Whatever Nasreddin did, his followers immediately copied. Every few steps Nasreddin would stop and shake his hands in the air, touch his feet and jump up yelling "Hu Hu Hu!". So his followers would also stop and do exactly the same thing.

One of the merchants, who knew Nasreddin, quietly asked him: "What are you doing my old friend? Why are these people imitating you?"

"I have become a Sufi Sheikh," replied Nasreddin. "These are my Murids [spiritual seekers]; I am helping them reach enlightenment!"

"How do you know when they reach enlightenment?"

"That's the easy part! Every morning I count them. The ones who have left – have reached enlightenment!"</comment></comment>


Trember Spaces - <AUTHOR> http://app.trember.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Video chat with friends, collaborate online with colleagues, present virtually to a group. Discover the possibilities of the new video group chats!</comment>