I would also be interested in seeing a ranking in terms of articles read by the user.
While h-index and karma are great to measure, well, measurable contribution to the community, it fails to capture the contribution to the community that consists in (and this is true of a lot of other if not of all "karma policies" too):
- sharing what one sees in this community, and spreading it through
other channels
- or even just using the knowledge gathered here
- or, in the best case, using the inspiration found in this community
to help build a better world
I for one read HN articles and comments about 2 hours a day every single day even now at 5am on a Sunday morning after a party. This made me a better programmer, dreamer, and probably a slightly better person too.
Yet I speak little and have only a little under
300 karma. I believe, though, that I contribute somehow more to the community than what my karma shows (e.g. by spreading the word about a cool and useful technology at work - say functional reactive programming for instance - and seeing it being adopted or experimented with).
> While h-index and karma are great to measure, well, measurable contribution to the community, it fails to capture the contribution to the community...
i really don't know how any of the stuff that you have mentioned is empirically verifiable or in other words, as you have so rightly indicated, measurable.
how would you rank things based on stuff that you cannot even measure ? e.g. if 'sharing what one sees in this community, and spreading it through other channels' is something that is looked at as a measure of contribution, how would you go about doing it ?
i could probably think of couple of ways. none of which will not appear 'creepy' e.g. one very obvious approach might be that we start linking up things like facebook/reddit/g+ etc. accounts here and start tracking things ? thereby, generating over a period of time, metrics which measure node (that's you !) centrality etc...
For anyone wondering, I had to read the wikipedia page and sql code to fully understand what the h-index means in this table: an h-index of n means the user has n submissions (stories, jobs, or polls) with a score of at least n. So, ColinWright has 143 submissions with a score of 143 or more.
Not to be confused with the Eddington number in physics[0]
"I believe there are 15 747 724 136 275 002 577 605 653 961 181 555 468 044 717 914 527 116 709 366 231 425 076 185 631 031 296 protons in the universe and the same number of electrons."
--Sir Arthur Eddington
Obvious is a dangerous word. Some of this is imaginary. The kaleidoscopic filter of media drama affects these perceptions as well as reporting on them.
All I have to do is read the tablets of your financial gods, cited daily here, to understand how utterly lost you all really are. It's an honest shame that so many brilliant, educated people with bright and positive outlooks have been so thoughtlessly coopted, with their own consent, into routine and pointless profit-seeking under the guise of "changing the world." Let's be clear: SV "startups" are pointless capital ventures that reasonable conscientious people would never support or pursue except for the sole purpose of personal profit-seeking. As you get older, I think you'll see, as a smart person, the curtain will pull back and the difference between substantive pursuits and what you're all doing will be truly revealed.
I don't say this to be mean or for any gain whatsoever. I am truly sad about the second internet boom, having seen a bit of the first one. I am just a lamenting academic with no horses in your race. I would only like to see the world truly changed, and I wish all our society's best education were put to use actually doing it.
You obviously have some nuanced views on this, which I don't object to (and probably agree with more than you'd expect). The problem is that when you present them in a polarized and polarizing format, you move the discussion towards a clash of enemies instead of a conversation of colleagues. That's a big deal.
It's hard to notice what a big deal it is because when we post such things it always feels like we're brave and tiny David against big ugly Goliath. But that's a cognitive bias.
The solution is to remove or at least de-escalate the pejoratives, and roll back one's grand claims to partial ones. If you consciously leave room for other options, people will become curious to engage with your point of view. Then we get interesting discussion, which is really all we care about here.
I spend countless hours reading these comments and have gradually gotten more inured to their sharpness than most readers can be expected to, yet when I read things like "your gods" and "how utterly lost you all are" my spine stiffens and my fur stands on end. Such comments only evoke tribal identification: for or against, depending on where one's pre-existing sympathy lies. Once tribal identification kicks in, we get reflexive responses rather than reflective ones, and that is the root of everything we're trying to avoid.
I don't really understand if you're chastising me or if you're seriously engaging in discussion. If your sole objection is to the tone and word choice of my response, I'll happily concede the point. You dismissed my perception of HN's worldview ("if there is such a thing") as imaginary and due to my susceptibility to unnamed sources of information. I replied contrarily in a purposefully absolutist manner based solely on the original post.
I recognize the zeitgeist is to "leave room for other options" for discursive comfort, but there is a fine line between that and self-defeatism, as much as I might agree that it could have rhetorical advantages to do so. I do not really seek those advantages, since I don't truly seek any gain. The "other options," in this case, might be that some of you are not worshiping Golden Calves and that some of you might be willing to agree that an algorithmic enumeration of bloggers, financiers, and self-promoters could be an anti-intellectual listing of false idols. I accept this could indeed be true for some of you, but it's not incumbent upon me to make your points for you in every rejoinder so as to parry your bristling.
lvs strikes a chord with me as well. I'm also an academic (well, staff in implementation of MS Cloud technologies at a 150k user university). Coming from a very liberal campus has exposed me to a great deal of people, from Anarcho-capitalists to Communists, and everything in between.
I get the idea that simply "doing work to make money" doesn't change the world in meaningful ways. I think of it akin to the idea of "Rent" or lock-in. Both of those ways can be used, and quite effectively, to extract more money. Yet neither of those can be used to further science, arts, technology, engineering, philosophy, or other more academic pursuits directly. Making a new DRM technology to retard sharing of media isn't innovative: it's built on a broken premise that will turn into a time and money sink for all those whom are involved.
Now, money can be used to fund those areas. YC is doing just that with the UBI research (linked elsewhere in this thread). But the money can also be stockpiled, sent in investments, or other non humanity-furthering ways.
But, I think the crux of his argument is that this 'gravitational' force of money sucks innovative peoples, scientists, and similar into what amounts to a tar pit. There's only a limited amount of these types of people, and the claim is SV and similar cultures around the world is sucking the air out from more pressing pursuits.
Now, the bad side: Academia is also just as poisonous... Just in not the ways SV is. Instead, at least in the US, I'm sure you know of the repercussions students have, are, and will go through for the loan crisis. My own job, as with most around me, are paid nearly all by exorbitant student loans. And it's a cyclical money-suck.
Faculty also deal with nasty issues. Three of my friends are PhDs in various STEM areas. All 3 of them are adjunct faculty. In other words, cheaply paid contract labor. This is similar to the Uber-ification of teaching staff.
I'm a relative outsider to that of business and that of academia (being IT staff). I see the value of both, and also its poisons. The more I think on it, it seems the underlying issue is money. Or better yet, it's the idea that one has to "grow or perish". The idea is the same in both spheres.
But it's a systemic problem, so grandiose denunciations of one segment of the system (in lvs's case, Silicon Valley) take us further from understanding it in a bunch of ways. The way that concerns me is that it interrupts the dynamic of thoughtful discussion and replaces it with yelling and chest-beating. No matter how sophisticated the rhetoric, that is what it is at bottom.
In this case it's also ignorant, since the more intelligent people in SV are aware of and worried about these issues.
But that's what I'm speaking of: an inherent bias.
Silicon Valley has this notion that one can replace hundreds, thousands, or millions of people with "short shell scripts". The base idea is something I'm OK with. However, with no social support structure in place, the ideas/implementations of Silicon Valley (and VC culture) seek to destroy people and families. No jobs == no money. No money == homeless, foodless, resourceless.
A great problem child is Uber. They destroy what little protections employees have, by refusing to have "employees". Powerless people either work for peanuts, or not work at all. They certainly won't sue. And Uber's end-game is "disenfranchise all workers by investing in automatic transportation via autonomous vehicles". That's the kind of endgames Silicon Valley thinks of. And that's frankly terrifying : "Be a serf until we no longer need you"
And, one can have the understood mindset of Silicon Valley and the VCs, and yet not live there. I know of those whom live in Chicago, New York City, parts of the Eastern Seabed in decent proximity of DC, London, and others whom share these notions.
The thing missing from the 'Valley speak is there is no discourse on how to handle everyone when nobody needs to work. That discussion is (not so) mysteriously left out.
> The thing missing from the 'Valley speak is there is no discourse on how to handle everyone when nobody needs to work. That discussion is (not so) mysteriously left out.
Here's an example of what I mean that some of these perceptions are imaginary. In fact what you describe is a hot topic of discussion in SV as in other places; YC Research is funding an experiment in Basic Income; and so on.
I held off responding because I wasn't aware of this. I needed to research after your mentioning involvement in UBI research.
Yes, my views of SV are shaped by internet media, business acquisition coverage, comments here at YC news, and conventions I attend. So no, I don't live in the 'Valley per se, but have at least some understanding of it.
If I cite correctly, I found these as the UBI discussions YC is funding?
So, yes, it does seem that YC is continuing the underlying research on what it would take to implement UBI. That's awesome!
Unfortunately, the negative comments towards "Silicon Valley and the VCs" was that: a larger discussion. I'm not meaning this to be a "YC sux" kind of discussion. That goes nowhere. I'm sincerely glad you (and YC) are getting into this tough area. But you seem rather alone in that regard. The Guardian puts it well, with this article (Feb 2016):
So, to keep this constructive, what can the members of the (tech enlightened) public do to help? Have other organizations (for and non-profit) entered into talks to assist with your UBI research?
>there is no discourse on how to handle everyone when nobody needs to work.
It seems like you are suggesting that we have not had numerous discussions about a 'Universal Basic Income' on HN? I'm pretty sure that there is a thread/wk on HN about that very topic.
Those two issues are orthogonal to each other. On some plane of understanding, business executives understand that lack of money makes commerce grind to a halt. It's a form of tragedy of the commons, in monetary philosophy. Henry Ford understood this concept; it's why he paid his people well to make cars... which his workers bought.
> there is no discourse on how to handle everyone when nobody needs to work.
I was in haste in that sentence. Things like UBI are being discussed. However, the flip-side is the actual actions that grind down the worker to a 'nothing': robotic/computer work is ideal for every job, to the minds of the Silicon Valley exec.
UBI/Minimum Income: It's been given a many great names through the years. But it's understood as a way for everyone to receive the basic necessities of life, plus a bit more. But this idea requires buy-in of the population at large. Or at least, buy in from the "rich" ( https://youtu.be/5tu32CCA_Ig?t=12 )
The problem with Silicon Valley is that they have an assumption this either this already exists somehow, or it will magically appear. What instead happens, is that people lose jobs, wages are forced yet lower and lower, and the human is removed carte blanche in the favor of unpaid robotic labor. On an individual company level, this helps the bottom line of the company (race to the bottom). However, when this idea is expanded to wider and wider areas, it gentrifies the owner class away from everyone else. For in that eventuality, not even upper class jobs exist.
I do not argue that column lines or minutes/week are not given to the idea of UBI. A simple HNsearch query shows that. But I do, and have argued, that SV culture seeks to an absolute minima of nobody working except the owners and, nobody getting paid except for the owners. This, given enough iterations, leads to economic slowdown and disenfranchisement.
As closing questions: What happens when these wheels of extreme automation are turned within the current iteration of government? What happens when we get 50% unemployment? 75%? 95% (nobody working except owners)? Do you think Marshall Brain's idea of Manna is possible or likely?
Of course, DanBC. But questioning the inherent biases (and actions) of Silicon Valley are verboten. It's a sacred cow, in to the point I'm not even allowed to discuss these areas.
And perhaps Uber was a good and bad idea both. There's hundreds of these companies that seek to "disrupt" whatever. The problem with these "disrupters" is that they also cause great problems... but those areas aren't explored because they are externalities. Outside the business interests; out of scope; government's problem; should have did it better; less interference... We've heard these as responses when individual areas are questioned.
The other part of highlighting inherent bias with regards to Silicon Valley (and VCs), is that areas like Hacker News punish you for non-groupthink. The more karma per recent post, the more you can post. If you have a contentious, but well thought out argument/discussion but yet against popular opinion here, you are modded down, and therefore silenced with "you're submitting too fast". There is no distinction between someone who is against the public opinion here, and that of a troll or regular crapflooder. I'd like to think there is a huge difference, but a -1 is a -1. The repercussions remain the same.
Maybe it's what Dang and other admins want. I don't know. Although I think it is of utmost importance to understand ones own biases. Knowing how your and others biases interact can be very useful, especially in business and enterprise.
> The other part of highlighting inherent bias with regards to Silicon Valley (and VCs), is that areas like Hacker News punish you for non-groupthink. The more karma per recent post, the more you can post. If you have a contentious, but well thought out argument/discussion but yet against popular opinion here, you are modded down, and therefore silenced with "you're submitting too fast". There is no distinction between someone who is against the public opinion here, and that of a troll or regular crapflooder. I'd like to think there is a huge difference, but a -1 is a -1. The repercussions remain the same.
I agree with you here. People who get flagged and downvoted for reasonable opinions should not be caught up in rate-limiting, and that seems to happen a bit too much.
For what it's worth you can try asking dang to remove the rate limiting if you're caught by it.
> There is no distinction between someone who is against the public opinion here, and that of a troll or regular crapflooder.
Over time, there is a huge difference. But people have a strong bias against wanting to admit this in their own case and those of users they agree with.
There's something about expressing a controversial opinion that compels people to be gratuitously provocative on top of the opinion they're expressing. Predictably, they get downvoted for the gratuitous provocation. Then they complain about how the hordes of HN can't appreciate their brave independent thinking, want to suppress them, and so on. This happens astonishingly often, and you can't understand how HN works without taking it into account.
Not exactly. The relevant lines in the BigQuery are:
[by] author, score, rank() over (partition by [by] order by score desc) item_rank
[...]
where score >= item_rank
The query uses a window function. What's happening is that it's counting the number of submissions with a score greater than or equal to the submissions rank relative to all other submissions by that user, descending.
For example, a user has four submissions with scores of 1, 2, 10, 3. Their h-index would be 2. (10 >= 1 true, 3 >= 2 true, 2 >= 3 false, 1 >= 4 false).
This is an odd way to calculate h-rank (as a measure of quality), however, the implementation appears to pass the test cases on Wikipedia.
Isn't that what I described? That user has 2 submissions with at least 2 points each. I also think that's a fairly sql-esque way to calculate h-index. I can't think of how else I would do it.
Your explanation (user has n submissions with a score of at least n) fails to pass one of the Wikipedia examples. ([25, 8, 5, 3, 3] should result in an h-index of 3)
Yes, if there are 5 scores with at least 3 points, then there are 3 scores with at least 3 points. Of course he left out the fact that the h-index is the largest number for which the property he mentioned holds true, but that was obvious.
Some people in the top 10 asked us not to show karma at that point. It's a distraction.
Actually I hate that leader page and would like to replace it with something more interesting. There's too much past and not enough present and future in it.
How about a "trending" page that shows users who have gained the most karma in the past x days or months? Here, I would say I prefer comment karma instead of article submission karma, as I don't care who submitted the story about Apple's latest device 5 seconds before everyone else did.
I'd say to just remove the page altogether, but a suitable replacement could possibly serve as a tool to uplift behavior you'd like to see more of. That's definitely easier said than done, but I'd love to see some experimentation in this area.
A running average of the latest <x> posts/submissions would be a better way to show the current most popular users. However I feel a better metric than popularity, which is all karma really is, might be some way of tracking influence. Response count springs to mind initially but that promotes controversy rather than quality.
I think it also caused bad behavior. I found myself not wanting to reply to people's comments if the post was old, as my comment would be less likely to be upvoted, and my average score would go down.
This is an example of how people try to maximize numbers, even when they know they shouldn't. You make what you measure.
Hell, I still have that habit. It took conscious effort to break it and respond to this post :).
That said, I don't think it was all bad: it definitely incentivized me to write comments that were consistently longer and deeper than they would be otherwise. Looking back through my old comments, a surprising number read like essays.
But it also created a bunch of perverse incentives. Apart from disincentivizing conversation it also pushed me towards trying to comment on bigger stories and pushed me away from commenting on stories that had been up for a while and would fall off the front page soon.
The downsides of focusing on average votes per comment definitely outweigh the upsides. I wonder if there's some better measure out there that creates fewer weird incentives and isn't as gameable but still has the same positive effects.
It's not the site, it's the people that pay too much attention to it that are a problem. Say what you want to say when you want to say it. Don't worry about points.
It's a fun distraction every once in a while (oh hey, another X points and I hit the leaderboard!), but gaming the system in general, or spending any time worrying about it... just no.
It's as useful as the existing karma system allows it to be. I suspect most of the problems you have with the leader page are an almost direct result of how voting and karma work.
It's worth leaving this leader page up as it indicates the system as it stands. The answer lies much more in changing the system than in hiding its results.
Please start by just killing the page. You can figure out something to replace it with later! You can't be more than 7 minutes of effort away from improving the site by eliminating the leaderboard. Do it. Do it! DO IT!
Hacker News users really don't like having information taken away from them. So my somatic response to your suggestion could be described as Pavlov meets Milgram.
It should be noted that the Karma scores were added to the table manually, as all karma data is not accessible publicly.
You can't simply add Total Points on submissions + Total Points on comments - # of submissions/comments: comment karma is no longer exposed via the API, and total karma counts do not incorporate points earned via suspected voting ring accounts. (while submissions do)
Some users get a high h-index by submitting tons of stories. For the sake of argument, suppose that of two users with the same h-index, the one who submitted fewer stories is a higher-quality submitter. What would be the best way to modify the h-index to incorporate this?
An H index provides a trade off between quality and quantity. It attempts to measure both impact (citations in the case of academics, or upvotes in the case of HN), and quantity.
You'll have a low H index if you have lots of low quality submissions, and you'll have a low H index if you have very few ultra successful submissions.
From wikipedia:
The definition of the index is that a scholar with an index of h has published h papers each of which has been cited in other papers at least h times.[4] Thus, the h-index reflects both the number of publications and the number of citations per publication. The index is designed to improve upon simpler measures such as the total number of citations or publications.
But IIUC, if one submits 1000 links and 10% of them get 100+ votes, while the rest get <100, then one's h-index is the same (100) as if one submitted 100 links, but all of them got 100+ votes. So, it doesn't measure "spaminess". That's what the question was about, I believe - is there a way to take this into account, while not losing the good parts of h-index.
1. Deduct a small value per post or as a function of total posts. Theory I apply is that all content has an assessment cost. More bang in fewer posts is better.
2. Evaluate posts seperately based on some value metric. E.g. thorny technical problems vs. "How I lifehacked my gym socks" pablum.
One way or another, the system must reflect value judgements.
Getting lots of karma on HN with submitting social justice related/SF housing articles is like shooting a fish in a barrel. Or being the first to comment on them. So is with Apple/MS PR events.
I would suggest for certain kinds of submissions/topics to add logarithmic instead of linear influence on the h-index. Or to add some form of handicap.
After all SF housing is something that the community is obviously interested and passionate about - you can easily get 200 comments/upvotes on any article on the topic. So you check if this article contributes to the h-rank by removing the baseline upvotes/comments an article about SF housing gets.
TL:DR - for some topics your contributions should count towards the h-rank only if they engage the community above average.
Sounds like a plan, I like it. Trouble is that to do that you'd have to have relatively sophisticated NLP to figure out what was the topic.
On the other hand perhaps a simple comparison of keyword frequencies in title or all comment bodies would work? Still, doing this properly is nontrivial.
This is interesting, but I suspect there is a bias.
Submissions, when they succeed, tend to get many upvotes. Comments also get upvotes, but in average an order of magnitude less. The same applies to replies in comment, which I would guess generally get fewer upvotes (or subcomments to comments other than the top comment).
It seems that the Top 100 users here are the one who are posting stories and that comment rarely, as that would optimize the "leverage" to get a higher H-index.
The H-index is designed such that posts with few upvotes cannot decrease the H-index. Since it is defined as the largest n such that you have ≥n posts with score ≥n, adding another low-scoring post doesn't decrease the H-index.
Wow, your account averages almost 24 internet points per day. That is pretty intense. Admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery. I thought I was spending too much time on HN with ~5pts/day. I hope you are able to get it under control (probably meaning kick it all together). My dad had a problem with Tetris in the 90s -- but that was better than the alcoholism he dealt with in the 70s and 80s (30+ years sober now). So, ivanca has a good point that it can be worse. However, there is no doubt that internet/games/etc can be addictive. Good luck.
Hey, I'm "broken" too but my addiction involves alcohol and bad girls, at least you are addicted to something sane and educational. And you work at Google, that's awesome.
While h-index and karma are great to measure, well, measurable contribution to the community, it fails to capture the contribution to the community that consists in (and this is true of a lot of other if not of all "karma policies" too):
I for one read HN articles and comments about 2 hours a day every single day even now at 5am on a Sunday morning after a party. This made me a better programmer, dreamer, and probably a slightly better person too.Yet I speak little and have only a little under 300 karma. I believe, though, that I contribute somehow more to the community than what my karma shows (e.g. by spreading the word about a cool and useful technology at work - say functional reactive programming for instance - and seeing it being adopted or experimented with).
I think attendance matters, too :)
EDIT: list formatting
EDIT2: added bit about FRP cuz, you know, redux