CNBC interview with David Drummond, chief legal officer at Google, who discusses the Internet giant's reaction to an assault by hackers who sought to penetrate the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
The x axis is the rank number of the posting divided by 1000, so that's a constant sampling interval in blocks of 1,000 but more compressed in time towards the right because of the higher posting frequency.
It wouldn't make much difference actually, apart from greatly complicating the matching up of the Y axis.
The bigger issue is the fact that this is just everything that is posted and not flagged, so it is if you wish a view of the 'new' page, it has nothing to do with the 'home' page, I'll try to address that tomorrow.
As for the labelling and clustering, that was based on keywords in the title from a fair sized sample, and from the urls the links pointed to.
What I am specifically searching for is larger trends, smaller trends would be very difficult to catch using this method.
I'm actually quite surprised how even the graphs come out over the longer term, I would have expected more variation in the submissions.
So if there is a problem at this point in time I would conclude that the problem is not in the submissions, they seem to have roughly the same subjects over the long term as they did in the beginning, with the exception of a shift of focus away from 'startups' in the first year or so of operation.
I think that has to do with an influx of programmers / people interested in technology in general whereas originally most of the people on news.yc were active in the startup scene.
they seem to have roughly the same subjects over the long term as they did in the beginning
That's been my impression for a long time. Do your techniques allow you to measure the trend of people complaining about the site deteriorating? Because that's been going on for a long time too, and in approximately the same way (though possibly in cycles).
I think that has to do with an influx of programmers / people interested in technology in general whereas originally most of the people on news.yc were active in the startup scene.
Pretty clearly that is because the site was originally named Startup News and had a relatively narrow scope, then was renamed to Hacker News as part of explicitly broadening the scope.
Bad example. I gave Expelled a 1 on IMDB for the sole reason I thought it was very badly made (for a documentary). Some votes might be because the movie is "being punished" but I seriously doubt all are. There certainly are enough ID advocates to cancel out the negative votes.
I tried watching Expelled a week ago. I approached it with an open mind trying to be able to see an alternate perspective. Unfortunately, I found it to be nearly unwatchable. I didn't like it because the presentation made it impossible for the documentary to even present an argument. Cuts during interviews were so rapid that I could barely understand the context of any statement. Furthermore, the rapid cuts symbolize an intention to mislead or misinterpret what people say. I got to point where Ben Stein visits the concentration camps. I was so perplexed by this I just turned the movie off.
As for the information contained in Expelled. It was hard to interpret because it was filled with so much opinion. Nothing was hard fact enough for me to consider that the professors were fired for an invalid reason.
You could try not acknowledging downvotes on a new item until the number of downvotes reaches a threshold. For example the first downvote on an item would have no impact on the score or the placement of the item on the page. If the threshold is 2 then, the item would be affected after 2 downvotes. At that point the normal result for downvoting would occur. This would require two people to independently interpret the quality of an item. Though, I am only considering the case of an item being only downvoted.
Another idea I have is to require a reason for the downvote. Reasons could include: disagreement, uncivil, or offtopic. The score could be affected according to the reason. This could make downvoting more thoughtful and scores could be impacted less for disagreement.
Last idea: Instead of hiding all scores. Only hide the score for items with a score less than or equal to 1. These scores have less relevance and I think people will be less critical of comments if they don't see a negative score attached.
I disagree. This event does not support the Nemesis hypothesis. This might only add evidence to suggest that there is periodicity to Earth impacts. Although, it might not. As I understand it the idea of periodicity for impacts is debated and is not statistically conclusive.
There are other hypothesizes besides Nemesis to explain the supposed periodicity of impacts. Essentially, we need something to cause a gravitational change to the Oort cloud. Other possibilities include Brown dwarfs and black holes or precession in the rotation of the milky way.
Correction. This event doesn't only support the Nemesis hypothesis.
More precisely it is evidence that something caused excess asteroid activity 65 million years ago. And therefore is supporting evidence for any theory which could explain that. Nemesis is the best known possibility, but is far from the only candidate.
The supposed impact is merely a data point that could be used to interpret Earth impact periodicity. It can only contribute to our to our current collection of data. Defining it as evidence in support or against periodicity is premature.
I was saying that it is evidence that the dinosaur asteriod was not just a random asteroid. Some external force disturbed potential asteroids and shoved multiple ones into the inner solar system. That fits with Nemesis. But would fit with other theories as well.
If you feel strongly about it you can always use: http://www.blackle.com/