Any chance we can see scores when we're looking at our own comments section?

Often when I notice a bump in my karma I look at my comment threads to see what was so popular.

Ok, now there should be scores next to your own comments. Better?

PG: Will you be applying some metric to determine if this improves site feel? If so, what metric?

But now I cant quickly skim off information from a thread. There are 87 comments in this thread at this moment. I am not interested in reading 87 comments about this experiment. I am however very much interested in seeing what the top few most insightful comments in this thread are. That feedback is very important. Right now I am feeling blind as a bat...

One Idea I've had for fixing this problem is to weight the value of a click based on position on the page. The further down on the page, the more weight its gets. Therefore the most popular topic at the top only get marginally incremented as people read it first and decide its worthy.

On the same note, if an article is waaaay down at the bottom, and someone's taken the time to read it and likes it, then it should get a good solid bump. This will create a "bubble effect" and allow those treasures that are buried deep down in the comment land, to rise to the top and even accelerate as more users find out and rank them.

This essentially is a formula to equalize the comments and give them a fair playing field as they battle for the top most position.

The question is inaccurate, because you're really asking which usernames we can recall. ;-) That's often an order of magnitude smaller than the ones we can recognize. The only way to test who we recognize is to MRI us, show us a bunch of usernames, see if the recognition centers of our brain light up.

That said, here's who I can recall off the top of my head:

YCombinator principals: pg, rtm, jl, tlb

Famous people: joshu, pmarca, paul, jeresig

Semi-famous people: aboodman, tptacek, cperciva, lisper, jrockway, ojbyrne, epi0Bauqu

YCombinator founders: sama, dhouston, ivankirigin, tipjoy, spez, aaronsw, mattmaroon, AlexS, SwellJoe, brezina, fallentimes, brett (at least, I think it's that Brett...the SlinkSet founder)

YCombinator company employees I've hung out with or otherwise interacted with: aston, dfranke, gaborcsalle

Folks I've met in person since moving to the Bay Area: lacker, litewulf, iamelgringo, abossy, timcederman, gaius

Prolific posters: nickb, rms, wheels, davidw, mechanical_fish, DanielBMarkham, edw519, swombat, patio11, raganwald, pchristensen, staunch, byrneseyeview, llimllib, ryanwaggoner, Alex3917, menloparkbum, DaniFong, dcurtis, unalone, masklinn, apotheon, plinkplonk, mynameishere.

(Yeah, I cheated and looked at the leaderboard and a few comment threads for that last one. The original question was recognition, not recall though.)

I think you can remove the word "by"

Wow, this interferes with key elements of my system for voting/commenting on HN. Here are some things that don't work now:

* If a comment is sitting at 1 or 0, I'll try to avoid downvoting it unless I really think the comment subtracts value from the site.

* If a child is attracting more votes than the parent, and I think this is because the child commenter didn't comprehend what the parent was saying, I vote to level out the comments.

* If I see a comment sitting in negative territory that I feel should only be a 0 or 1 because it wasn't that bad, I'll upvote it even if I otherwise wouldn't have.

* If a thread is already dominated by a couple of high-scoring comments, relative to its age, I'm less likely to post a new top level comment. My feeling is that if a good comment just sits at the bottom because it arrived slightly too late, I've only added noise to the thread. The lack of visible points makes it much harder to gauge how a new comment will 'compete' on the thread.

* If the scores indicate that something is being widely misunderstood, I might comment where I otherwise would not have to try to restore sanity.

Of course, if this change were to stick, it would alter the character of the site, and we would all develop new voting and commenting systems. I can already tell that this change magnifies my tendency to vote with an eye toward reordering comments rather than voting on each comment in relative isolation.

No he's not. He invented Free Software, and he wants Free Software to win over the half-assed "open source" movement. Many people think they're the same, but they're not.

He also wrote emacs, gcc, the GNU userspace, etc.

Also:

attempts to fight Tivoization of Linux with the GPLv3 (notice that the Linux kernel is still GPLv2? This isn't an accident.)

You're right, it's not an accident. Linus didn't require contributors to assign copyright to anyone, and hence the only way Linux's license can change is by getting permission from each copyright holder. Since many of Linux's copyright holders are dead, this isn't going to happen. Linux is stuck at GPLv2 forever.

I feel your pain. I don't think I like the new system that much. At least so far.

I'm used to scanning comments as a way to determine which articles to read. Postings with a lot of comment action usually indicate something emotionally appealing.

Once I go to the comments section, then I filter by score, only looking at comments above a certain threshold (depending on how much time I have). I usually try not to comment, unless some comment has been upvoted to a high level and doesn't make sense to me.

Alas, there are a huge number of comments that I disagree with or fail to understand, and only by knowing the score am I able to determine whether or not my adding to the discussion will help the other readers.

That don't work no more. Now I'm just blindly poking around in the comments section, not really feeling connected to the discussion at all...

You know how sometimes online stores won't tell you the price of something until you add it to your cart? Hacker News feels kind of like that now. Like price, comment score is the best indicator of context, class, and quality.

I feel kind of lost.

I didn't realize how much I was affected by the comment ratings until they went away. Commencing cognitive restructuring.

I think reading about the early history of the MIT AI labs and the history of LISP machines really helps to put RMS in context. Before reading about how that all played out, I was one of the ones who respected RMS's broad goals, but decried his almost radical attitude.

I don't think like that any longer. Instead, I now see RMS as a sort of holocaust survivor warning against complacency when dealing with dictators. If RMS seems overly concerned with corporations co-opting free software, it's only because he's been there!

(P.S. Sorry for not providing links to the LISP machine history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine and http://funcall.blogspot.com are probably a good jumping-off points. The tl;dr of it is: MIT AI labs developed LISP, Symbolics took MIT's work and commercialized it without giving back, the MIT AI lab guys responded by going off and forming their own LISP machine company, and that left RMS all alone at MIT and hating commercial software)

Hmmm... I always considered that a feature rather than a bug. Only voting when the scores looked "wrong" was an optimization. How do I decide when to vote now? I have a feeling I'm going to settle into a pattern of voting to reorder comments and that I'm going to vote less overall.