I think the quality of stories on HN is pretty good. What I'd much prefer to see any amount of attention given to is things like:

1) Let me take back a vote. Particularly on mobile, I misclick those tiny arrows a lot.

2) Let me comment inline. Having other comments, besides the parent around for examination while commenting would probably help overall comment quality.

3) Fix the mobile interface. It's impossible to use HN on mobile iPhone and Android handhelds. Making a slightly modified styled sheet with JavaScript is trivial.

4) Support someone making an app, or commission one. As far as I can tell, the current HN apps are all kind of buggy and have little updating. There are lots of young neophytes who'd love to work on this, particularly if sanctioned, and a funded effort would lead to a better product.

These basic UI improvements don't even seem to be on the radar. Also, I'll add, the story-killing on this site is pretty heavy-handed, yet capricious. Same with the title-editing. What constitutes a "hacker-centric" story changes with the mood of the moderators, and the tendency to just change each title to the original headline is misguided. I also think that the special privileges given to YC companies corrupts the whole system.

If there were any other community like this, people would be driven away by the neglected UI and the Star Chamber that governs the content. But there isn't, so there's no pressure to do anything but midnight HN science experiments. I should just pray for some competition I guess...

Because when I spend time on HN my top priority is features that will make the content better. I believe that matches the priorities of the users-- that users would rather use a site with good stories and comments and a primitive UI than one with a slick UI and worse stories and comments. And time is a zero-sum game. Spending more time on UI = spending less on quality.

The focus on content quality above all is the reason you find yourself saying later "If there were any other community like this..."

You're simply wrong about the moderation. Nearly every story that gets killed is either autokilled, or a dup, or flagged to death by users. I would guess moderators manually kill less than 10 non-dup stories a day. You're also wrong that YC cos get special privileges.

So, uh, how come I and everyone else affected don't have an email in our inboxes from Gawker right now, marked as urgent, explaining the situation?

Doesn't that seem like the right thing to do?

    A short primer in unconstrained, high-dimensional, non-linear 
    global optimization (over time!)

    You can't do it.

Unconstrained and high-dimensional means that your search space is IMMENSE. Non-linear means that the optimal designs may be arbitrarily twisty, very small, fractaline and chaotic, and, most importantly, unconnected. Temporal dependence means that even if you magically find a good solution, it may fade with time.

Fortunately, we never have to do that because we use an incredible amount of prior design information (craft) to ensure that our search spaces are much smaller. This page provides an overview of that information (and even includes a call to test) which will hopefully put you somewhere in the neighborhood of a useful page and inform you of what direction to go.

If you "just had to test" then there'd be no need for art, science, literature, stock markets, language, thermodynamics, technique, craft, effort. Computers would have already solved everything (not that we would have ever invented them).

My opinion is that testing is vital because it's your only consistent, trust-worthy way to measure your value function (conversion rates). It's how you put a stick in the water to measure depth. That is only one tiny part of a complete solution no matter how important it is.

"Well the marginal cost of a copy of [some digital good] is 0 so it isn't stealing!"

That argument is actually completly irrelevant.

I took a train the other night, and there were only 2 people in my whole car. The previous week it was packed. Both times I had to buy a ticket at the same price.

If you don't see what that has to do with pirating music (or software, or movies, or TV), then you don't really understand economics.

Everyone compares it to widgets where there is some fixed cost and some marginal cost, and suddenly the marginal cost is 0 so we should be able to have it for free right? Right?

Wrong. The train has 0 marginal costs, and all fixed costs. Whether that train is empty or full, they pay for the conductor, the engineer, the maitanence and the gas. But you are expected to pay for your ride whether you are 1/1000th of the total population on the train or 1/20th. And if you don't pay, you are breaking the law. Stealing services.

Digital goods are things with a high fixed costs (software developers, authors, directors, actors etc) and 0 marginal costs. There are plenty of other things out there with the same economic model and you are expected to pay for all of them. The only difference is that it is far easier to steal from content creators than service providers.

So please correct everyone you see making that arguement. The fact that copying the music costs nothing really doesn't matter. It comes down to dividing the fixed costs by a certain amount of customers, or there simply won't be content creators anymore. Maybe the songs need to be 2 cents each, I don't know, but the fact is there are high fixed costs and they need to be covered somehow by someone. The lack of marginal cost just doesn't matter.

Perhaps most importantly, legacy media knows it is superior to websites, and doesn't feel the need to treat you as a professional colleague or peer publication if you aren't on dead tree. They'll happily just lift your stuff or ignore it. Want to get a job with them? Pfft, you ran a website? Darling, this is the New York Times. We hire journalists here.

I mean, its very very hard to get it right the first time and hit one out of the park, so you have to try a million tiny things to find some things that stick. The trick is knowing when you're on to something and when you need to double-down. If you can't do that yourself, get outside people involved when you think you have something. If everyone walks away disinterested, you may not have anything yet... keep going.

For music piracy the only cost is the potential lost sale of the music to the "pirate".

Edit: to follow up, I'm a music pirate and proud of it. In my experience there are three types of people who pirate music. There are casual pirates who occasionally download the most popular songs of the day. There are hardcore pirates and digital packrats who refuse to pay for anything they don't absolutely have to and download music they might not even like, just to have it. And there are music lovers who have an insatiable hunger for lots and lots of music and enjoy discovering new music. From a financial perspective for the artists piracy is not generally a serious problem. Casual pop-music pirates generally download only songs that are already mega-hits, and the artists have been compensated thoroughly from. Hardcore anti-business pirates aren't necessarily a significant impact on artists because they wouldn't have paid for the albums they've pirated regardless.

The really interesting aspect comes from the 3rd category of pirates. Music lovers may "pirate" music but they also buy music too, and being exposed to more music means only that they end up buying more music (and going to more concerts), which is nothing but good news for those artists. Some of my favorite music I've discovered only by first pirating it, and in many cases this has lead to supporting artists financially (through album sales, merch, and concerts) that I never would have known about and never would have given a dime to previously. I can't see that as anything other than a good thing.

The current hypothetical non-piracy model for music is broken, and it always has been. There is too little variety on the radio and 30 second or 1 minute clips of songs don't cut it. Sometimes you just need to borrow an album and listen to it a few times before falling in love with it. This is the way it has always been. There's always been borrowing and copying in music, but the internet has made it infinitely more effective and so cast the issues into much sharper relief.

There is an even more important point at play here. And that is that a train line can prevent you from sneaking onto a train without a ticket fairly easily, but it is nigh impossible to put the music piracy genie back into the bottle. Music piracy is going to happen. The technology makes it too easy now, and there is a cultural desire for it. There is no choice to stop it, the only choice is to figure out how to live with it.

P.S. Some people might enjoy listening to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdRAQWp73S4

P.P.S. http://www.gemm.com/item/GEINOH--YAMASHIROGUMI/ECOPHONY--RIN...

(perhaps this is an experiment?)

It also doesn't help that our intellectual property laws have a lot of inconsistencies. If I steal your ideas for a startup, that's ok unless you have patented technology. But if I make a copy of something that I own and share it with a friend, that's illegal.

Up until now there had never been a way to take a material possession and duplicate it at essentially no cost. I think that we have a long way to go before we develop strong cultural norms on how to deal with intellectual property.