i don't know about the nature of the YC.news architecture, but if it's an error that happens unexpectecly then it must be due to some scheduled automatically recurring function that fails somehow and eats up all memory...
so probably it must be on the web server or the stats logging
update: or the weighting algorithm, which is obviously a new addition
"Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos"
I am surprised by the ease of spreading panic. Really bad taste of them.
There is not even a link to a a url of the research. the quality of YC submitted stories are in downhill.
If everybody has a mobile phone, then it's impossible to limit the cause for their health failure to a mobile phone, so no study can proove anything...
for every study that "proofs" the negative effects of a mobile phone there is another that does the opposite.
Until there is one that proofs the problem either use a hands free or limit the use...
why lose time? you are not going to learn programming in 1 day anyways, neither in 1 month...except if thats the only thing you are doing...
it's better that you find an idea in your knowledge domain (economics that is), find someone to do the hacking for you, (learn a few programming stuff while starting up) and contribute to the company your knowledge...
i agree with you that they may had any other idea and be determined about it, but if the idea wasn't what people needed it wouldn't have the enormous success it had.
bad analogy i'd say. they may lose some shots but their team mates may score better that day.
At the end of the day, their target is to win the game so it doesn't matter who lost any number of the shots. If they lost the game then the team and all fans are emotionally affected.
The players will get paid at the end of the day. If a startup fails nobody cares and you are certainly not gonna get paid.
so, most of the new users voted up for this story, and the older users contributed the comments in the story...this is interesting about the "quality" of the users, so maybe the weighting that will affect story order, should take in mind user contribution(karma) in comments...
So, maybe comments's karma should be kept as a different record. And there should be comments weighting too, because we wouldn't want new users to game the system with each other and thus game again the weighting system for the story order.
"Quality" could be expressed as "experience" because obviously people adapted in the climate of YC.news who behave the expected way, as you say you expect to happen and thus the problem correct it self. But expecting the situation to correct it self may not be the right way.
Expected way though shouldn't be mean is the correct way, because the community would remain closed instead of being open.
So, because of the problems that arise with a weighting system making it probably not democratic, the most correct way for weighting would be to happen in manual down voting, which should appear only for "experienced users".
Weighting should happen there, so for example if you have 1 experienced user up voting and another one down voting, their vote is eliminated, which positive/negative difference could be used in two ways:
1. added in the current points of the story
2. or a non-linear scale be used that would determine the quality of the story.
let me make it easier for you, here vote this down too...
good luck and good bye yc.news. hope you recover
i am done.