A "voting ring" is when people get friends to upvote their stuff. This is against the rules. We want stories to be on HN because they're good, not because they were promoted.
It's sadly common for a great Show HN post to get demoted because its creators, eager to get it on the front page, tried to game it. I've noticed a pattern, too: usually their gaming technique is pretty weak. Perhaps that's because they're creators, not promoters. Unfortunately, it has the side-effect of making it certain that the ring detector will nail their otherwise good post, while we carry on the usual cat-and-mouse game with people pushing crap.
I've got what I believe will be a sweet solution to this problem, but it awaits time for implementation.
Please everybody, don't ring-vote your posts; just take your chances with HN's randomness. If a post is solid and hasn't gotten any attention yet, a couple of reposts is ok. Be careful not to abuse that, though, since we penalize accounts for reposting too much.
I'm going to demote this comment as off-topic so it won't get in the way of the real discussion. Send any moderation questions to hn@ycombinator.com.
- I know! We'll set up a voting ring to game my blog post about a garage door opener onto the front page of Hacker News, even though I don't get any kind of benefit aside from exposure to my cool project!
- Hey $socialnetwork friends, check it out, I submitted last weekend's project that you helped me on to Hacker News!, followed by folks finding the link there upvoting it because it's cool.
You, and pg before you, apparently default to option 1. Even in the way you've worded this comment you are implying malicious intent, as if the author of the blog post tried to game the article onto the front page. Honestly, unless there's a tangible benefit to the traffic such as advertising or leads, there's no reason to game HN and most of the "voting ring" stuff you are likely observing is organic-ish, not intentionally gamed upvotes from social sharing.
Option 2 is something I have personally observed dozens of times and you should account for it in your thinking and code.
Having a voting ring detector is a good thing. It is no doubt hard to tell organic friendly votes apart from sophisticated voting ring bots, and lots of good posts probably get flagged for this. But without such a detector, there would be a programmatic way to ensure posts get to the top of HN, which defeats the whole voting system.
The ring detection algorithms are vital to the quality of HN. I've looked at a tremendous amount of data on this, and I don't think it supports your interpretation. But certainly the algorithms and moderators both make mistakes. As I mentioned above, I think I may have a way to compensate for that, but I don't know when we'll be able to implement it.
Priceless!
I wish Siri had an API though.
https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/
By the moment it requires registration, but we are using it and works nicely. It's one step in the right direction, I suppose.
[1] http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/2-530 - Integrating Your App into the Windows Phone Speech Experience
"Siri, text house open the garage" was as close as I got.
Still, some sins are excusable in the name of proof-of-concept. :)
An easiest way would have been to use Wit.AI API [1](disclaimer: Wit team member here). You can create any command in minutes and use any device capable to stream audio to the API (including your iPhone) as client. I'd be interested to have your feedback if you have time to check it out!
I see in the near future a folder named "commands," on your iPhone filled with long name apps just for automation. Are you using https or some type of SSH keys to authenticate?
I know you said your running wired instead of wireless, but it sounds like you have to run some type of lightweight server to listen to the http requests. I guess you could just port forward/trigger internally through the router.
Currently it's security through obscurity... so not great. I'll make the arduino only accept requests with a token next weekend.
Yeah if you take a look at the arduino code on github it's a super light http server. Currently I just do port forwarding to access it.
I've got one that will control my electric desk from my phone, one day soon.
I wanted to do this as quickly as possible rather than playing around with Linux and learning a new framework!
I use a hack to have Siri retrieve my bank balance via a SMS. This comes in handy while in the car and you want to balance your checkbook in your head.
But when you say "app" what exactly does that mean? Can it just be a web app that you save a shortcut to? Or is this actually a native app?
Siri doesn't recognize the names of bookmarks you save to your home page.
(Integrating it into a phone is slightly more compelling)
