skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I am willing to give pg and company the benefit of the doubt, I would consider what you said to probably be the most noticeable difference that would matter to the bottom line of the parties involved who have felt the brunt of such situations.

With this new system, I can't imagine YC companies being called out on their dirty closets like they have in the past (any maybe indirectly large swaths of people who are employed by big co's who are power users on HN with those stories, or in general up and coming companies people engage with in the community).

I know some may feel I'm over exaggerating (because there are the passive bans through blocking upvoting/downvoting effects for comments/posts/polls, filters, hellbanning, etc.) , but I feel like until now, I have taken the information access, discussion that goes on here and all the interesting people this board attracts for granted. I just don't see it being the same place to discus/mention ideas/concepts and ask questions if pg and co decide to stick with it, and it just becoming more watered down onanism that it can increasingly be and has been on track to becoming more of up until today. But this is the internet, and moments like these may inspire someone to offer other environments.

On another note: I'm finding it really fascinating to be able to experiment with social systems like this. I'm excited to see the posts of people analyzing the affect of a change like this via the search api or scraping.
HN is like EMACS not WordPad. It has a learning curve.To some extent, HN is unwelcoming to new comers by design. It filters out people who want to behave to the same standards as the rest of the internet.

To put it in perspective, your post would several standard deviations above the mean both in length and content on most sites. Would have written so thoughtfully and carefully a year ago?
This completely breaks the commenting feature in both ios & android mobile apps.
The difficulty needs to ramp up significantly quicker (does it even ramp up at all?).

Make the tutorial a single page.
In this example no government oversight would probably work much better. If a carrier starts opening your mails, they would lose their customer base and other services would come up. Also, you could probably stipulate this in the terms of service so that you can have a legal recourse if the carrier violates the contract. With government intervention, all carriers would be subject to government bullying, legal or otherwise. Which scenario would you prefer?
Your estimation of BLAKE2's data/second is indeed off by an order of magnitude <https://blake2.net/ >, and the demand is certainly there to have better checksum algorithms in filesystems, both for integrity and deduplication. ZFS for example uses SHA-2.

BLAKE2's authors do say they designed a fast algorithm envisioned for storage, so that's why I think it fits btrfs.
This kills the Hacker News.
a 100k bill that most likely is actually just 5k inflated. See Dr. Keith Smith on this topic. Excellent: http://surgerycenterofoklahoma.tumblr.com/post/79972487684/b...
Downvoting someone saying they prefer some text editor is useful because those conversations are often very dull.

Downvoting the incorrect post is valid but as you say it would be more useful to provide a correction post.
The Comforts of Dystopia
> I also hope to see more non-standard crypto and protocols, where "the market" leads the way

This is super-dangerous, unless the amorphous "market" is also paying for cryptanalysts to bang on the crypto primitives as a public service to all competitors in the market.

After all, RSA adopting Dual EC DRBG was a business decision, and one which the market didn't reverse despite Dual EC DRBG being publically known to have a probable backdoor since 2007.
That's a great system, and I love that OpenSSH has a SOCKS proxy in it (and I make use of it quite a bit).

I wanted to comment on your ec2 traffic observation and make you aware of Digital Ocean machines if you were not already aware. Not only are they inexpensive but D.O. offers quite a few egress points from their data centers. I also believe that their hosts have individual public IP addresses, which may help further reduce the chance of being blocked wholesale.

Granted, the IP addresses are still clearly identifiable as D.O. machines, so if those services want to filter out "data center traffic" they still can but you might fly under the radar as compared to EC2 traffic.
That is exactly the plan. To prevent the change from being too disruptive I set all the parameters controlling pending comments very loose.

I know a lot of people are worried that this will break HN socially. I frankly am relieved it didn't break HN literally. The new code touches so many things. I'm amazed it works. But if it does seem to be breaking HN socially, we'll tweak it till it doesn't, and if that's impossible, we'll turn it off. I'm not wedded to having pending comments. I just wanted to try it to see if it can eliminate the very worst comments.
So have I lost the ability to comment or is this for new users?
It's at least above 300, because I can't endorse.
Seen it

edit: just for research I noted how long this took to go from [pending] to not. It took 10 minutes for what it's worth
My issue with it is if you're posting link bait threads all the time you might get hundreds of karma for very little effort.

However In my case I have 6XX karma which was earned by people up-voting thoughtful comments over several years on HN.

Point being, not all karma is the same and I'm not sure we're going to get higher quality commentary with this new system. I actually think it's going to make users chase karma and try to game the system.
I'm curious about the karma threshold numbers, is there any data available for the number of users that have a karma > 1000? Does HN have a data API?
There is a bug on this comment. It says [pending], but there is no endorsements button, it says endorsed instead.
The thing is, this is a kind of change which makes it difficult to know the real impact since the users who would have a problem with it are the ones losing their voice (until a karma elite user intervenes, of course). That's one of the reasons most people are opposed to this.
Some people take 5 semesters of theoretical computer science. I took 5 semesters of asm and hardware datasheet programming.

What you need to write a compiler is 5 asm course, not 5 theoretical computer science courses.

the fucken pretenders say "It compiles to a virtual machine, right? or you use a backend?"

I say, "No, I fucken know what a compiler is and I fucken wrote a compiler."

I took a compiler, an operating system and a data structures and digital logic and numeric methods and computer graphics and architecture courses, too.

They don't believe me.

http://www.templeos.org/files/ASU_Transcripts.pdf

CSC226 CSC326: x86 asm

CSE421 CSE422 CSE523: M6800 asm
BLAKE2b is <3.5cpb on Sandy Bridge, or ~570mb/s at 2ghz. 5cpb in general on 64 bit x86, 400mb/s. 6-8 cpb in general on 32 bit x86 with SSSE3, 250-333mb/s. It definitely might be overkill for some situations, but it's fairly affordable overkill.
My karma is >10k and my comments are still going into "pending" state. I don't know if they are being endorsed by other users or the system just automatically endorses them, but I do see a [pending] on them for at least a minute after I post them -- haven't tried to make a quick post while another is showing [pending].
It didn't say people on welfare get $20k/person. They don't get anywhere near that. That's how much the government spends to administrate giving them welfare (including managing means testing to prevent people from abusing it) as well as the welfare itself.

I'm pretty sure US welfare is somewhere around $500-900/mo, and if you get a job (thus, work towards becoming a 'productive member of society') you may lose it.
And if you read the actual motion[1], you'll see that's referring to people that send email to people with gmail accounts, not the account holders themselves. Quoting Smith v Maryland didn't exactly endear them to me in that case, but it is certain true that "Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient’s assistant opens the letter, people who use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their communications are processed by the recipient’s ECS provider in the course of delivery." Sorry, but if you send an email to me, I'll treat it as I see fit, including letting my email provide run ads on it to pay for my service, and no, that "confidentiality notice" you included has absolutely no legal power over my email account.

[1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/160134104/Google-Motion-to-Dismiss...
Glad to see the correction, it solves the one problem with an otherwise very well written incident report. Kudos for setting the record straight and taking the criticism so well.
My issue with pending comments requiring endorsements is that I have been here for several years and I only have 247 karma. I browse regularly but only tend to comment when I have something good to add. I don't try to game the system, and I don't try to comment immediately on new posts. I'll probably never hit 1000 karma, and now I'm even more disincentived to post since the chances of someone actually seeing what I post will now be even lower.
Jeebus. I been waiting SOOOO long for a chance to tell everyone how much I hate hidden comment karma. Here is my chance. Ok. I am done. Sorry I just had to vent.

Edit: Crap! my comment is pending... I guess I won't get to say it at all.
> this is going to kill a lot of real-time commentary on posts that are only moderately popular

I hope discussions become more drawn out, less intense, & more thoughtful; Instead of an intense period of commenting on the popular articles.

If some discussions are drawn out, then there would be less redundancy of comments, since people would have more time to view the entire conversation. Also, it would lessen incentive for quick, "kneejerk" comments to get the largest audience (thus karma).
Hopefully this will prove overly pessimistic. The way I see it, either we'll be proven wrong or pg will revert to the system we know and love until he comes up with a better method for improving the quality of comments.
As a (mostly) lurker who's quite wary of this change, I agree that stifling newcomers and longtime but quiet users could deprive the HN community of something real.

That said, Hacker News is a high enough quality forum that it could fare quite well for some time even if it completely cut off registrations. I don't think the experiment will be catastrophic by any means; though it'll undoubtedly result in at least some useful content never reaching daylight.

Of course, the fact that the HN comment sections are right now orders of magnitude higher quality than the internet at large is precisely why this change seems unnecessary. HN has long been- and still very much remains- a secluded mini-Reddit for startups and hackers. Doesn't that ethos almost demand the welcoming of newcomers?

EDIT: I wonder if everyone realizes the feeling of being excluded arbitrarily by karma count. Sure felt weirder than I anticipated while this comment was pending.
It would be nice if the page didn't reload when you click endo rse. I lost my place on the page and my first thought was, "Well I won't be doing that again."
I agree with thaumaturgy here; your comments are very emotionally charged for something as insignificant as a change to the moderation policy of a link aggregator's comment section. I hope that this new system will bring down the emotions that tend to run high in the comments.

In your first comment, you've criticized change, ridiculed the site's look and feel, and provided an opinion that was astutely refuted by thaumaturgy with a reasonable amount of data. In your latest reply, you questioned the grandparent commenter's intellect, created a strawman argument, and minimized the validity of the commenter's emotional reaction. You then made an inflammatory generalization about a group of people who shared the commenter's point of view and created some sort of strawman faction out of them.

All the while, I have yet to see a well-formed argument come out of your two comments; just, as thaumaturgy said, needless anger. Just because you can write in complete sentences and can write passionately does not mean that your comment is substantive.
We already have upvoting/downvoting of comments. Why do we need to moderate each and every comment? A non-popular post will have no comments at all as all will be pending and no 1000+ karma users to endorse the comments. :(
My karma is >10k, so maybe the system still puts my posts into a pending state but then auto-endorses them? Not sure, but pg did say in another post that users with karma >10k were exempt.
Positioning elements, fighting to implement the support of multiples screen resolutions, dealing with JS quarks, etc. All those topics are mastered in most native frameworks and clearly a hot topic in web dev.

Maybe broken is a little bit exaggerated, but very well deserved IMHO.

After several years in web dev _and_ mobile dev, I can safely say that even in a couple of years, native toolchains won't be relegated to a marginal role and remain the only efficient way of developing native apps.
Ok, the $4 meta question:

How many of the comments on the page would you endorse?
This story is a cheap attempt to make people with an inferiority complex feel good. There is nothing great about mediocrity. Someone who fails to deliver on their work is not brilliant, appearances to the contrary. But at the top of the world are brilliant people who have delivered, and no amount of self-congratulation for stolid mediocrity can change that.
I'm afraid that comments that don't jive with the HN world view will never be endorsed. It's a good way to keep the opposition shut up! Hopefully I'm misunderstanding how it works.
This is obviously an attempt to increase the quality of quality of comments, is there some type of guideline you can give about the type of comments/commenter HN is looking for? I worry that there is a karma feedback loop in action where users with higher karma are better known and naturally get more upvotes than an unknown poster making the same comment.

1000 just seems like a really high threshold that would take a very long time to reach. I'm not sure if this is desired and HN just really wants people to work for it or I just don't provide much value. Obviously I think I provide value but I haven't even reached the threshold to downvote yet and after over a year HN is putting my comments on probation? It just really seems to devalue new members, it makes me wonder if I should be posting comments at all. Now I'm going to be scared to comment since I might get stuck is approval hell. So now it'll probably take an even longer timeframe to reach 1k since I'll be posting less. I know that in some way this what HN wants, fewer fluff comments but honestly sometimes I don't know what HN is going to upvote.

Is there some guideline to how long it should take to reach 1K? I know it depends on how active you but maybe some idea of how the karma average looks for quality commenters at 100 comment intervals from 0-1k. Obviously I'll reach it at some point but that doesn't mean I provide the value HN is looking for.
It's also above 429.
Agree. I'll add that the most frustrating thing to me is this: 3 comments in a row, are ranked as #1, #2, and #3. I end up reading crap, or not reading good things because that order tells me almost nothing. If I saw the scores, and they were 200, 5, 3, I could know to skip the bottom 2 if I wasn't very interested in the topic. If the scores were 200, 199, 198, I would be sure not to neglect reading #3.
It's 500 at the moment.
I'm attempting to endorse georgemcbay's reply to your comment, but it just sends me to the reply page.
Your comment brings up a really great point.

Hiding comment karma actually took something away from the community.

If it added something. I did not see it.
Let's put it this way: There are not many jobs a regular SQL database can't do. MongoDB is used in many types of environments, but in my experience, it is best used as a key value store. If you are using a pure Javascript stack, then it might make sense to store some data into it. But don't try and fit a complex schema into it.
Using Software Copyright To Benefit the Public
Out of curiousity, how do/will dead posts interact with the endorsement system?

Will dead posts that are not endorsed still be visible to users below 1k karma? Is endorsing a dead post (perhaps a good comment by a usually poor poster) a no-op, or will endorsement allow the dead post to be seen by users who are below 1k karma but have showdead turned on?
Hmm... Now I find myself hoping that I never hit 1000 karma so I won't have to wade through all the never-endorsed comments. Could this feature deter high karma users from logging into the site?
The single payout amount is $500 million (not that it matters any more).

https://www.quickenloansbracket.com/rules/rules.html
I'm not surprised this is the top comment on a hacker site. But having watched my 5-year old son assemble a 300 piece set while following a 40+ page manual, gave me a new appreciation. He was obviously creating a new thing, even if not experienting. Not only did he have great pride in his creation, but he leaned a lot about 3D visualization and spacial awareness. Sign me up!
Yup. I'm at 935 points and I can endorse comments. I feel like this is going to be such a dilemma for me, and HN, as a community, will soon discuss what really can be endorsed, even though PG already set some rules.

I feel bad that comments posted just to say they agree with someone/something cannot/will not be seen. This type of 'noise', as long as it is sprinkled lightly throughout, isn't so bad, in my opinion. I mean, I understand HN is meant to reward thoughtful comments, but at what point does this concept go into Less Wrong-type of ridiculousness? I'm totally not trolling, but we're only human. To deconstruct all aspects of a community/forum to only allow strict logical/cerebral behaviour seems like a community I would rather not be a part of.

In the end, I'll probably not endorse any comments, or at least extremely little, because I don't know if I agree with the concept and would rather not get involved.

I'm probably in the minority here, though.
Could you share what companies you are referring to? Which finance companies use Python? I am soon to graduate and I would like to find something in London that is using Python or C/C++.
I created a new account to test out the system, and within 4 minutes of you posting your comment, I was able to see it and reply to it. For what it's worth, it was also the top comment of this thread.
I joined more than 2000 days ago. I don't have 1000 karma. This way I'll maybe never will reach it. Seems a bit of a high threshold to me. But maybe my commentary just isn't good enough.
I think is very timely, I have noticed an increase in number of comments with a corresponding decrease in quality, and I am not just talking about my own comments.
I was driving back from meeting with my co-founder so came late to the party. I posted then deleted this in the old thread.

As a long time lurker and reader of HN I really hope that you reconsider this change. I made an account just to explain why I dread the impact of this change on the quality, openness, and character of discourse at HN.

Put bluntly this change inspires a visceral feeling of loss and disappointment in me. I have viewed HN as a community where anyone can participate fully if they have something useful to say. This change feels like it will destroy this character of HN and turn it into a system where elites will have all the knowledge of a discussion and the rest of us will not. They will be able to incorporate ideas into their own posts before others can and can choose which ideas get general airtime. Particularly in low traffic stories this feels unjust and noninclusive.

I really enjoy reading the comment threads at HN and some of the best comments come as replies to comments that are unlikely to get endorsed in this system. This is because this system contains powerful disincentives for approving anything other than comments that will universally be viewed as high quality. If you approve enough comments that are viewed as low quality by moderators you will lose your ability to even view non approved comments and therefore your ability as an elite to fully participate in discourse at HN.

When this goes live hopefully people will be very very liberal with approving comments and people will do the public service of approving most comments in a pending global queue quickly. For me it will be very sad that I cannot read the lone, often very informative, comment to a story that will never make it to the front page but that nonetheless I and other lurkers want to see any response at all to the story. I am willing to read the trolls if I am allowed to read those who will be neglected by +1000 karma users.
1. War and conflict are desirable

2. Unfit/unintelligent people should be sterilized

3. Sex with children is ok

mad yet?
We can try it out, and if it doesn't work switch it back.
In the AskHN thread I made, only one person responded to it, but it was VERY USEFUL.

Would Pending Comments have hidden that post from me? (I am assuming not many other people saw or cared about my thread) If so, then this policy seems like a big step towards focusing discussion to only what is on the front page.
Yeah, that is very weird. Shouldn't it this?

.replace(/>/g, '&gt;')
.replace(/</g, '&lt;')
I remember. Every time I visit HN, I think about the golden days of visible comment karma.
A counterexample is welcome. The Cirrus SR22 has a somewhat mediocre safety record, in spite of its absolutely cutting-edge safety features, because...

Seriously. Insert content here. I see from your other comments that you've got one of these, so seriously, you must have some actual thoughts on this.
I'd maybe agree if the issue was dealing with comment spam.

The system kind of gives me the feeling of the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I think it'll be much tougher to get to that 1000 karma threshold which will make sub 1000 users less likely to comment if their comments aren't actually getting posted. 1000+ users may also get bored of having to endorse other peoples comments. From what it sounds like it could seem like a job.

One alternative could be to only allow 1000+ users to upvote and all other users can only downvote comments. That way you still get your idea of having top karma users pick what everyone else reads. In either case I'm a fan of the Reddit model for all users.

There are lots of ideas that I think are dumb that still manage to do well so it'll be interesting to see. The free market will decide soon enough.
Some observations:

* pg, please move the "endorse" and "flag" links further apart? Upvoting on mobile devices is already a risky proposition (easy to accidentally downvote instead) unless I zoom the upvote arrow to ridiculous size. Now the same problem applies to /pending.

* /pending is moving pretty quickly right now, and I've seen at least one unhelpful comment get endorsed. Hopefully this will reduce as the novelty wears off (or the karma threshold to endorse increases).

* agree with georgemcbay that it's tricky to judge the quality/appropriateness of a comment out of context.
Or, if the purpose is to have high karma users function as semi-moderators, why not just keep the upvote/downvote system but make a comment's precedence a function of weighted upvotes based on the karma of those voters? I guess that still wouldn't prevent a very deep off-topic tangent off of an ancestor post that's high up on the page, but it seems like a simpler and safer solution with much less potential downside, and there are always specific solutions to the above problem such as collapsable threads.
Mostly we'll learn what governments are better at taking over others.