skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Love the idea, think and hope it will improve comments greatly - a few questions:

Will you be able to tell whether a comment you posted has been endorsed enough to become visible (or even how many endorsements)?

Would it be a good idea (and if so, would it be doable or too complicated) to automatically figure out users who deserve to get auto-approved, at least until they are flagged enough to undo it? Maybe if x% (95? 100?) of your last y comments (100? 500?) have been approved it could give you the benefit of the doubt?

Would it be worth offering users with 1000+ karma the ability to disable their abilities so they could enjoy the filtered version others see? Or would too many people chose the option making it not work at all?

Finally, I lost my flagging rights ages ago, presumably for using it too liberally - is there any system in place whereby that might reverse? Will that mean I don't see new comments, or can I see but not flag/endorse, or can I see and endorse but still not flag?

Anyway, excited to see the change :)

Edit: a related, slightly, question: Does HN "shadowban" users from downvoting, i.e. do some users think they can downvote (or indeed upvote) but their votes aren't counted? Not sure why, but I've felt that might be the case for my downvote for a little while.
I don't think that will universally be the case. Low karma might also indicate you don't post much, so you're less likely to be annoyed.
Being naïve is a luxury a journalist can't afford. Not when the identity of his source and his career are at stake.

Assumptions are forbidden. Trust that a company he just wrote about won't read his e-mails is beyond comprehension.

And that cost someone their job and, probably, he's burned: Any employer will phone Google to get their opinion. I don't know if they agreed to keep it secret, but I'm pretty sure there will be a part where you'll have: "Off the record ? We fired him/her because he/she leaked a story to TechCrunch" in that phone call.

And yes, I'm pissed.

I mean, just ask yourself .. If you were Google and someone broke a major story about you, and he uses Gmail .. Wouldn't you want to sneak a little peek ?

I wouldn't do that if I were a child. That's just like invading a country, and using its postal services to transmit sensitive information: It is just ... I can't picture that.
It's always nice to hear these libraries and people get a mention around here. I have been fortunate enough to have worked with both Mario/Nate of libGDX, and Andreas (the book). LibGDX really is a fantastic project. I've spent 3 years with it every working day.

I see a bright future too. For the best part of the last 12 months, a team of us have been working on a very complex game. Just the other week; using an outdated (pre-RoboVM), bastardized fork of libGDX, it took me a grand total of 3 hours (and I had never attempted it before) to merge in the RoboVM changes, install RoboVM on my system, fix a couple of bugs; then had the whole thing running flawlessly on the iOS simulator, iPhone and iPad. It runs faster than our native (albeit, Objective-C) iOS version of the game.

I couldn't recommend a better set of tools. I have a lot of respect for the contributors.
In what way is that a difference?
In Arc, or...?
I don't think it matters which. We are potentially going to go from 7 billion people to 9 billion people. At the 7 billion mark we would need 5 planets worth of resources if everyone were to consume at the level Americans do, so where does that leave us is a few decades while the poorer nations are evolving at such a rapid pace? Ideally we get engineers and scientists to start with x amount of resources and x number of people then learn along the way.
I am making a sports training system and this will be a great way to embellish the data for the bikes people enter in. I am 100% going to give this a try. I am also willing to share back the bike models that people put into my system that are not in yours.
If I want to make a Show HN post that links to a project, and immediately comment to introduce it and fill in details will it have to wait for a 1000+ karma person to endorse it? Any way to make that kind of scenario work a little better? I have a feeling a lot of Show HN stuff will just get buried.
It's just top-10.
Great, not only am I really, really bad at hundreds of variants of 2048, now there's an AI that's much better at it than me, even when I'm doing my best to stop it. Presumably, someone will write an AI to combat this one, and I've completely lost the thread of reality to which I have been forlornly clinging.
I really like the idea of making pending comments anonymous (proposed by 8ig8). I strongly suspect that many current upvotes are based on who is making the comment, rather than the merits of the comment itself.
Steal from the poor to feed the middle.

Has served Europe well for the past fifty years or so.
Bummer, I thought this was on candlepin bowling! Last I heard a startup survived by taking over the league so it would make more sense on HN.

It also doesn't suffer from the "too easy" problem of 10 pin. For example, no one has officially bowled a perfect candlepin game.
It's not like the economic incentive to work will be completely gone though. Presumably BI would be, at least to start, roughly the bare minimum required to survive. Any luxuries would still require earned income.

Also, given hedonic adaptation, humans are rarely content with any given level of luxury. While there are certainly negatives to that, it does mean that most (or at least many) people would continue to attempt to earn as much as possible even with a basic income.

Finally, the money does have to come from somewhere. I expect that the system would be designed so that it begins net neutral for the middle class. And I can't see most middle class people suddenly deciding to give up half their income just because there's suddenly a softer landing. For the rich, the effect would obviously be even less pronounced.
What s great vision for the future.

Time will only tell.
Facebook Reportedly Slashing Organic Reach for Pages
> It's bad enough that people are downvoted for contrarian opinions

I have observed this as well and it is rather childish.
Basic income (replacing pensions, welfare, healthcare), military, education are the three most expensive government functions.
> 2. Say it without gratuitous nastiness.

I really hope this change addresses this! Maybe I'm just becoming an old curmudgeon, but there really seems to be mean, argumentative tones to a lot of the conversation I read on HN these days.

I hope we can address it because HN really is a community of smart, earnest, helpful minds that can be a wonderful crowd to eavesdrop on when at their best.
This is situation I feel would not matter in this case. We live in a very regulated societies and corporations always have had a very central role as it is. Go further into the past and just replace corporations with the elites, the wealthy and the aristocracy. Very regulated and large governments easily produce the series of financial and human rights disasters we have seen in the past decade.

It's still buyer beware. Don't use services which say they can look at your email if they want to. Self-interested organizations and people will act self interested, it's a bit of a no-brainer.
I'm more comfortable calling it hn-influence than I am calling it power.

If the idea is to take it away from people that are misusing it, I don't think the occasional lucky submitter getting some undue hn-influence will be a big problem.
Well, I wouldn't endorse it. But, since some of your points are often raised...

> It's bad enough that people are downvoted for contrarian opinions

That particular disease doesn't seem to have taken hold here yet. Comments that are downvoted below 1 more often are angry, abusive, trollish, or devoid of content.

> ...but now our comments need to be vetted by the elite HN users...

An "elite" group of, by a rough estimate, 50% of the site's users. A lot of users, anyway.

> This site looks like something made in 1996 (with absolutely no regard for readability)...

This mistakes graphic design for community value. Reddit was also (and still also, by most measures) one of the ugliest sites online.

> ...but the big new upgrade we're getting is a draconian (and wholly unnecessary)...

I think the most common complaint on HN, especially among its longtime users, has been the diminishing quality of comment threads. So this is an update that's dealing with the #1 problem on HN.

> A lot of HN users bitch about Reddit, but they would never implement something this ridiculous since it would kill their community.

On the contrary, some of the Reddit communities with the most recognition for high quality discussions are the ones with the heaviest moderation. /r/askhistorians is consistently great; /r/askscience is another good one.

Some people finally seem to be coming around to the realization that you don't have to hear everybody's opinion on everything to have a worthwhile community.

> Ironically, this comment is precisely the kind of thing that may never receive an "endorsement."

Well, and no offense intended, but hopefully not, since your comment is a good example of the problem this is trying to solve. It's unnecessarily angry.
You should also look at it from the other side: if I have a job that I work at 8-10 hours a day (and might not do if I didn't need the money), how am I "punishing" the other guy by not sharing the fruits of my labor with him for nothing in return?

EDIT: To put it another way: if I'm a productive worker and have a job, I am "rewarded" by working for a boss (taking orders from him/her), and having to turn over 35-50% of my income to government, to give it to others. If I were unemployed, I'd be "punished" by receiving welfare, food stamps and a bunch of other stuff, without having to contribute in any way to society.
The any idea will only matter if it is executed upon well.
Correlation does not imply causation... that said, congratulations on your success! I would be interested to see more about the parameters of your A/B tests.
Fair enough. I would much prefer fixing the long comment thread problem with 5 lines of JavaScript than implementing this bizarre system.
Maybe with a Virtual Machine?
There's also certain commentators who are more authoritative on certain topics, because they are known to have positions at certain companies etc.
BLAKE2: “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” Than MD5
Exactly my thoughts. I know if my first comments had been voted off the island I would have swam away.
I finally managed to complete it! I was very proud too - I managed to complete it with no residual blocks. Here is a bit of proof:

http://imgur.com/2fSkkNT
An interesting, and perhaps time saving option would be an "endorse entire thread" or "endorse entire sub thread" button, for threads that are interesting but really so tame that the likelihood of bad posts is small.

Also, it would be interesting to know what problem this solves, and how you will know if it works.
I wonder if this'll be a good idea to, but I'm willing to give it a try. My biggest worry would be that it slowed-down discussions too much.

> I don't get it. This site looks like something made in 1996 (with absolutely no regard for readability), but the big new upgrade we're getting is a draconian (and wholly unnecessary) comment moderation feature/policy?

I like the look of HN, it has all I need and nothing else, plus it loads fast. The only thing I'd like is a way to collapse comments (Reddit style) so I can easily get past a long chain in a discussion. I'm curious why you think it's hard to read.
Will the comment actually disappear completely, or will it just go into a state where nobody else can see it? It seems like it is 1) useful to be able to see your comments that never got endorsed (to let people build a mental model of what makes the cut and what doesn't), and 2) less confusing than just having stuff mysteriously disappear.
Just throwing out an idea, but why not allow the user who posts the article to select whether or not they want to use pending comments? This way one user doing a simple Ask HN can get immediate feedback while another posting a controversial article can have an intelligent conversation.
"Please nominate me for Abel prize"
Aside from the fact that the Daily Mail is a tabloid which makes its money primarily from inflaming right-wing sensibilities while misreporting or fabricating stories, this seems like a particularly ludicrous assertion considering that it would imply a far higher rate of welfare fraud than actually happens.

Could you tell us how much money it's possible to claim from the system, and how much a realistic minimal standard of living might actually be? If you do your research honestly, you might find it illuminating.
You wouldn't need any of this if it were done properly. C# is a good demonstration of the principle and I'm sure Java could support something similar. In the case of C#, forward declarations are unnecessary, and if you want/need to see something like a .h file then one can be generated automatically from the metadata included in the binary.

In fact Objective-C already includes pretty much everything necessary in the binary already, as you can see by using class-dump. Perhaps additional work would be required to support exposing absolutely everything that might be required, but there's no obvious reason why the language couldn't be extended to allow direct use of compiled code, with no need for a .h file.
Not impossible! I finally did it!

http://imgur.com/2fSkkNT
This is helpfully "fixing" something that isn't particularly broken.
Agreed, if the "elite" don't agree with your differing opinion then it will never be heard. When has that type of dictatorship ever worked out well...

I agree about choosing this for new functionality, if you are going to improve comments why not first start with notifications. Currently I'll make a comment and 10 people may reply but I'll have no idea unless I actively look through my own comments, which I might do once a month. This leads to a whole lot of dead end comment threads.
I would agree if not having to type curly characters is a major benefit of IGo syntax. As a CoffeeScript user, primary benefit of IGo I see is in readability, not saving keystrokes which I think TextMate/Sublime Text macros are better at.
It's great that a list like this exists, to start, but it would be even better if it provided some info about the educations and backgrounds of each woman listed. That would really help younger women or those not yet involved in startups & tech to find out about paths they could follow.
Ah, so it works for the full API but not the chooser? or have they fixed the content servers? This is what Dropbox Support originally told me when I contacted them about the problem:

> Thanks for writing in. It looks like the issue here is that our content servers (dl.dropbox.com) don't currently allow arbitrary cross domain access in JavaScript. (This doesn't apply to accessing the file directly in your browser, or downloading to your server locally, which is generally what one would do with the link returned by Chooser.) […] This is something that would need to be enabled on our side, so I'll be sure to pass this on as feedback.
Is there any plan on adding data for size/geometry? (arguably one of the most important things to look at when comparing bikes)
I had a bad feeling just reading the initial post, before thinking about any specific drawbacks. But this? If you failed to notice that your system would result in many users being arbitrarily and permanently banned, what else have you missed that no one else has pointed out yet?

Personally, I wouldn't read a "pending comments" page, because I come to HN to read and discuss stories that interest me, not to browse piles of random, context-free comments. I suspect that most users will feel the same, so it won't help much.

This entire thing is a bad idea, and the current state of Hacker News comments is nowhere near bad enough to warrant such drastic measures.
LOL Does this means what I think it means ? Basicly you don't care about people's privacy O_o

> DOWN‽ : Safe, anonymous punctuation in your social network.
> DOWN‽ was created to avoid awkward punctuation, so rest assured we don't really care about privacy.
What about Medicare/Medicaid? Those are pretty much essential at this point and the $10k will not even begin to cover insurance premiums for the elderly.

Also don't forget that a huge number of the people work for the federal government and the budget you are citing includes their salaries. For a large percentage of the population, your proposal would mean poverty.

Simple math like this does not work on a system as complex as this. While I agree with the premise, your calculation is off.
They're keeping all the non-transparent, behind the scenes stuff though - except now it affects not just commenting yourself but also approving the wrong comments. Is the controversial but insightful comment you just approved going to pass the vague behind the scenes restrictions? Why risk it!
I fear that this is going to have the effect of drowning out minority or contrary opinions, even those that are legitimate (non-trolling) and expressed in a respectful manner.

Currently, the downvote button is only supposed to be used for unproductive comments - drivel, and the like. Of course, people use it to show their disagreement (even though that's not how it's meant to be used).

As a result, people that post controversial or minority opinions often get downvoted, even if their comments are well-thought out. This effect is less noticeable on Hacker News than on some subreddits (/r/politics is one of the worst), but it's noticeable to someone who reads Hacker News regularly.

I fear that this is going to exacerbate this effect. We can establish rules for which comments should be endorsed, just like we establish rules for which should be downvoted, but in other forums, the way that these tools are used in practice oftentimes do not match the stated guidelines.

EDIT: Also, I'm not entirely sure why this is preferable to simply allowing users to automatically hide comments below a certain score. Unless there really is a significant difference between the views of users with > 1000 karma and the rest, the "endorse" button is not fundamentally different from an upvote, is it? (In principle, not in implementation).
Is this why npm made the changes with self signed certificates http://blog.npmjs.org/post/78085451721/npms-self-signed-cert... or is that unrelated?
When I endorse a comment, does that also upvote the comment? Or is voting completely separate from endorsing?
No, that's not intended. If it happens we'll fix it.
It's far too idealist to be realistic, but they shouldn't be able to use that information for their own civil inquiry. If gmail or pgp were used they wouldn't have access to it, it being a Microsoft account shouldn't make its contents available to them for a private investigation. Of course it does and probably always will because they have lots of lawyers and terms of service, but I just disagree with them being able to.

I agree that if they have to do this investigation (and really they're the ones that will ultimately decide that) they shouldn't get anyone else involved - especially the criminal justice system.

I think what I'm trying to get at is that the conversation is turning here toward just how should Microsoft access the data they want, when it should be whether they should be able to at all. I don't like the idea that it's a given that they can take that information, and that's what should change here.
I see diabetes-inducing amounts of sugar...And no protein.

Gotta love advertising.
Eh. Yes, but not at the cost of wasting good-faith efforts to contribute and making it hard for them to contribute on other threads. I'd probably endorse similar comments on a thread, even though they were redundant, for that reason.
Since the article looks like it's behind a paywall, can you give us an idea of how the information has been diluted, specifically?
Proposed graphene cardboard has highly tunable properties
He dreamed about more than 200 billion dolar in his simple html comment unconsciously. Heavenly!
Yeah. I want gold now though so here is my code NAT6rw96 :)
I feel like it will continue down the path of groupthink that has been a criticism by some I think. I think that claim has been a bit too much but at the same time it is a real thing. But, I've also never been a fan of needing to be "sponsored" to have your say.
The limit on 1 pending comment per user could be changed to 1 pending comment per user per top-level story. Although I don't see why limit them at all.
I had the opposite feeling, I actually felt accomplished after beating it, even though I have not completed a single 2048 variant.
http://i.gyazo.com/61d02988bb765bd95e26e48b576e8aaf.png

This is the first 2048 variant that I'm able to beat. yay me... .__.
Furthermore, we expect others to work and respect them based on what they do.

I believe that a basic income may make life easier, but it will make it all that much harder to reach equality of respect, equality of dignity.
Separate. Endorsing just means you think a comment is substantial, not that you agree with it.
Berlin Is Not Germany – STARTÜBERLIN
OP's comments should be automatically endorsed.
> cut the amount of discussion on HN by a large amount. Maybe even by 90%.

Indeed, this seems to be the point.. which is kind of ridiculous.

What problem is this solving again? If it's bickering sub-threads, just add UI to collapse threads.
> Ironically, this comment is precisely the kind of thing that may never receive an "endorsement."

And as far as I know very opinionated (in either way) comments usually gets upvoted. And with that I'll assume they'd also get endorsed.
I'd think wed want to minimize how often the FBI is combing through data. I'd rather MS pull up an email than the FBI get more free access to data.
I'm not sure how well that would work, with the number of comments coming in per second it would be easy for some useful comments to get lost into oblivion.
1) Maybe the "cannot submit a comment if you have an pending comment" should be a per thread thing, rather than for the whole site.

I suspect a lot of people read in batches. They take a break and read a dozen new stories over the course of a few minutes. If the exclusion is site wide, and the endorsement rate does not turn out as high as you hope, that would in effect in many cases mean that they only get one comment per batch. If there are more than one story they want to comment in on a batch, they will need to remember to go back during another break and revisit the old story.

2) Won't someone think of the children? Suppose X comments, and his comment is endorsed, and goes live. Y sees it, and comments on X's comment. Y's comment gets endorsed and goes live.

If X and Y's aforementioned comments have each received an endorsement from a third party, count that as an endorsement of the conversation between X and Y, and allow their future comments to go live without endorsement if they are children of the X/Y conversation.

Take a look at the several long back and forth exchanges between tptacek and cperciva in this discussion: [1]. It would be a shame to impede such things.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7439363
By the way, you can use HN Notify (http://hnnotify.com/) to get an email when someone responds to your comment. This way you don't have to dig into your comments every time just to find replies.
Same here. I have followed but rarely make any comments and those are usually too late after the post's popularity has cooled.
> IMO you loose influence by adopting lots of other vendors' tech

That shouldn't be how it works, and I don't think that's how it works. Good tech is adopted by other browsers all the time, just look at WebGL, WebRTC, Web Audio, and this isn't only recent but goes back to XMLHttpRequest and before.

There are lots of specific issues and questions regarding every new technology. Those things matter, not a general "we lose if we adopt a tech another vendor proposed" approach, which you assume here.