skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Their reasons made very good sense to me. I read their comments less as statements of precluding or forcing and more about incentives and focus.

I'm a big fan of the "tie yourself to the mast" (Odysseus and the Sirens reference) approach to managing yourself or your team. Many times the strategy of intelligently removing future options for yourself in order to eliminate distractions and temptations pays off very well. You've removed a path that you can see may be taken in moments of weakness.

The business plan you develop because you need it will be better than the one you develop because you know you should have one.

If you see people as Galts or Ubermensch or some kind of rational actor then this seems crazy to you. Why limit your choices when you can remain flexible in the face of an uncertain future?

If you acknowledge that you yourself are subject to coercion by incentives, that willpower is a depleteable personal resource, that paradox of choice type situations carry a cost? Then it makes a lot of sense.

Of course, as you pointed out, there are a lot of projects where this choice simply doesn't apply.
> > 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.

Some of the comments voted below 1 are, indeed -- but a more relevant metric to respond to that critic would be: How many well articulated contrarian opinion expressed on HN are voted above 1? There are other, less draconian ways, to avoid abuse. The one chosen here would do that, and more -- too much if PG, YC and HN goals remains to take more risk. My impression of actively commenting for the past month is that contrarian opinions are already extremely unwelcome, while passive-agressive abuse roams.
Totally off-topic: What a domain name...
http://www.scroogled.com/mail

Cough... cough...
Most implementations I've read lean towards it being similar to a negative tax (there are other possible implementations out there). So if you file $0 income, you get a $10,000 credit/refund. If you make $200,000 income, you pay $20,000 in taxes.

So taxes on the top brackets pay for basic income on the lowest brackets, with the understanding that the impact isn't changing much for most people because we already have a progressive tax system and this is just a simpler/more efficient way to distribute.
Health Insurance in 3 Minutes
> you are not, but society is an organism with more than you in it, and if he's thrown into the bin because he's can't make it in it the guy may think it's fair to take it from you...

I already had a similar discussion on Slashdot recently. Taking other people's money by force is, IMHO, theft. My question then isn't why it would be OK for the guy, but why does theft become OK for society? Why are you arguing that stealing is acceptable if you're desperate enough? I say it's never acceptable.

EDIT: Paying people so they don't steal from me is called a protection racket. If that's what you're arguing for, let's call it what it is.
What led you to this conclusion?
Why Writing Firmware Is Kinda Like Software Exploitation
What is this? I don't quite get it. Looks like a page of stories that simply didn't make it to the front page...
Being able to "lose" 15 pieces out of each set without incurring any penalty sounds like a great way to grow the home lego collection. The Pley membership cost isn't cheap but neither are new lego sets.
Are you doing things that would enable Microsoft to get a court order against you? What parallels do you see with the actual facts of this case?
Do not let the title fool you. This is not about security; it's about all the stuff Steve Ridley learned working on bringing an RF hardware product to market.
I'll take a look, thanks. Some reviews will, of course, be manual in nature -- implementation correctness of digest auth, for instance, is one that comes to mind (I need to contribute that back to a particular module).
To be fair HN is not apolitical in the slightest. Sure, it is taboo to speak highly of any particular party by name but espousing particular political ideologies is not at all uncommon.
> Basic income is the first step to an empirically ethical society

Not sure, but wouldn't basic income induce increased prices for commodities? If disposable income increases for everyone, then there is an incentive to increase prices everywhere (including accommodation which is a significant part of monthly expenses), thus negating the positive effects of basic income.

Then you know what would happen next... people asking for an increased basic income, and the thing would spiral to the end.
I have a proposal. Those who favor basic income should pick one or two recipients who are deserving of assistance, and open their own pockets and provide the money. The recipients will be glad and thankful, the donors will feel they have moved society toward utopia, and the rest of us can just get on with our lives without suffering the burdens that an additional entitlement would impose.

I say this not to incite a flame war or partisan jibes. I just feel that it's the most honest and ethical way to provide basic income; those who believe in this approach are free to contribute, while those who don't are free not to.

Seems fair to me.
People do "get loud" about stuff that's inherently an improvement. C++11 is a good example of this. It generally does improve C++ in significant ways, and there are a lot of people who are willing to express this.

The fact that we overwhelmingly hear silence or anger toward Mozilla's UI changes is indicative of them not being very good at all.
1) When people don't need to produce value to live in the world, they will cease to produce value.

2) Ultimately it is not income that is needed to survive but resources properly organized. The cost of survival is getting cheaper and cheaper at an exponential rate. You wouldn't know that though because they keep raising the bar on what it means to "survive"—big screen tv, air conditioning, car, etc. The amount of work required to live according to living standards 100 years ago is rather minimal.

3) Where does this "basic income" come from? If you are taking it from others who produce value then how are you any better than a slave owner? The only difference is that instead of owning and taking the livelihood of an individual you are taking it from everyone collectively in smaller amounts. The moral principle is the same.

4) Why would people work if they can just take from others? Everyone will do the least amount possible because everyone else is just going to take their profits so why bother. Communism didn't work so why are you proposing it now?

5) You can't protect people from being stupid. Unless you are physically handicapped or retarded, in which case there is charity and family, it's really pathetically easy to survive in today's world. You aren't being chased by tigers. Agricultural yields are 100x than they were just a short time ago. The Internet provides a vast amount of resources to better yourself. There are greater abundances than ever before and people are generally charitable towards others. If you can't survive under those conditions there is something wrong with you.

6) I find it offensive and an attack on my personal liberty that you would demand that I sacrifice my livelihood so that another doesn't have to work hard and make wise decisions.
You created and ID just to say that?
They're stories submitted by newly-created accounts.
I told my kids about this. They were like "how is that like Netflix?" I realized to them, Netflix is a company that streams video to you. They don't remember a time we used Netflix to get DVDs in the mail.
You need to add a cool off timer of say 5 minutes still even if you delete a pending post, otherwise can bet somebody will abuse this to churn up there system DOS style. There be dragons out there.

Also some visiable indication on near the user/logoff part of the page indicating if can post or awaiting approval of a pend - say a "+" indicating can add a post and a "-" indicating you can't as have pending post.
Another idea would be: tie the number of outstanding comments allowed to the user's karma.

For those of us in non-US timezones, it would be nice to be able to post a few comments before having to wait while the site isn't getting much traffic. I would say something like 500 karma = 1 extra comment you can make before getting the previous ones endorsed.
Additionally, people may be more willing to have these conversations if the comments made in old threads didn't impact their average karma. Long ago I decided I didn't care about average karma and just try to add something to a larger discussion or attempt to have a conversation in an old thread, but in the beginning I was concerned.

The back and forth comments deep in threads no one reads are some of the most interesting I have had.
This library is a good example of what Dan Describes in this talk

Daniel Spiewak discusses problems and design considerations which arise when dealing with multiple data that must work together in the same function- which is to say most functions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVXt1RG_yN0
FWIW, anecdotally, HNNotify doesn't appear to work all that well on topics older than a few days... or maybe it's just me. I've noticed that I definitely miss comments, and the trend there tends to be when the discussion has cooled somewhat. I always get discussion notifications for topics that are still on the home page.
Do you have any examples? This thread (and some other recent activity) notwithstanding, I'm not really active on HN anymore.
> So since this is HN... is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with? Or is this solely in the realm of public policy?

Scale it down? Seems pretty obvious to me. If you can make it happen in one city, you have a foothold.
I'm not fond of the idea, but at the same time, playing the victim like you are here doesn't exactly do much for comment quality.
> Here's a simple solution to this whole moderation hammer: add a downvote for poor comments (ala Reddit).

There are down-votes. You just don't get the ability to down-vote until > ~500 karma (it may be a bit higher now).
It appears to be a page of stories with new users.

Possibly intended as a quasi-response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761 ?
Cocaine can't advertise on tv? And bowling is less colorful.
People like you scare me. I can't even understand that point of view, and I don't think we can have a productive argument if we don't share a basic understanding of what a society is. Saying that taxes are theft is as absurd to me as saying that private property is imoral.
Wow, just scanned your comment history. You really have boner about slagging on Firefox. What is your story? Every browser has good points and bad points, but for some reason you myopically focus on the shortcomings, real or perceived, of firefox.

I understand fanboy mentality of being invested in something and over promoting it, but I don't understand where you are coming from. Care to elaborate?
I completely agree, I personally want to see everyone's comments not just the ones that have been curated by the chosen.
Startup ideas for developing countries
Is cheap private insurance illegal now? Is that why my premiums are so outrageous? </sarcasm>

Insurance is not like a car: there are no luxury and budget brands. Either you can afford premiums + costs not covered or you cannot. Not going to the doctor is not an option: the physiology of a poor person is the same as that of a rich person. The treatment therefore is the same. Thus what you are proposing is basically legalizing leaving the poor behind. That was in fact how things used to work up until roughly 35-40 years ago. We then decided that it was a bad idea because the quality of care for those who had the "budget" care was so terrible that we would all be willing to pay more and not risk ending up in their shoes.

Look, I don't disagree with everything you are saying. We need to reign in spending, streamline the government, reduce the size of the military, fund more social programs and education. I do disagree with the tiered approach. Healthcare is a basic human necessity. Lots of first world governments provide it and do it better and cheap than the "free market" in the US. One day people will realize this and we will have sane care for sane prices. Until then we need the hybrid approach like the Affordable Care Act, Medicare/Medicaid, and private insurance.
Lazy hobbyist at best here, so I'm sure this can be picked apart, prodded, even laughed at. Not OO, not pretty, just something I did one afternoon and kind of wanted to post somewhere.
The thing about losing your ability to endorse supports your claim. Even endorsers that are not holding to the right echo chamber can be worked out of the system. So it does seem "self-regulating" in that sense.
A $4k billable week is incredibly cheap, so much so that I'd worry about the team delivering it. Our rates are high because big firms bid them up. Why are the cheap teams turning down free money?

If someone offers you a $4k week, make sure they know they're cutting you a deal.
Unless PHP has truly awful string concatenation performance, your microbenchmark will spend almost all of its time generating pseudorandom numbers, and a tiny fraction of its time moving bytes around to concatenate strings.
People who regularly endorse comments that fail one or both of these tests will lose the ability to endorse comments.

Punishing people for endorsing comments that don't meet an arbitrary and vague content standard will inhibit endorsements. Endorsements are necessary for comments to show up. Seemingly weird comments that are brilliant only after reflection will not get endorsed. Hacker News will trend towards mediocrity. Another site killed by excessive moderation...

I run with dead comments showing. I hardly use my ability to down vote comments, but I rarely see a dead comment that didn't deserve it. There's a consensus on what should die here and I see no need to add more moderation.
It's not a summary; it's a feature of HN itself. It's at /noobstories.
This is why I think the anonymous idea above is a good add-on, if we have to have this system.
The posting delay sounds like a terrible idea. Say I spend some time writing a very long comment to a not so popular thread and hit submit. Then I notice that someone replied to another comment of mine and had a question or something. I can't reply to him in a timely matter since I used my one comment already. So do I need to go and delete my newest comment, reply to the person who responded to me, then go back and re-comment the one I initially did? This sounds very silly.
The readership and contributions here are very tame, I think this change is unnecessary. Whats wrong with some debate involving contrarian opinion with a little fire in their bellies? We can cope, we don't need to be saved from one-another.

It will end in a bunch of people all agreeing with each other in one massive group think.

At the very least that would be unhelpful when people are seeking varied opinions on their work.

Bonkers really. Hey ho.

HN becomes news aggregator only.
Considering Patrick's tendency for amassing huge amounts of karma (not a dis), even on older threads, I'd be surprised if that poses any issue whatsoever.
"Will they prosecute people who hurt others, or preside over those trials to make sure everyone's rights are protected?"

We don't even do that now, with people. Might as well try robots.
Just to be clear: any firm charging appsec rates should not be an automated-tool shop. I know there are some firms like that, but we banned scanners altogether the first year we were in business. I used to think we were cool for doing that, but really among the high-end firms that's table stakes.
AI Company Vicarious Gets High Profile Funding Boost
> ...is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with? Or is this solely in the realm of public policy?

I don't know, but technology like http://ethereum.org may make it possible to move some things from the realm of states into software. For example, given data feeds of births/deaths/retirements, it might be possible to implement a software contract for voluntary social security that pays contributing participants an annuity from retirement until death.
And that is where this solution falls down. You are relying on a subset of people to ignore their human nature and endorse things they do not agree with.

Whilst I'll admit they maybe some who will do this, I believe the majority will just follow their instincts. This sort of behaviour can be seen in any internet forum.

Inevitably new posters are required to write posts they think will be endorsed in order to achieve the karma threshold needed to use the site properly
Do one or two tutorials, then jump straight into a moderately-sized project. Google profusely but also don't be afraid of hitting the language's manual.

Perhaps most important is to not settle for code that you know is not ideal. If you recognize that a piece of code you've written isn't good, then improve it. If it's still not idea, improve it again. Keep iterating on it. This will necessarily involve focused learning. In fact I think this is the key to picking up a language quickly. But it does require that you not be mentally lazy.
Whether or not that's true, that doesn't actually respond to the part you're quoting.

Unless you're arguing that an empirically ethical society is not possible?
Wal-Mart's new tool gives competitors prices
HN could use an /r/HailCorporate.
In the mystical future world where a GBI has been implemented charity still exists, and much of the capital once dedicated to assisting those in poverty-absent-illness can now be directed to those who need help in addition to the GBI.
It is pretty good you have lots of brands already in your database, however the comparison UI is not much helpful. e.g. an end-user of bikes might not understand what 105, Tiagra, Ultrega means and just showing specs is not enough IMO. How about you also compare components one by one in rows of a table for each bike and then greens/reds tell us which one is better?
I use HN regularly and post comments once in a while. I have asked a few questions which never reached the front page but have 1-2 answers which helped me immensely. The posts have 1-2 upvotes only. But it still works for me. Now with this pending review feature, those comment will never show rendering it useless for a small time guy like me.
I agree that diet and other environmental factors definitely contribute to appearance. For example, even though many Americans are largely European stock, there are certain developmental tendencies in some areas that I feel like it's possible to, with a better than chance guess and based on a little observation, tell if somebody is American or European - it can be something in the food, or differences in popular sports, or social body language, but all leading to developmental differences.

Of course I'm generalizing a bit, but I'm almost as good as my native South Korean wife at guessing where a person from East Asia is from. It's a combination of factors, height, facial features, but often as not it's fashion (which includes hair, eyebrows, facial hair, glasses style) etc.

An interesting test is found here http://alllooksame.com/

I can guess it pretty above average.

But it's a pretty big jump from guessing what stock a person is from to predicting what they look like based on their stock.

The problem with the examples in the article of course is that the example really looks very little like the actual woman. In fact, it's a pretty terrible likeness, especially in the eyes. About the only part that's debatable is the nose. I wouldn't rely on it for a police sketch.

Another challenge will be in populations with large groups of "mixed" children. Americans are a reasonable example, even though we're largely Europeans at this point in history, that's changing quickly, and even in the Caucasian population, there are very few who don't have ancestors from all over the place. What about my children? Will they have red hair or dark hair, epicanthic folds or not? Will they be barrel chested like my father's side, or have a physique more like my wife's? Even dominant genes can be suppressed in the right hormonal and developmental environment.

This sounds very sci-fi, but it's as long away off as those novelty "what will your children look like" facial morphers that were so popular in the 90s.
I'm just wondering if there's maybe an atypical gap between the time Patrick tends to post comments and the time those comments tend to soak up their comment, so that the endorsement delay could be an issue.
PG, instead of adding an endorse button, why not just use the upvote button and display the pending comment after it's been upvoted by a few 1000+ karma users?

Do you want the standards for endorsement to be different than the standards for upvotes?
If you want to improve comments, you need to have less carrot-and-stick (that will drive comments into parroting types) and more specific criticisms, or offer the possibility of re-writes. Children, no matter what age they are, do not learn faster by being slapped on their fingers but guided; I believe that kind of mentoring is the exact reason why YCombinator improves naked capitalism.

I had enough of my comments voted down for “not respecting community standards” because a handful of people can’t imagine my questions are not rhetorical. If they had to re-phrase them, they would have realised negativity was only in their knee-jerk.
A bad new user experience is just plain bad. I've been on at least one forum where they did this for the first N comments and my experience was basically that you are taken out of the conversation. Yes, your comments eventually get approved, but 15, 60, or 600 minutes later. By that time the people who can speak freely have already moved on and whatever you had to say is no longer relevant.
From an evolutionary standpoint, I disagree with your first statement. Work involves using energy. When an animal does not need food, it is often better served by not working so as to conserve its energy.
You have heard of communism, right?
Sure, but far from a majority.
This was all the code it took:

(newsop pending () (pending-page user))

(newscache pending-page user 60
(listpage user (msec) comments* [if (and (cansee user _) _!pending) _]
"pending" "Pending Comments" "pending" nil))

In this project I've really benefited from having kept the code tight.
That would only seem workable if the donors could offset the amount of donation from their tax liabilities. Also, most BI discussions I've seen are about how to replace the existing benefits delivery infrastructure with BI, and not as an additional entitlement.
They won't need webp in their codebase 5 years from now when everybody is using h.265 (much better than webp) except a couple old sites.

Browsers can add anything they want at any time, but they can't remove things without breaking part of the internet. If you just throw in anything that is marginally better then you just accumulate cruft.

Google's attitude is, if it's 1% better then do it. Do any marginal improvement regardless of how much complication it adds. But sometimes you need the wisdom to say this 1% isn't worth it in the long run.
Macro-economic policies are not accurately represented at a small scale.
Love it! Got the whole office involved in our game.
You should what out for that with any cloud service.
um ... ok. But the thing is I don't think this necessary so I would like some way for the echo chamber to not hold. Obviously, the ideal would be to not have the restriction. :)
What you get a reaction to is not sexism is bad. It is that sexism in favour of women is bad. You're not allowed to say that.
Implementation of Service Locator design pattern for Objective C.
Bill Hicks said it best, so I'll leave it to him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo