skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Based on my experiences w/ MongoDB:

* If you have a read-heavy workload, it should perform pretty well

* While it lacks transactions, MongoDB supports some fairly powerful atomic operations which make it fairly flexible

* It's all fun and games until you start sharding, which adds a huge amount of complexity and administrative troubles; a few gotchas I ran into: mongoc lists in mongos configs are order sensitive, if they're out of order, your cluster will fail after some indeterminate amount of time and you'll have to step down the primary to fix it, if a mongoc instance goes down, mongos will keep querying it, indefinitely. So every query will get the added latency of that timeout. The proposed workaround from the MongoDB folks was to use a script to firewall off the offending mongoc (what?).

* Rebalancing is a clusterfuck. You can either wait for every write to propagate to your slaves (could literally take weeks), orrrr... disable this "throttle" and get balls-to-the-wall rebalancing which, in my case, pushed the write lock to the point if was dramatically effecting application performance. You basically have to write your own script to deal with this correctly. Rebalancing requires careful planning.

* There's still only only db level locking, so you'll need a db per-collection in many cases, which means you'll need a connection pool per db (and even a mongos instance per db), which can add up to a LOT of connections (thousands)

* 16MB limit for aggregation framework! Because the result of EACH STAGE of aggregation is stored in a document, NO PART of your pipeline can exceed 16MB! This is a huge and very frustrating limitation (though I understand this will be addressed in 2.6). Map/reduce is an option, but far from ideal

What I like:
Very flexible, easy to configure (save sharding), great for prototyping!

Aggregation framework! Building queries as a data pipeline is very cool.

What I don't like:
Does not handle write load well (having had to scale writes in production, even w/ SSDs and sharding), but I can see a read-heavy unsharded application working splendidly. Compression seems poor, but I have no hard numbers to back this up.

But keep in mind, mongo is still improving. I would say its still beta-quality (but not marketed as such! tsk tsk!), but 2.6 is literally right around the corner (they're on RC1 now IIRC)
This may be a stupid question but exactly where is the delete link? I see deleted comments, but I don't see a delete link or even a downvote button when comments are downvoted. Is there a karma threshold for these?
"have to adhere to certain standards"

Google already deliberately violates[0] the RFPs defining the expected behavior of their SMTP server by rewriting your headers when they want to. If they feel entitled to change your outgoing email messages, the other stuff shouldn't be too surprising.

[0]http://lee-phillips.org/gmailRewriting/
> the country doesn't work like it did in the 50s.

No, in the 50s (in the US) basically every working age man who survived fighting in the war had been given the opportunity to get a free education and probably even a discount mortgage[1] on a house while the government was building what might have been the biggest and most extensive road system[2] since the roman empire.

And then was born one of the most productive eras in American history. Funny that.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GI_Bill

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
and yet "octopi" is the most euphonious of the three, and deserves to win for that alone if nothing else.
We're what is called a 'Web-Based Entity'. This means we have been given the right to integrate with hc.gov on the backend.
I agree! My reply would never be endorsed either!
Unless you have a really good crystal ball.
Let assume that these kinds of investments actually lead to something: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/03/21/zuckerberg-musk-inves...

Maybe not immediately, but 10, 20, 50 years? Good luck.
I am also going to add my two cents and say that I think this is not a good idea. HN has in no way reached Eternal September, and if it has, then this isn't the way to fix it.

I think it would make much more sense to add moderators (if there already aren't any, I'm not sure). A dozen or so moderators could definitely mitigate any threat that post quality is going down. There are only a dozen new posts per hour, they could definitely handle it.
If someone stole from me, and I knew how to find the thief, regardless, of the legality of the methods, I'd probably do it.
Math says you'd be willing to sell a 50% stake for $10M. Sad to think that compared to the "billion $" headlines.
> Well, someone needs a job for the system to work, since it's presumably funded by taxation.

Someone needs income that is taxed. That doesn't require a job, though in the short term (e.g., until we've reached a very advanced level of automation where most market income goes to capitalists who own completely automated firms), yes, it relies on lots of people still working -- its a replacement for poverty support programs which removes the disincentive for work that many of those contain in the eligibility criteria, and the administrative overhead that enforcing eligibility rules creates, not a replacement for work.

Most people, even if they aren't starving in the street, are willing to work more to get more. That certainly tails off at some level of combined work and income (as work has an increasing marginal cost and income a decreasing marginal value), but for the vast majority of the population, that's far above the level BI could conceivably be set at without vast technological progress.
Yeah, me too.

There really needs to be an entirely new kind of discussion forum, something that merges the various strengths of phpBB, IRC, newsgroups, and reddit. I have some ideas on that, but sadly not the time to code it. I hope someone beats me to it.
This is a very important consideration.
I won! http://i.imgur.com/VOXJaOo.png

My strategy was to give the AI a single 2 at the beginning, then only 4s. When the board fills up enough, there will probably be a space where you can put a second 2 to make it lose before it can combine them.
PG please take HN with you when you step down
This community suffers from content marketers. Penalizing all new comments misses a likely cause of bad discussion - bad content, like the content that is written for HN and then shilled to the front page of HN every day in growing numbers.

Many of the companies doing it are YC. There is an obvious ethical dilemma there so please consider separating HN from YC by taking it with you preferably before the entire front page becomes one continual advertising campaign.

Examples right now include:

- "Look we made a version of 2048 too" by instapainting

- "Hacking Hack on Heroku" by Heroku

- "NoSql, Erlang and Technologies effect on culture" by NoSQL vendor

Nobody gets smarter discussing advertisements every day except the marketing shills writing and submitting them.
This is similar to most basic income or negative income tax proposals. Most finance themselves through progressive income taxes, generally scaled so that those of average income see their taxes increase the same amount as what they receive from BI.
I think this is an interesting solution to a common problem. The problem isn't poor comments, it's how to deal with a community site when it's in the post-early adopter phase. In the past, when sites like this hit a certain maturity level, you have a few problems: people complain about all the new users and the loss of character. It's all part of what happens when network effects take hold and your site has an increasing number of users. Once you've hit a certain inflection point, each site evolves whether they want it to or not...

I think Slashdot ignored it and lost a lot of relevance to Digg. Digg tried to pivot to be more marketable and drove people to Reddit. Reddit hit that point and decided to fracture into lots of sub-reddits (which I think was the most successful way to evolve so far). [1]

The pg/HN approach is basically to leave it to the users who've been around longest to cultivate the community. It's a lot of trust to put into those 1K+ users, but probably not overly so. It remains to be seen if this can be a successful way to keep HN relevant to more than just the YC-set, but we'll just have to wait and see. Hopefully this works out better than Slashdot meta-moderation (which was just odd).

[1] This is my take on the histories of these sites... they all went through the growth, plateau, and loss phases to some extent. I'm sure others can tell me if earlier communities had the same patterns.
So I have absolutely no idea how this works, but I've seen it around a lot.

So I assume that you can enter once, how many unique entries would there need to be to actually get a combination that would win?
IIRC, it's written in Arc

http://arclanguage.org
Most could come from the money diverted from existing anti-poverty programs. The rest could be made up by the increased taxes collected on the jump in spending by those receiving the BI. (Those at or below the poverty line spend more then 100% of every dollar they receive.)
A car is necessary in some parts of the country. Good luck walking 10 miles to work in the subzero cold. A cell is not exactly necessary, but some form of communication is. A cell happens to be the most convenient. Cell phones and the current infrastructure can mostly eliminate the need for an internet line. Restaurants are, of course, not necessary.
It's crazy that a Gold PPO plan would charge me $800/month with a $12,000 out of pocket max. $22,000 a year for health care!
pg - I am going to reply to this (even though I fear it might cause me to never be able to post another live comment again)

It seems to me that your aim is to trying to protect the people reading the comments, but this will only protect the people whose Karma is less than 1000! That is to say, it actually protects the people who use the site the least, and in response to what, those people "diluting" the site? Presumably the others who have 1000 Karma earned it by making enough good posts and comments. So you are protecting the wrong group!

Reddit allows people to see highly nested comments by explicitly clicking a link. Here you would be completely hiding them from anyone except the HN "regulars". It seems this will only decrease value for those people. Why not give them the OPTION to see those comments by clicking a link to expand, like on Reddit?

And what if I delete a pending comment after a couple days, does it reset this status - which is like a hellban but only with regard to visibility to lower-karma users? Also what happens to replies to a pending comment?

Requiring too many people to vote and participate in site governance (and given the number of comments, this will require a lot of HNers with high karma to keep being active) often doesn't work. Consider when facebook asked its members to vote - it didn't receive enough "turnout":

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-site-governance/resu...

Thus until you get this system to a point where it's good enough, I strongly suggest you give everyone the OPTION of seeing "pending" comments. Or at the very least, make the pending comments grayed out so that high-karma HNers would be psychologically conditioned to click on them to endorse them (and subsequently click again to un-endorse them).
Well, hopefully new users can hit the 1000+ mark quick enough to not have it affect them too much.

But, I wonder how the lack of visible scores on comments has affected the overall comment scoring rate. For the average new user today, how long do they have to wait to get to 1000 karma? How long was it a few years ago? These would be interesting questions to answer.
If you are using IMAP, it keeps the status of the message synced with the server.
You don't have to provide an email address.

It's actually designed to challenge various racial stereotypes among East Asian populations.
It's unusual how intolerant of experimentation entrepreneurs can be.

This may or may not work. PG even acknowledges that it's likely to go wrong initially. Implicit in that is that they will work on fixing it until it's working better than the current system. In the end, it's guaranteed to either completely fail as an experiment (they'd probably roll it all back) or yield something working better. Yet there's so much angst about the changes here.

It's not always irrational to get concerned about changes. For example, laws are typically written and then there are substantial barriers to revisiting them. In the case of a website, though, why worry? If this isn't working better, it's extremely unlikely that YC would leave it in that state.
If these four teams are equally competent. Then you have 50% chance to choose each of three correct (2 final four games + 1 title games correctly). So the chance to win it all is (1/2)^3 = 0.125. Your expected return is $1B * 55% * 0.125 = $68.75M.

Or if you prefer a single payout, $300M * 0.125 = $37.5M. So considering inflation for $68.75M is over 40 years, maybe your expected return is between 37.5M to 50M (idk about 50M, I made it up)? Of course the reality is how much you would sell it very much depend on your conviction of how likely your guesses on final 3 games may be correct.
As a long-time lurker but new user, I see little reason to ever even attempt to participate on a forum with moderation rules like this.
This may be speculation but I'm guessing many others would make the same cost/benefit analysis.
Victory at 1124 puppies eaten! Highest tile is 128.
> Additionally, as well as 100% Inheritance tax with exceptions for personal items

A more plausible (less confiscatory, but recognizing that inheritance is income and that untaxed inheritances fail to reflect this) alternative would probably be taxing inheritances as income to the recipient and allowing them to be split over a set period of years (say, 5-10) for tax purposes.
I would endorse it, because I think you're mostly right, but then i'm probably part of the problem and not the solution. Even if I disagreed with you I would endorse you because I think a too-well tended garden all too quickly becomes a tomb.
It's hard to tell how much friction HN needs. Some more, probably. A lot more? I'm guessing not. A little moderation goes a long way.

Metrics for comment approval might include opening up a thread complete, or for folks with a karma threshold, or who have made posts in the past without being downvoted much. (The _Making Light_ site has some interesting ideas here).

You might include who voted on an article, and how. If someone's gonna moderate, they may as well be listed as having moderated (so they can get the credit or blame). Meta-moderation might be one of the things that killed Slashdot, though.
I'm still clueless as to why the lowest cost plans are twice the premium I'm paying today, on top of having higher deductibles. You'd figure that (a) it's so much cheaper because of some policy change and should have been cancelled, or (b) it's so much cheaper that they should have cancelled it to force me to pay twice as much.

* 29, non-smoker, Pennsylvania

* PPO through Aetna

* $3000 annual deductible / max out-of-pocket

* 0% coinsurance, no annual coverage limit

* $90 per month premium, up from $85 when I first signed up, yet I got a rebate check back last year for part of it

Essentially the same plan from the same insurer, but with a $6350 deductible instead of $3000, is now ~$200/month if I were to sign up today.
Gmail Encrypts Emails to be Safe Against NSA
From a "get people to play with numbers" perspective, this was actually a pretty cool challenge on Warren Buffet's part. Most people are going to spray-and-pray (my facebook feed is full of facetious "shit, there goes my billion dollars") but I would be surprised if there weren't a large number of people who put more effort than they otherwise would have into trying to figure out statistical models for who wins basketball games.
It's written in Arc.

Regarding the square bracket syntax:

[... _ ...] is an abbreviation for (fn (_) (... _ ...))

http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_%28programming_language%29
I don't comment often. I came here following the dice purchase of slashdot, and found a quality tech oriented site without too much crap.

At the rate I (slowly) accumulate the imaginary internet points here, it will be the better part of a decade before I end up with the ability to "endorse" any other comments. I don't really care about that, except you're locking out those of us that don't have a following here, or name recognition. We, collectively, have seen how "voting" works -- here and elsewhere -- after a very short time, people just upvote based on who the person is, not the comment. Endorsements will work the same way.

Being limited to only one "pending" comment at a time, and the very high probability that I'll see significant delays between being able to comment, pretty much guarantees that I'll leave and find my tech news elsewhere.

Perhaps that's fine with you. But it's a shame to ruin a community to solve a problem that, quite frankly, doesn't exist.
It's seems like this would severally tip the balance towards people getting karma via story submissions and not comments.

It also seems like it will kill questions and dissenting opinion. I cannot help but feel endorsements will be few and fit in group beliefs.
I agree with you, but he is hardly unknown. (Not sure if that was sarcastic?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett
Microsoft Selling User Data to FBI, Syrian Electronic Army Released Invoices
Wow
All of those plans.
Even after you pay monthly, you're still charged $30+ copay for every visit.

It's sad to see that healthcare is being played with by businesses.
It's not in the article but my guess would be that none of Warren Buffet's money was ever actually on the line. The last time Pepsi had a contest for $1 Billion, they bought insurance against someone meeting the conditions to win the prize. Who'd they buy that insurance from? Berkshire Hathaway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Billion_Dollar_Sweepstake...
+misery = +violence
-misery = -violence
+people participating in the economy = +business, +salaries
better society = better society for everyone

You still can't seem to think outside your box it seems.

Misery breeds violence, there's no "or else", there's no "they", it's reality, I could resort to violence to survive and so could you.
>However the creators of XP are not supporting it.
How long should they be supporting an OS? You can't expect them to support it forever. No one complains that older phones aren't supported anymore, any is the case for XP so special?
If you assume knowledge about basketball is useful, billions:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/we-have-a-1-in-6001225228...

It goes way up from there if you treat it like coin flips.
I hate this game for some reason, whereas I really liked 2048. Not sure why.
A liquid wealth tax. The actually wealthy have many vehicles for hedging against inflation, from owning durable property, to complex financial instruments.
I suggest another option: wait to see what it's like.
Surely allowing two comments to be pending (and posted) rather than one, isn't a big deal? I do wonder if this can scale, though. I usually open up the top 10-15 interesting (to me) stories, along with a list of my old threads, whenever I take the time to check hn. I then reply to old threads (if that seems to make sense), and post the occasional comment across the stories that I find interesting.

Do we really believe positive moderation will be in the range of a few seconds to a minute?

I know there's been really great experiences[1] with negative moderation/flagging -- but then all users could flag, not just a subset -- and flagging something that's clearly wrong (as in goatsex wrong) is much less effort and much higher incentive than approving a somewhat contributing comment to a story.

Which brings us to what the goal of a comment policy should be. Should we really work towards discouraging people to post things like github-links to stories missing them, because sometimes they'll be beat to the punch by someone else, and now have to wait before contributing to the discussion on a different post?

Perhaps allowing "one pending post per story" might work better?

[1] I'm not sure which talk this was from, but I think it was "building web reputation systems" with an example from Yahoo that touched on flagging (users flagged in sub-second time, much better than automated spam detection). Not sure if this is the same thing(s), but they seem relevant to this discussion:

Randy Farmer (I think this is what I remember)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn7e0J9m6rE

Bryce Glass (similar topic/similar takeaways)
http://www.slideshare.net/soldierant/designing-your-reputati...
> I'm opposed to rewarding those who sit around and do nothing period, including the current system.

So what's wrong with a system that still rewards laziness (because it can't be stopped no matter what system is in place) but benefits the country a lot more?

> All I'm hearing is excuses.

Excuses from someone who's started a number of companies (successful and failed), been through acquisitions, all without going to college. And it has been hard. And I would have really appreciated a GBI =]. If your society requires people to work 16 hours a day to provide for themselves, your society is broken.

> That's a straw man argument there.

No, it's not. Overused term, especially on this forum, doesn't apply here. People do live in indentured servitude to their student loans as an alternative to working full-time in college. It's a detriment to society.

> Bored people creating? Then why aren't they doing that now instead of watching reality tv?

I know a lot of creative people who actively work to make art in various forms who get jack shit in return. They don't watch a lot of reality TV either. You seem really out of touch with a lot of the general population.

> The free market definitely approves of art. What are you talking about?

Once again, I feel you're out of touch. How many artists do you know? Painters? Musicians? Performers? Most of them (if not all) have side jobs to allow them to do their art (while still living in poverty). The free market accepts art in a pop-culture sense, but people who are pushing the boundaries in art are usually lacking in capital. Not because what they're doing is wrong or useless, but because the general population doesn't approve. Which is a big part of art in the first place.
I find this very ironic given this:
http://paulgraham.com/say.html
I'd argue that your chance of winning the bracket (or, at least, a valuation of it) is much higher than that given your ability to predict all of the matches prior.

(I don't think this would qualify as gambler's fallacy, though I'm welcome to counterarguments.)
sigh

If you have information you want to keep private or secure, it's your responsibility to ensure that it private or secure. This means understanding the agreements you make when you store said data in certain locations.

> I don't think, that many companies are aware of this.

No, many companies are in fact aware of this. This is the reason there providers that do provide increased security and oversight as far as data access goes. Apple, Google, and Microsoft just happen to provide free email services that aren't that secure if you violate their T&C.

> than cloud storage and any online service of vital documents is just impossible in the US.

Yeah, if you think using a cloud service outside the US immediately makes you immune to these problems, you are the one who isn't aware of the situation.