skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This might be true in the US, where both political parties are right-wing and flaunt "socialist" as a curse-word every day.

I think BI is something that cant and shouldnt happen country-wide one day to the other. Cities should start doing it first. Cities like.. SF? which have a ridicolous surplus of money the city squanders, while still having a lower class without medical care.
This seems like a rather hostile change to an already hostile community. HN has never felt like a welcoming place to me, and I don't think this will help. Maybe PG prefers the community to be small, so he's trying to trim it down? Because I'm fairly certain this will drive users away, and not just the ones he wants to keep out.

Please noble 1000+ers, free my humble comment from the depths of the low-karma peasants. For I have but 522 karma, thus I deserve to be spat on and excluded from the flawless utopia which is the HN comments section...
What about reserving the pending system for stories on the front page where you typically get the bulk of low-quality comments? A user commenting on a 2-day-old front-paged thread is either contributing meaningfully or feeding a flamewar, so by automatically endorsing all comments on stories that have fallen off the front page, you allow the former to continue a meaningful discussion unhindered and you give the latter no incentive to continue a meaningless argument (no one is seeing it).

Also, from what I've noticed, the Ask HN posts tend to receive comments of higher quality since the questions/submissions there aren't as sensationalist or polarizing, yet that particular section of the site receives only a fraction of the attention that the front page gets, so implementing the pending system there might unnecessarily stifle discourse.
Why do you hope the leave completely? What's next? :(
This system of empowering community members to endorse comments from newer users has worked really well on Gawker!

<< The editors are the only ones who can give you a star, and we'll be giving them out to the commenters we trust the most. ... [Y]our comments will automatically appear in the featured comments, and you will have the ability to promote non-star comments up to the top level. In fact, just replying to a comment will bump up to the front page. You'll also see all of the unapproved comments left by new users and can approve the ones that you think are up to snuff. But use your powers wisely. We're going to be taking a closer look at who's doing what. Use your star powers to make mischief, and we'll take them away. >>

http://gawker.com/5311027/gawker-comments-are-made-of-stars
This is an issue with the concept of basic income. Likely the most equitable solution would be for government to step in and provide housing directly or limit rents in some areas.

The federal basic income level would likely be based off of a national averages for cost of living, with state/city governments stepping in to provide greater subsidies if they feel it's needed. People may still need to pay more for convenience, but should have other options available, even if it means moving an hour or two away from the trendy metro areas.
It's not that hard to get to 1000+ slowly. All you have to do is hang around for years and make the occasional decent comment. If anything this is biased towards old timers.
When talking about public policy, it's important to get away from words like "some" and talk about actual statistics, because this will impact real people, not just a philosophical position.

If some is 10% of the population, and poverty is resolved for 90% of the population, the system would be much much better than the current system for eliminating poverty.

In Canada, we have actual statistics for both Old Age Security and the Mincome experiment.

Statistics on OAS (includes stats on the US). http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/society/elderly-po...

And quoting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

"Dr. Evelyn Forget conducted an analysis of the program in 2009 which was published in 2011. She found that only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies, and teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families, which resulted in more teenagers graduating. In addition, those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did. Forget found that in the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 percent, with fewer incidences of work-related injuries, and fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic abuse. Additionally, the period saw a reduction in rates of psychiatric hospitalization, and in the number of mental illness-related consultations with health professionals."
There probably enough people with 1000+ karma to reduce potential groupthink. You just need three people to say "this comment doesn't inspire rage", not necessarily as far as "I really like this comment". That's still the upvote's role.

0-3 upvote hiding would massively inflate karma, as you'd have a minimum of 3 karma for every "acceptable" comment. Not to say it couldn't work, as the karma source is then at least slightly filtered, but it would change the fact you can post a ton of average but not inappropriate comments and maintain close to zero karma.
You only need one person that sees some kind of value in your comment to endorse it, even if they disagree with it.

There are a lot of users with > 1000 points.

edit: not one, a few.
Haven't they done you a favor by you finding out up front? This is what transparency is good for.
There are three major advantages of unconditional basic income.

1) It will always be beneficial to work. I.e. even for a couple of hours.

2) Society wont have to waste money controlling whether someone should have the money or not. The frees millions of people and billions of not trillions of control.

3) It removes most argument around inequality and it makes sure there always is customers.
No, Mantle is for lower end CPUs. It's all about reducing the CPU bottleneck to feeding a graphics card effectively.

Which, incidentally, is the reason why the initiative came from AMD (also the strong emphasis on multithreading, since AMD sells cheap 8 core CPUs). If you can all of a sudden game on a weak CPU, then Intel chips will look less attractive in comparison.

Where you're seeing small improvement with higher end cards is that they're pumping the resolution, AA etc, with the same number of draw calls. If you instead ramp the draw calls up - for example by putting a ton more objects in your scene - you'll be able to get much more out of high end cards.

Mantle isn't going to help at all in the move to 4k, but it really will allow for much more complex games on the PC, akin to when Total War was released.

I'd also not take the launch titles as a good indication of what the hardware of these consoles is capable of. They're usually rushed, ported from other platforms, etc. The hardware is capable of much more.

This is a good demo that goes into lots of detail:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIWyf8Hyjbg
Although pg touches on the question of truth in the social sciences, I think he accidentally touches on the answer but then misses it. Precisely because society is so fluid, the question of what is "true" not only does not have a clear answer, but the "truth" itself carries little value. Things might be true today but not tomorrow not only due to changing fashions, but they might be objectively true only because of circumstances that are in our control. Suppose Asians really are smarter than Caucasians. Not only is this "truth" unhelpful, it is also, possibly, fluid.

The reason why people often choose to condemn those who speak an unpopular truth is because the truth is a powerful and dangerous weapon, often used to fight progress. This is what is known as the naturalistic fallacy, or the is-ought fallacy: the fact that something is true does not mean that it is good, or that it cannot change if we try hard enough. A "lie" might be more valuable than the "truth", because a lie might be a bright hope for the future, while the truth is simply the status quo.

For some reason, even people that are usually curious and generally skeptical, sometimes stop questioning society when they find data demonstrating that some notion is "true". They don't take the extra step to ask why is it true, and can we change it? Or, should we change it?

That is why the "truth" in the social sciences might be a dangerous thing, because if people come to assign the same meaning to a true finding in physics or in anthropology, we have a problem. While we cannot change the laws of physics, we can certainly change the social order. And we have.

I don't think, then, that "truth" is all that important when it comes to ideology. What's important is picking values that you feel comfortable believing, and staying true to them.
Clearly we need to make some. There was that cardboard bike guy?... But I think that flopped. The future is yours!
I think in that case you would be justified in telling the irresponsible person tough luck and maybe they would spend it more wisely the next time around. If they die of starvation that's their problem. I have a hard time believing that would be a wide spread problem though.
> As I understand the idea, endorsing a comment doesn't mean you agree with it.

Yeah, that's exactly how it will be used.

Sarcasm aside, the word "endorse" has a very specific definition which basically guarantees how this system will be used, intentions or not. I think about every single grayed-out comment I've seen, downvoted simply because it shared an opinion that made people feel uncomfortable but was nonetheless on-point, and now realize that we'll never even see those comments.

Real bummer for those inheriting HN to get it after this bad decision has been made. Will probably represent the end of useful dissent on HN.
The only means by which corruption can fought and reduced all involve bureaucracy by definition.
Some thoughts:

1) It would be fun to try this on only a subset of articles posted, so we could get real A/B testing on how well it works. The same issues get posted under multiple submissions, so we could see if the quantity and quality of comments is improved by pending, independent of the topics.

2) "showpending" to allow <1000 karma people to view the pending comments, much like "showdead" today.

3) These's now a huge incentive to farm a few 1001 karma point alt accounts. You can do that with a few submissions.
To be fair other web forums have that capability.
I wish people would engage my argument instead of punishing it silently with a down vote...
It sounds to me like an excuse to drastically slow down discussion under the guise of improving the community. Imagine this scenario, which feels plausible to me: "good" discussions on HN don't offer much value to HN stakeholders, but "bad" ones (whether regarding employment discrimination, or bad press for YC companies, etc.) pose a credible threat to HN stakeholders. Then, anything that simply dampers discussions, even if it does so at a constant rate across all types of discussions and comments, if good for HN stakeholders. Shutting HN down altogether would do the same, but might itself result in bad press throughout the community.
What I was doing before: writing essays and software.
It doesn't change that fact that this is censorship. If it wasn't any comment would have a chance to be shown. If the comment is bad it can be flagged or voted down, but still anyone can see it.
This is a very striking article, and I feel it gave me some important things to consider when it comes to medical decisions like this. While I'm still (very) young, and hopefully won't have to deal with this sort of thing for many years, I hope that when I am in the position of choosing to prolong an uncomfortable life, or dying with a little more dignity, I will be brave enough to choose the cheaper and potentially less painful option for all involved.
Is it possible to unendorse a comment?
I find the argument pretty compelling. If Netflix usage requires more internet pipes to be upgraded, then it seems logical that Netflix users should pay rather than internet users in general.

However, it all presumes that we can attribute increased demand to Netflix and Netflix alone. Suppose you have two services, A and B, which each require 10 ZB of ISP bandwidth. The ISP builds 20 ZB of capacity and the world is happy. Now a third service, C, comes along and requires 10 ZB more of bandwidth, requiring the ISP to upgrade its 20 ZB pipes to 30 ZB. Does it make sense for the ISP/society to charge service C for that network upgrade? C's only crime is arriving last. Otherwise, it is identical to A and B in terms of the load placed on the network. It seems you me you could just as plausibly blame sustained demand for B as much as new demand for C.

I'm conflicted.
It should be obvious whether such an answer sounds authoritative or not, and it sounds like a comment could still be downvoted once endorsed. So I don't think this is as big of a problem as users endorsing (or not endorsing) based on username.
If BI was disbursed bi-weekly, then "Spending everything" wouldn't be a catastrophic failure. It's not like you'd be sitting on a pot of gold. What if BI was disbursed daily, even? You would never amass enough money to "spend everything" on gambling on drugs...
I think I like this idea quite a bit. I don't know how many users there are with >1000 karma, but will they be motivated to keep endorsing everyone else's pending posts? Sometimes good discussions do happen on quieter threads, or way down the list that the 1000+ users might not see.

Well, I guess it really comes down to just how much (proper) endorsing ends up happening. One thing I like about HN is that it's open and fast to use. Having a pending mode on everyone's comments affects not only the troll-users, but many of the normal ones too who aren't abusing the system ><.
> If it's the latter, I'm worried that this might stifle the (admittedly rare) back-and-forth discussion between two experts, such as tptacek and cperciva

Why wouldn't they just endorse each other's comments and continue a meaningful dialog?
That's quite sad. Would they be better off with the entire sum in the long term, or would their problems simply escalate?
I think the term I more often see used for this role is "system architect" or "systems engineer."

To be more specific:

An architect "lives" in the development staff: they're aware of the internals of the application. Of the system, the architect specifies what must be true of the stack the application runs on--and this can be quite detailed--and might participate in bringing that stack up. But in the system's day-to-day life, the architect need only be aware of APIs for interacting with that stack (which they presumably specified needed to exist.)

An admin, meanwhile, "lives" in the ops staff: they're aware of the internals of the stack. Of the application, they are only given a set of APIs it expects to be made available to it; it's otherwise a black box.

The architect writes scripts, which run alongside the application, to maintain the application's presence on the system. The admin writes scripts, which run directly on the system, to maintain the system within the reference range specified by the architect.

Picture, for example, a de-novo implementation of Search at Google. The Search application has an architect, who specifies what sort of servers Search needs to do its job. The Search architect sends this information off to ops. Ops designates someone "the Search sysadmin", and that person constructs a server farm. They script the farm to correctly cluster tasks, maintain its own health, etc. and train operators in the management of that farm.

In my mind, it's really clear if you think of servers as running something like Docker containers to contain the application: everything outside the container is the sysadmin's job. Everything inside the container is the architect's job.
I had an MP personally mail me asking me to move my business there. In general, it doesn't seem as bad as the US for immigration (from outside EU; within EU it is trivial), but it's a bit bureaucratic and complex. As a funded startup, it's not a big deal.
Comments get from pending to live by being endorsed by multiple HN users with over 1000 karma.

By "multiple", does this literally mean 'by at least two', or by a fixed number that you may or may not want to divulge, or by some other more complicated factor? I think the answer to this will heavily impact the 'unpopular (but not bad) comment' concerns.
PG, Is 1000 Karma a major threshold? How many people does this mean? like 100 people, 10,000 people? Just curious about the sample size if you can reveal it.
Basic Income the only way to prevent the black market from taking over for many people.
In principle, this should work.
anecdotes != data
At least few 1000+karma users must endorse the comment for it to become visible.
Most presentations don't use pure go-fmt'd code, they usually do some vertical space compression to get the code to fit on the slides better. So technically you already have to do this anyways.
"Yes, the perp is some Puerto Rican guy of average Puerto Rican height"
It sounds like each comment requires multiple endoresements.
What about a redesign?, or a password reminder?, or all the basic features in website?
Seems great! I'm wondering what the incentive is for users to endorse comments, beyond improving HN's quality?

There is a malus for endorsing bad comments, shouldn't there be a built-in bonus for well-behaving endorsers, to compensate and make the system self-sufficient?
As I understand it, that's kind of the point.
can't respond to PG's comment directly for some reason. Any cool software ideas you'd like to briefly share?
Additionally, as well as 100% Inheritance tax with exceptions for personal items (inheritance is the biggest game breaker in a fair system), another very practical and fair idea would be no VAT/sales tax (disproportionately affects the poor) and vastly reduced business taxes; however
Progressive personal income taxation that works like the effects of relativity on the speed of light (no tiny group of bands that end at a middling percent and allow capital gains but rather a direct calculation from the income; the more non-charitably allocated income, the even higher the tax rate approaching 90+% in the stratospheric levels, encouraging investment in business, employment, public good projects etc, just like the old rich guys in the early 20th century building all those public libaries. All of these resources held in the public trust (as well as complete citizen ownership of natural resources and most land; nobody should have rights to important earth resources because their daddy had a piece of paper they got from their slave plantation) used for basic income & investment in automation as well as myriad other public good projects.
Please consider making pending comments anonymous. Let the comment stand on its own.

User names are shown next to comments now, but I find that my eye gravitates to the text of the comment. I used to think I had an "enemies list," that is I used to think that there were other participants here who I would reflexively never upvote, but in fact I have found that among all the user names I recognize, I have from time to time upvoted comments from all of those participants. (And, in general, to fight the rot here I try to upvote the good stuff at least as often as I downvote the bad stuff. Changing either the numerator or the denominator can change a signal:noise ratio.)

But if it's not too much technical trouble (I have no idea about that issue), sure, we could let pending comments live on the basis solely of their content, with their authorship being exposed when the comment itself is exposed after review. I could live with that, as a user who has enough karma to review under the new system.
Wait, who is blue and who is red?
Sounds like a system very slow to change,
nearly self-perpetuating,
like more of an echo chamber,
like stew without garlic or pepper,
like ignoring that a stream bed is
cold and uncomfortable, full of
mud and gravel, but also one of the
best places to look for gold.

Fundamentally the high karma people
pleased the masses at HN and/or
have been commenting at HN for a long time
and maybe have made the better comments
but still are in the middle
of the road. So, content that is new
and takes some effort and reflection,
is challenging to the status quo,
is radical and provocative will have
less of a chance to be seen at all.

With some irony, the Silicon Valley
world of startups is heavily about
being disruptive, not self-perpetuating.
We're prioritizing brands based roughly on the number of bikes registered on the Bike Index from that brand. So register more Author bikes and it'll happen.

And yes, category search would be nice. It's something we'll work on.
US Personal income is about $13tn, so a 20% flat tax would currently provide about $8500/yr basic income. And that, of course, is on top of our current government spending.

Also I'm not sure what you'd do w/ payroll taxes.

You're just grossly understating what tax rates would have to be to accommodate this. You think there will be economies of scale that SS today doesn't already achieve that could somehow offset this in a meaningful way? I disagree.

I personally believe in "basic income" in a very elastic sense to increase demand in the economy when it's weak. It's something different than what's discussed here. And I'm not against it strongly, it's just I'm not able to see how we would accomplish that without tax rates similar to what you see in Europe and I don't relish that thought.
I think that bsamuels' point about replies is also important: I sometimes reply to comments with the intention to be helpful to the author of the comment, not necessarily everybody else.
People becoming "unemployable" because of robots is one of the most common arguments in favor of this, and that argument is nonsense because actual skilled jobs are not going away.

Will a robot fix your car when it breaks? Will it be designing new and better cars? Will it even design the automation systems that let those new cars be built more efficiently?

Will those robots provide legal advice to the companies that operate them? Will they provide medical care to your kid when he breaks a bone? Will they provide him with counseling when he's struggling emotionally? Will they give him a lesson on algebra, and then work with him one-on-one to make sure he understands it?

Will robots patrol the streets and keep you safe from crime? Will they prosecute people who hurt others, or preside over those trials to make sure everyone's rights are protected?

Will robots invent the next Google or Facebook, and will they code it up and design a nice-looking and intuitive interface for it? Will they entertain you from a stage or a movie set? Will they write new jokes for a stand-up act, write an original novel, or provide an author with advice on how to make his characters more lifelike?

Maybe McDonald's fry cooks will eventually be replaced with robots, but "labor" isn't going anywhere.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders. Way more than 100, almost certainly more than 1,000, and very likely more than 10,000 if my guesswork based on those figures is correct.
I agree with this. "Feelings" and "opinions" should not have an effect on whether or not a comment is allowed to be posted. Historically, people (innovators) who have correct (but unpopular) outlooks on things have been suppressed.