skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why it’s impossible to know what makes your Netflix slow
The HN leaderboard shows 100 users with > 15500 points, they mostly all seem to be active users, and the scores seem to be doing the usual long tail dropoff that such distributions tend to do.

So I would expect there to be a ton of active HN users with more than 1000 points.
That's a good point, but I think it would have an unintended negative consequence of punishing late comments, which tend to have low karma but may nonetheless be worthwhile.

It would also punish comments on 'new' threads, which often stagnate with 0 or 1 upvotes.
I'm sure that this has been brought up before, but I've always wondered whether it makes sense to split karma into comment karma and submission karma, reddit-style, and grant this new endorsement power only to folks who cross a certain comment karma threshold.

Since now users with high karma will have a lot of power (than just downvoting, which IMO was relatively innocuous), I think it makes sense to ensure that this power goes to folks who have gained that power by contributing meaningfully to the community over a long period of time, and not by by a few - oftentimes lucky - submissions.

Am I totally off-base here? Or maybe this has been considered, but was too big of a code change?
This might cause duplicate comments, which were previously not written, because commenters were able to read comments posted before them.
It's impossible to predict the future perfectly, but I hope to leave completely. The only YC thing I'm going to do is office hours with the startups.
> I believe that millions of years of evolution have baked into every living thing a deep need to work, and we'll feel bad if we don't (because for millions of years lazyness meant death). We need to struggle.

I think there is a difference between "work" that fulfills our desire to dedicate time and effort toward challenging endeavors and "work" that creates sufficient net value to keep oneself alive (or in the case of a redistributive society, to keep society as a whole alive).

And yes, I think this even applies to people who do jobs that align very closely with their passions, like many computer programmers. My argument isn't that passionate programmers wouldn't continue programming if they had no need for a wage, but rather that they would do precisely the parts of programming they enjoy.
> The real solution is to move to a resource managed economy that eliminates money all together

So, rationing? I wonder if that's been tried before.

Money is a repesentation of resources. And resources cannot be allocated efficiently by central authority, because of the calculation problem[1]. But maybe some college dorm discussions will bear some other solution.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
Does Stress Cause Hair Loss? Discover the Answer
I feel like this really discourages unpopular truths from the discussion. This is one of the worst options I've ever heard for a comment system.
Karma/Comment is not a very good metric as well. As someone that posted a big post that stayed in the Front Page for long can amass a lot of karma in little time. Giving them a very high Karma/Comment. You would have to remove the outliers.
I agree. Meeting basic human needs through other means seems to be a necessary prerequisite to basic income.
Guess what? your comment wouldn't be endorsed either.. You will not have any chance to even see that comment. It may be a good thing, but the current system has few issues one of them: it will be much harder for anyone to get to 1000+ karma so effectively current "crème de la crème" will be in total control. Remember how some news with NSA in the title were being censored? This new system is much worse than that.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I think large enterprise companies can definitely be much more difficult to work with in that way compared to a small business.
This Goblin 630 RC Helicopter will blow your mind
not possible :(
I would imagine most sources don't just blurt out the information. I would expect some back and forth which would probably give him the time to warn the other person.
Another option would be to allow the withdrawal of pending comments by the submitting user. Reply -> you already have a pending comment (with a link to the explanation of the system). Would you like to withdraw your comment X in thread Y and post this comment? -> Y/N.
Author here: Funnily enough, I have! I wrote the Super Debugger which uses F-Script (http://shopify.github.io/superdb/)

Please note though this is not at all what I’m describing in my essay. A REPL is hardly a graphical, direct manipulation drawing tool for creating software.

But it was fun to dip my toes in more dynamic waters.
Is the only difference between pending and live that pending will lock them out of posting again (within the timeout period)?

Or, will they eventually drop out of visibility from others?
We already have pretty good protections against that from years of spammers and voting rings trying it.
It's not a very big problem, because it's possible to unflag a comment.
Do you assume people would be spending their BI rationally? Spending everything on gambling and drugs would still be possible, having more than the least possible income by shady means would still appeal to some. It seems to me reasons for crime wouldn't be exactly destroyed.
Similar: Heather Dewey-Hagborg's project http://deweyhagborg.com/strangervisions/

In Stranger Visions artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg creates portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material collected in public places. Working with the traces strangers unwittingly leave behind, Dewey-Hagborg calls attention to the impulse toward genetic determinism and the potential for a culture of genetic surveillance.
I think this change makes the mistake that people with lots of karma are good contributors.

That's not an invariant property of participants with karma over 1000 points, to be sure, but the population of participants with over 1000 points skews to include a fair number of people who have been long-term contributors (patio11, who has my same join date and deservedly much more karma, immediately comes to mind among several other participants). What's practical about this bright-line rule is that it strictly limits the number of participants who can review pending comments at all, and allows the moderation team here to go to the next step of evaluating the reviewers, while ALL OF US are put on notice that what's desired here is substantive, polite comments.

So while I agree with you that the relationship "high karma implies good contributor" is not an invariantly true relationship, it has enough heuristic value to start as a seed for the system as further hand-tweaking of review power by the moderation team responds to your legitimate concern here.
I would imagine he thought Google would never read a journalist's e-mail.
I second this, too. HN has some very divided cliques.
As I understand the idea, endorsing a comment doesn't mean you agree with it. It just means you think it deserves to be in the thread. That should leave room for unpopular views as long as they're respectfully expressed.
True, however you could require say 4 users to block a comment out and this maybe would mitigate the problem a little?

I think the point I was trying to make was that by turning it around it would require "less" active participation from the users and by default everyone gets a chance, but the really bad comments would still get removed I think. Anyway we shall see how it works out!
So basic income is the minimum living cost? What if minimum cost of living increase every year as it does? What if you live in San Francisco where the standard of living is crazy high? Do the citizens of S.F get a higher basic income than say Milwaukee?
A perfect opportunity to use comment-karma H index! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index
I agree with this sentiment, and money is without a doubt a huge obstacle in properly reassigning and redistributing resources. It allows hoarding more than any other asset, being so abstract and thats a fundamental flaw in its mechanics.
I did this as well and was rather disappointed with the reality.

I wonder if there are enough open source bikes for a worthwhile comparison.
Announcing the C++ FAQ
Could you please move endorse and flag to be far apart (maybe on separate sides of the line, or at least with a no-op like "link" or "parent" in the middle)? I iPad or iPhone often, and accidentally hitting the wrong thing would be annoying; I might not be watchful enough to unflag.
Pending comments won't be visible, except to the submitter and to potential endorsers. That's the whole point of pending comments.
It's difficult to automate: vendor relations, software and package assessment, configuration tuning, troubleshooting, hardware replacement, PCI / SOX / other audit processes, pager response, documentation authoring, procedures development (and refinement), user education (especially on matters affecting security and stability), and what I tend to call technical anthropology: digging into the dim mists of ancient history (anything more than 6 months ago, but in cases stretching back decades) to figure out why a particular design decision was made (often being "hell, seems to work, make it so"), and what might explode spectacularly if it's changed.

But yes, your competent sysadmin is also automating the living fuck-all out of as much as possible. Using standard methods and tools and very clear documentation so as not to create yet more technical debt for the next guy.

And if you're classifying your devs by language, you've got other problems as well.
How about purging pending comments after a certain time (say 24 hours)? If they haven't been endorsed by that time, they will most likely never be endorsed. And even if they would be, nobody would read them anymore.
Bitcoin ATM Map
If the comment doesn't make it out of pending in a day, what happens to it and its poster then?

Edit: Deletion is currently possible for less than that (2 hours?). Will this be different for pending comments?
No. Simply having money means nothing. This is true for all economies. It's entirely up to society accepting the currency you have to produce the goods you desire.

In a basic income society, the amount received should be based off of indexes for items/services deemed necessary to meet some basic quality-of-life thresholds. If the private sector cannot provide items/services to meet those thresholds, then the government should step in to provide them, until the private sector can provide it more efficiently(if possible).
severely means-test it

Means-testing is where a lot of the cost of social welfare systems comes into play, and where nearly all of the moral hazard starts (making it more expensive to work than to not work). It's best to keep means-testing out of it altogether.
They will get jobs to supplement their income, if they living expenses are higher than the BI. And if they always spend more, they definitely have the same problem today.
This sounds promising. I'm worried about two things:

1) Will a minimum number of endorsements lead to groupthink? Will a substantial, polite but unpopular comment still get endorsed?

2) If this works initially and improves comments immediately, could it have negative long term affects? Will new users find it confusing or intimidating? Will people comment less knowing that others are less likely to see it?

And one question:

Why not have comments with 0-3 upvotes only visible to people with 1000+ karma? Isn't that the same thing as the endorsement system?

Worthy experiment, regardless.
That might work... but only if people actually read that page. Given how few people look at /newest (as estimated by the fraction of votes which are cast before submissions hit the frontpage) I'm not optimistic.

How about only placing comments into the "pending" purgatory if the submission they're attached to has received more than X comments in the past Y minutes? I assume it's the chatty discussions which you're concerned about cooling down, so this would handle the problem case while avoiding the side effect on quiet/abandoned threads.
If a person were getting 10x the amount a person gets on unemployment + food stamps, you might be able to call that basic income.

Please show us all how a person living in a US city could survive on food stamps, ethana.
Hacker News has a pretty strong history of being apolitical, and for good reasons. I don't see how stronger moderation of comments by the community is worse than encouraging political discussions. FWIW I'm strongly against the NSA stuff, but I understand that it starts to become a discussion similar to ones religious people hold rather than actual intellectual discussions about how to solve a problem or discover something. If I want to solve the problem with the NSA, I have to become politically active or donate to an organization like EFF so they can go do that for me, not have conversations online about them.
I tried that, but found the inability to copy/paste between the reference and my text editor was annoying...
That doesn't provide a remedy when you only want to launch a civil investigation, not a criminal one. And given how frequently the criminal process is abused to go after relatively minor crimes (e.g. Aaron Swartz), this is probably something we shouldn't encourage.
How long is the immutable timeout? I've never timed it, but I have a hunch that comments lose their delete-ability in less than 24 hours. So please be sure that pending comments can be deleted for the entire duration of their 24hr pend state.
I agree 100%, HN should be an open place for discussion.
I want to live in a society of people who are working together to make human existence meaningful. What I don't want is the pseudo-free market designed to further despotism and self-interested behavior which we have today.

That said, I'm not for giving someone food, shelter, water, and health care for falling out of a uterus. You have to contribute in some measurable way. Also I believe that we should provide, specifically these things...NOT currency/income.

I've seen too many examples of people having children for well-fare checks.
> Are you at all worried that the increased comment friction will cause us to lose a lot of users?

Not speaking for pg, but he's stated in the past that growth was never a goal for HN.

HN could lose a lot of users and still be no worse off than it was 4 years ago, and it was pretty OK 4 years ago.
Furthermore, how about auto-accepting pending comments after 1 day? And maybe, not having the pending state for threads which are more than 1 day old?

The above will allow people to submit comments even when the thread has lost its popularity.
CastAR sounds like it might make a cool dev environment. Hang up the reflective material, put on the glasses, and you've got a screen. Doesn't block everything else out the way the Oculus does.
http://technicalillusions.com/castar/
It is absolutely reasonable, but its way easier to provide BI than to provide that infrastructure. Its cheaper, and allows people to have more freedom to pick between options.
A comment only needs a handful of people to endorse it, out of the large number who could, so that doesn't seem a big danger.
I don't think I will ever hit 1000 karma on HN which is fine.

However what is the current standing of users with this karma that are actively? I hope there are enough.

Thanks!
Many Randians believe that a free and unregulated capitalist market is the best solution to most problems. This is being put forth as an example of a problem with allowing private corporations such a central role in society without any oversight beyond the "invisible hand" of the market.
Also, so much for 1-on-1 comment threads that are deeply buried and are not intended to be prominently displayed to anyone else. I've had lots of interesting conversations like that.
He wouldn't need to write that comment under the new system.
HN was using more subtle censorship before, I'm glad that they are more forthcoming with what is actually visible now instead of pretending that this is an open forum.
Don't worry, they can.
I'm personally no fan of postmodernism, but I hope that people will settle their ideological differences in endorsing comments.
The only reasonable answer to that is "if they can get away with it."
Better delete that comment or you'll lose a lot of karma. They keep down-voting me :)
You could argue the system in the UK provides similar payments and could be called a basic income system if you rebrand it. Basically the system comes out roughly as:

Zero earned income. You get about £60-200 from the state per week so lets call this a £60 basic income. Typical unemployed.

Annual income £12K. No tax and no subsidies. We could rebrand as £60/wk basic income = 3K/yr and and 25% tax on the 12K.
Typical minimum wage earner.

Income £50k. Roughly £35K in your pocket, £15K tax. Rebrand as 18K tax less 3K minimum income.

The system kind of works. One of the main problems is that there is a very steep effective marginal between zero income and minimum wage - a lot of people end up about equally well off in the short term whether they do nothing or flip burgers. This would be better under a straight basic income system.

I think you could improve the basic income set up by something like karma points where you get a bit more money if you are productive even if it's doing something unpaid like charity work or writing poems and less if you are criminal etc.
Yes, deletion is possible for a pending comment as long as it's pending.
For threads that have fallen off the frontpage, drop the required number of endorsements to 1 and let the parent commenter have the option to endorse the child comment regardless of the parent poster's karma. That will let back-and-forth continue in old threads.
Make economic inheritance tax 100% with allowances for personal, sentimental items etc. Distribute the resources amongst public works projects and personal resource funds for each citizen.
Any idea what you'll be doing next?
That seems like it would create a perverse incentive to breed unnecessarily.
Why? This is substantial and not nasty.

That's just a different point of view. Although it doesn't add a lot of context to his opinion.

That's the problem with moderation. People will tend to endorse what supports their beliefs. You can endorse a post you don't agree with.
What does "the impulse towards genetic determinism" mean here? Comparisons of identical twins raised apart show that physical appearance is highly heritable, so it would seem that "the impulse towards genetic determinism" is in this case correct.
Many users will endorse a comment whether it is popular or not, so long as it contributes to the discussion.
How is it much worse? For a comment to be censored, literally every user with over 1000 karma must refuse to endorse the comment. That doesn't sound like centralized thought control to me...
Every few months I find HN starts to impede my productivity, and I kill my account by removing the valid email address, and changing the password by mashing keys. Having breached the 1000 on at least one of those, possibly more, I kinda regret that. Especially since it obviously doesn't work, at least not for more than a week or two at most.

I'm also concerned because of the hive mind effect. Just because something is popular, doesn't mean it's quality. You attract more flies with honey than you do with vinegar, but you get a LOT more with a steaming turd. And sure, the turd is popular, but is it good eats?

And I find using the karma total is a poor choice. Reaching 1000 karma isn't that difficult, nor is it an indication of quality, it can be an indication of the age of an account, or the prolific nature of the commenter. Someones ratio is a far better way to ensure that the individuals deciding are also quality posters. A single troll with an account in the 1000+ can chose to use that to green light his other accounts, and other trolls.

I look forward to being proven wrong though.
Whether that makes sense depends on the context. Particularly in the case of someone submitting a link to their own (startup|open source code|blog post|etc), people often ask questions along the lines of "what does the author think about X" and the identity of the person replying matters a great deal to whether a reply is meaningful.
If a thread is several days old, not many people will even look at it, so why not just auto-accept those comments?
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> "after I've read a thread a couple of times, I probably won't re-check it"

It's funny, since we lost usenet 10+ years ago, we lost reader software that show which comments are new since you last time looked at a thread.

In this sense, the software we had in the 90's was technically superior to the web forums we have today.
Physical violence isn't the only form of might. "Might" is a synonym for power. And ownership, which is what squintychino claims justifies their actions, is certainly a form of power.
Does this have any impact on Arc? Are you still going to be using it for things you make? I hope you are.
Is the endorsement requirement a set threshold throughout the entire day?

As an international user, it is already fairly difficult to participate in discussions because of the lack of activity here at certain times. So I would imagine that there will also be far fewer 1000 karma users here as well. I fear that this change might cause the activity level on HN to have higher and lower peak activity periods throughout the day.
this guy: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2568109/Unemployed-b...
I think the problem is that we have extensive precedent in the USA that warrants to search cloud data are properly presented to the cloud hosting provider, NOT the "owner" of the data -- in fact, the data owner is often prohibited from even knowing that the process is taking place.

Others have pointed out that this is a clear way in which cloud storage is fundamentally different from local storage, which one might not expect -- being able to be secure in one's papers, a fundamental right in the US, only pertains if the papers are physically located on your person or property.

I'm overextending here, but I think the physical analogy applies as well -- if the police want to search a rented storage locker, the search warrant is served to the storage company, not the lessee of the locker.
Looks interesting.

Do you consider selecting by bike category (e.g. I don't know all makes and models but say I'd like to narrow my search to just folding bikes or hybrid (cross, Wheel size 700c) bikes?)

Do you accept suggestions to expand the list of brands? I would like to see Author http://www.author.eu/en/
I honestly think the overall quality of comments is quite good on HN. Besides the quality of the articles (which is also top notch), it's a big reason why HN is a thrice daily part of my routine.

The bigger issue is that nesting is a poor format for displaying comments, once a discussion gets large enough. I've been a part of the team revamping Huffington Post's discussion interface, and I think it's a great solution for giving people the option to switch between breath-first and depth-first exploration of the comment tree as they see fit. It's not a perfect solution, but I do think it beats some of the worst problems of nesting.
No one can reply to a pending comment, or vote on it, or see it in most cases.
Thomas Paine makes a good point for citizen's dividend in his pamphlet "Agrarian Justice". http://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html

Now that we live in a civilized state and people own all the property, it makes it impossible for one to live in a natural state. So, he argues property owners owe a tax to everyone reaching maturity. That way everyone has a chance to acquire property, education, or what not to live successfully in a civilized state.