skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I fear this change will have some unintended consequences:

1. In a Ask/Show HN post, (which is often similar to a reddit AMA), the OP will not be able to reply to clarifications questions until their previous one is 'endorsed'.

2. Multiple (<1000 karma) people will post very similar response to a question, or other objective comment, since they would not be aware of other pending comments on that thread. This would lead to...

2a. Either moderators endorsing multiple such comments, due to race conditions and stale views during moderation, or

2b. Moderators would endorse the first (or "best") of them, and many people with reasonable comments will be in limbo in the rest of HN, for the fault of writing a similar response to another endorsed poster.

3. (NEW) If a user has something meaningful to say to two different posts, he/she is now more likely to choose the one with more activity since he can't post on both anymore, and he/she wouldn't want to wait for the moderators to see the less active post. As a result, the power law distribution on post activity is going to become even more prominent than before.

I would recommend the following changes:

1. Apply this policy on a per-page basis, rather than on a global HN basis.

2. Allow 2 or 3 pending comments per person, rather than 1. Anyone who needs more than that, and is not getting endorsed at all, is probably trolling or spamming, and can be dealt with other means.

3. Auto-accept pending comments after 24hrs for users with >250 karma (or some other lowish number that filters out absolutely green accounts).

4. Add a "showpending" option. Even if people can't upvote/reply to them, it's democratic to be able to see them.

5. (UPDATE, adding tantalor's suggestion) #1 above can be solved by auto-accepting the OP's comments instantaneously. I would even go further and give endorser rights to the OP on a Ask/Show HN post.
Would love to hear about the software :)
Not by language, no; I meant "Erlang developers" as in "the fellows at Ericsson who make my life easier by repeatably automating distributed failover, at least when you're using their platform." You'd call these fellows, and the Docker ones, and the fellows responsible for writing Chef and Puppet and so on, sysadmins?

I guess I mean more by "automation" than you do, though. Paying some other company to do things like software and package assessment for you, so you just have to consume their customized software distribution and can let the system update whenever it likes, is "automation." Buying standard hardware that you can find pre-tuned configurations for is "automation."

Effectively, anything that moves the company away from maintaining a "system", and closer to being just a tiny core of people who run one tiny thing on top of a large set of frozen, well-known components is "automation."
Team looks to me the same as Yammer is now, and from Zack's post "high-level communication in the company" is exactly what Yammer is about (were just trying Yammer out ourselves, ad well as slack, which rocks!)
> So if you're not sure whether you should endorse a comment, don't.

hi!

So will there still be a karma system and how does this new comment system will affect karma?

thanks.
That could pose a dilemma to the endorser too. Two comments with similar text: do you only endorse one?

I like it when social problems can relate to computer science: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_check_to_time_of_use
What about dye that is only visible to UV light?
Clearly, this:

1. Limits speed of information distribution

2. Can be used to filter out specific information

3. Promotes centralised points of view -> Fewer people decide what is information is valuable

But:

1. May lead to better quality of information

---

3 facts vs 1 possibility
> The problem is money = power and society is hell bent on gaining power.

A major source of trouble now is that money is tightly coupled with politics. It boggles the mind how it's not universally understood that politics should be entirely de-coupled from private money. All of politics should run 100% (including elections) on a public fund.

Unless this is done, very few things of true substance will be fixed.

> The real solution is to move to a resource managed economy that eliminates money all together.

I don't think that's doable unless we've made work entirely optional. When AI and robots could do any job we don't want to do, then you could instate some form of basic income, or even your more radical idea.

But until then, it's going to be very, very hard to change things in a fundamental way.
You have to wait or just click "link".
U.S. laws usually permits landlord inspections so long as they provide notice.
"Resource-managed economy" does not imply a centralized authority, which is where your snide rejoinder comes off the rails.
What materials could we use to prototype? Cheap materials and rapid construction should probably take precedent, to ensure speedy iterations by a large number of people.
If you can move when it says ____ color, then you're that color.
Maybe that says your comment is off base.
Imagine you wanted to run two apps on the same host, and they depended on different versions of those components, and you wanted to be able to install the app and its dependencies on a new machine really quickly for scaling reasons, and you wanted an exploit on one of the apps to be difficult to escalate over to the other app from, and you'll start understanding some of the pain points Docker solves. :)
Is this the biggest change ever made to HN? The last major change I can think of was not showing comment scores, and this is at least an order of magnitude bigger.
8402: 2048 from the other side
+1 for showpending. At least allow people some way to choose read what's being intentionally kept out. Might be interesting.
There are a whole bunch of blogs (from MIT, CBS, NBC) talking about that. Numerous things have been written, and I bet you anything that none of them actually read the article.

Here it is, by the way:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/03/06/1321202111.full...

They only say "An article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences". Yeah ? If they'd read it, they'd at least cite the authors or give a link to the original work.

And the information gets diluted: MIT writes about that(info dilution), CBS and NBC pick it up and dilute it even more, some distortion, and low-life bloggers pick it up from CBS and NBC and completely miss the point.
Presumably there are quite a lot of those. It's not like your comment will be reviewed by The Cabal of Twelve. I certainly am not part of any Cabal, as fun as that sounds.
It's not currently that hard to get to 1000+ slowly. By slowing down commenting and making it harder to even get comments through, this is presumably going to make it harder.
Will there be a 'show-dead' style option for those who choose to read HN unfiltered?

Otherwise, new users are unable to judge for themselves whether they agree with how the community endorses comments*.

Without such options any community eventually becomes a self-perputating hivemind.
The 47 millions food-stamp recipients disagree with you.
This would prevent users from commenting on multiple articles in a short period of time, and for articles that don't hit the main page the op may never see someone's thoughtful remarks.

For users with over 1k karma, do their comments go through the pending phase too?
Government workers in Sweden get 13 months paid maternity leave. That's a pretty good incentive. But they rank 187th in the world by birth rate, according to the CIA World Factbook.
What you describe seems like the status quo system: the state distributes food and shelter to people directly (through food stamps and council housing). The idea of basic income is that it is much more efficient if the state redistributes _money_, and then everyone can buy food and shelter using money.
What about when a permanently-pending comment is deleted? Does that satisfy the conditional? Relatedly, can there be a case to ensure that pending comments can always be deleted?
> If robots/AI do most of the labor

Exactly. But we're not there yet, and possibly not very close.
So now we have to wait years to be considered good enough posters to be allowed to fully participate?
Somehow I doubt a meaningful and substantial discussion between two experts is going to have a lack of people endorsing it. But I guess we're going to find out soon!
Ah perfect. I haven't flagged anything as of yet so I wasn't sure.
I think it'd be smart to only have this pending workflow during the period where the signal to noise ratio can be affected the most: the first N hours after a post first hits the front page.

After that, either nobody is posting anymore or the relative impact of a snide comment is quite low (in terms of viewership and also relative to body of the thread.) Usually after a day or two people are just ping-ponging in their own private threads and there isn't much need for the endorsement bottleneck.

The place where this seems crucial is in determining which comments end up being the upvoted root comments for the main thread. These comments are upvoted early on and ultimately end up forming the shape of discussion from that point forward, so it's a good idea to ensure they aren't flamebait.
But the number of people that want / need to do those visionary / human-centric jobs (though I would not consider all of those jobs as necessarily human) is lower than the number of people that would be seeking employment without a system for basic income; and, as long as it's pennies to get a person to do those low-income jobs, they're not likely to be automated away
I like the idea of pending comments, but I don't like encouraging the deletion of the unsuccessful pending comments. Especially in the low flow threads.

I suppose that the 24 hours is a parameter that is easy to change and tweak. I think it's a lot of time. What about 1 or 2 hours?

Another possible idea is to have up to two pending comments, so someone can contribute in two threads, go to work/eat/sleep, and read the replies. But this version is more difficult to implement and more difficult to explain.
So only popular posters with popular opinions will be allowed to endorse posts.

This feels like you are walling off HN for those who are already established here.

I've been here for years, I like to feel like I have a chance to contribute to discussions without hoping some karma overlord will approve.

I believe this change will cause HN to stagnate and become an echo chamber of the thoughts of those who are already popular enough
How the hell do you allocate resources with maximal efficiency, without either a central authority or trade?

Maybe I'm just an old stick in the mud, but those two are "I tell you what you want" and "You tell me what you want", and I don't see the third option.
pg says 1000+ is arbitrary. It probably stands to be tuned. I wonder if this will have any effect on interesting comment sub-threads on links that don't hit the first couple of pages.
you are absolutely right sir! it is what I think will kill HN ...
Please, please do make this. I have exchanged very useful information with other commenters on HN this way.

Sometimes I ask a question in the comments, and it gets answered days later. I go through "comments" in my profile periodically to see if someone replied to those. In this process I also see if someone asked my something and reply there as well.

IMHO, HN should have a "private message" feature if comments get policed this hard.
Aside: I don't know how I feel about all these new TLDs...
I see. You said above that a comment only has a day to make it out of pending. Why not auto-delete it when it doesn't? Edit: Never mind that question. Based on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446005 this seems to be the case (i.e., you won't have to delete a failed pending comment manually).

On a related note, the new system may prevent people from posting in the feature suggestion thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363). Since it's already a special thread that never closes for comments perhaps comments posted there should not be made pending.
I have to agree with you that this looks like a hostile change. There are, of course, many here who would prefer a smaller community. That's an elitist group, imo. I've always felt that the quality of discussion here has remained top-notch, even as the popularity of the site has grown.
To kill conversations which are deemed useful by all participants and have no negative impact other than the negligible cost of hosting them?
Karma/Comment is a poor metric, I think, because it encourages the strike attack comment style.

If I post something and people post counterpoints or questions or concerns, I will respond. But the truth is that from a pure karma average perspective, by far the best action would be to simply leave the threads hanging, the single post floating at the top of karma heaven. That works great from a pure karma perspective, but it subdues conversation because every point is a single attack.

It also encourages the stealthy comment editor. While Paul mentions this, it is something that happens regularly -- people make a comment, someone responds unfavourably, and the original person subtly edits their comment to make them look unfairly attacked. This is a specific problem on HN given that quoting is generally discouraged. So everyone piles on the downvotes and upvotes, respectively, to right this seeming injustice.

Karma on HN is easily gamed, as it is elsewhere. It is unfortunate when we care too much about it because it leads to completely artificial conversations.
>Others, however, will waste their income and again find themselves short of what is necessary to cover their needs.

You can do this now at least under the UK system.
Matchmaking is a bit slow, but two player competitive works fine. Basically you go head to head on the same board, Red vs Blue. Your goal is to merge as many of the opponent's tiles.

Whoever gets to 2048 first wins, or if no moves are left, whoever has the most points (added up value of all tiles on the board).
Adding a "private message" feature could solve this for all the people who don't want to give a public e-mail in their profile.
I got a Prism but it said game over. Bug?
Just my 2 cents : often the top comment becomes the root of the discussion for all the "thread". Would be great if top comments were shuffled so all the discussion is not concentrated on the first comment of the "thread". Bad comments can still be pushed at the bottom of the page.But the top comments with the most karma should not stick at the top of the page.
If a basic income was implemented, would we also be comfortable getting rid of minimum wage?

And, if we attempted to go for this in the US, how much struggle would there be to both implement the minimum wage and also remove all of the other programs such as welfare, food stamps, disability?

The system is very well established and you couldn't just remove each part in a single step. Each program that gets removed would need to be eliminated one by one.

Overall, I think that a basic income is the cleanest, fairest, least game-able way to help the lower class. I just don't see it happening in our current political climate.
Docker containers let you isolate the entire environment for your app. Let's say your running an app on CoreOS in a container that needs python 1.2.3.

On your laptop you can build and test the new version of the app that needs python 1.2.4. Once you decide that's ready to go, you can push the new container onto the same CoreOS machine, so it's running both containers. Without the containers, running two versions of python on the same box isn't possible. If you had a chef script that updated to 1.2.4, you'd possibly break every other app on the box.

Containers also let you do some cool things like sign and verify a container before it's launched on the box. It should be bit for bit the same on your laptop as it is on the remote machine. Containers also boot within seconds, much faster than a VM. There have been a few tech demos running around that actually spin up a new container with a web server to service every web request, just to show how fast you can boot them. 300ms is pretty long for a web request, but it's the idea that counts.
> 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?

Fluff will pass through.

Another option would be to enable the pending machine on big stories for the time they are on the home page, then auto-validate everything (but mark the unendorsed comments as such).

It would be nice if users with a lower karma could validate the replies to their own comments, once they have been validated.
"Don't downvote if you disagree" doesn't seem to work very well anywhere, so I'm not sure this will be any better in that regard.
What MS did is in there terms of service. If you do not like it use do not use Hotmail. It is really that simple.
Why I never Hire Mediocre Men ™
I think you misunderstand. It's not that people are pushing out crap updates. Rather, the problem is that when you update one thing on linux you usually end up having to update 100 other things.

I'm in a similar position to the OP, in that I don't generally update linux systems. The problem is that there is no way to simply 'update everything' in linux (at least, not in Centos). yum update certainly doesn't do it - in Centos 5.5 it only gets you php 5.1.x. To get a newer version you have to update it manually or bodge yum.

Then the problem is that many newer packages require a newer glibc or whatever, and that is something that can break your entire system very easily.

I think the root of the problem is that linux isn't very easy to update, unlike Windows.

As long as your linux system is well locked down and you regularly keep an eye on it, I don't see a problem with not updating regularly.
Thanks, this gives me some basic figures to think of.
Truly exactly as big?

The Rubygems vulnerability was the ability to run any code you want. What you describe is remote file browsing/access.
I keep showdead turned on for purposes of the hellbanned folks, some of whom really don't deserve the ban.

I wouldn't turn on a showpending, though. If you can't get a few users to endorse you, it probably wasn't worth saying.

I suspect anything remotely substantial will get the endorsements it needs. The userbase here is more diverse than is readily apparent.
How about instead of only allowing a single pending comment, allowing some number, where that number is managed in a similar way to the TCP sliding window. Start by allowing a single pending comment, allow an additional pending comment if that is endorsed, and so on, up to some maximum number of pending comments. However, if a comment is rejected, reduce the window size. You could employ all sorts of heuristics here - reduce the window by one per rejection, halve the window if there are two consecutive rejections, reset the window to its initial size if there are three, whatever.

One obvious problem here is that we are not getting a way to positively reject comments; rejection is simply not being endorsed after 24 hours. That is probably too noisy a signal to base a mechanism like this on. Oh well.
I thought the apology was measured and appropriate.

They knew they needed to have an audit and have intrusion detection when they started, four years ago.
As HN becomes more popular,it will attract more and more uselss commenters.
It's hyperbole. That comment claims it will make HN _useless_.
Absolutely. Reading it I was thinking that I also want to die without a fight, without the last desperate medical torture.

But perhaps it's only the experience of seeing how people suffer in prolonged death that makes doctors brave enough to face death that way.
As an exercise, I'm trying to think through what UK law would say about doing similar with hosted email within the UK for EU residents[1].

I am not a lawyer, and I'm not the one making the call for my clients on any potentially legal matters. Would appreciate to hear the thoughts of those with experience in this area.

My gut feeling is that, although users may have signed T&Cs allowing this, UK/EU courts would hold that there is a reasonable expectation of privacy around the mailbox, and so the Regulation Of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) would apply [2]. This means that such a host couldn't go digging themselves into the email.

However, a potential route in could be via getting the source to make a subject access request under the Data Protection Act 2000 (DPA) into the organisation, supplying their external email address, in response to which there would be a very tenuous grounds to release the mail. However:
1. I'm fairly sure that this would be considered a misreading of the DPA, and hosted mail would be considered information held by the client, rather than the host
2. There's such an obvious claim here that all of this would have happened under duress, and that's a huge can of worms....

So in conclusion, I suspect the only way to legally get at such an email within the UK/EU would be via working with law enforcement, or via one of the two parties to the discussion providing it.

[1] Most of the relevant acts of UK law are descended from common EU legislation, and apply broadly across the EU, hence the repeated use of UK/EU here

[2] Unless you're working in certain very strict offices with clear Security Operating Procedures (SyOPS) and regular training, UK/EU courts are likely rule that even corporate email systems can be considered to hold personal communications protected under RIPA
> A company who fires all it's employees, and uses only robots, would see a huge surge in profit from reduced overhead.

Where is their revenue coming from?
It's probably going to be for the better. My biggest concern though is that HN may become to clique-ish... Those with low karma that have interesting thoughts may now be discouraged from sharing...
It could be distributed by the second. Hopefully it just drips into your bank and you can use a chargecard.
If purging (substantial and interesting) one-to-one conversation is an intended effect I think that'd be a shame.
As someone with 24k karma, I'd like a way to turn showpending off, too. Like, whenever I read an article about certain topics, I'd like to not be forced to see the pending comments. (I'll probably just use incognito-mode for that)
All reasonable restrictions to apply to a national Basic Income program.
SF already tried giving homeless people a stipend.
Love and Richard Stallman's facial hair, just like all the best open source projects.
Well, that and C is a nice lowest common denominator; virtually any language can manage a fairly decent foreign function interface with C code without too terribly much friction.
These's now a huge incentive - keep things in proportion :) Presumably, there are (or can be) checks for heavily reciprocal accounts.
2b is not really an issue. Endorsing only the best of similar comments is a feature.

You can remove your pending comment after some time.

It may also have a second order "unintended" consequence over time- People would stop posting shallowly obvious responses, due to the negative feedback of never having them endorsed.
I've been told that credit card companies simply forbid this sort of thing as part of their contractual agreements with merchants. Comcast appears to have similar leverage, so I imagine they would do likewise.
Before admitting that ISPs are screwed I'd want to see their books. How much capex would it actually cost them to support Netflix without congestion? The unlimited business model is totally reasonable if almost all the cost is in maintaining the last mile.
What's more, since people with under 1000 karma can't fully participate because unlike high-karma users they can't see if their comment duplicates someone else's and will get stuck in limbo as a result, it's going to be rather difficult for them to reach the 1000 karma threshold - certainly more difficult than it is now.