skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Aren't income taxes a logical fit here? You would still have graduated tax brackets, so you wouldn't have an enormous cliff once you started earning, but all tax brackets could be increased such that the middle class end up about the same, and the poor are better off. With the added efficiencies described by the parent comment, this should even be possible without reducing net income to those in the higher brackets, but it might be desirable to do that to some extent as well for greater redistribution.
Basically, that turns HN into politics ? Because 1000+ commenters get to choose between:

- upvote and take the risk that other cliques will tag that as not worthy of an upvote, punishing both the commenter and yourself, possibly even pushing you back into the powerless silent majority.

- don't upvote: don't take risks, only grind up hoping others will take risks for you.

Sounds like it kills most discussions and only radical threads between cliques will remain :(

So given that will probably be my last comment here if that change remain, what other sites would you guys suggest as HN alternatives?
Thanks for being one of the least insane and retarded people on this comment thread.
Its an Aluminium tube with a Lithium battery.
Sorry, I wasn't very clear. I was saying that in addition to failing (b), (c), and (d), there's also an additional problem with called the length extension attack.
Whenever these stories appear it seems impossible to tell if they're genuine or just trolling Microsoft to try to get a better deal.
I feel the game is missing an exit option.
Most unspeakable thoughts today deal with isms and phobias: sexism, racism, agism, Islamophobia, homophobia.

PG suggested this as well with his references to "racial insensitivity," etc. And he may be right that future generations may not worry too much about racial insensitivity. But that does not mean that trying to speak and write about race in a way that is sensitive to the problems that race presents is irrational or merely fashionable.

We live in a time of ongoing racial strife in America and around the world, and we come from times of even worse strife. Attempting to be racially sensitive is a rational response to the fact that, for centuries, we white western men have been extraordinarily racially insensitive.

Let's look at an example of statements about race that would fall on different sides of that line. If I were to say that black men earn, on average, less money than white men, most people would say I was speaking factually. If I were to say that black men are, on average, less intelligent than white men, most people would say I was being racially insensitive -- or worse. In fact, one striking thing about many taboo or insensitive things that one could say today, is that they are frequently used as moral apologies for other, factual statements. Anyone arguing that black people are usually less intelligent than white people is probably also going to argue that black people deserve to make less money than white people. If it is taboo to say that urban gay men are more likely to contract HIV (in a moment I'll argue that that is not the case), it would be because there could also be a whiff of a suggestion that therefore a gay man with HIV deserves to be sick.

Another striking thing about this variety of taboo statements today, as opposed to taboos of previous generations, is how frequently such taboo statements are factually inaccurate. In fact, calling "black men are less intelligent than white men" racially insensitive is possibly the most charitable thing one could say about that statement. When you see "racially insensitive" in print, that is usually because someone (a politician or celebrity) said something false and/or blatantly racist, but the publication felt it was too inflammatory to call it what it was -- false and racist.

Finally, as a rebuttal to your statement about HIV, if it's taboo, why does a doctor ask me if I have sex with men the first time I meet her? Why are gay men still not allowed to donate blood? Context is what matters here. As a matter of fact, HIV is more prevalent in the gay community than the straight one (or at least it was -- feel free to offer newer data that refutes this). It is also more prevalent among African Americans. Stating these facts is not taboo, but suggesting that these fact hold any moral weight, that any of these groups that has faced ancient discrimination actually deserves it, is rightfully subject to distaste and rebuke given our cultural history.
"I'm turning off pending comments for now, because I'm going to bed and I don't like the idea of something this new running without me being able to watch it."

Sage advise for every developer and the fervent wish of every system admin. Goodnight sir.
What Microsoft should improve in their Office Online
This is a helpful site, but I feel like what is missing is the fine details like 'Does this plan cover the XYZ medication that my wife requires on a weekly basis?'. I ended up having to go with a more expensive plan in order to get the coverage I needed for her.
It's about time. In fact, it's way past time. But don't expect Microsoft to give up without a great deal more fight, a legal challenge or two, and other tactics from their vast playbook.
So now we should rate up everyone so they reach 1k karma?
Likewise. HN seems already to have some of the highest-quality discussion on the internet, and I attribute that to a lot of other factors besides the gamified mechanics of voting/endorsements/etc.

The sites that attempt to overstructure and gamify discussion to excess end up suppressing the capacity for emergent conversation and undermining the development of coherent community. I almost never visit StackExchange sites anymore, because interacting with their convoluted discussion mechanics is too much of a chore to be worth the constrained, limited payoff. I really hope HN doesn't go that route, because there's really not much else like it on the internet.
I wonder if parents still buy the sets we loved as kids; the last time I looked I had a hard time finding one in the local Toys R' Us or Sears.

(For that matter, do kids still ask their parents to buy these sets?)
Internet toxicity's effect on game industry is "very real and very dangerous"
Since when did "liberal" mean someone who supports coercive redistribution by states?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism
When I was a self-employed single male for a couple of years in my late 20s, I also qualified for a plan well under $100 per month. Not sure what it would be if I didn't receive coverage from my employer, but I imagine I'm still in a low-risk pool. However, I'd think your plan would at least have a cap. I think I figured out "Annual Durable Medical Equipment Maximum" but it's funny that Google only has 3 results mentioning that phrase.
You're assuming that the remaining $4trillion is lost. It's not. It goes to other people who will spend it on other things worth, in total, $4tril... even though some of them may need it less.

The benefit they derive from the increased flexibility that $20k could easily exceed $20k by itself - you've probably seen the research on how people make bad decisions when they are financially unstable. And all that benefit is raw positive.

For a BI to be bad from the perspective you're talking about it has to actively make people less productive. Simply giving them $20k doesn't count as a 'cost' in itself - it all comes full circle.
Liberty means allowing people to make their own decisions about how they live and use their resources, as long as they're not infringing on the liberty of others. It's a universal concept, not just tied to your vilification of wealthy conservative people.

Thanks for the nasty stereotype though.
A lot of discussions I've seen that seem superficially to be back-and-forth flamewars actually are instances of intense but substantive debate, and I'd really hate to see even rough-edged but worthwhile discourse suppressed just because someone who gave it only a cursory glance felt put off by its style.
Florida trauma centers charge huge fees the moment you come through the door
Having a $5 sign-up fee would be better than 'pending comments', IMHO.
This is awesome and could be very useful. Can't wait for more data. No Dahon yet on the database.
Basic income doesn't have to be all or nothing. You can supplement with targeted aid. Just should be able to get away with a lot less effort since you only need to cover the obvious extreme cases.
We had a 20 year advantage after WWII though, we were one of the Allies on the winning side that took the least amount of damage. We were able to do these because everyone owed us money then and we just won the war. All of our competitor companies even on the Allies were battered and their industries took decades to rebuild on top of owing us lots of money.

So we had massive infusion from '45 to the mid-70's. Germany in fact just finished paying off the WW debt in 2010. After winning WWII we had a much different structure and trusted the government doing things, we couldn't do anything like that today with our divided team-based political climate that mimics the WWE.
Sorry, you must have misread Belleruches' post. He asked for examples where this has worked.

Last I heard the UK was a depressed shithole with a stagnant economy. Hardly a glorious example of the success of such policies.
What's "it"? What is the problem that you all are trying to solve? I have showdead on, and maybe 2% of the comments I see are unreadable-grey.

Pending what? Approval? By whom? Sounds scary. Perhaps I missed the tps report. If so, sorry. But as an outsider who spends a lot of time here (work; analogue; fortuitous), I can't wait to have the comments here that I've come to love be editorialized by some cabal of power users.

Simple indeed.
I take it this won't affect submissions by those users?
It's been time for a while, unfortunately.
Inflation means higher salaries, which is highly correlated with middle class net worth.
Have a dependency on conflicting libc is a favourite problem that can be difficult to solve without some form of container (vm, chroot or something "in between" like lxc/jails). Another is dependency on different kernel (either major version on same os, or dependency on a different kernel, like freebsd), which docker (by design) doesn't solve.

I don't use ruby much, but it doesn't strike me as very easy to work with/very reliable for production deployment. But that might be me. How well does it handle dependencies on conflicting modules with parts written in c?

Perhaps the most important point is that (when it makes sense) a docker setup might allow easier horizontal scale-out, and or redundancy.

All that said, keeping things simple is generally a good thing. But sometimes adding complexity in one area makes the overall system less complex.
>>It may be that bad comments tend to be concentrated on particular threads, and that the right way to implement pending comments is per-thread rather than site-wide.

So what about this? Here comments is a vector of all the scores of comments inside one particular thread.

----

(defn filter? [comments threshold]

(let [size (count comments)]

(if (< threshold (/ (reduce + comments) size)) false

true)))

;;user=> (filter? [1 2 3 4] 2)

;;false

;;user=> (filter? [1 2 3 4] 3)

;;true
> How do you keep some demagogue from campaigning on abolishing this mechanism and just giving people more money?

You don't. People can run with any platform they want.

Of course, pretty much this idea has been raised against even the idea of democratic government for centuries -- that if the masses could just vote for people to give them money, they would. Strangely, that doesn't seem to happen.

There'll be plenty of people that understand the problems with that idea and have self-interest in communicating those problems -- and they will be disproportionately the people with the resources to effectively sell the idea. Frankly, I'd be more worried about the system being eroded by people campaigning to limit the dedicated revenue stream than by abandoning limiting controls. (Not that I necessary think that method of control is necessary in the first place, just that its an available option.)
I'm actually scared to comment on here. If my comment is "too reddit" or if I am incorrect in what I write I could be shadow banned. I try to save my comments for when it's something really important.

It feels like I'm the outsider at high school all over again and I'm scared the cool kids will notice me and tell me to get lost.

It's odd because HN inspired me to make lots of passive income projects that now make enough money for our family of 4 to live off of. I even got Angel funding by winning a hackathon for another company I'm building now.

I fit the criteria to be one of the HN crowd on paper, but I don't think I'll ever feel like I belong. A comment queue seems like it'll move HN even further into that judgmental direction.
My most up-voted comment is this:

"2048 is HN's Flappy Bird"

Hardly enlightening or interesting.
What a terrible idea. Please reconsider.
It would also depend on what the situation was then. If you predicted this crazy team to exceed all expectations and make it to the final four and then lose, they could well be a significant underdog.

Buffet's offer of a buyout would be great. If not, at some point I would start betting big at vegas against my picks so I at least made some money if one busted my bracket.

Of course I am more likely to win the lottery (even though I don't play it) than I am to have to put my plan into action.
Or, even better, have a demo on the home screen, or at least a link to one.
Is there any information on how spread out geographically the "karma elite" is. If it's very US centric then users in other time zones may suffer most in terms of pending delays.
The lifetime max was $5M (had to look it up), which seems like it'd be enough to cover any conceivable illness [1] for decades. But I got your point.

1: http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidwhelan/2012/02/25/the-10-mo...
Great, I look forward to the day when you read The Gulag Archipelago and a first-year economics textbook and realise that you're talking out your ass. Maybe throw in some Hayek while you're at it. Good luck!
That's what I love about cottonTracks, even if it does lack a bit in the portability standpoint.
I believe an API already exists[1] and a number of people have already built some cool apps[2] on top of it.

[1] https://hn.algolia.io/api

[2] https://hn.algolia.io/cool_apps
Doesn't this remove HN from being protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act if every comment is now screened by a human?

There could be serious liability issues to think about.
MetaFilter does that, and doesn't seem to have problems with quality of discourse. Of course, HN as it stands doesn't seem to have significant problems with quality of discourse, either, so I'm not sure that HN needs either solution; discussion here is already far superior to what you find on the vast majority of sites.
Web form security – avoiding common mistakes
I have pretty high (but < 1000) karma. Even so, this sort of move smacks of consolidation of power into the existing high status group. Another way to look at this is that this is a classic "next-step" for an established player in the market and the market of course is ripe for ... ugh... disruption.
I think that this is a bad idea. Not enough people care about approving other people's comments for those accounts to get approved.

Note that my comment comes from someone with over 8600 karma. I'll never be silenced, but I fear anyone after me will be.
It's definitely correlated but not 1 to 1. Wealthy people will use leverage though. Effectively their r-value is > 1.0. With middle class it might be around 0.6. The middle class still loses some as their salaries do go up but not as fast. Also, you usually need to quit and go to another job. The wealthy have more control and options.
I don't think you suck for relying on StackOverflow/reference when writing code. You just haven't completely understood or remembered what you're doing. After a few time you'll remember and understand and move on to using SO/reference for the next more complicated thing.
Elsewhere in this discussion someone posted this link [1] which claims that

Odds are that Buffett’s bracket isn’t worth your time,
however. Having a 1-in-7.4 billion chance of winning a
billion dollars is worth the equivalent of 14 cents.
That’s before accounting for taxes

I understand why you entered. It's for the same reason people play the lottery. People value a large payoff much more highly than a small one, even if the odds are worse for the big payoff.

I.e. for many people it's not worth betting $2 for a 1:2 chance of winning $4. That won't be a life changing event. But people are willing to bet $2 for a 1:175,223,510 chance of winning perhaps $100,000,000, even though those odds are much worse. That's how Powerball makes money. BTW I do bet on Powerball once in a while.

In my case I figured it wasn't worth betting $0.14 (because I knew it would take more than that of my time) to win $1,000,000,000.

[1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/we-have-a-1-in-6001225228...
Now, whoever finds an error in Newton's exercises would feel like a god. :)
Joyent would probably claim that kvm+zfs would be best. But if you don't have kernel support for jails, then no, using jails isn't better. It's not an option. Oracle would probably claim solaris zones are better (and arguably, they'd be right).

Jails are (as far as I can tell) great -- but not so great that freebsd didn't include a new hvm assisted hypervisor in freebsd 10 (BSD Hypervisor (bhyve)).

LXC in many ways are *bsd jails for Linux.
Right, same deal this time as I remember reading about it. It is funny that Buffet gets most of the PR when Buffett's company is just making a fortune insuring against a very unlikely outcome. Normally the crazy people marketing the potential $1B payout (that buy insurance from some boring insurance company) would get the PR.
Is this something new or the good ole' hole196?

http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/07/wifi-hole196-major-e...
I don't know about other people, but the only way I really learn a new language is by dedicating myself to build a project using it, no matter the size, but it has to be something that you have a clear vision of what you want to build (so you struggle at the hard parts, instead of just changing the course of the project). This will make you search for ways to "say" what you need in that language. It's analogous to going to another country to learn a foreign language.
it' Friday night in the US ...
The developer sounds like a complete amateur. Site is slow as f* and they want to implement some pending comments feature in the worst way possible.
I think we need control, but not this much control. Moderation is key in everything. No pun intended.

If this becomes reality, I see a future where we have no bad comments, a lot of decent/good comments from the same people and therefore turning into an elitist society (more-so than it already sort-of is). I feel this will push new users away, and therefore slow our knowledge diversification.
What I think would be ideal:
Comments ranked by the network of users I have upvoted / downvoted in the past, by computing a centrality:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenvector_centrality

(I don't understand the mathematics of this entirely, just have an intuitive understanding of it)
Thanks to Cambridge for making this available to the general public, under a CC 3.0 license! The images are crystal clear, and easy to read. Props to Newton, as well :)
$5000 / 33ft² – Waterfront Condo (downtown / civic / van ness)
I do not think this is a good idea. I've already looked through the list of noobcomments and without any context, I have no interest in looking to see if they are relevant or not.

The issue with the current model is that all I see is a list of green comments. What articles are they related to, what other discussions are they replying to?

Realize my comments come from the perspective of someone with 8600+ karma. I won't be silenced by this, but most people that come afterwords will be.

Its a bad, bad idea.
Especially for capped connections we already are paying for it. Say we get 250 gb a month. We should be allowed to use that as we see fit. If that means millions of cat pictures why should that be treated any different then streaming video. The big problem is that in most areas there is little to no competition so we are all stuck.
second point first: markup _is_ common in notes apps (many).

personally, i'd predict zero uptake with textile; it's dead.

and there are so many other notes apps around that i think
you will have trouble with uptake even if you add markdown.

if you're doing it for love, or experience, then go ahead;
otherwise, you'd need some kind of new angle to break big.

-bowerbird
This is so appalling. If your wife is in labor and needs to rush to the hospital, the cab driver ought to charge you outrageously because you're richer than him?
When the elites are allowed censor "bad" voices, it ends up hurting progress. The elites of the middle ages did the same to the "bad" voices defying the clergy. The elites in Afghanistan do the same to the "bad" and "immoral" voices demanding freedom for women.

The brain plays tricks on you and makes you believe that your perception/ideas are "good", while those opposing you are 'bad'. Letting humanity play into the hands of this cognitive bias of the elites or the majority. Nothing worse for progress. We could've come much further had it not been for this.

If no one in the 'elite' club thinks that my ideas are 'good', does that mean my ideas are wrong?

It has been and will be bad science to suppress "bad"/"crazy"/"stupid" ideas. "Bad" of today might be the status quo tomorrow. Interfering with this evolution is "bad". No matter how smart you think you are.
This is my core concern also. pg says that hopefully traffic will be high enough that you won't even see a delay - that's logic that only holds true for the front page. Further down, comments won't come through for large amounts of time. That's going to ruin discussion and also create pileups where 10 people see that some link should obviously be posted and do so before anyone gets approved.
30 Images in 30 Days
Hard to say. HN still archives dead submissions, so maybe you can verify.

I personally thought the satoshi identity thing was mainstream bullshit.

My assumption was that people in power have a lot of incentive to find out who he is, and would have done so were it possible.
I'm kind of skeptical. The biggest problem as I see it is that a lot of the more interesting comments get voted to zero because 'controversy' or not 'mainstreamed thought,' while frequently a lot of the heavily upvoted comments are platitudes/acceptingly normative/self-reinforcing meh kind, while many of the more interesting ones are often in the middle. Now I may be wrong about this, but I don't think high karma is indicative of the quality comments so much as it is indicative of a comments' closeness to the communities normalized colloquially accepted wisdom, since the crowd is self-reinforcing.
>maybe 2% of the comments I see are unreadable-grey.

Maybe that's the problem? That is, maybe bad comments are, to paraphrase Mark Twain, like the weather; everyone talks about them but nobody bothers to downvote them to unreadable greyness.

(either that, or there are voting rings that devote themselves to upvoting greyed-out comments).
> I could use it to write native code

mono -aot
I think there's a lot of value to this idea. Think of it as basic network effect/peer pressure/culture thing. Just as you want "more of the right people", you (probably) want to start out on a topic with "more of the interesting/right" comments. That will generally steer the discussion -- as readers adapt to what is being discussed.

This could/should probably be a/b tested (eg: on/off on odd/even numbered submissions or whatnot).