yajoe

$0.02 regarding the name of the feature, which I think anchors too much in the "censorship/free speech" principle discussion when it seems you have much more tactical goals (moderator workload, foster specific topics, etc.).

Consider renaming the feature from "pending comments" to "civility filter." In prose one would say Moderators now can require civility via special-purpose moderation on specific threads.

Similarly, consider changing the "[pending]" text to "[Pending civility check]" and changing the "endorse" link to "Affirm civility" (or just "Civil" to keep with one-word nav elements).

Why?

"All speech must be endorsed" --> "Bad Thing"

"All speech must be civil" --> "Good Thing"

This is an interesting feature, and certainly not something I would have expected as the "next" feature to add. When I read "pending comments" I expected something similar to slashdot's old "preview" feature so one could double-check spelling, formatting, etc. i.e. preview the post before submitting to HN. I would not have expected "pending" to mean "pending moderation" given the successful voting feature here.

I would ask what the goals of the change are, but they seem obvious:

1) Limit nastiness and negativity

2) Encourage deeper and pensive comments

3) Cynically, it seems like a private goal would be to limit criticism of YC, though I know this would never be a stated goal. The criticism may simply have increased the priority even though HN has seemed more civil in recent months as an outside observer.

While the change may achieve these results, I would expect the following effects:

1) Fewer comments overall (there is a new "tax" to post, so-to-speak) and as a result there will be fewer visitors in the medium term (sites like HN, reddit, slashdot, huff post, etc all thrive on both the quality _and_ quantity of comments since that's what entertains people). Without controlling the number of front-page stories, you will in effect decrease the available content for viewers to consume. The demand will be filled elsewhere. I always assumed there was a private, invite-only forum for YC and that you would leave HN alone as a great PR platform... this move makes me wonder some more.

2) Comments will trend towards the quality of bane, tokenadult, ChuckMcM, patio11, cperciva, etc (we all know them) at the risk of fewer "provocative" posts. Often the greatest quality posts, however, are in response or to contradict simple-minded or provocative posts.

3) I am concerned by this line: People who regularly endorse comments that fail one or both of these tests will lose the ability to endorse comments. I like meta-moderation and all, but I don't like being reminded that all actions are recorded and tied back to my account. I would ask for some separation between "endorsing" and "agreeing" -- as a continual skeptic, I like reading and promoting contrarian views since it helps us learn.

I look forward to watching the experiment, and as a parting request, would you be able to record and measure the goals? There must be a YC company that can help with that, and I imagine it would be a wonderful blog write-up!

Similar to another poster, the only person admitted to MIT from my high school 10 years ago out of a class of 1200 from a wealthy suburb was the daughter of an alumnus who ran the interviews for the region. I just find it hard to believe Legacy doesn't play a factor even if there is no checkbox on the admission forms. The father stopped running interviews the year she got in.

Even Harvard, Stanford, and Yale each admitted 3 people that year (which, interestingly were different people -- it's as if they colluded to induce enrollment).

totally off-topic, but because of the SOPA nonsense I've slowly moved my 40-or-so domains to namecheap during 2013 when their renewals came up. I was otherwise ambivalent about which DNS service/registrar to use before that incident...

but thank you for helping the guy get his twitter account back and fixing up the internal controls.

Mind elaborating, even if it's wild speculation and rumor? I haven't been following YHOO closely to know the backstory or context behind this individual.

Thanks, you're right. I don't know why I would have ever thought "!" was bitwise... only on a Saturday night.

It just goes to show that sleep is very important for interviews!

Agree on needing comments.

My C++ is a bit rusty, but I think the code is in fact checking if the number is divisible by 2 (i.e. n % 2 == 0).

I think it's using the bitwise and operator (single &) to AND each bit in n and (n-1) and then checking if the least significant bit is 1 or 0. The code would need to shift (<< or >>) to check if the number were a power of 2.

I thought there was another bitwise NOT operator, not the !, but I think, and this is the part I'm hazy on after getting home, that the ! applied to an int is intended to flip each bit. Here's why:

------------

n = 6 = 110

n-1 = 5 = 101

n & (n-1) = 110 & 101 = 100

!(110) = 001 => true

------------

n = 5 = 101

n-1 = 100

n & (n-1) = 101 & 100 = 101

!(101) = 010 => false only if the least significant bit is used for logic decisions... this seems non-portable for some reason, just like using the ! as a bitwise NOT. It may actually be that ! only looks at the least significant bit, but I can't find c++ docs to say one way or another.

Whatever the code actually does, this is exactly the kind of example to use as a poster child for adding just a few comments.

Thanks. We've been segregating authenticated vs non-authenticated traffic to different domains for a few years now (we had the same realization as moot), but I was unaware about this specific exploit related to TLS compression.

That said, it seems on nginx TLS compression was not enabled by default, so we are ok (for this known vulnerability).