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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Job ads should go to the 'Who is hiring' thread.

I'd argue that, though this is an advert for a job, the reason it was posted here was for its news/interest value - the people reading it are unlikely to be applicants.

Technically correct, but speaking for myself: I was interested to read this job description even though I have no intent of applying.

Although I realise that deciding where you draw the line for "interesting job descriptions" is very blurry.

The rule is pretty simple: YC backed start-ups get to post job ads using a special mechanism, everybody else lines up for the who-is-hiring posts.

I understand what you're saying, but the notability of the role would get lost in a general hiring post.

If you're suggesting it's simply impossible to discuss notable job descriptions on their own, that would be a bit sad. Alternatively, if it's that this isn't sufficiently notable, I guess that's arguable, but I found it interesting :|

Isn't this a job ad for the United Kingdom (YC1215)?

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Don't find that UK's defence is hiring a wargames designer is curious?

Not in the least, I'd fully expect them to have each and every job that one would normally find in a government either staffed or an open position.

If you feel that it is interesting then you're welcome to upvote the entry.

Thanks for the recommendation, I have done so.

I don't believe the British government has YC backing (yet).

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poe's_Law

Quite true, but I think the other users are probably right that it wasn't posted qua ad but repurposed for curiosity. A salt shaker isn't a chess piece but it is if you use it as one.

I think you're dead wrong about this.

See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=service.gov.uk

Which has a bunch of such submissions, always by 0 comment HN participants. It's most likely someone trying to fish the HN pool for applicants.

That it's borderline interesting is just a nice little hook to get around the rules. But feel free to undo my flag.

Either something odd's going on and past submissions have been removed, or there's only two things from service.gov.uk. One of which is this and the other from 531 days ago doesn't appear to be allowing comments. Not saying you're wrong, but your link isn't backing you up so you may want to double check it's the one you intended.

They don't allow comments because the links are too old. But I was referring to the comment history of the accounts posting those links, not to the links themselves.

I'd say https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=orome is much more benign! I'd rather encourage people to post out-of-the-way things, even if a few unwanted twists get in there.

If it gets to be more of a problem we'll arrive at your view soon enough, and more importantly, I appreciate your watching out for the quality of HN. On that we agree fully.

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