Comment by drats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drats | Hacker News Reader

Strange popup: "Hello, i see you are coming from hacker news.

the article you clicked on was most certainly not submitted by nodejitsu.

news.ycombinator has a long history of squashing articles and submitters that aren't funded by y-comb.

most of this is done through their "silent" banning and censoring mechanisms, that leave people not even realizing they have been silenced.

i hope you enjoy this article, and remember that HN is extremely biased and that you should keep your horizons broad."

While I would agree that HN is bias towards YC-funded projects I would not agree that it is biased against non-YC projects or news. In fact, the majority of the items on HN are non-YC. This also follows for submitters and commenters for the year or more I've been here.

On a different note. Hpricot is not representative of Ruby scraping anymore - nokogiri (http://nokogiri.org/) is where it's at. Which has a Hpricot translation layer if you need to change. Even when I decided to solidify on Python for everything else I will still go back to Ruby just for nokogiri when it comes to scraping.

Marak, the guy behind the Nodejitsu (and, presumably, the popup message) is known to exhibit asshole behaviour. (See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1448309) The popup message is consistent with what HN knows of him.

Whether being a jerk justifies banning I can't say - but his assertion that HN is biased has little justification (particularly when you consider that the writer himself is biased.) Kindly ignore.

He seems to be about the same sort of asshole as a lot of other internet personalities (Theo comes to mind). i.e., he's good at what he does, knowledgeable, and he doesn't take the time to play nice with others.

It kinda comes down to what sort of "thing" HN is supposed to be -- whether it has a place for people like him -- but regardless, he's certainly not exactly hurting over his inability to play in our little sandbox here.

Perhaps, though I wouldn't put it past him to write that popup message. It reads as childish sniping, is unnecessarily snarky, and it detracts from the core message of the post.

Knowledgeable he may be, but professional he is most certainly not.

Edit: I must admit, however, that I'm interested as to why he was banned. I don't believe he's said/done anything spiteful and mean in HN itself.

But he's actually not knowledgeable or good at what he does -- if you view his Github page, you'll see that his projects are 100-line thefts or wrappers around other people's work.

He's been a major drain/drag on the Node.js community, and makes the IRC channel a toxic wasteland for a good part of the day.

He trolls other sites as well... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrkDqh9ZVog

Marak is definitely unpleasant for some. However, he regularly contributes code to the community that people consider useful. For example among many high profile developers, Tim Caswell, a cornerstone of the Node.js community voted 5/5 for utility on the Nodejitsu Node Knockout entry. You're acting like you're a part of the Node.js community? If you or anyone is going to be so negative, they should at least have one or more nodejs projects that have been publicly noted as useful or relevant. So ironically, you're quite a troll.

Say what you will about his interactions with people, but "not knowledgeable or good at what he does" is an unfair characterization.

I find his hook.io project (http://hook.io/about.html) particularly interesting, and the BDD testing app he was building for Node Knockout has a lot of potential as well.

The thing is, that when it comes to other e-assholes (Zed being the obvious one), I genuinely respect their talent, and they generally do have enough insight available to them to realise when they've stepped too far. Zed in particular pumps out code I find useful and well built (<3 Lamson), and generally, his rants aren't overly horrible.

Marak comes across as someone who's seen that and intends to emulate it, without the actual development skill or talent to back it up.

Further examples of charming behavior starting at comment 3 on this thread: http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/c...

Possible justification for HN being biased:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1074079

The language in the popup pretty much makes me not interested to actually proceed with reading the article.

It's because all the Nodejitsu team are perma banned from HN.

? Why is that?

"for a few reasons, but some others for much lamer"

I have no personal knowledge, but some poking around on searchyc suggests this brouhaha may have been involved: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1448309

Question answered above: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1666304

Are there any information/discussions about the "censoring mechanisms"?

Over the years, I've occasionally heard of people getting kickbanned from HN. It doesn't happen that often, but when it does, it's been because of egregious trolling, spamming, etc... I've also heard of one or two voting rings that got booted as well.

It doesn't happen too often, however. The community here usually has pretty high commenting standards, and there's peer pressure that encourages good behavior.

There are some individuals that are either around for a while, or just getting started, and for whatever arbitrary reason one day all of their comments and submissions will be auto-dead.

They of course aren't notified at all, so they're quite happy to keep adding comments to the site, all of which stay at 1 point and never get replied to (or even read by anyone except those with showdead on).

Since there's no messaging system on this site, if they haven't bothered to add any contact information to their userpage then there's no way to let them know.

I occasionally see these folks posting some pretty thoughtful comments while auto-dead, too.

However, this has been a subject of discussion here a few times, and nothing has changed; I don't expect it to.

I do expect that this site will be banned soon too.

They could be notified by the site when they log in. People investing in thoughtful comments, or even attempting to add value to the site, who have been arbitrarily banned seems quite tragic. A community with secret rules is one to think twice about investing in. I've learned this the hard way in the past running afoul of moderators because I disagreed with one of them or their friends.

PG says that silent banning is the best way because trolls might keep going for awhile after being banned in that case, doing no harm because they're banned. But if they know they're banned, they'll just create another account.

I'm not saying that that's the best solution. A mefi-like $5 cost to join might be better, but then a) PG has to implement the payment stuff, and b) some people will complain about us charging nontrolls to get accounts.

It's possible that there could be some system where if, say, 5 people with at least 200 karma will vouch for you, it's free, but then there's even more complicated code that needs to get written, and people will complain that you can only join HN if you pay or are part of the "in crowd" that know lots of HNers.

I actually think that could work really well though. If for the first month/50 karma, those people were supposed to moderate the sponsorees comments and give them feedback on what they're doing well and what they're doing badly, we might have a lot fewer complaints about all those noobs that are ruining our site.

In my benchmarks, hpricot has a better performance for simple link extraction (and regexp has an even higher one :D)

I'm not sure how you can be biased toward something without being biased against everything else, but the spirit of your meaning seems true. YC companies and submitters have an institutional advantage, but I am not with a YC company and don't feel discriminated against.

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