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Comment by greyman | Hacker News Reader

Whether true or not, IMHO this is not appropriate to publish or discuss publicly. It is his private matter and only tabloids would publicize that for their own gain.

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I agree. It was an asshole move to write such a story. There's no actual news here. And despite all their high-sounding justifications for writing it (which make up about half the text), it's pretty clear what their motives are.

Incidentally, according to the software I wrote to warn if the quality of stories on the front page goes down, this is the lowest scoring story ever to get this high on the front page.

Perhaps you could publish a list of similar stories that don't deserve front page status and display them to users when they create an account.

Or arm the top 100 users with a -1 button and let them offset the tendency to front page bad (or non) stories.

or perhaps only being able to downvote a story once it reaches X points, so it doesn't get downvoted to hell but doesn't stay up too long either

Personally, I think if you blocked fromedome's blog spamming, the overall quality of submissions would probably go up by a measurable amount.

I have a sneaking suspicion that "fromedome" is actually "Dan Frommer" from Alley Insider. The names are just too similar but I have no way of either proving or disproving it.

I assume that's who it is as well; given every submission is to a Dan Frommer article. Which is why I'm saying he's just a blog spammer. Well, that along with the fact that he's never even bothered to comment once here.

How does the software that rates the quality of stories work?

Lisp has AI built-in!

Were I to design it, I would pagerank on users and their votes, or use a bayesian filter on article text with classification via some top users' votes. But I'm very curious to find out pg's solution.

it's also called cynicism

I totally agree that a story SPECULATING about Jobs having cancer is total crap. But on a slight tangent, I disagree (reluctantly) with his decision to keep it private if he DOES have cancer or if it comes back at a later date. I don't think he should have kept it private the first time, either.

If you're a CEO who can be easily replaced, this isn't as big of a deal (i.e. making it public or not public isn't going to rock the boat too much either way). But to a great portion of the general public, Steve Jobs and Apple are the same thing. He's largely credited with single-handedly bringing them back from the brink. If Jobs announced today that he was quitting Apple, the stock would almost surely tank. He's the CEO of a public company, and if his personal health has a signification effect on stock price, I think he has an obligation to disclose that. Billions of dollars are at stake to shareholders, and they have the right to make decisions with all the information that controls the price of that stock.

If you're a politician, you know your lifestyle is under the microscope and your morals and ethics are always in question. You know this going in. If you're a CEO of a public company, you know that you can personally have a large impact on the stock price. You know this going in. It's unfortunate that personal issues can impact the stock, but if they do, I think it needs to be disclosed.

While I find the article itself off-putting, I can't help but think of the loss of trust in Jobs when he didn't disclose it the first time. I think it sucks that he is in a position that he needs to dislose it, and I can't imagine going through that publicly if I was in his shoes. But is it really that surprising for people to be worried and talking about this when they're going to assume that he won't disclose the information if he does get sick again? Probably not a very popular position, but if you had a couple million in Apple stock (hypothetical -- I don't), would you be okay with it losing half its value in one day because Jobs didn't disclose in advance as possible and let you decide over time whether to take a chance and hang on or to sell on your own terms?

Either way, I don't envy the position the guy is in. I hope it really is just something he can quickly get over.

I can see both arguments. If you are a shareholder you are entitled to know anything that may impact your earnings. There are certain conditions people should be aware of, I am not too sure cancer is one of them.

Imagine a politician was schizophrenic, wouldn't you want to know that before you voted for him?

He's not a politician and we don't have the opportunity to vote for him, so that's not much of an analogy.

There are laws about how much a publicly-traded company needs to disclose, and I'm pretty sure that the health of its CEO isn't on the list.

On the other hand, since it is kinda important to the future of the company and the industry, I can't see any point in making it a taboo topic for the rest of us to discuss.

If you are a shareholder you do get the opportunity to vote for him. I'm not familiar with the laws, just playing devil's advocate here.

CEOs come and go so one should ideally be investing in the company, unfortunately that is not the case.

The principle public companies adhere to is that they should disclose anything 'material', meaning anything that, if it were widely known, would affect the stock price. Perhaps there are investors out there who think Apple would be worth $162 billion run by Gil Amelio or whoever, but I'm not one of them.

The health of the CEO definitely has impacts on the company, especially so in Apple's case. The health of Apple is directly related to Jobs, much more so than any other large company I can think of. There was an article (can't remember where) about his first bout with cancer and the struggle he had to stay on the up and up with the SEC. Basically it's his private matter up until it would be likely to affect his performance. It's kind of a grey area, but keeping things disclosed is much better for the company.

It's pretty depressing, but you'd have all sorts of insider trading problems with only a few people knowing you're sick. The people who would know (nurses, doctors, etc) would probably be fairly under the radar as far as that's concerned too.

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