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Comment by seagreen | Hacker News Reader

If that ever changes and HN is overrun (insert dramatic and sad Hans Zimmer score) what about starting a new HN just for programmers? I wouldn't be able to get in at the moment, but someday I'd hope to be able to.[1]

[1] I'm assuming you'd have some kind of rotating or individualized Project Euler style problems that you have to solve to get in, and that they would be pretty tough. It occurs to me that you could also have temporary student accounts for people who are just getting into the software world as well though.

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Passing a programming test is no guarantee for having anything interesting to contribute to an online community, just look at your company's internal IT mailing lists.

Totally! That's why I'm not suggesting anyone do it now. There's a place for kludgy solutions, but not until you've tried everything else.

An invitation based system, while not perfect, would probably be the most effective method. Plus, the owner of the site could restrict or encourage growth by the amount of invitations allocated... allowing for easy management of unwanted lulls or spikes in user activity.

Invitation based communities are also very self-policing. If you invite someone and they happen to be an idiot then there is egg on your face as well.

Ideas were floating around for this: http://i.imgur.com/BuF7d.png

Clever. It's like CAPTCHA for programmers. It wouldn't be much more difficult than the current registration process.

By "get in" do you mean to comment or to simply read the comments? I'm all for a intelligence test (I personally would like a "actually RTFA test"), but I'm pretty sure that making that test required to even read the comments is a terrible idea.

I meant to comment. Though of the three strategies mentioned here (obscurity, invitation-only, and skill tested) I definitely prefer the first two.

could try what metafilter does. It seems like a nice community.

Iirc there's a certain site that requires you to solve a differential equation as captcha. The name escapes my mind.

One of the comics I read requires you to solve a simple calculus problem before you can comment, as a pseudo-captcha.

http://spikedmath.com/

That's cool. By the way, I got mine as well. It's the Quantum bit service.

Link - http://random.irb.hr/signup.php

This has already happened. Someone should start something new, ideally a smaller, more focused crowd.

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