Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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HN policy for years has been to allow two kinds of job ad: (1) job posts by YC startups, and (2) the Who's Hiring threads. We kill job ads that are neither of these.

(Incidentally, PG designed the /jobs posts to be the one privilege that YC startups get on HN. Other than that, the site policy is to treat them the same way as everybody else.)

It's not uncommon for posts to be in a grey area between job ad and story. A programming test for an interview process doesn't seem all that grey, though, so I've been killing these. Sorry to be a hard-ass about this, but I don't want to be accused of enforcing the policy erratically.

Edit: I'll unkill the post (but otherwise leave it demoted) so the discussion can remain open.

Edit 2: The argument has been put to me that this is newsworthy because A16Z are doing it. Since that's corroborated by external sources (e.g. Twitter), and the post has gotten a lot of upvotes even while it was buried, that's reasonable—so we'll restore it as news rather than as an ad. Besides which, HN is one of the few places where a programming test counts as interesting.

Can an actual list of policies be posted somewhere ? - I don't ever recall there ever being a discussion of such a policy before. Certainly there have been highly voted non-HN job posts in the past (e.g. Khan Academy)

I'm reluctant to mess with the informal way that HN has been run over the years, so there isn't likely to be a complete list of rules. We do intend to augment the HN guidelines, though—just not any time soon. The new team has to get settled in first.

In the meantime, I've been posting feedback comments most places that issues like this come up. You may need to look to the bottom of the threads to see them, because we usually mark them off-topic.

And you can always get answers to questions by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.

The informal way things worked was by the community not upvoting posts or in some cases flagging them; if the new HN position is that moderators will manually intervene to enforce these informal policies then that's the major change. Publishing the policies is minor in comparison.

The informal way things worked before is exactly the same as how they work now. There is no "new HN position". The only difference is that we're trying to be more transparent, and that's not a policy change—it's that we have more time to put in to answering questions, and users made clear it was something they wanted.

>> A programming test for an interview process doesn't seem all that grey, though, so I've been killing these.

I'm quite interested in those tests, could there possibly be a way to see them?

The "these" in "I'm killing these" simply meant reposts of the current article. Sorry there was no there there.

Thanks dang

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