The Pitchforks are Coming | Hacker News Reader

The Pitchforks are Coming

politico.com

5 pointsenjalot8 comments

I'm curious to see if this only grows worse given the continued automation of industries like manufacturing that have traditionally been the backbone of the American middle class during the 20th century. Not so much that jobs won't be there, but they will require more advanced skills and less employees, thanks to "software eating the world."

Building the case for raising the minimum wage is an interesting one to be viewed objectively (not that it ever is), but I think it's also too early to tell with Seattle what the long-term outcomes are.

If capitalism works, it will solve that problem. In other industries there are talent shortages. Maybe markets will be created on making tools to raise the relative skillset of a displaced workforce?

One can hope, and I would sincerely like to think that new markets within manufacturing or other "old" industries are going to emerge. Off-shoring isn't the cheap solution it once was. Then again, I tend to be very critical of the belief that other industries have "shortages": http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-i...

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=pitchforks+are+coming#!/story/fore...

To be honest, this is one of the problems I have with HN. If there's a decent article but it goes relatively under the radar, I'll never see it. And there's no system in place to give an article a "second chance". It seems like based on the algorithm in place, if it doesn't take off immediately, the article will never get traction.

Thanks for writing that. It's definitely a problem that too many good stories fall through the cracks on HN. If all the good stories were able to reach the front page even briefly, I'm convinced that the story quality on HN would be much higher. So this problem is actually my primary focus these days when I have time to work on the code.

You're a bit mistaken about there being no system to give second chances right now. If an article hasn't had significant attention within about the last year, we don't treat reposts as dupes. That already helps quite a lot. However, the ideas that we're hoping to implement around this are different and, if they work, will have a more dramatic effect. So I hope you'll be willing to wait and see.

Now for the bad news. I'm afraid we don't agree that this "pitchforks" piece is a decent article. To me (qua moderator) it looks like a low-substance political riler-upper by an author who has been circulating the same message (including through HN) for a while now and happened to score a post on Politico, a questionable site for HN to begin with.

Qua reader, by the way, I have a different reaction. I kind of like that stuff and I find the root question very interesting. I mean the question of whether the postwar social order which has been so stable is threatened by current macroeconomic developments. But (qua moderator again) I think any HN discussions on that need to be seeded with higher-quality material.

So the reason you were frustrated in this case is not HN's dupe detector, it's that a moderator is more or less calling an article you like off-topic for HN. My thought was that since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7953608 did have some discussion, we could just treat all the reposts as dupes. Maybe that was overly finessey.

Thanks for your response. Glad to hear you're looking for a solution, and I'm very interested in seeing what ends up getting changed. I wonder how many people are actually looking at the "new" page vs. the front page, as I would imagine that an incredibly small number of people are the ones that end up being responsible for whether an article falls through the cracks or not. Personally, I rarely look at articles on the new page, so I expect that there are quite a lot of articles that do fall through the cracks for me.

Appreciate the input on the article in particular - I thought it was an insightful look as a Seattle local who has been puzzled by the $15 wage minimum for quite some time. I definitely see the point of it being more off-topic, but I'd argue that the author's background helps that cause (I have seen plenty of articles about random tech luminaries' opinions on somewhat off-topic items).

Regardless, thank you again for writing a reasoned reply to add context.

As a local Seattleite, this is the first logical explanation I've heard for a $15 minimum wage, and it has given me a reason to change my mind on the policy. I don't know how it will play out (I don't think anyone does), but I hope he's right.

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