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Comment by sillygeese | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but the point is that only YC companies get to advertise jobs here.

They wanted to remind us that other companies can't advertise here, but also felt obligated to pretend that YC companies don't get any special treatment because they can't post job ads "as stories" either.

But in reality, rules concerning job ads are about job ads, not what constitutes a "story submission". Fair rules don't have tailor-made loop-holes for favoured companies either.

Note that I'm not actually opposed to YC posting job ads for YC companies here. It's their forum. I am opposed to dishonesty though, and that's why I commented.

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Posting this sort of thing is like releasing web software. As soon as you do it, you start seeing the bugs you missed. Writing it late at night makes it worse. Oh well, at least my copy-paste code (s/whoishiring/dangispostponing/) to auto-submit at 8 AM didn't fail. I had visions of it making a new post (by me!) every 2 minutes until I woke up.

Let me try again. There are three rules.

  1. Anyone can post job ads to Who Is Hiring threads.

  2. Only YC startups can post job ads to the front page.

  3. No one can post job ads via /submit.

Obviously Rule #2 doesn't apply equally to everyone. But Rule #3 does apply to everyone. That was my point.

Why did I include that? Because we've noticed an uptick in YC startups mistakenly posting job ads via /submit instead of through the separate mechanism of #2. I wanted to let everyone know that these should be flagged just the same as any errant job ad. Otherwise users might see them and think, "well, YC startups are allowed to," when in fact they're not allowed to do it that way. The story stream (i.e. /newest) should be kept free of job ads by anyone.

I used the word "story" in the technical sense of what kind of post gets created when you post it via /submit. Job ads posted under #1 are comments; under #2 they're jobs; under #3 they're stories (and shouldn't exist). These are disjoint types.

I have to run out for a few hours now. I'll come back for the next round of bug fixes later.

Your patience is amazing. I've really appreciated the calming effect you've had over the past several months, along with your thoughtful explanations. So, thank you very much.

Thanks for the civil response. I'll keep this brief, because we shouldn't keep this up anyway.

    no one is allowed to submit job ads as stories to HN
    --> Alright, a general rule. 
     
    That includes YC startups
    --> The general rule applies to YC companies too.
        That's fair.

    since the job ads we let them post are not stories
    --> .. But the only reason it applies is because
        YC job ads circumvent the submission mechanism
        that can't be used for submitting job ads.

Of course you want only YC companies' job ads on the front page, and that's fine. It's your forum.

I have a problem with the wording because it's basically all about pretending that YC companies don't get any special treatment, based on the fact that they're not actually breaking the rules that apply to all companies.

But the only reason they're not breaking the rules, is that they get to circumvent them. That's special treatment right there.

Pfft. This took way longer than it should have. I'll just move on now.

> I have a problem with the wording because it's basically all about pretending that YC companies don't get any special treatment

This is false. No one is "pretending" anything of the sort, not now and not earlier. That ought to be clear from my second post, if not the first.

If we wanted to pretend something, we'd hardly specify its exact opposite in the FAQ.

As I said, I'm moving on now :)

There's no dishonesty, except perhaps to people who don't realize that news DOT Y COMBINATOR dot com is primarily a YC-startup job board, and always has been. There has never been any pretense of fairness that non-YC companies can post job ads, which are a different sort of entity from stories/text posts: no comments, no votes, no flagging, etc. I'm not sure why you put "story submission" in quotation marks; it's a very different sort of entity.

> primarily a YC-startup job board

That's far from the case. I spend less than 1% of my time thinking about job ads. I spend most of it thinking about the quality of stories and comments on HN.

HN is primarily a forum for intellectually interesting stories and civil, substantive discussion. Most, probably nearly all, of its value to YC is intangible. The quid pro quo of the job ads is relatively minor, but gets attention because it's visible.

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