billme

Good bye HN!

Dang (HN’s mod) just asked me to be identifiable and given that’s not a good fit for me, this will be my last post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23441542

Okay, understand; unfortunately that means I will just stop posting on HN, since I neither have the desire to have “an identity” on HN, nor do I intend to disregard any guidelines. Thanks for all the work you do to keep HN running, please don’t take this personally, understand and agree with your position, just not good fit for me. Cheers!

Thanks, wasn’t aware either of them intentionally linked ADs to public comment threads.

Have any notable examples?

Thanks, agree that’s a typo; unfortunately I am unable to fix it since editing is now locked, but appreciate you taking the time to point it out.

Downvotes per item are limited to -4 and the signal-to-noise ratio for negative votes beyond pushing them below the “new comment” boost is of little positive impact in filtering content, in my opinion.

And yes, there a lot of filters in place for upvotes, many of which are intentionally kept secret.

Personally, I don’t use downvotes.

Related link:

https://lobste.rs/about

And history:

https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...

Per the login page:

“Not a user yet? Signup is by invitation only to combat spam and increase accountability. If you know a current user of the site [1], ask them for an invitation or request one in chat [2].”

[1] https://lobste.rs/u/

[2] https://lobste.rs/chat

——

Related comment on the history of lobste.rs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23441470

Related link, leader list:

https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

Direct link to top users by rep:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek

(tptacek’s comments are super useful and extremely knowledgeable)

Agree, I personally feel this is a major issue, in fact recently posted twice about it:

Ask HN: HN user ghosted 5 years, why?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436276

Ask HN: Dark Patterns on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439617

Here’s a mod’s recent comment on feature requests to give some context on the topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23199062

Related top level comment in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23440929

For related prior discussion:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+are+posting+too+fast%...

Nothing stopping any user from creating posts related to an aspect of the content on any of those ADs, but it’s obvious allowing comments for ADs would potentially cause unneeded overhead for the advertiser; clearly if any YC advertisers want to post on HN, they’re free to do so within the guidelines on HN.

HN doesn’t block negative posts about YC companies.

Sure, read all the comments by dang (aka HN’s main mod) here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23239164

My experience is the post without URLs, but say 10 upvotes are generally of lower quality than URL related posts with 10 upvotes. Not sure why this is, but I was forced to speculate, URL post intend tend to be by an expert on a topic and while non-URL post tend to be seeking experts; again, just speculation, might be wrong.

Yes, there’s a lot more upside to comments as a result.

Generally voting signal to noise ratio goes: upvote, no-vote, downvote — allowing more downvote would most like have more negative than positive impact on the community.

Agree, not sure why after X amount of rep is earned something like this is not featured for just for new users, users who haven’t viewed it, etc.

Related link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/invited

Generally speaking ADs don’t allow comments. Have an example or reasoning why this would make sense?

Not sure that’s always been true, or at least for sure PG was open about subsets if the code. Generally, there’s reason to open source code, and open sourcing it would likely result in more overhead not less; generally HN goal is to very, very slowly change the code, interface, etc.

Honestly, cloning HN really would not be that hard, cloning dang, that’s another story.

EDIT: Here’s a recent comment from dang on open source HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22791221

Stating the obvious, Reddit was in the first YC batch; YC is HN’s parent company. Further, HN was created in part because Reddit’s intend is more general than HN; HN’s intend is to focus on substantially new information that triggers both curiosity & notable dialogues.

Because they are officially sponsored YC related ADs.

Reasoning is HN’s goal, per dang, is to promote substantially new information — unless the tutorial fits this meaning, it’s less of a priority to feature than those posts that do meet it.

Worth noting there’s nothing stopping you from building custom HN searches like this to find tutorials posts, though this would not solve the likelihood of the community posting related comments:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Not surprising last reference I know of it is years old and PG is busy doing other things now.

Yes, that’s PG’s username, or at least the original & official one, but no, that’s not where it would appear.

Here’s example of a prior reference to this feature:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7432526

PG’s phone number used to appear if your rep got high enough, not sure if that’s still a feature.

Are these the only supported “custom colors” ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7432201

Here’s an example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643177

Right, I am a HN super user.

I repeatedly get accounts to 500, then move onto a new account; no reason other than by doing so I am never able to downvote regardless of the desire to do so, let’s me easily benchmark perception of my comments & excluded community’s bias to upvote known users, it’s a minor form of OpSec, etc.

Here are a few examples:

- HN automates a lot of mod related tasks, but to my knowledge rarely prior to establishing such automation defines a measurable outcome, then tests to confirm the desired outcome holds true;

- Recently discovered user that’s been shadowban 5 years will likely never know they are ghosted unless I tell them;

- Other examples which are likely considered “secrets” that might not be appropriate openly disclose; I personally object to this;

- as for the audits, it would allow HN to get an independent opinion in a way that doesn’t result in data they normally withhold from being public.

Happy to address or clarify anything on request.

I personally use any distro based on the situation.

As others have pointed out, common reasoning behind picking a distro include: hardware requirements, existing ecosystems, end user, package management, configurableness, security, long-term support, ease of learning, driver support, core dev team’s opinions, funding, etc.