Ignoring questions about the honesty or self-serving nature of the invisible-hand moderation, HN's rise came at the expense of a number of other sites, including reddit's /r/programming, Slashdot, dzone, etc.
The draw of HN, despite serious (and continuing) technical deficiencies, were hordes of young programmers who wanted to gain the attention and favor of Paul Graham and YCombinator.
So it's a serious question when I ask whether the technology community has been made better by Hacker News. I would quite sincerely say that no, it has been a net negative for the community, even if it serves Paul Graham and YCombinator well. The technology world is worse off for it.
On HN you have access to the world's experts on pretty much any tech (and some non-tech) topics you can think of.
The only other community I've posted to is Reddit, but... It seems like what sets HN apart is the ability to craft and hone your reputation. If you want to become known as an expert in bitcoin, all that it takes is time, intelligence, and writing good comments on HN.
You can gain a reputation on Reddit, but not as easily as here, I think. And it's usually a lot easier to get a negative reputation over there than to gain a positive one on here.
You can also write a profile for yourself, which a lot of people will read. Reddit doesn't have an equivalent of that. Even if you just provide contact info, you still gain value. For example, after I rather publicly lost a bunch of money on Mt. Gox, someone emailed me to see if I was okay. It was a really nice gesture, and in hindsight I'm not sure I'd get that kind of experience out of some other community. But I'm of course biased, since I've spent my time here and not in other communities.
It concerns me that people think this is true. I would bet that HN regulars include very few of the worlds experts on tech subjects; for the most part the world's experts are too busy to hang around on a web forum to chat. That's what makes them experts: focus and hard work.
Which leads to my second point of concern, which is thinking that a person's HN "reputation" means anything beyond HN. I would be very surprised if it does. Speaking of bitcoin, it seems to me that the generally accepted experts tend to be people with a deep history of working on crypto currencies, or at least a deep history with bitcoin specifically.
I've been participating, moderating, and in a few cases researching forum communities for about 15 years. It's easy to fake expertise; just make sure all your comments and posts are well-researched and fact checked before posting. That's not the same thing as being an actual expert--it's the difference between a Ph.D. in physics and an undergrad writing a research paper. No matter how accurate and readable their paper is, the undergrad is not an expert. And forums tend to disproportionately reward readability, humor, and writing style, over substance.
I'm not trying to criticize your posts or expertise specifically; I don't know either well enough to comment. I'm just sounding a general cautionary note about taking online forums too seriously. They are great for entertainment, social gratification, and light education. But they are no substitute for the work of creating real accomplishments.
Log out and you'll be surprised how speedy the site is. Log in...12 seconds to return 6KB of data, at least in my case.
Have I been capriciously slowbanned to encourage me to lose interest and get lost, or is the process of counting up the user karma a cause of significant slowdowns? Are certain accounts more costly than others?
The "fun" of Hacker News is that you never can tell...
It is interesting that the top post in this story is someone lauding the moderation of someone whose moderation they, presumably, have no ability to view. While the assignment of hellbans and slowbans may be completely just and deserved, it might also have a profoundly corrupting influence, steering conversation exactly where it serves certain purposes best.
Have I mentioned how fantastic the current crop of YC companies are‽
I'm currently pushing 13 seconds a page load (for just the HTML), clearly caught in a super-clever (albeit comically cowardly and childish) slowbanning.
I've said absolutely nothing controversial or mean-spirited, aside from perhaps questioning Paul Graham's dubious "hidden until approved" moderation scheme.
Truth be told I've derived little value from the site for quite some time, so as Cartman so oft said: "Screw You Guys, I'm going home!". Or at least to Slashdot or something.
Sites like HN can't escape Parkinson's law of triviality: Complex or mixed-conclusion content will naturally get drown out by easily "understood" (at least in the perception of the reader) and debated material.
Titles play a large part as well, as they allow people to support or reject a notion without the effort of even following the link.
This isn't meant to be grumpy or conspiratorial, nor is it negative about HN, it's just the way these things often work. HN does not measure or demand that you follow a link to click the arrow (nor does it require it for "flag", which is a used in practice to downvote). It doesn't maintain a history of recently visited items to ease voting on content you may have read earlier in the day. These naturally lend themselves to cheap votes.
HN has always been rather intensively curated. You may be right about the statistical trend, but conscious intervention can reverse this "entropy" somewhat in our limited context. The question is how we can do this better.
Fascinatingly, the number of stories posted to the site has not been increasing:
That might be a good thing. The number of substantive HN-appropriate stories in the world is not growing by leaps and bounds; neither, therefore, should our story stream. We want quality, not quantity.
There's a lot we can do about story quality, because the front page is so limited, there are many fewer stories than comments, and because we manage the front page for quality in ways we could never manage the threads. However, there's no way we can scan the universe of stories to find all the best ones. We rely on /newest to be our universe of stories. If /newest is broken, we'll fix it. But we're going to focus on the problem of bad comments first.
I'm happy to see these are the priorities. To emphasize comments > submissions, my HN app for android opens all articles directly to the comments. it takes 2 clicks to see the submitted link.
Almost certainly because they knew about their own enormous liability. They settled with a family for this issue in February of 2006, and not long after did the engineering change, albeit leaving the defect out there on millions of cars (insert Fight Club quote).
I suspect this issue is going to continue to grow until someone is charged with criminal negligence causing death.
> I suspect this issue is going to continue to grow until someone is charged with criminal negligence causing death.
Which is worth noting won't happen; not under this administration with Holter behind DOJ's steers. Keep in mind, GM was bailed out and saved from bankruptcy by taxpayers money, despite their uproar. Clearly, GM is in bed with administration.
Not a single person said that it has no value. But the site does an arguably poor job communicating what it is about (to those who say "watch the video", understand that many people consider videos a last resort. There has to be a significant lure to even go that far, and for many of us it didn't seem worth it).
Comments about the site are entirely appropriate on HN (this is something that concerns most of us), and you could consider your own advice and simply skip over them if they don't interest you, instead of wasting emotions on being appalled.
Exactly as others experienced, I skimmed the site and found nothing compelling me to look deeper. The site gives the feeling of significant style but little substance (technologists usually put attention only on substance, which itself is seldom compelling. There is a middle ground somewhere in between).
IMO Facebook should have never offered any free reach for businesses
It has always confused me that Facebook has done so little to monetize businesses, many of whom now list their Facebook pages in major advertising campaigns rather than their own website. Traditionally the service that Facebook provides to businesses was a pretty high value one, and it wasn't that the businesses brought users -- the businesses went to Facebook because the users were already there.
While their website is an anti-pattern, I do have to applaud one pattern that paint.net was early (if not first) to adopt: Asking you about updates when you exit the program rather than when you first open it.
Contrast this with Notepad++. Every single time I open that app -- which I only do when I have pressing, immediate work to do -- it imperiously demands that it and its plugins be updated for various trivial, if not irrelevant things. I'm sure there is an option I can find someone in the hierarchies of options, but as a default interface behavior that is atrocious.
The only time you should interrupt work -- and app start is a primary indicator that work is afoot -- is if it's a critical security update. Otherwise do something less obnoxious.
Add that to Julie Zhuo (Designer @ Facebook) doing the same thing just a few hours ago and it makes for a very curious confluence, in both cases diminishing the immediate credibility of the articles.
Is this actually possible? You couldn't change the original transaction without the private key, nor can you spend the results of it until it is in an accepted block chain block, no? Am I wrong?
You can broadcast a valid tx that depends on an unconfirmed valid tx that was already broadcasted. The second tx will only be confirmed if the first is, this is how betting sites that accept 0conf txs (such as SatoshiDice) work.
Not sure if pool software currently selects txs as a sum of the fees of the txs that depend on them, but it seems reasonable to implement.
If you don't serve the market, there are a lot of people who very quickly will.
I have mixed feelings about this. While they may have mulled over this game for a year, it remains a relatively simple idea and execution (compared to most other mobile apps). Threes has always seemed a little odd to me given that it was endlessly pitched on HN by people who seemed to believe that the authors are owed some debt of gratitude (even before the clones appeared), while endless rich and innovative apps languish on the market. I'm not saying they don't, but the way they were singled out seemed incredibly strange.
There is something in this story about the value of ideas. For years we've heard that ideas are worthless, and execution is everything. In this case the execution was very easily cloned, and such is the case with most games and apps now, and the real novelty was the idea. So where does that leave that equation? Is the idea still worthless because the execution was cloned? Does the idea now have value? Etc.
Some things are only simple in retrospect, like the laws of planetary motion as opposed to the older epicyclical orbit theory.
Three is a great game, but there were gaps in the market. The delayed Android release and the fact it couldn't be played on a desktop certainly left a vacuum others would try to fill.
Ignoring questions about the honesty or self-serving nature of the invisible-hand moderation, HN's rise came at the expense of a number of other sites, including reddit's /r/programming, Slashdot, dzone, etc.
The draw of HN, despite serious (and continuing) technical deficiencies, were hordes of young programmers who wanted to gain the attention and favor of Paul Graham and YCombinator.
So it's a serious question when I ask whether the technology community has been made better by Hacker News. I would quite sincerely say that no, it has been a net negative for the community, even if it serves Paul Graham and YCombinator well. The technology world is worse off for it.