If we're not able to attend but would like to submit our resume to the YCombinator companies, is there a good place to do so? I'd be tempted to submit my resume via the application, but it doesn't seem fair to the startup companies to have to sift through resumes from people unable to attend.
Where does this nonsense come from? I can't take being silent and just flagging anymore. This is exactly The kind of story that made me stop reading digg then reddit... I really don't want to finish that sentence with Hacker News. I don't care if these stories are submitted but I do care that there is an opaque process around how I can make my actions against these stories more effective. I would also like to know the general stats about the community. I wonder if this is just a natural communal process as the community grows or a flaw in the structure of the community design.
Don't take action against the story—more will come in its place. Take action instead against the submitter. jrp has submitted three stories. Two were HN-type stories. This, the third, is descending into irrelevance. Tell him that "we do not want this here, and if this is what you have to offer, we do not want you here (or, at least, we do not want you submitting.)"
Although we think of HN as a community, we still tend to deal with it in terms of the shared domain objects we create here—links, comments, and votes. We ignore that there are people sitting around this table and playing with the shared collection of LEGO we call a site. If someone keeps building things no one likes, look up from the table and tell the person; don't just take apart the blocks. If we actually want a community, then people should feel social, not just technical consequences for doing things that negatively affect that community.
HN doesn't actually have a good method of going about this, though. Perhaps there should be a user-flagging mechanism (let's call it "intervention") that gives people a chance to air their complaints, in private, to the person, and prevents the person from posting publically again until they've replied to the greviances? There's nothing technical standing in their way of just replying "asdfghjkl;'" and going back to posting, but the social guilt of doing so might make HN feel "real" enough to discourage it. Plus, we could stick a "review user" link beside those replies, so people that felt they hadn't been given adequate response could submit the person to the mods for a possible ban.
While the submitter of the story plays a part in bringing the content to the community, the main reason the story makes it to the front page is due to many readers upvoting the story. Taking action against the submitter to me is wrong, because the story would get pushed back if the community hadn't upvoted it in the first place.
The voting mechanism certainly does help, but only to a point. Imagine a "new" page where only 1 in 10 posts are worthy of upvoting (about the same as now.) Now, after some growth, imagine that changing so only 1 in 100 are valuable. Then one in a thousand. If you don't weed out bad submitters, it eventually becomes so hard to find the things that are interesting that you either start "grading on a curve" and just upvoting the best of what you can see—thus creating schlock like Reddit and Digg have—or you give up and move on to another site.
To put it in telecommunications terms: you need to keep the signal clear throughout transmission. If the clarity drops, amplifying it again (through a process like voting) will only pick up the bits that survived, and will also amplify some of the noise in the process. If we can eliminate the sources of noise, however, then we don't have to amplify.
But both signal and noise are completely subjective terms to the community. What some people may consider quality posts, others may consider that noise. That's why you need voting that reflects whether the total community considers an article signal or noise.
Perhaps the solution would come somewhere from tweaking the front page display based on votes, or even customizing displays based on past voting practices from users, but I certainly do not believe that condemning the submitter is the solution. If that were followed through, I believe that the only articles that would eventually make it through the submission process come from a community that consistently echoes back the same interests to one another, without ever deviating from the norm.
20 people upvoting it is not "many" people nor does it reflect poorly on the community as a whole. Those 20 people can't make up more than 5% of the total number of active users on HN.
No matter how hard we try, we're never going to be able to control the community's whims without literal rules. No matter how much we'd like it to be so, the Reddit/TechCrunch/Gizmodo/etc commentors are not going to "unfind" HN. All we can do is flag crappy submissions like this and hope they eventually get the point.
I disagree completely [with the second paragraph.] You're trying to force people that aren't a community, people that don't share the same interests, to enjoy only certain topics—to artificially impose community upon multiple distinct masses. It doesn't work. The only way to create a community is to ensure that the people that belong post, and the people that don't, don't. They won't "eventually get the point", because for every one person that gives up, three more will discover HN for the first time. You have to tell them the point. Otherwise, we're just doing the "community summoning" cargo cult raindance without understanding what a community is: people that impose social mores on one another to create homogeneity of interest, for the better.
Well, I didn't mean to imply that we should try to impose any sort of literal rules on the community, only that all we can do is hope most of them get the point.
How are we supposed to "tell them the point"? We can't contact this jrp fellow directly and tell him to quit submitting irrelevant articles (nor would that do a whole lot of good, methinks) - our only options right now are flagging and making pointed comments on the more egregious submissions. Either those techniques work and persuade the three new readers to toe the line, or they don't. We simply don't have much control over the masses.
Personally, I think the problem could be reduced if long-time users could downvote submissions in some way (there have to be enough people who think this is a dumb article to get it off the front page, at least). After all, the number of decent comments here far outweighs the number of crappy ones, and I'd imagine that same self-moderation dynamic would hold for submissions as well.
Logged in with history of voted preferences plus chosen subreddits it is much better than HN has been lately.
I use both daily. Starting a couple months ago the number of "I want to read" articles on HN has plummeted. Today it's .5 to 1 out of 10. On reddit esp in the subreddits I care about it's 3-5 out of 10.
HN started better but stagnated and is experiencing the doom of popularity. Reddit is the superior choice now because of it's downvoting, subredits, and training(although I'm not sure this is part of code any more. But, looking at my logged in front page and the default front page is night and day difference. So, something is going on.)
Note: Don't just compare frontpages. You have to login and use the tools provided to get results.
2nd Note: HN comments are still far superior (using HN's values of "superior") than the avg reddit comment.
Well, if flagging isn't enough for you, you can try submitting other things or upvoting other items to try to push it off the front page. Not a great answer, I know; but that's all I've got to offer.
That being said, the weekends always have a worse signal-to-noise ratio than weekdays do.
I've seen this happen to every other social news site. And I don't see anything inherent in the HN design that would prevent it from happening. Sadly I think this is just how these things go.
While interesting speculation, I don't understand why we've frontpaged this story on a community site generally focused on technology, startups and hacker culture. I'd love to see this on a community site called UnsolvedMysteryNews, but until one exists, flagging for relevance.
I don't know about you, but speculation about the reality of international affairs certainly "gratifies [my] intellectual curiosity". See: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Aliens, it's definitely aliens. Wait, it's called the Arctic Sea, penguins it's definitely penguins, emperor penguins! Wait, it was sailing too far south for penguins in a non-refrigerated vessel, Alien-Emperor Penguin Hybrids! Being, er delivered to North Korea, to, er, make counterfeit US One Dollar Bills!
There, solved it. So now that's over and done with, can we find something else to satisfy your intellect, not mysteries that are only a mystery because the investigation isn't complete yet.
You caught me, I have plans to release Emperor Penguins onto the Arctic glaciers, now you might want to forget this whole conversation . . . unless you want to fight a Mexican Snorkelling Kangaroo!
Dammit I haven't made those yet either. Supervillanry is hard :(
P.S. You pointed out the most logical flaw in an illogical conspiracy theorist dig, I feel quite honoured.
Because HN is optimized for churn (constantly getting new stuff on the front page), and it only takes as a little as a single upvote to get something on the front page.
I think I saw another similar "unsolved mystery" posting about the Dyatlov Pass a few days ago. This one is at least related to current events, but how did the other one come up?
And yet, it is possible to stretch it to make it look like it belongs to hackers news: trying to resolve a mystery is like hacking through the fog surrounding the mystery. (Not only is it a stretch but also a mixed metaphor. Oh well.)
The "stretching it" is a game called "7 degrees of hacker news". Take any random page on the internet, and explain how it's really about hacker news. For example:
Bicycle frames are high tech, especially carbon fiber ones. Hackers are all about high tech. The hack is that for most people that aren't elite racers, steel is still better for the price/performance ratio than carbon fiber, despite the advertising and bandwagon effects pushing carbon. So, the article is perfectly at home on hacker news!
Have to agree. In general, as much as I like most of these alt stories that have been posted to HN lately, I came to HN to escape this sort of posting. I'm sure we could expand the term 'hacker' to apply to anyone who was a creative misfit in their field; ingenious doctors, writers ahead of their time, one-handed clock makers, etc but that's not what I consider a hacker in the context of this community. Still, would love the alternative with links like this as a companion site to HN.
I'm not commenting on this specific article, but, to me, the definition of a "hacker" has always been someone who "tinkers", as opposed to a design springing fully formed from the head of Zeus. By this definition, Edison was a hacker, and Tesla was not. Linus is a hacker, but Dijkstra was not. I don't know enough architects to say who was a hacker in that field (maybe Christopher Alexander?), but Frank Lloyd Wright was not (he designed fallingwater in the time it took his client to travel to meet with him, after meditating ahem on it for months).
By this definition, for writers, a hacker is someone who fiddles with their writing - as in this morning, I removed a comma from my novel. This afternoon I put it back in.
I don't claim it's the definition of hacking, but I think there's some merit in its perspective.
> but Frank Lloyd Wright was not (he designed fallingwater in the time it took his client to travel to meet with him, after meditating ahem on it for months).
Isn't putting stuff off to the very last moment the hall mark of the true hacker ?
Minor quibble from my 1st impression: Not really into the signin / signup form. From a usability perspective it just seems like it deviates a lot from what most users are familiar with. I like the narrative take on signin / signup but I think it would work better if the underlined sections were typical input boxes.
use it yourself, "eat your own dogfood" or however you would like to describe it. That's the most important one for me. If you're not using it to solve your own problems then what are you building it for?
Your tough-love approach "...that's life, life is not fair, deal with it" is completely misguided and naive. I certainly hope that if you ever have children you don't use that mindset on them when they come home bullied, frustrated or upset.
As someone who works on a project with a team of dedicated engineers under fairly strict code guidelines including code reviews, I can tell you from experience none of these factors have to do with "code cleanliness" (as ours is not, at least in my opinion).
It would be an interesting legal case to say the least, especially because they do not indicate that they will provide further information about the warrant, or how to act other than individuals should "take special notice".
Still I believe you are correct, by having a publicly stated policy about their planned inaction when served a secret warranty is effectively the same as making a public announcement. Ballsy, but kudos to them for making a statement about their privacy beliefs.
It does seem like something that only works once. As soon as a warrant is served and they stop updating the file, when can they start updating it again? When the warrant is made public?
Does it matter? Either rsync.net is clean, or it's not. Once surveillance begins it could continue indefinitely, and once law enforcement decides rsync.net is a threat it's likely that they'll become a regular target. After that point, if you're not OK with having your data searched by government agencies, you're not going to be entirely comfortable with rsync.net. But until that point, rsync.net can stake a big claim on keeping your data safe.
