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I'd love to know more about this. Does anyone have insight into why YC changed on this point? Maybe it's just the obvious "people lose focus." But I'd like a confirmation.
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He does not. He stopped at the same time he announced his retirement from YC. (He'd at this point transitioned the running of HN to dang.)
I miss pg. He was really cool. I understand why he left, I think, but... I miss your comments too! You should write more. Both essays and comments. I think it's easy to care too much about image and whether someone might stir up controversy. But you have genuinely interesting things to say. Even if HN doesn't feel like the kind of place you can say them, it still does a lot of good. I don't know. Sometimes it just fe…
Just to be clear there are still a lot of incredible people who post to HN, but from the signs that I see, a fairly large chunk of early HNers who are well known in hacker circles basically stopped posting. And there are also a large number of people who are very reluctant to take part in the discussions here knowing how a vocal subset of HNers react to any post or comment : talk trash. Examples of the latter : tptacek, dguido and other secuity professionals. If you read some of the security related threads where tptacek takes part, you will notice that he is literally talking to a wall, people refuse to listen to the guy or try to understand the reasoning behind his comments, though he is respected in the security community and is always right on security related topics. Especially on security related threads there is dangerous advice floating around. Eg- use Tor or some stupid suggestion on how to trick the CBP at the border.
I also noticed the rise of anti-semiticism and just generally hateful comments when the topics of religion, nationality or Trump are brought up. This issue is only getting worse and god help the moderators who have to read these comments on a daily basis.
Though this might be controversial, the general quality of discussion has gone down over the years. I think this is inevitable : as the community grows, quality of discussion goes down. HN is doing incredibly well on this count, the discussions are still the best on any public forum, but IMO the quality is going down. As the community grows, veterans generally tend to become inactive.
(Before people point out that my account is only 159 days old, I've been part of HN for much longer under different handles.)
Reminds me of that old Dropbox "ShowHN" post. Looking back at old emails takes some heart, I'm afraid of the idea as I'd probably cringe too hard. My Reddit account just had it's "cakeday" which means I'm in the "9th year club" and the idea I have comments from 9 years ago still publicly available kind of scares me. Too the point where I feel motivated to write a script to delete anything beyond >1-2yrs back. Old com…
> Too the point where I feel motivated to write a script to delete anything beyond >1-2yrs back. Please don't. I used to write a diary with meaningless essays when I was in the second grade. When I rediscovered it as an adult, I found them so embarrassing that I threw it away. It's hard to say how much I wish I hadn't done that. Those idiotic essays could have been my good memories; little reminders of how I thought…
And when they do, any little thing in your past can and will be used as a social cudgel against you.
Reminds me of that old Dropbox "ShowHN" post. Looking back at old emails takes some heart, I'm afraid of the idea as I'd probably cringe too hard. My Reddit account just had it's "cakeday" which means I'm in the "9th year club" and the idea I have comments from 9 years ago still publicly available kind of scares me. Too the point where I feel motivated to write a script to delete anything beyond >1-2yrs back. Old com…
I'm going to take a contrarian view that this is not necessarily something that we need or want to keep associated with ourselves. There are groups like Archive Team and IPFS who talk about how ethereal components of the web cause vanishing history and a lost cultural heritage, while neglecting to note that the web is first-in-its-kind because it makes pedestrian, routine conversations to be transcribed and accessed from all over the world.
In olden times, even personal letters would generally include significant news or interesting updates, and these were never intended for a non-personal audience. The high cost of committing information to a fixed medium like paper, as opposed to the ethereal domain of air in which conversation naturally abides, would cause self-selection that made for only the elements considered most significant by the authors or artists to be committed. I am not convinced that archiving every comment or writing that gets published is a necessary or even beneficial part of preserving a cultural heritage. In some cases, like Geocities, the benefit is obvious, but I doubt the value of treating every conversation or exchange as a prized historical artifact.
There are several reddit auto- and back-deleters already. Check out shreddit [0], which I've used with some success in the past, and which can be configured to retain certain high value posts (posts above a user-specified score threshold or that have been awarded gold). I think it's good to keep this running on a continuing basis so that unless the comment is exceptional, only the last few months of comments are available.
This is particularly important/valuable if you have any slightly controversial opinions on anything. Over the years, it's easy to accidentally leak a little information here, a little there, and when a psycho decides to go on a vendetta against you because you insulted the species of grass they just installed in their front yard, it's too late to go back and plug those little leaks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I miss pg. He was really cool. I understand why he left, I think, but... I miss your comments too! You should write more. Both essays and comments. I think it's easy to care too much about image and whether someone might stir up controversy. But you have genuinely interesting things to say. Even if HN doesn't feel like the kind of place you can say them, it still does a lot of good. I don't know. Sometimes it just fe…
> But the voices that pg once enjoyed talking with are still here. Just to be clear there are still a lot of incredible people who post to HN, but from the signs that I see, a fairly large chunk of early HNers who are well known in hacker circles basically stopped posting. And there are also a large number of people who are very reluctant to take part in the discussions here knowing how a vocal subset of HNers react…
That has its own issues but has been really nice for me to keep in touch with the old familiar faces.
And yet it felt completely obvious to many of us that were around since the beginning. YC, reddit, HN, and Dropbox are among the companies I definitely would have invested $1000 into, had the opportunity been available. I predict the next generation of YC will be a scalable crowdfunding company. It will look more like a startup-focused Kickstarter than seed-stage Sequoia.
Yeah, it was limited to "accredited investors" in compliance with SEC and tax laws in the US, but even that is changing, at least on paper [2].
[1] https://fundersclub.com [2] https://www.cooleygo.com/can-you-raise-money-from-unaccredit...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I miss pg. He was really cool. I understand why he left, I think, but... I miss your comments too! You should write more. Both essays and comments. I think it's easy to care too much about image and whether someone might stir up controversy. But you have genuinely interesting things to say. Even if HN doesn't feel like the kind of place you can say them, it still does a lot of good. I don't know. Sometimes it just fe…
> But the voices that pg once enjoyed talking with are still here. Just to be clear there are still a lot of incredible people who post to HN, but from the signs that I see, a fairly large chunk of early HNers who are well known in hacker circles basically stopped posting. And there are also a large number of people who are very reluctant to take part in the discussions here knowing how a vocal subset of HNers react…
this applies to all sorts of things, and PG is no exception. PG is an expert on programming and on founding VC funded companies. he is certainly not an expert on most other things but would frequently comment on those things as if he was, and then act very defensive and shocked when he was criticized for things he was wrong about or tone-deaf about.
really this applies to ANYONE in this community. there is lots of very intelligent, well-reasoned discussion, but nobody ought to get a pass on things because of their reputation. we ought not defer to authority. we ought to discuss the arguments as presented.
And yet it felt completely obvious to many of us that were around since the beginning. YC, reddit, HN, and Dropbox are among the companies I definitely would have invested $1000 into, had the opportunity been available. I predict the next generation of YC will be a scalable crowdfunding company. It will look more like a startup-focused Kickstarter than seed-stage Sequoia.
There is a reason many companies aim to stay private.
And yet it felt completely obvious to many of us that were around since the beginning. YC, reddit, HN, and Dropbox are among the companies I definitely would have invested $1000 into, had the opportunity been available. I predict the next generation of YC will be a scalable crowdfunding company. It will look more like a startup-focused Kickstarter than seed-stage Sequoia.
Didn't you just describe FundersClub's [1] business model? Basically a crowdsourced investment platform for startups. Yeah, it was limited to "accredited investors" in compliance with SEC and tax laws in the US, but even that is changing, at least on paper [2]. [1] https://fundersclub.com [2] https://www.cooleygo.com/can-you-raise-money-from-unaccredit...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But the voices that pg once enjoyed talking with are still here. Just to be clear there are still a lot of incredible people who post to HN, but from the signs that I see, a fairly large chunk of early HNers who are well known in hacker circles basically stopped posting. And there are also a large number of people who are very reluctant to take part in the discussions here knowing how a vocal subset of HNers react…
I respect tptacek's expertise in his domain. I sometimes argue with him in other topics, where he is out of depth but assumes that because his a respected expert in one domain he is also an expert in others when he is actually not an expert at all. this applies to all sorts of things, and PG is no exception. PG is an expert on programming and on founding VC funded companies. he is certainly not an expert on most othe…