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Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

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Re: Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

#571

Post by dang »

xmodem wrote: post #542
dang wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a natural assumption, but if you think a step further it's not hard to see why it's false: you shouldn't optimize for local optima, especially if doing that would ruin your global optimum. When you have a goose that lays golden eggs, don't risk the goose for an egg. YC's economic interest in HN is having it be a happy, thriving community. That dominates all other considerations put together. A fast way to ruin…

> When you have a goose that lays golden eggs, you don't risk the goose for an egg. I would agree that you shouldn't, but all too often we see companies do.

Ok, I've edited out the "you" in "you don't" to remove that ambiguity.

More interestingly: do you have examples in mind?

Re: Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

#572

Post by dang »

yojo wrote: post #558
dang wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a natural assumption, but if you think a step further it's not hard to see why it's false: you shouldn't optimize for local optima, especially if doing that would ruin your global optimum. When you have a goose that lays golden eggs, don't risk the goose for an egg. YC's economic interest in HN is having it be a happy, thriving community. That dominates all other considerations put together. A fast way to ruin…

Great explanation! I’m surprised you didn’t mention the two reasons I always thought YC pays for my news: 1) YC company friendly marketing channel. Reasonably good posts from YC companies get upvotes here, which means eyeballs and potential customers or users. 2) YC company recruiting channel. Related to above, since many posts end in “we’re hiring”, but there’s also the explicit time-decaying recruiting posts that s…

Not so much #1. It's true that YC companies get attention on HN, but they have to struggle for it like anyone else (not counting the Launch HN posts - see below). We help them sometimes, but we help non-YC startups too, and the question is always what the community will find interesting. YC startups probably have an edge on HN, but if so, it's for more subtle reasons (e.g. the fact that YC alumni have always been a core part of the community).

Definitely #2. The job ads that appear on the front page are only for YC startups, and that's one of three formal ways that HN gives back to YC in exchange for funding it. The other two are that YC startups get to do Launch HNs, which get placed on the front page (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), and YC alumni usernames are displayed in orange to other YC alumni. For some reason I always forget to mention these things when writing on the above topic, I guess because I don't think they add up to the biggest thing, even though they're significant. In my mind the big thing is the connection to startups forming and applying to YC. However, no one has ever tried to measure these things, and I'd feel a bit queasy about doing so. It would feel like stepping out of the magic circle in a fairy tale. One should not step out of the magic circle.

Re: Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

#573

Post by xtracto »

bialpio wrote: post #415
Zekio wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well if they have European users they basically have to make it opt-in

Not really. Depending on what you mean by European users, GDPR may not apply here (if GDPR was what you were alluding to).

Do you think American anti-hacking/DMCA/etc laws do not apply to people living overseas? (like Gary Mckinnon for example).

Corporations don't get to choose, either laws apply or they don't apply internationally.

Re: Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

#574

Post by notnap »

Xelbair wrote: post #559
sulam wrote: post #554

If you, like most people in this thread, find this incredibly unethical and/or potentially damaging to your relationship with your current employer and as a result you are trying to delete your account, do one thing first: Obfuscate your information before you hit the delete button! Change your name, change your address, change the email to a throwaway, etc. Yes, they -might- delete your information when you ask, but…

and what does stop them from using backups with unchanged data anyways? At least for internal/statistical purposes.

The goal is to prevent public profile with your real data first. If they publish backup of your profile it would be next level violation of trust

Re: Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

#576

Post by scandox »

egberts1 wrote: post #553
scandox wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a difficult problem? I'd be interested to hear what they got stuck on. I guess I naively imagine that in a world of text chat and voice to text it would be pretty doable.

They only initiate that phone call. I’ve explained that I can arrange for an interpreter by my side if they would give me a phone number in which I could initiate the call. But ... nope.

So pure can't-be-arsed by the sounds of it

Re: Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

#577

Post by ashtonkem »

perl4ever wrote: post #496
wbronitsky wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter what you think here though? Your customers gave you their data under one pretense, why do you think you can ethically change that pretense without discussing it with your customers? Said another way, you entered into a business deal with your customers and unilaterally changed the terms. I feel like if someone did that to you, you would be upset as well. People in this thread have carefully laid out th…

"you entered into a business deal with your customers and unilaterally changed the terms" This just jumped out at me. Doesn't every agreement/TOS document these days say they can unilaterally change the terms at any time and your only recourse is to stop using the service? I mean, I guess my point is not that it's ok, but that it emphasizes how "agreements" in our society don't seem to be actual agreements and we go…

As with most of these cases, the legal text and the social understanding vary quite significantly. From a legal perspective I would not be surprised to find out that Triplebyte is in the clear here (IANAL). But from a social perspective, they are quite obviously in the wrong.

Re: Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

#578

Post by ashtonkem »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #162
zkim wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey that's neat, I didn't know HN had a flamewar detector. How does it work? Content matching and post frequency?

I know at some point there was a penalty attached to articles that had more comments than upvotes. This struck me as incredibly unnatural, since I frequently comment and very rarely upvote an article. I don't really see what the one metric has to do with the other. But apparently everyone else has a different model of HN in mind.

I’m sure some heuristic that combines comments per hour, average thread length, and ratio of comments to upvotes could do a pretty good job detecting flame wars in a community the size of HN.

Re: Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public

#580

Post by sulam »

Xelbair wrote: post #559
sulam wrote: post #554

If you, like most people in this thread, find this incredibly unethical and/or potentially damaging to your relationship with your current employer and as a result you are trying to delete your account, do one thing first: Obfuscate your information before you hit the delete button! Change your name, change your address, change the email to a throwaway, etc. Yes, they -might- delete your information when you ask, but…

and what does stop them from using backups with unchanged data anyways? At least for internal/statistical purposes.

If they are _determined_ to use your data, they will have backed up before they announced this and saved it off somewhere. Normal backup mechanisms won't get the job done, though, because they typically age out. GDPR and CCPA both require backups to explicitly not allow for restoration, although of course they could ignore both.
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