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Re: undefined

#111

Post by BWStearns »

conductor wrote: post #82

My 5 cents: today I've submitted this [0] post, its title was "Valve is planning to use Blender as a game modding tool in Steam". Then it was renamed by somebody to "Steam-powered Blender" which resulted a bunch of title related comments like: > You know, with a link title like that, I was really hoping to see a food processor powered by a steam engine. >> That's HN for you. You're never quite sure whether it's progr…

I was tempted to click on that actually, then work got the better of me. I figured it was some crazy hardware.

Re: undefined

#112

Post by lifeisstillgood »

unono wrote: post #74
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That strikes me as unfair on two counts, one, its not brazen, at least by any standards I know of. HN is hardly a rolling advert for HN companies. Secondly, and more importantly, we are all about using algorithms to automate and take care of peskiness. I applaud people who do that in nearly all circumstances.

I meant that he's trying to hide HN's real intention, publicity for YCers - their job ads and blog posts are on front page but no one else is allowed, and if anyone else's story gets up there it's dealt with by his algos. Algo's are good, but his algos are specifically designed to promote his content while not revealing that. Google has a strict policy of separating ads and organic, "do no evil". PG doesn't adhere to…

I would like some citations here - Yes there is a whole job posting section solely for YC'ers. But thats pretty clearly sign-posted. And AFAIK, the only way a post there makes it to the front page is if it is voted up. And they are clearly marked 'cos you cannot comment on them, so everyone ignores them unless its for a cool company.

Do those posts get to go higher on less votes? I don't know but some proof would be nice before I agree.

And while its in context re: Google, as a personal bugbear, please reserve the word evil for events in Syria, and the like. Message boards don't come within spitting distance of evil.

Re: undefined

#113

Post by antitrust »

Part of the role of Reddit, HN and other social media is to motivate you, the collected developers out there, to write your own version and fix all the problems you see in the system (software + admins + "culture") as it is now.

That includes me. Maybe after the wedding, kid's baseball game, co-worker's going away party, and stuff this weekend.

Re: undefined

#114

Post by antitrust »

alan_cx wrote: post #77

What confuses me is why many submissions are killed off and hidden. For example, right now, if you click new is show dead on you will see this grayed out: 15.[dead] Oracle's Larry Ellison enthusiastically applauds NSA spying (techeye.net) 1 point by Mitt 17 minutes ago | flag | discuss I copy and paste it in to google, and find what looks to me like a reasonable article. It even has a CBS video source(1). It is a leg…

The weird thing about online communities is that at some point they transition from being promotional opportunities owned by the promoter to online communities owned by the users and promoters alike.

Re: undefined

#115

Post by vonmoltke »

jerf wrote: post #84
alan_cx wrote: post #77

What confuses me is why many submissions are killed off and hidden. For example, right now, if you click new is show dead on you will see this grayed out: 15.[dead] Oracle's Larry Ellison enthusiastically applauds NSA spying (techeye.net) 1 point by Mitt 17 minutes ago | flag | discuss I copy and paste it in to google, and find what looks to me like a reasonable article. It even has a CBS video source(1). It is a leg…

Some sites are auto-banned. I wouldn't be surprised techeye.net is among them, based on a quick look at the home page. While this has the occasional false positive, there are reasons for most of them.

It would be nice to know which sites those are, so we don't try to submit links to them. I submitted an article last week from i-programmer.info that went dead immediately. I assume this is the reason, but I was very confused as to what happened.

Re: undefined

#116

Post by decadentcactus »

My least favourite are product titles that are completely unrelated to the use (which is fine), but when titles are modified, it becomes completely pointless:

"Goose - A JS library for 3D graphics" --> "Goose"

Yeah thanks guys.

Re: undefined

#117

Post by lifeisstillgood »

nonchalance wrote: post #109
mcphilip wrote: post #98

The most egregious case of title manipulation that I recall was when the submission of a blog post that broke the airbnb scandal [1] was renamed. The title of the blog post was too generic to attract interest and gave no indication that it was related to airbnb [2]. The submission's title was originally something like "Airbnb user's home wrecked". The title of the HN submission was changed to the blog post's vague ti…

The cynic would say that AirBnB is a YC company and HN doesn't want to draw attention to negative news, which makes sense (if you were the operator of this or any site, you wouldn't want bad news to surface)

Those who believe in cock-up before conspiracy would say there is a 'bot running round changing submission titles to tags, given a certain SOUNDEX gap (ie if the title is close enough, leave it, else call it editorialised)

It might be feasible to test this by changing titles a lot. A mean person could build titles ("AAA AAA") to discover the algo.

Whatever. Bit of a tangent.

Re: undefined

#118

Post by RivieraKid »

There are tons of problems with Hacker News. Unfortunately it's a monopoly (network effects), so there's basically no market pressure to improve the site. The site has remained practically unchaned for years and there are so many things that could be improved:

* Real-time notification when someone replies to my comment (or when someone upvotes, turned off by default).

* More openess and transparency.

* Speed. Just tried to open this comment page in another tab: 8 seconds. Seriously?

* Collapsible comments (I have to use an extension for that).

* Limit the max width of a comment text.

* Show newest submissions in some box on the homepage.

* Highlight new comments since last visit.

* Show top submissions for a specific day.

* Markdown support.

And many more.

Re: undefined

#119

Post by PavlovsCat »

swanson wrote: post #90
alan_cx wrote: post #77

What confuses me is why many submissions are killed off and hidden. For example, right now, if you click new is show dead on you will see this grayed out: 15.[dead] Oracle's Larry Ellison enthusiastically applauds NSA spying (techeye.net) 1 point by Mitt 17 minutes ago | flag | discuss I copy and paste it in to google, and find what looks to me like a reasonable article. It even has a CBS video source(1). It is a leg…

You are waaaay overthinking it. Probably was just flagged to death because people are getting overloaded with NSA stories, especially when there is no new additions. I would probably have flagged it if I saw it, doesn't really advance the discussion and frankly, I don't come to HN for politics.

Probably was just flagged to death because people are getting overloaded with NSA stories, especially when there is no new additions

People also seem to flag stuff a lot even when there are new points made. That is, we have a gazillion articles about programming patterns, frameworks, or languages, NONE of which add "new facts"; which is fine, because they make new points, or even just old ones in an eloquent way.

The Snowden/NSA stuff was/is news, but there are also essays about the general situation. These also get flagged, and looking at dates, points, numbers of comments and positions on the front page is actually so SNAFU sometimes, I actually thought of scraping the first few pages and making a graph of position vs. time vs. points, just to find the interesting stuff that gets buried for some reason more easily.

frankly, I don't come to HN for politics.

Right. Then why do you and others engage in the political act of stifling discussion about a specific topic, for reasons you then don't apply to other topics as well?

I don't come to HN to masturbate about money and disruption; yet I'm sure if I just started flagging everything I don't like, I'd loose that privilege real quick.

Re: undefined

#120

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

hnha wrote: post #88
subsystem wrote: post #30

This thread will probably disappear soon as one of the few rules that is actually enforced on HN is the "no talk about moderation" one. You should instead (per the rules) e-mail info@ycombinator.com with your concerns.

ah, the feeling of living in a false democracy...

What on earth ever gave you the impression that HN was any sort of a democracy?

Like most internet discussion sites it's rather openly a benevolent dictatorship isn't it?

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