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The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

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Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

#271

Post by mikewarot »

blast wrote: post #221
mikewarot wrote: post #148

I find that NH is a great jumping off point for adventures I didn't even know I wanted to take. For instance, in this story I learned that some people can down-vote, and a lot of work is done in the background to keep goofballs like me from derailing things. I too would like to thank the moderators. Further, and more interestingly to me, I learn that HN is written in a LISP variant called ARC... I've never understood…

There are several IDEs for specific Lisps, like Dr Racket or the Lispworks implementation of Common Lisp. There's also Emacs, which is kind of like a Lisp-based IDE, and Slime is a really good Common Lisp plugin for it.

I tried Portacle, and my experience was utter frustration. Once you go astray, there's no way to know what is going on. It threw me into so sort of debugger, with no obvious way out.

Lispworks looks like exactly what I want, except it seems to be in the Delphi business model, thus I can't afford it.

DrRacket looks better... but it doesn't seem to be lisp?

I thank you for the lifeline. If only Borland had made TurboLisp back in the day.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

#272

Post by dredmorbius »

chrisweekly wrote: post #107
echelon wrote: post #32

Thanks dang! You've helped keep HN readable, corrected countless title and link errors, and prevented heated discussions from devolving into fights. I also am super thankful for your help getting my "Show HN" post to the front page. We all appreciate you.

Seconding the props for Dan -- and reminding folks to thank Sam (the quiet one), too!

Rumour is that there is now a mod team, though dang is the public (and email) voice. sctb (Scott) left about a year ago.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

#273

Post by dredmorbius »

crispyporkbites wrote: post #118
echelon wrote: post #32

Thanks dang! You've helped keep HN readable, corrected countless title and link errors, and prevented heated discussions from devolving into fights. I also am super thankful for your help getting my "Show HN" post to the front page. We all appreciate you.

What help is available to get show hn posts to the front page?

Second-chance queue.

I've had several submissions re-upped. I nominate others (via email) on occaision. '2nd chance nom', plus submission link.

Do NOT ask me to do this --- I base my recommendations on what strikes me as 1) credible content 2) that seems underappreciated. The submission queue ("new" link in top menue) is quite busy.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

#275

Post by pratik661 »

rattray wrote: post #230
SkyMarshal wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I followed a lot of economists (ie Robert Reich, Krugman, etc) thinking they would post interesting economics related content. I think you have to stop following famous people like those guys, and instead follow up-and-coming economists and other scientists and bleeding edge researchers/builders, who are working hard to make a name for themselves with novel research in some interesting area. Those are more likely t…

This is a really good idea. Any accounts you'd recommend in particular?

My personal favorite is Noah Smith (NoOpinon or some similar spelling). He is a journalist at Bloomberg. His articles are posted quite frequently on HN. His twitter has a lot of interesting discussions.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

#276

Post by pratik661 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #156
pratik661 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I followed a lot of economists (ie Robert Reich, Krugman, etc) thinking they would post interesting economics related content. They do, but it turns out that they are ordinary humans who like posting the same tweets (and rants) that I would post. I don't think Twitter can have the same signal to noise ratio as a well moderated forum like HN, even if you follow the "right" people, because the format of the site incent…

HN tends to devalue the individual, and value the content. (E.g. high quality comment by a not famous person) Twitter seems to value the individual, but devalue the content. (E.g. low quality posts by a famous person) The former is more meritorious, inasmuch as the vote base can accurately judge a comment. The latter is more consistent, in that popular people stay popular (and admittedly, are popular for a reason). P…

Thats an interesting observation. Username based forums value the content, while Twitter (where your identity is public) values the individual and his/her expertise.

The issue with the former is that it relies on upvotes of people from the community. This leads to the problem of people upvoting comments on topics in which they lack expertise (ie developers upvoting comments about astronomy that "sound right")

This results in a trend (on HN and reddit) where the most upvoted comments are comments that "sound correct", but would not hold up against scrutiny of people who have expertise in that area. I like that HN censors the upvote count, so we are forced to judge the comment on its own merit.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

#280

Post by grayclhn »

dang wrote: post #222
saagarjha wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d argue that the comment page is probably the most important page to have that link on.

Ok, I'll put it there - but can you guys please specify exactly what you mean by "the comment page"?

The page where the "reply" link takes you. I.e. where I'm typing at this very moment, and where you'll type if you reply to me. :)
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