why on earth did they not post this directly to HN? who goes to twitter in 2025
HN's higher level folks like Gary Tan are uh, very friendly with Elon and his ways. They consider the current state of twitter a success.
Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
281–290 of 317 posts
Re: Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
#282[dead]
Re: Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's formal. Formal systems that purport to answer all questions in advance are a bureaucratic bane, and as long as I'm in charge of HN, we won't go there. I'm confident that the community feels the same way. If there's any information that someone wants to find out about HN or HN moderation, all they need to do is ask us.
Dude, you're leaving people guessing. That's no good. That is not nice "informality".
Everyone is always guessing about everything. I try not to combat too many universals.
Re: Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
#284I wonder when it's HN birthday.
Depends how you track it I suppose:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 (Oct 9, 2006)
https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html (Feb 20, 2007)
https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html (Aug 14, 2007)
Re: Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
#28520 years? BRB, scheduling my ice float.
Re: Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dude, you're leaving people guessing. That's no good. That is not nice "informality".
Everyone is always guessing about everything. I try not to combat too many universals.
No, you're just evading responsibility which, unfortunately, is typical of the tech sector these days.
Re: Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone is always guessing about everything. I try not to combat too many universals.
No, you're just evading responsibility which, unfortunately, is typical of the tech sector these days.
Maybe you can talk a little bit about how your ideal HN would work, or look like or be moderated like? What sort of stories and comments would it have? How would it be different from the current one? It's hard to tell what you're actually arguing for given that most of your output seems to be directed at some windmill of your own construction.
Re: Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
#288"Founders at Work", written by Jessica is what got me into HN (and I was an initial lurker for quite sometime). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founders_at_Work Note: YC didn't have HN to begin with, it was launched 1-year later (Oct 2006 as seen by pg profile). And the book was launched the subsequent year (2007). https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg
In case you’re not aware, there is a podcast by Jessica Livingston and Carolyn Levy called “The Social Radars” that interviews founders.
Thanks for the recommendation; I’ll check it out!
I love that this podcast only comes every two weeks. Some (like Software Engineering Daily) are far too often so I either feel the paradox of choice or that I’m missing out.
Re: Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
By informal I do not mean opaque. What I mean is that anyone is welcome to ask questions about HN and we're happy to answer them. What we don't do is try to answer all the questions in advance. That's for several reasons, the first of which is that it's impossible.
But you're not willing to be upfront by including that information on the user's account. That's opaque.
You (both zfg and any HN member reading this) can email the mods if you've got questions about how the site's treating you.
I don't believe I've ever had sanctions put on my account here (though dang did admonish me, once, among numerous other interactions). But I've had my IP address caught up in bans (I often read HN without logging in), and a few other things.
That is: if you want to know what's happening to your account, you can fall back on the slightly-higher-friction option of asking what's happening. No, it's not there automatically in your account profile, but then, that solution would permit for an attacker to automatically detect (and presumably counter) such information. The soft / opaque / translucent failure mode of HN actually works reasonably well in that context and environment.
NB: I'm in general agreement with many of your concerns about HN, and in particular how it fits and how it is behaving in a rapidly-changing political environment in which HN and YC have a considerable role. But not everything you're proposing bears out, and even some of what does (e.g., opaque limitations on accounts) doesn't work well in a larger context. I do have strong concerns about how HN's comments guidance hits unevenly in political discussion especially. I'm not entirely sure how to best improve on that, though I've been thinking through options and doing some reading (Jurgen Habermass's work in particular).
I've spent about 15 years studying HN (and often being wrong about it). If you'd (again, zfg or others) care to discuss via email my contact info is on my account page.
Re: Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like it enough to keep coming back, but lobste.rs is slightly preferable in my experience; more goodwill/less pedantry, and less Trumpelon apologism. (If you are gearing up to reply to the last three words of the previous paragraph, I can promise you I'm not interested in hearing it. You have your preferences and priorities, and I have mine)
I found that lobste.rs had a much narrower range of views on every topic. And the intolerance of other views is presented far less eloquently than here. People just get hard downvoted or banned. Not just the obvious political ones but technical views too: dynamic typing is rubbish, cryptocurrency is rubbish, etc
Or perhaps the community has less tolerance for someone who trolls and runs from challenges before providing any support for their opinions, and your broken behavior has led to a unrepresentative perspective. Thats what i’m betting. Still want to try claiming mallen baker is only providing rage bait? Perhaps with some evidence that doesnt involve your poor analysis.