Lamer News(lamernews.com)
lamernews.com
Lamer News
http://lamernews.com/news/1
134 comments
Just to give some context about the genesis of LN, here are some tweets by Salvatore:
Funny, pg's handling of the site has always been amazing to me. He appears to truly go out of his way to ensure he doesn't get in the way of the community, but just there to stop fights from ending up in the hospital. Even when the topic of discussion might not be one he wants to have on his site.
Several recent-ish negative stories (Dropbox security, Air BnB apartment damage) about YC companies really demonstrated pg's commitment to an open forum and really helped earn a ton of respect for pg and his commitment to this community. Within reason we were all able to say what we wanted about the companies and have a vibrant discussion (sometimes argument) with each other and often with the founders themselves.
If I have to see a job posting for a yc company every once in a while as the price for what appears to be a great and truly open tech/business forum so be it.
I'm not really sure what the point of this is other than to write a news/discussion site. If that's all it is, cool, hack away. But I don't get the weird counter-culture fight the man vibe that seems to run through it.
Several recent-ish negative stories (Dropbox security, Air BnB apartment damage) about YC companies really demonstrated pg's commitment to an open forum and really helped earn a ton of respect for pg and his commitment to this community. Within reason we were all able to say what we wanted about the companies and have a vibrant discussion (sometimes argument) with each other and often with the founders themselves.
If I have to see a job posting for a yc company every once in a while as the price for what appears to be a great and truly open tech/business forum so be it.
I'm not really sure what the point of this is other than to write a news/discussion site. If that's all it is, cool, hack away. But I don't get the weird counter-culture fight the man vibe that seems to run through it.
If there is a single person that at the same time: 1) Influenced positively my life a lot. 2) I don't know. This is Paul Graham. I have a lot of respect for him, and he did something very important for our community, it was an inspiration for many.
Now he is doing great things for the startups community. While I don't like that IMHO HN is polarized, I still think YCombinator is one of the most significant phenomena of the latest years in our field.
But still I think it is legitimate to think that this kind of news sites are important enough that can't be polarized, that should be handled by many people (I want to create a consortium or alike otherwise lamernews would be like HN, with a single vision, but just worse since Paul Graham is smarter and with more resources than me).
Another goal of LN, not the site but the code base, is to provide to people a good code base to create this kind of sites for other fields using little money. Once those kind of sites start becoming big scaling them is apparently non trivial, but with LN this should be pretty different, we'll be able to do some math later when the site gets busier or when the code base is used for other bigger sites, but I believe that LN code base can serve a lot of traffic with little hardware, and the BSD license allows to use the code base in more contexts.
So I don't have nothing against PG, YCombinator, the community here, I just thing that at this point we understood that news sites for programmers are so important that there should be a "third party" involved in running them, without ADS, without job postings, without a big percentage of users being from a particular incubator, and so forth.
p.s. also if you ask me, I don't think PG is biased and kills stories against its startups, the things I don't like about how the site is handled are: the unilaterality of decisions, not fixing the site performances, and that PG did not resisted to the temptation of using the site to post job postings (you should try to realize how a huge value this is for YC however, startups are made of hackers).
Now he is doing great things for the startups community. While I don't like that IMHO HN is polarized, I still think YCombinator is one of the most significant phenomena of the latest years in our field.
But still I think it is legitimate to think that this kind of news sites are important enough that can't be polarized, that should be handled by many people (I want to create a consortium or alike otherwise lamernews would be like HN, with a single vision, but just worse since Paul Graham is smarter and with more resources than me).
Another goal of LN, not the site but the code base, is to provide to people a good code base to create this kind of sites for other fields using little money. Once those kind of sites start becoming big scaling them is apparently non trivial, but with LN this should be pretty different, we'll be able to do some math later when the site gets busier or when the code base is used for other bigger sites, but I believe that LN code base can serve a lot of traffic with little hardware, and the BSD license allows to use the code base in more contexts.
So I don't have nothing against PG, YCombinator, the community here, I just thing that at this point we understood that news sites for programmers are so important that there should be a "third party" involved in running them, without ADS, without job postings, without a big percentage of users being from a particular incubator, and so forth.
p.s. also if you ask me, I don't think PG is biased and kills stories against its startups, the things I don't like about how the site is handled are: the unilaterality of decisions, not fixing the site performances, and that PG did not resisted to the temptation of using the site to post job postings (you should try to realize how a huge value this is for YC however, startups are made of hackers).
Good to know. I too think that HN can sometimes get on weird, polarizing, issues for too long: cult of Apple/Gruber, why Haskell/Lisp/etc. is better than anything else ever and if the world just knew this we'd claim our rightful place among the stars, what some random mildly known guy on this site has to say about some random topic, etc. and not enough of things of actual hacker interest like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3065619
Several recent-ish negative stories (Dropbox security, Air BnB apartment damage) about YC companies really demonstrated pg's commitment to an open forum
Funny you mentioned that. A few days after I posted a few of criticisms of dropbox in one of those threads I was hellbanned. All of my posts on that topic had positive point scores, one was at even 50+ points and sparked a fair bit of discussion.
I won't pretend that all I ever posted with my old account was deep wisdom and insight, some of the comments sucked outright, but very few are gray and given the timing I don't know what else I that I had posted that could have possibly been the reason for that ban.
Funny you mentioned that. A few days after I posted a few of criticisms of dropbox in one of those threads I was hellbanned. All of my posts on that topic had positive point scores, one was at even 50+ points and sparked a fair bit of discussion.
I won't pretend that all I ever posted with my old account was deep wisdom and insight, some of the comments sucked outright, but very few are gray and given the timing I don't know what else I that I had posted that could have possibly been the reason for that ban.
I believe it's highly related:
Dudes that's incredible, hacker news guys removed my blog
post from the home page. Truly lame.
https://twitter.com/#!/antirez/status/122310866728271872
What's wrong with the iPhone 4s, and why Jobs is not my hero
-> http://antirez.com/post/iphone-4s-and-jobs.html
https://twitter.com/#!/antirez/status/122302491734978561We didn't remove his post. It only got 3 points. That's not enough to stay on the frontpage long. In fact at most times it's not even enough to get on the frontpage.
I think a chunk of HN consists of Apple and Google aficionados(nothing wrong with that, we're all technology guys with strong opinions here), so I notice that anything critical of them either tends to neglected even if it's newsworthy or tends to get heavily flagged(so you see a story with 50 points posted 3 hours ago at the bottom of the page and stories with less points posted more than 3 hours ago on top). People (mis?)use the flagging as a way to get things off the front page rather than only as a way to vote down spam and unrelated content.
Same with the comment section, people get a little sensitive and trigger happy with the moderating. Does not happen with every story obviously, but the trend is definitely there.
I believe this explains his frustration more than some hidden agenda by mods to censor things. It's still a democracy, even if a little skewed with the community biases.
BTW sure fire way of getting karma is to pile on MS :)
PS: PG, can we get some stats on OSes/Broswers used on HN? There's a couple of stats compiled by sites that were linked that show ~40% OS X usage, so just curious. And if those can be correlated with karma(respecting privacy, of course), we could get even more insight into the community.
Same with the comment section, people get a little sensitive and trigger happy with the moderating. Does not happen with every story obviously, but the trend is definitely there.
I believe this explains his frustration more than some hidden agenda by mods to censor things. It's still a democracy, even if a little skewed with the community biases.
BTW sure fire way of getting karma is to pile on MS :)
PS: PG, can we get some stats on OSes/Broswers used on HN? There's a couple of stats compiled by sites that were linked that show ~40% OS X usage, so just curious. And if those can be correlated with karma(respecting privacy, of course), we could get even more insight into the community.
>"It's still a democracy"
Hardly.
It's a republic with its own philosopher-king.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher_king]
Hardly.
It's a republic with its own philosopher-king.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher_king]
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It's a cool piece of code, and an extremely valuable example application for Redis, and a useful package. But instead, let's definitely talk about the drama that's attached to it.
It's obvious that for a lot of HN participants, the site isn't fun unless we can divide everyone into heroes and villains, or at least shirts and skins.
It's obvious that for a lot of HN participants, the site isn't fun unless we can divide everyone into heroes and villains, or at least shirts and skins.
> It's obvious that for a lot of HN participants, the
> site isn't fun unless we can divide everyone into
> heroes and villains
Most news stations, for example, seem to me to be all about dividing the world into heroes and villains.
Also, do you think this is something that can be changed? My initial reaction is that this kind of black-and-white thinking is part of human nature, stemming from our need to apply our own morality to the events that occur around us.
Sorry about that I didn't want to feed a flame with new fuel, I just wanted to add some context to the topic which is "LN the community" and not the software behind it (already discussed in another thread).
Still if you think my comment is inappropriate downvote it.
Still if you think my comment is inappropriate downvote it.
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"for instance YC funded companies job postings are special news that are "sticky" or alike."
I didn't know HN did sticky. These articles are voted up out of general interest level.
Cool to see something like this tried and wish you luck, but this kind of reminds me of Diaspora. I think when you closely base your product on something else, you need an exponentially better value proposition. I don't think "being open" is a huge selling point, and really the whole motivation is explained in less than a tweet.
The community here might be more sensitive to openness than other communities, but HN is generally seen as impartial/neutral anyway.
I didn't know HN did sticky. These articles are voted up out of general interest level.
Cool to see something like this tried and wish you luck, but this kind of reminds me of Diaspora. I think when you closely base your product on something else, you need an exponentially better value proposition. I don't think "being open" is a huge selling point, and really the whole motivation is explained in less than a tweet.
The community here might be more sensitive to openness than other communities, but HN is generally seen as impartial/neutral anyway.
I think he was referencing to occasional YC job postings where comments are disabled (are they upvoted/downvoted? I can't remember).
I really wish they'd enable comments on those. It feels like we're not trusted to comment responsibly regarding jobs for YC companies. In most cases, there'd be no reason to leave a comment, except to ask about details of the job that might be of general interest, which seems like a legit thing to do.
I do not.
First, those comment threads were often toxic; for instance, they tended to host deliberate and pointed efforts to unmask companies that hadn't launched yet.
Second, I think it's totally reasonable for YC to provide HN perks to YC companies, and if that's going to happen, I prefer the overt perks to the more subtle ones.
Third, public comment threads are a crappy venue for having conversations about a job. If you want to know more about a job, contact the person who posted the ad. If the ad sucks, let them write better ad copy.
Finally, for the HN demographic, these are some of the best job advertisements on the entire market. They're a clear win-win.
It is possible that I have hired more people directly off HN than any non-YC company, and probable that I've hired more people from here than most YC companies have. I don't feel like I'm getting a raw deal at all. I'm perturbed by the degree of entitlement on display on this thread.
First, those comment threads were often toxic; for instance, they tended to host deliberate and pointed efforts to unmask companies that hadn't launched yet.
Second, I think it's totally reasonable for YC to provide HN perks to YC companies, and if that's going to happen, I prefer the overt perks to the more subtle ones.
Third, public comment threads are a crappy venue for having conversations about a job. If you want to know more about a job, contact the person who posted the ad. If the ad sucks, let them write better ad copy.
Finally, for the HN demographic, these are some of the best job advertisements on the entire market. They're a clear win-win.
It is possible that I have hired more people directly off HN than any non-YC company, and probable that I've hired more people from here than most YC companies have. I don't feel like I'm getting a raw deal at all. I'm perturbed by the degree of entitlement on display on this thread.
> I'm perturbed by the degree of entitlement on display on this thread.
I'm fine with those postings, what with it being PG's site and all, so that's not really what I'm talking about. I just think the postings would be better with comments for the same reason everything else is. They can have bright purple headings to make them more visible to everyone for all I care, if some method to make them stick out is desired.
I don't recall those threads being nasty, but perhaps that's been crowded out of my head by the two or three things in my life more important than a particular variety of posting on HN. I think nastiness should be rooted out in a fairly blunt way: if people are being lame/immature about companies' job postings, they're likely going to be lame about other stuff as well.
#2 is something we're in agreement on.
> public comment threads are a crappy venue for having conversations about a job.
Yes and no. I think there are some kinds of questions and answers that might be useful to all applicants, and I think most people here are smart enough to figure out the difference between what ought to be public, and what is best addressed to the company in question via private email. For many of these companies, it may be the first time they've ever sought to hire someone, so it's entirely reasonable that they don't nail the posting 100%. A helpful comment or two might also help the companies.
I'm fine with those postings, what with it being PG's site and all, so that's not really what I'm talking about. I just think the postings would be better with comments for the same reason everything else is. They can have bright purple headings to make them more visible to everyone for all I care, if some method to make them stick out is desired.
I don't recall those threads being nasty, but perhaps that's been crowded out of my head by the two or three things in my life more important than a particular variety of posting on HN. I think nastiness should be rooted out in a fairly blunt way: if people are being lame/immature about companies' job postings, they're likely going to be lame about other stuff as well.
#2 is something we're in agreement on.
> public comment threads are a crappy venue for having conversations about a job.
Yes and no. I think there are some kinds of questions and answers that might be useful to all applicants, and I think most people here are smart enough to figure out the difference between what ought to be public, and what is best addressed to the company in question via private email. For many of these companies, it may be the first time they've ever sought to hire someone, so it's entirely reasonable that they don't nail the posting 100%. A helpful comment or two might also help the companies.
Jobs never had comments. They're not ordinary items like stories and comments; they just get displayed similarly on the frontpage. You may be thinking of times when people posted jobs as ordinary posts.
Yes, that's what I'm talking about: submissions to HN with the Text set to a job ad and no URL.
As I recall, YC companies were allowed to submit those, but (for example) I couldn't for Matasano (I'm fine with that).
As I recall, YC companies were allowed to submit those, but (for example) I couldn't for Matasano (I'm fine with that).
When YC cos did that it was by mistake. A job listing submitted as if it were a story would not end up on the jobs page. We're now careful about telling everyone to submit jobs as jobs.
I'm remembering this thread, for what it's worth:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2021547
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2021547
I believe PG had a comment in which he explained the ads(usually job ads) which start at position 3 and work their way down but don't have any comment section. I am not sure if those are provided to YC companies only, but that was spoken of as providing ad revenue.
I am all for open and new sites and all that, but I do recognize the need to generate revenue to run something that we all enjoy and derive value, free of cost. So I have absolutely no problem with these barely noticeable ads(which still provide value to readers because they're about startups looking for people to give jobs to).
This way, it won't end up dying like code.google.com or other free services.
Coming to LN, I might be visiting the site but I am bit skeptical of "throw it on a VPS and github and lets see what happens". Something more concrete is appreciated.
I am all for open and new sites and all that, but I do recognize the need to generate revenue to run something that we all enjoy and derive value, free of cost. So I have absolutely no problem with these barely noticeable ads(which still provide value to readers because they're about startups looking for people to give jobs to).
This way, it won't end up dying like code.google.com or other free services.
Coming to LN, I might be visiting the site but I am bit skeptical of "throw it on a VPS and github and lets see what happens". Something more concrete is appreciated.
Thanks for this. I've joined.
What I'd really like to see is "$NAME, like Hacker/Lamer news, but for book reviews". The submission has a title which is $BOOKNAME - $AUTHORNAME; then the post contains maybe a link to some online store selling it. (affiliate links are allowed). After that the first post is a review of the book. That allows people to upvote the book, but downvote the review (or vice versa.)
Really, I should just buy some hosting and get my head round hackernews / lamernews.
What I'd really like to see is "$NAME, like Hacker/Lamer news, but for book reviews". The submission has a title which is $BOOKNAME - $AUTHORNAME; then the post contains maybe a link to some online store selling it. (affiliate links are allowed). After that the first post is a review of the book. That allows people to upvote the book, but downvote the review (or vice versa.)
Really, I should just buy some hosting and get my head round hackernews / lamernews.
All of these are social problems, not technical problems. It's really really not hard to programme up a vote up/vote down site.
The hard part is the community.
The hard part is the community.
I think this is one of those ideas that's gets progressively less attractive as you get into details.
It takes a lot of time and thought to write a good book review, and you don't get anything out of it (unlike spending time to post a well-worded Ask HN, or spending almost no time to post a link to something interesting).
Most folks in a HN-like community don't have that time. If they even have time to read more than a few books a year... so they aren't going to spend hours perusing book review (which aren't actually of value themselves.. they just point to other things that will be valuable to buy then read...).
It takes a lot of time and thought to write a good book review, and you don't get anything out of it (unlike spending time to post a well-worded Ask HN, or spending almost no time to post a link to something interesting).
Most folks in a HN-like community don't have that time. If they even have time to read more than a few books a year... so they aren't going to spend hours perusing book review (which aren't actually of value themselves.. they just point to other things that will be valuable to buy then read...).
I have something very similar somewhere in my project graveyard. I never got round to launching but your comment has motivated me a little. I'll see if I can dig it out.
This is a lovely idea I can see myself using it!
I would definitely use it! I just know that I'm never going to get around to setting it up.
So, if anyone else wants to they should.
So, if anyone else wants to they should.
There's this http://www.reddit.com/r/redditbooks
Also see links on the right of http://www.reddit.com/r/books for more books related sub reddits.
Also see links on the right of http://www.reddit.com/r/books for more books related sub reddits.
Certainly not trying to be rude, but what is the value of the site? What does it provide beyond HN?
Love that it's open source, though. I'll definitely be taking a look at it.
Love that it's open source, though. I'll definitely be taking a look at it.
HackerNews is (mostly) Open Source as well: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=4718
It's just written in some crazy esoteric language by some nutjob. :)
It's just written in some crazy esoteric language by some nutjob. :)
By reading the source you learn how to write a real-life application that uses Redis as its main database.
Oh I see! Could be helpful. I'll try to add to the community, too :)
A website like HN is really simple to make in PHP. I don't see the point in making it open source. I don't see the point copying HN either.
HN is not a great website because of it's design (which is really poor in my opinion). It's a great website because of the community.
HN is not a great website because of it's design (which is really poor in my opinion). It's a great website because of the community.
Personally, I think Hacker News has a great design and a poor community. I guess these things are just a matter of taste.
Honest question, why have you stayed at HN for almost three years if it's a poor community?
Well, when I see post like that hitting the front page I'm really wondering about the community. And the worse part is, even if it's a lame post, it's not even generating interesting discussion.
[deleted]
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Looks like an interesting concept to hack on. But somehow I get the nagging feeling it's suffering from the whole "everyone needs to code their own CMS at some point in their career".
Maybe the new saying will be "Every competent web dev has coded a news site at some point"?
PS: I joined, my internet OCD demands it.
Maybe the new saying will be "Every competent web dev has coded a news site at some point"?
PS: I joined, my internet OCD demands it.
antirez is not new to this. he created one of the first Digg/Reddit inspired news site in Italy back in 2005 or 2006. I beleive that was originally built in PHP/MySql and recently ported to Redis as the main database. The entire project was aquired by one of the largest italian internet companies around 2006 or 2007 and it's now hosted at http://oknotizie.virgilio.com
As far as I know, that project was never made open source. You can find other early projects from antirez here http://merzia.com/
As far as I know, that project was never made open source. You can find other early projects from antirez here http://merzia.com/
Link should be http://oknotizie.virgilio.it/, not .com.
Me too. I can't resist on voting up every article on the front page.
I really don't feel this is the right approach to come up with a HN alternative.
Maybe Hacker News has it's issues but, even if it Lamer News were a better option I do not think that somebody mocking 'competitors' (even though to be fair that is not even close - as this new site is only days old - as compared to HN) is a 'leader' worth following in forming a new community.
Maybe Hacker News has it's issues but, even if it Lamer News were a better option I do not think that somebody mocking 'competitors' (even though to be fair that is not even close - as this new site is only days old - as compared to HN) is a 'leader' worth following in forming a new community.
Minor bug: Both lamernews.com and www.lamernews.com lead to the same site, with no redirection either way. Logging into lamernews.com does not log me into www.lamernews.com, and vice versa. This would get confusing once people start linking to various parts of the site. Nothing that can't be fixed with a quick rewrite rule, though.
First easy test I posted was a link to a domain that gets blocked here (legit content). While it's just a tech demo site, I hope it will turn into an experiment for new ideas, particularly with the right balance between Y-combinator startups and their competitors (blocked submissions on HN).
We don't ban sites of competitors of companies we fund. Even if we wanted to do something like that, how could we ever get away with it? I'm guessing you're referring to Nodejitsu.com. They're banned because they created an army of sockpuppets to vote up their posts.
Your claim that Nodejitsu "created an army of sockpuppets to vote up their posts" is outrageous. Let me enumerate the issue here:
1. Your moderators are simply unable (or unwilling) to distinguish "sockpuppets" from a legitimate community of developers (that is the node.js community). Yes, when we post something to HN we send out the link via Twitter and IM to colleagues in the node.js community who may potentially upvote it. This is natural "word of mouth". We have never used bots, or any kind of malicious automation to ensure posts reach the front-page.
2. There is no transparency for bans, nor is the ban every communicated to the owner of the HN account. If you think an account is unfairly trying to manipulate the voting system; you have to contact them. Anything less is blatantly ambiguous and unacceptable.
3. Given the silent nature of bans on HN, we have no choice but to move onto a new HN account and continue to submit legitimate posts using legitimate word of mouth dissemination. Perhaps you view this as "sockpuppets," but what other choice do we have?
4. In the particular case of Nodejitsu, this behavior is even more unacceptable. We are a platform-as-a-service where any user can create a publicly available application on a subdomain of nodejitsu.com. How can you ban the entire *.nodejitsu.com domain when we are not responsible for malicious actions (real or perceived) taken by a given user? This is not an admission that any such behavior has taken place; I'm sure that your claim is addressed in [1]-[3].
In the copyright world, site owners are protected by malicious actions of users through DMCA safe-harbor. In such senarios, the owner of the site will be contacted and the malicious behavior (real or perceived) can be addressed and/or removed. By silently banning posts and not communicating with members of the HN community about what you perceive as malicious behavior you are doing yourself a serious detriment. This has (and continues to) raise questions about the legitimacy of the content on HN as just a shill for YCombinator.
If you'd like to speak with me personally you can email [email protected]
Charlie Robbins Founder and CEO Nodejitsu Inc.
1. Your moderators are simply unable (or unwilling) to distinguish "sockpuppets" from a legitimate community of developers (that is the node.js community). Yes, when we post something to HN we send out the link via Twitter and IM to colleagues in the node.js community who may potentially upvote it. This is natural "word of mouth". We have never used bots, or any kind of malicious automation to ensure posts reach the front-page.
2. There is no transparency for bans, nor is the ban every communicated to the owner of the HN account. If you think an account is unfairly trying to manipulate the voting system; you have to contact them. Anything less is blatantly ambiguous and unacceptable.
3. Given the silent nature of bans on HN, we have no choice but to move onto a new HN account and continue to submit legitimate posts using legitimate word of mouth dissemination. Perhaps you view this as "sockpuppets," but what other choice do we have?
4. In the particular case of Nodejitsu, this behavior is even more unacceptable. We are a platform-as-a-service where any user can create a publicly available application on a subdomain of nodejitsu.com. How can you ban the entire *.nodejitsu.com domain when we are not responsible for malicious actions (real or perceived) taken by a given user? This is not an admission that any such behavior has taken place; I'm sure that your claim is addressed in [1]-[3].
In the copyright world, site owners are protected by malicious actions of users through DMCA safe-harbor. In such senarios, the owner of the site will be contacted and the malicious behavior (real or perceived) can be addressed and/or removed. By silently banning posts and not communicating with members of the HN community about what you perceive as malicious behavior you are doing yourself a serious detriment. This has (and continues to) raise questions about the legitimacy of the content on HN as just a shill for YCombinator.
If you'd like to speak with me personally you can email [email protected]
Charlie Robbins Founder and CEO Nodejitsu Inc.
You could have just emailed him and asked.
You seem to be having difficulty with the concept that what you know not to be sockpuppetry would, to the part-time admins of this site, seem like sockpuppetry.
HN makes banning mistakes with some regularity. Get over it or go somewhere else. It's ungracious to spit venom ("unacceptable", "blatantly ambiguous and unacceptable", "HN as just a shill for YCombinator") at the site admins, all of whom have better things to do than resolve individual disputes like this.
I'm as cynical as anyone about YC, 'pg, and the valley culture, but I can see when someone's doing me a favor. Like, every f'ing day for one thousand four hundred fifty two days. I too would run a site like HN differently, but that is irrelevant, because I didn't build a site like HN and so my opinion doesn't matter.
You seem to be having difficulty with the concept that what you know not to be sockpuppetry would, to the part-time admins of this site, seem like sockpuppetry.
HN makes banning mistakes with some regularity. Get over it or go somewhere else. It's ungracious to spit venom ("unacceptable", "blatantly ambiguous and unacceptable", "HN as just a shill for YCombinator") at the site admins, all of whom have better things to do than resolve individual disputes like this.
I'm as cynical as anyone about YC, 'pg, and the valley culture, but I can see when someone's doing me a favor. Like, every f'ing day for one thousand four hundred fifty two days. I too would run a site like HN differently, but that is irrelevant, because I didn't build a site like HN and so my opinion doesn't matter.
I didn't realize users' stuff was hosted on subdomains. Ok, I'll unban nodejitsu.com.
We don't ban sites lightly. We only do it when people make repeated, deliberate efforts to bypass lighter weight protections. Human mods can't watch every upvote 24x7, so if a site seems really determined to hack their way onto the frontpage, the only thing we can do is ban the domain.
I'm happy to unban nodejitsu.com if you promise to stop trying to game HN. In your case I recommend the following standard for what counts as gaming HN: if you're not sure, don't.
We don't ban sites lightly. We only do it when people make repeated, deliberate efforts to bypass lighter weight protections. Human mods can't watch every upvote 24x7, so if a site seems really determined to hack their way onto the frontpage, the only thing we can do is ban the domain.
I'm happy to unban nodejitsu.com if you promise to stop trying to game HN. In your case I recommend the following standard for what counts as gaming HN: if you're not sure, don't.
Problem is, Paul. that YC companies do this exact same behavior on a regular basis. I've gotten emails from founders to ask for word of mouth upvotes on specific blog posts, etc..
There is an unofficial "Upvote YC company articles" rule among YC founders. So, that's why YC company news tends to dominate HN. And, why so many amazing non-YC companies tend to not get profiled here.
It creates a echo chamber, which I think is detrimental to the entire startup ecosystem. It also gives an incorrect assumption to a segment of geeks that YC companies dominate startup the startup scene in Silicon Valley. In reality, YC companies are a very small percentage of the $20B of Venture Capital that is invested in Silicon Valley every year.
There is an unofficial "Upvote YC company articles" rule among YC founders. So, that's why YC company news tends to dominate HN. And, why so many amazing non-YC companies tend to not get profiled here.
It creates a echo chamber, which I think is detrimental to the entire startup ecosystem. It also gives an incorrect assumption to a segment of geeks that YC companies dominate startup the startup scene in Silicon Valley. In reality, YC companies are a very small percentage of the $20B of Venture Capital that is invested in Silicon Valley every year.
No they don't. The software doesn't distinguish between posts about YC companies and other posts. The algorithm for which votes to count, the threshold for a voting ring, and the penalty applied if one is detected, is the same for every post on HN.
HN has in fact been less and less focused on YC cos as time has passed. The initial core of users were YC founders, and anything to do with YC was interesting to them. But over time that group has been diluted by large numbers of new arrivals. A lot of people now think of "Y Combinator" as a news site rather than an investment firm, which was certainly not the case a few years ago.
HN has in fact been less and less focused on YC cos as time has passed. The initial core of users were YC founders, and anything to do with YC was interesting to them. But over time that group has been diluted by large numbers of new arrivals. A lot of people now think of "Y Combinator" as a news site rather than an investment firm, which was certainly not the case a few years ago.
I wasn't suggesting that the HN software creates an "upvote YC company" rule.
I'm suggesting that it's common for 500+ YC founders who are and have been active HN members, to quickly upvote articles about other YC companies.
I'm suggesting that this is a cultural artifact of what's happening on HN, not an algorithmic one.
And, I'm suggesting that this cultural artifact changes the content on HN to be quite focused on YC companies. It's natural. It's reasonable. And, certainly beneficial to the investment aspect of YC. You run a media site about startups, and you invest in lots of startups. Those startups naturally want their investor to do well, and their brand to succeed.
I'm not accusing you of malice. What I'm saying, is that I think that this cultural artifact benefits YC and it's startups to the detriment of the startup community at large.
I'm suggesting that it's common for 500+ YC founders who are and have been active HN members, to quickly upvote articles about other YC companies.
I'm suggesting that this is a cultural artifact of what's happening on HN, not an algorithmic one.
And, I'm suggesting that this cultural artifact changes the content on HN to be quite focused on YC companies. It's natural. It's reasonable. And, certainly beneficial to the investment aspect of YC. You run a media site about startups, and you invest in lots of startups. Those startups naturally want their investor to do well, and their brand to succeed.
I'm not accusing you of malice. What I'm saying, is that I think that this cultural artifact benefits YC and it's startups to the detriment of the startup community at large.
Sorry pg, I didn't downvote you, but you're wrong (or you didn't read the comment you were replying to)
Here is what iamelgringo said "Problem is, Paul. that YC companies do this exact same behavior on a regular basis. I've gotten emails from founders to ask for word of mouth upvotes on specific blog posts, etc.."
iamelgringo is just one of thousands of people who receives requests to upvote HN posts. I have received several requests myself (from people who are YC founders as well as people who aren't YC founders).
I'd be happy to forward some of those (mass-email blasts) emails to you, if you think that YC founders and other HN members don't game HN the same way that the nodejitsu guys tried to do)
Here is what iamelgringo said "Problem is, Paul. that YC companies do this exact same behavior on a regular basis. I've gotten emails from founders to ask for word of mouth upvotes on specific blog posts, etc.."
iamelgringo is just one of thousands of people who receives requests to upvote HN posts. I have received several requests myself (from people who are YC founders as well as people who aren't YC founders).
I'd be happy to forward some of those (mass-email blasts) emails to you, if you think that YC founders and other HN members don't game HN the same way that the nodejitsu guys tried to do)
What the Nodejitsu guys did was more extreme than just asking a few friends to upvote your stuff. The software catches and ignores most of that automatically.
I thought we were past this kind of slander.
* Can you enumerate what you claim we did?
* Can you provide log files illustrating your arguments?
If the answer to either of the above is "no", then please keep your false claims to yourself. I'm happy to view this as water under the bridge, but I will not allow lies about my company, Nodejitsu, to circulate: we did not (and would never) use any kind of malicious, automated, or anti-competitive tactics to falsely generate upvotes for anything on *.nodejitsu.com
Again, if you'd like to speak with me personally I am available at [email protected].
* Can you enumerate what you claim we did?
* Can you provide log files illustrating your arguments?
If the answer to either of the above is "no", then please keep your false claims to yourself. I'm happy to view this as water under the bridge, but I will not allow lies about my company, Nodejitsu, to circulate: we did not (and would never) use any kind of malicious, automated, or anti-competitive tactics to falsely generate upvotes for anything on *.nodejitsu.com
Again, if you'd like to speak with me personally I am available at [email protected].
Here's one of many:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2809827
Apparently this is Marak Squires using multiple accounts (barracks and changelog) in the same comment thread. I learned about this when the guys who run the changelog wrote to me to complain about it.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2809827
Apparently this is Marak Squires using multiple accounts (barracks and changelog) in the same comment thread. I learned about this when the guys who run the changelog wrote to me to complain about it.
How is this more extreme than asking friends to upvote stories? It is simply posting from a different account. I have 15 email accounts for various projects and companies; does that mean I'm a spammer?
Posting from a different account and up voting from multiple accounts are two completely different issues. We have never used fake accounts to artificially upvote anything. Period. Nothing provided suggests otherwise. On the subject of data, if the above is an attempt to justify the original decision it is insufficient.
* How were you able to infer that both accounts were in-fact represented by a single individual?
* When one considers it objectively, two accounts with the same IP Address posting comments to HN on the same thread from different accounts is not necessarily malicious. It simply could be two different computers on the same home or work network. Point in fact, Marak and I were roommates during the early days of Nodejitsu. How would you be able to infer the difference?
Full logs of all relevant messages / comments with dates and IP Addresses included are really the only thing that will be satisfactory, feel free to email me: [email protected].
I still do not see a pattern of malicious behavior or any malicious behavior at all. As I mentioned before, I am very happy to make this water under the bridge, but please stop making false claims in public without providing more than conjecture.
Posting from a different account and up voting from multiple accounts are two completely different issues. We have never used fake accounts to artificially upvote anything. Period. Nothing provided suggests otherwise. On the subject of data, if the above is an attempt to justify the original decision it is insufficient.
* How were you able to infer that both accounts were in-fact represented by a single individual?
* When one considers it objectively, two accounts with the same IP Address posting comments to HN on the same thread from different accounts is not necessarily malicious. It simply could be two different computers on the same home or work network. Point in fact, Marak and I were roommates during the early days of Nodejitsu. How would you be able to infer the difference?
Full logs of all relevant messages / comments with dates and IP Addresses included are really the only thing that will be satisfactory, feel free to email me: [email protected].
I still do not see a pattern of malicious behavior or any malicious behavior at all. As I mentioned before, I am very happy to make this water under the bridge, but please stop making false claims in public without providing more than conjecture.
I used this example because I think in most people's opinion using sockpuppet accounts in a comment thread is even worse than using them to upvote stories. It's not uncommon for people to try creating sockpuppet accounts to upvote their posts, but rare for people to resort to this.
I was able to infer the two accounts were the same person because, as I said, the changelog guys emailed me and told me so. I notice you don't deny it, which seems both revealing and revealingly disingenuous.
(Incidentally, if anyone is reading this far, this sort of thing is why it sucks to run a forum.)
I was able to infer the two accounts were the same person because, as I said, the changelog guys emailed me and told me so. I notice you don't deny it, which seems both revealing and revealingly disingenuous.
(Incidentally, if anyone is reading this far, this sort of thing is why it sucks to run a forum.)
> "two accounts with the same IP Address posting comments to HN on the same thread from different accounts is not necessarily malicious"
Of course not. My wife and I both post to HN, and nobody has ever criticized us for it.
It helps that we give full disclosure. If we're both involved in the same thread, whoever came in second will usually say "so there's no confusion, I'm married to [the other of us]".
That seems to be one factor some of your colleagues are missing.
> "It is simply posting from a different account."
The HN community has no problem with those who post from separate accounts for "personal" and "professional" stuff. Anonymous threads asking for legal, moral, or health advice are commonplace. Using your personal account to comment on political stories and your business account to comment on code stories is cool.
But it definitely bothers me when someone uses multiple accounts in the same discussion. pg suggests this is a pattern, not a one-time occurrence. Whether or not it's intended to be malicious or manipulative, posting to the same thread from multiple accounts definitely comes off that way. Similarly, using multiple accounts to circumvent bans so you can give your posts publicity appears sketchy.
Maybe pg, the moderators, or the algorithm made mistakes. There are better ways to respond than making multiple accounts, and there are better ways to "make this water under the bridge" than the path you've chosen in this thread.
Of course not. My wife and I both post to HN, and nobody has ever criticized us for it.
It helps that we give full disclosure. If we're both involved in the same thread, whoever came in second will usually say "so there's no confusion, I'm married to [the other of us]".
That seems to be one factor some of your colleagues are missing.
> "It is simply posting from a different account."
The HN community has no problem with those who post from separate accounts for "personal" and "professional" stuff. Anonymous threads asking for legal, moral, or health advice are commonplace. Using your personal account to comment on political stories and your business account to comment on code stories is cool.
But it definitely bothers me when someone uses multiple accounts in the same discussion. pg suggests this is a pattern, not a one-time occurrence. Whether or not it's intended to be malicious or manipulative, posting to the same thread from multiple accounts definitely comes off that way. Similarly, using multiple accounts to circumvent bans so you can give your posts publicity appears sketchy.
Maybe pg, the moderators, or the algorithm made mistakes. There are better ways to respond than making multiple accounts, and there are better ways to "make this water under the bridge" than the path you've chosen in this thread.
Does that constitute an army of sockpuppets? I would disagree. I have two gmail accounts. One is personal, one is professional. Also, our posts we're censored long before hook.io got its second wind. Perhaps we should chalk this up to a misunderstanding and move forward.
It seems like the software isn't very good at determining the difference between a "voting ring", and a small-ish subcommunity that's interested in a specific technology niche.
For myself, as a node developer, articles about rails, python, erlang, and iOS apps aren't so interesting. I don't upvote them. Articles about node, politics, system programming, http, and JavaScript are interesting, so I do. As it turns out, a bunch of my friends are the people who write node-related articles, and often post them on Hacker News, and then tell me about it.
I'd be surprised if I wasn't one of these alleged puppets. Of course I'm more likely to vote up something that someone mentions to me in IM, because I have to see it before clicking the button.
I can see how this looks like sock puppets. You've got a few dozen users that always upvote the same articles from a few dozen other users, and are much less likely to upvote other articles. I'm not sure the best way to know that we're all humans. If there were fewer people using/excited about/writing about ruby on rails, then the behavior would appear very similar, I suspect.
The term "gaming" is really vague. It's not at all clear how "this is something interesting that I'd like to share and discuss" is much different from "this is something that I'd like to get people to look at." It seems to me like the ultimate purpose of a site like this is to be gamed in a particular way by a particular population.
For myself, as a node developer, articles about rails, python, erlang, and iOS apps aren't so interesting. I don't upvote them. Articles about node, politics, system programming, http, and JavaScript are interesting, so I do. As it turns out, a bunch of my friends are the people who write node-related articles, and often post them on Hacker News, and then tell me about it.
I'd be surprised if I wasn't one of these alleged puppets. Of course I'm more likely to vote up something that someone mentions to me in IM, because I have to see it before clicking the button.
I can see how this looks like sock puppets. You've got a few dozen users that always upvote the same articles from a few dozen other users, and are much less likely to upvote other articles. I'm not sure the best way to know that we're all humans. If there were fewer people using/excited about/writing about ruby on rails, then the behavior would appear very similar, I suspect.
The term "gaming" is really vague. It's not at all clear how "this is something interesting that I'd like to share and discuss" is much different from "this is something that I'd like to get people to look at." It seems to me like the ultimate purpose of a site like this is to be gamed in a particular way by a particular population.
Great point. It'd be interesting to be transparent about rings of people who frequently upvote on the same post. I'm sure they have that info. It might actually be interesting and open up some level of transparency -- whether among the YC companies (and the ability of their job posts to somehow make it to the top) or among other subsets of the coding community like node.js I have nothing against YC companies; I'm friends with lots. I have nothing against promoting a link you post on HN.
Just would be interesting to be more transparent.
Just would be interesting to be more transparent.
[deleted]
Thanks.
I like silent bans. They seem like the appropriate response to real spam. If you give spammers a clear indication that they are blocked then they can immediately start trying a different attack. By removing that indicator then the spammers even know they need to start trying something new. It makes the whole process muddy for them and generally slows down the whole spam "cold war arms race".
It does suck more to be hit with a false positive since you might not notice it right away. But I think overall the system is good. It speaks to my inner passive aggressive. :-)
It does suck more to be hit with a false positive since you might not notice it right away. But I think overall the system is good. It speaks to my inner passive aggressive. :-)
Sorry, no. I led AOL's mail team in the '90s, and we had the same philosophy. Many, many complaints about lost e-mail, but it was Necessary And Right to block spam, our #1 complaint. (In fact, we once got sued for trying to deliver the bounces back to the spammer.)
We were wrong. It didn't really block much spam; from the very beginning, spammers had "quality control" bots checking delivery rates of their spam, and they'd adapt to new algorithms within hours, demonstrating just how well they could monitor their black hole rate.
Early this decade, the technology to do efficient blocking "at the edge" was finally implemented, and boom - no more lost mail.
Silent bans are really just a way to exert power. They achieve nothing.
We were wrong. It didn't really block much spam; from the very beginning, spammers had "quality control" bots checking delivery rates of their spam, and they'd adapt to new algorithms within hours, demonstrating just how well they could monitor their black hole rate.
Early this decade, the technology to do efficient blocking "at the edge" was finally implemented, and boom - no more lost mail.
Silent bans are really just a way to exert power. They achieve nothing.
While I appreciate your insight and experience, you might want to view http://news.ycombinator.com/newest with and without "showdead" turned on for your account: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jaylevitt
Frequently over half the submissions are dead spam, presumably killed by the policy in question. I rarely see false positives. While the quality of the remainder isn't always great, it's a lot better than it would be if there were no controls in place.
ps. Flag some spam while you're there :)
Frequently over half the submissions are dead spam, presumably killed by the policy in question. I rarely see false positives. While the quality of the remainder isn't always great, it's a lot better than it would be if there were no controls in place.
ps. Flag some spam while you're there :)
They are not a good way to stop spammers, the bot can easily make a comment and check if its there when it is not logged in. But it is a good way to annoy HN users when they get banned.
I agree. I liken it to "security through obscurity". I imagine it would be quite upsetting to be posting as a reasonable community member, and suddenly discover through some external means that my account had been silently black-holed, without being notified that my behavior was violating some of the community norms before-hand.
But perhaps such measures are needed to defend against the non-bot trolls and other belligerent individuals, and only implemented after numerous attempts at corrective feedback have failed.
But perhaps such measures are needed to defend against the non-bot trolls and other belligerent individuals, and only implemented after numerous attempts at corrective feedback have failed.
"only implemented after numerous attempts at corrective feedback have failed."
That's not how it works. You say something that offends some random moderator, and he/she can trivially silent-ban you. No comment under your comment saying you will be banned etc.
That's not how it works. You say something that offends some random moderator, and he/she can trivially silent-ban you. No comment under your comment saying you will be banned etc.
That is indeed unfortunate then. :(
Thanks for the clarification.
As to your 1.: Let's assume you're being honest and it isn't sock puppetry. It's still basically astroturfing, and I, at least, don't want to see that here.
If entire communities are allowed to flock to Hacker News to upvote the latest post about their pet platform, the site will become nothing more than a cheap marketing tool.
So, PSA: Please don't strip-mine this community's goodwill for your own or your company's benefit.
As to your 2.: You're entirely correct.
If entire communities are allowed to flock to Hacker News to upvote the latest post about their pet platform, the site will become nothing more than a cheap marketing tool.
So, PSA: Please don't strip-mine this community's goodwill for your own or your company's benefit.
As to your 2.: You're entirely correct.
"If entire communities are allowed to flock to Hacker News to upvote the latest post about their pet platform, the site will become nothing more than a cheap marketing tool."
Because there's been none of that happening for the past year...
Because there's been none of that happening for the past year...
I guess you missed the month of erlang posts that were posted because community was asked to post and upvote them?... How is that different exactly?
What an odd series of replies. Surely you all realize that:
1) Whether astroturfing does happen has no bearing on whether it should happen,
and
2) Examples of people astroturfing are an argument for having the rule, not an argument against it.
Right? Bueller?
1) Whether astroturfing does happen has no bearing on whether it should happen,
and
2) Examples of people astroturfing are an argument for having the rule, not an argument against it.
Right? Bueller?
What? You don't think articles are being systematically upvoted by groups of people? Sorry, I am a realist and it definitely seems like they're being upvoted.
HN is now the tech news site for insiders. It's not some obscure backwater.
HN is now the tech news site for insiders. It's not some obscure backwater.
"... Given the silent nature of bans on HN, we have no choice but to move onto a new HN account and continue to submit legitimate posts using legitimate word of mouth dissemination. ... This has (and continues to) raise questions about the legitimacy of the content on HN as just a shill for YCombinator."
Charlie the above scenario should have triggered alarm bells. I always thought of HN as both an experiment for Arc & free publicity for YC. What's the controversy?
Charlie the above scenario should have triggered alarm bells. I always thought of HN as both an experiment for Arc & free publicity for YC. What's the controversy?
If you think an account is unfairly trying to manipulate the voting system; you have to contact them. Anything less is blatantly ambiguous and unacceptable.
I completely disagree that it's unacceptable. I prefer it that way. It makes it harder to game the system, and I think that keeps the quality here better. The current system is biased towards the community as a whole. You want it biased towards the organizations that benefit from visibility. I don't see any reason to swap those biases.
Personally, I find it marginally acceptable to tweet a HN submission instead of the blog post itself. Tweeting the HN submission is an implicit "Hey guys, please vote this up for us!" to everyone who follows you.
I completely disagree that it's unacceptable. I prefer it that way. It makes it harder to game the system, and I think that keeps the quality here better. The current system is biased towards the community as a whole. You want it biased towards the organizations that benefit from visibility. I don't see any reason to swap those biases.
Personally, I find it marginally acceptable to tweet a HN submission instead of the blog post itself. Tweeting the HN submission is an implicit "Hey guys, please vote this up for us!" to everyone who follows you.
Wait, does gaming mean a thriving community of hackers spreading faster than gossip? Ahh, caught. Detective Graham ... To the zzZZZZzz
The problem with that is you are also penalizing Nodejitsu customers (like myself) that host their projects on their platform. I support the Nodejitsu guys but I'm not an employee and don't share all their viewpoints; I was just working on my first Nodejs project for NodeKnockout and wanted to get some feedback from the HN community, but my site was blocked also.
A fair argument, but I don't see how excluding content without transparency is any better. At the very least you could let people know why or what is happening when something is submitted. Not all communities need to overlap and it's HN's decision for what goes here. Also, you'd be better off if your guidelines included some wording on this.
As for the competitors line, I was possibly confused by past drama certain threads that there was something going on with that. Sorry for any misinformation this may have spread. It might be to everyone's advantage to ensure that there is a proper way to communicate with HN to get someone unbanned (I am not with Nodejitsu but I'm sure they'd be willing to talk). There is good content on that blog.
As for the competitors line, I was possibly confused by past drama certain threads that there was something going on with that. Sorry for any misinformation this may have spread. It might be to everyone's advantage to ensure that there is a proper way to communicate with HN to get someone unbanned (I am not with Nodejitsu but I'm sure they'd be willing to talk). There is good content on that blog.
I don't see how excluding content without transparency is any better.
You can see everything that gets killed by turning on showdead in your profile.
You can see everything that gets killed by turning on showdead in your profile.
Ok, that statement seems a little misleading. I just turned on showdead. Yes, I can see the text, but the link doesn't seem to be there, so I can't convince myself that the kill was warranted. Am I missing something?
E.g., "[dead] Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer, hacker in AT&T iPad case, on Occupy Wall Street (youtube.com)" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3146776
Edit: another killed link, "Funding for venture capital industry plunges" from the mercury news. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3146633 The article seems pretty relevant to the audience here.
E.g., "[dead] Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer, hacker in AT&T iPad case, on Occupy Wall Street (youtube.com)" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3146776
Edit: another killed link, "Funding for venture capital industry plunges" from the mercury news. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3146633 The article seems pretty relevant to the audience here.
I make the links inactive to ensure spammers get no traffic, and thus give up spamming us. HN gets so much traffic that otherwise they might get a significant amount just from people clicking on the dead link. Anyone who wants to see the url of a story can see it on the edit page, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=3146776
As for your specific examples, the first was killed because that user is banned from submitting, and the second I killed myself because when I tried the link it was broken; it's since been fixed so I unkilled it.
As for your specific examples, the first was killed because that user is banned from submitting, and the second I killed myself because when I tried the link it was broken; it's since been fixed so I unkilled it.
[deleted]
I think it's more about informing the person submitting. Most people who hear about this are surprised and had no idea. It might be solving the problem of transparency from the wrong end.
When we kill something it's almost always for some form of abuse: usually spamming, or in a handful of cases for particularly egregious sockpuppet upvotes. I don't feel like we owe such people much. Plus the more you tell them, the easier you make it to get around you.
I'll let it rest here as I'm sure you've thought much longer than I have but I do feel it a bit unfair to assume it's always the spammers submitting content when the domain is shared.
https://twitter.com/#!/FrankDenbow/status/128144916655259648
https://twitter.com/#!/FrankDenbow/status/128144916655259648
The poster is completely unaware however. See http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3146243 - I posted the link to check whether it's actually banned. It showed up and I could see it. Now it's dead without any notification or feedback for me.
I don't think pg's trying to hide anything. It's presumably just a lot of work to maintain an up to date public index of blocked domains and rationale.
Simply killing submissions and relying on a lesser known profile switch on the users end is pretty indirect if not obscure. The submitter should be able to lobby to get something unblocked and to do that they need to know what happened in the first place. It's a pretty simple change to the process.
>[Nodejitsu.com] is banned because they created an army of sockpuppets to vote up their posts.
Some evidence to support this claim would be useful.
Some evidence to support this claim would be useful.
How would it be useful? Are you planning on making your sockpuppets more realistic?
> They're banned because they created an army of sockpuppets to vote up their posts.
I too am interested in some sort of substantiation for this claim.
I too am interested in some sort of substantiation for this claim.
+1 Show us some proof, don't just throw (up) accusations around.
I for one made at least 30 accounts to request this evidence be presented forthwith
Repost from a dead link that seems relevant. I know nothing about this situation, and don't know Marak, but it seemed best to let someone defend their company:
marakmarak 5 hours ago | link [dead]
> They're banned because they created an army of sockpuppets to vote up their posts.
That is inaccurate, and libelous.
We have never used fake accounts to artificially upvote anything.
Your users and moderators harassed me to the point where I would be forced to create a new anonymous account every-time I wanted to post materials, so I wouldn't have to deal with the onslaught of your abusive community.
I was very candid about this, tweeted about it, talked about it in IRC, it wasn't a secret.
These accounts were all used once, then instantly abandoned. You have full logs of all of this.
I think you've been fed some bad information, because if you checked your logs you will find what I'm saying is accurate.
Show me one instance where our "army of socketpuppets" upvoted something from nodejitsu.com. You can't, because it never happened
marakmarak 5 hours ago | link [dead]
> They're banned because they created an army of sockpuppets to vote up their posts.
That is inaccurate, and libelous.
We have never used fake accounts to artificially upvote anything.
Your users and moderators harassed me to the point where I would be forced to create a new anonymous account every-time I wanted to post materials, so I wouldn't have to deal with the onslaught of your abusive community.
I was very candid about this, tweeted about it, talked about it in IRC, it wasn't a secret.
These accounts were all used once, then instantly abandoned. You have full logs of all of this.
I think you've been fed some bad information, because if you checked your logs you will find what I'm saying is accurate.
Show me one instance where our "army of socketpuppets" upvoted something from nodejitsu.com. You can't, because it never happened
I'm disappointed that HN has become such a big news site, because it is not designed responsibly to be one, so trying to get a post featured is very difficult. I think the only reason any posts do get featured is because of the 'sockpuppets' that the submitters have built up (or that follow the content), but that is legitimate upvoting (I'm not sure why someone would upvote something they aren't interested in?).
Perhaps the most important change that HN needs to make is to have topics. It isn't fair to other people and content if the stream is full of NodeJS content, but that is a legitimate interest so HN can't ban the prominent workers in that field (bizarre). The ban from HN seems to be purely a side effect of the fact that the maintainers are not interested in designing the system responsibly (they are too busy with other responsibilities). Topic channels are obviously needed.
I think the difference between HN and reddit needs to be considered well and the two should be integrated some how, I would like to see topic channels on HN.
Perhaps the most important change that HN needs to make is to have topics. It isn't fair to other people and content if the stream is full of NodeJS content, but that is a legitimate interest so HN can't ban the prominent workers in that field (bizarre). The ban from HN seems to be purely a side effect of the fact that the maintainers are not interested in designing the system responsibly (they are too busy with other responsibilities). Topic channels are obviously needed.
I think the difference between HN and reddit needs to be considered well and the two should be integrated some how, I would like to see topic channels on HN.
I did not know HN blocked legit content. Can you give me an example?
Nodejitsu's blog is the example I was referring too.
Edit: submissions will silently be hidden. Following the link below brings me to a blank page. Also nothing on the new tab.
Edit: submissions will silently be hidden. Following the link below brings me to a blank page. Also nothing on the new tab.
Perhaps this is related to the track record of at least one of the Nodejitsu founders (digging a little there's a fair amount of blog-related drama although not on their blog so maybe this isn't a fair evaluation)?
Although in principle I agree that "legitimate content" shouldn't be blocked, if spam has happened from or is related to a blog it's only reasonable to expect that such a blog might become blocked (how else should the moderators handle this?), the other legitimate content notwithstanding.
Although in principle I agree that "legitimate content" shouldn't be blocked, if spam has happened from or is related to a blog it's only reasonable to expect that such a blog might become blocked (how else should the moderators handle this?), the other legitimate content notwithstanding.
At least on reddit, if Marak Squires posts anything at all, drama follows (justified or not). Maybe it's for the best that it can't be posted here.
"Perhaps this is related to the track record of at least one of the Nodejitsu founders"
This is irrelevant to applications hosted on his company's domain.
This is irrelevant to applications hosted on his company's domain.
Just speculating, but silence seems like the right behavior for dealing with spam submissions. If you tell spammers when you reject their posts, they'll just start working on spams that are harder to filter.
That's strange... could someone confirm? I would be very disappointed if that was true and not widely known. On the other hand, I didn't have any problems with submitting that link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3146239
Here is the list of banned sites: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499044
"The great majority are banned for spamming and/or voting rings. Others (like url shortening services, squidoo, etc) are banned because they're often used by spammers. Others are banned for the reasons I listed in that recent essay: linkjacking, being offtopic, or characteristically being fluff."
"The great majority are banned for spamming and/or voting rings. Others (like url shortening services, squidoo, etc) are banned because they're often used by spammers. Others are banned for the reasons I listed in that recent essay: linkjacking, being offtopic, or characteristically being fluff."
Thanks, didn't know about that. 3 years old though, I'm assuming there's a more up-to-date list in operation.
I would really love to have an API for lamernews, given that the system is trying to be more open than HN: http://lamernews.com/news/58
I'm currently developing a similar open-source news aggregation codebase in Python/Pyramid. NoSQL support is something I'd like to add at some point but right now all database operations depend on SQLAlchemy. I would really, really like to see some NoSQL-ish modifications to a library like that, I hope antirez or other big names in k-v stores work on that soon -- it would certainly expand redis et al much faster.
I plan on making a big formal post about this when it has a bit more polish, but there are already a couple of sites that are using it. Here's the link if anyone's interested: https://github.com/sjuxax/raggregate
I plan on making a big formal post about this when it has a bit more polish, but there are already a couple of sites that are using it. Here's the link if anyone's interested: https://github.com/sjuxax/raggregate
Larger arrows. My #1 feature wish. Why do I have 10 points just for signing up?
On the to do list, he says that he intends to transfer karma to the poster when you upvote something. So if you upvoted a link, you would be deducted one karma point and it would be given to the person who submitted the link. So, eventually it seems as if you'll need those 10 karma points to allow you to start voting.
This looks like a good idea to encourage contributing instead of simply lurking around and voting things down. But LN will have to be careful with the economics of karma, because otherwise people might become reluctant to vote for fear of losing karma.
Somebody left the debug switch on: http://cl.ly/BBFy
Considering joining just because it is a much smaller community, and I will have a disproportionately larger impact than I do at hacker news. I am more likely to be able to influence it to be more like the site I want it to be than I am able to influence hacker news. I imagine most hn folk who join lamer news at first will do it for that reason.
I don't think many will actually be giving up hacker news in joining lamer news, tho.
I don't think many will actually be giving up hacker news in joining lamer news, tho.
Cool. I've joined. Hopefully LN will be a more democratic forum than HN.
Am I the only one who occasionally gets a page full of Go Daddy ads on http://lamernews.com/news/1 ?
i started to make a reddit clone too to demo our mety db - http://vsetec.com/uncensor/ (dont click the spammy links, the site is sorta unattended now).
I support the idea!
Buz please change the name. Being proud of what you do and giving an appropriate name is underrated.
please, please, please, do not re-invent the wheel. HN software is fine. http://arclanguage.org/item?id=4718
It isn't as though there weren't Slashdot, Digg, Reddit and a million similar sites before Hacker News. If he wants his own codebase, that's his prerogative.