corresation

I'm currently pushing 13 seconds a page load (for just the HTML), clearly caught in a super-clever (albeit comically cowardly and childish) slowbanning.

I've said absolutely nothing controversial or mean-spirited, aside from perhaps questioning Paul Graham's dubious "hidden until approved" moderation scheme.

Truth be told I've derived little value from the site for quite some time, so as Cartman so oft said: "Screw You Guys, I'm going home!". Or at least to Slashdot or something.

Cheers.

Why?

Ignoring questions about the honesty or self-serving nature of the invisible-hand moderation, HN's rise came at the expense of a number of other sites, including reddit's /r/programming, Slashdot, dzone, etc.

The draw of HN, despite serious (and continuing) technical deficiencies, were hordes of young programmers who wanted to gain the attention and favor of Paul Graham and YCombinator.

So it's a serious question when I ask whether the technology community has been made better by Hacker News. I would quite sincerely say that no, it has been a net negative for the community, even if it serves Paul Graham and YCombinator well. The technology world is worse off for it.

Log out and you'll be surprised how speedy the site is. Log in...12 seconds to return 6KB of data, at least in my case.

Have I been capriciously slowbanned to encourage me to lose interest and get lost, or is the process of counting up the user karma a cause of significant slowdowns? Are certain accounts more costly than others?

The "fun" of Hacker News is that you never can tell...

It is interesting that the top post in this story is someone lauding the moderation of someone whose moderation they, presumably, have no ability to view. While the assignment of hellbans and slowbans may be completely just and deserved, it might also have a profoundly corrupting influence, steering conversation exactly where it serves certain purposes best.

Have I mentioned how fantastic the current crop of YC companies are‽

Sites like HN can't escape Parkinson's law of triviality: Complex or mixed-conclusion content will naturally get drown out by easily "understood" (at least in the perception of the reader) and debated material.

Titles play a large part as well, as they allow people to support or reject a notion without the effort of even following the link.

This isn't meant to be grumpy or conspiratorial, nor is it negative about HN, it's just the way these things often work. HN does not measure or demand that you follow a link to click the arrow (nor does it require it for "flag", which is a used in practice to downvote). It doesn't maintain a history of recently visited items to ease voting on content you may have read earlier in the day. These naturally lend themselves to cheap votes.

This goes against commonsense, why was this done?

Almost certainly because they knew about their own enormous liability. They settled with a family for this issue in February of 2006, and not long after did the engineering change, albeit leaving the defect out there on millions of cars (insert Fight Club quote).

I suspect this issue is going to continue to grow until someone is charged with criminal negligence causing death.

Not a single person said that it has no value. But the site does an arguably poor job communicating what it is about (to those who say "watch the video", understand that many people consider videos a last resort. There has to be a significant lure to even go that far, and for many of us it didn't seem worth it).

Comments about the site are entirely appropriate on HN (this is something that concerns most of us), and you could consider your own advice and simply skip over them if they don't interest you, instead of wasting emotions on being appalled.

Exactly as others experienced, I skimmed the site and found nothing compelling me to look deeper. The site gives the feeling of significant style but little substance (technologists usually put attention only on substance, which itself is seldom compelling. There is a middle ground somewhere in between).

IMO Facebook should have never offered any free reach for businesses

It has always confused me that Facebook has done so little to monetize businesses, many of whom now list their Facebook pages in major advertising campaigns rather than their own website. Traditionally the service that Facebook provides to businesses was a pretty high value one, and it wasn't that the businesses brought users -- the businesses went to Facebook because the users were already there.

While their website is an anti-pattern, I do have to applaud one pattern that paint.net was early (if not first) to adopt: Asking you about updates when you exit the program rather than when you first open it.

Contrast this with Notepad++. Every single time I open that app -- which I only do when I have pressing, immediate work to do -- it imperiously demands that it and its plugins be updated for various trivial, if not irrelevant things. I'm sure there is an option I can find someone in the hierarchies of options, but as a default interface behavior that is atrocious.

The only time you should interrupt work -- and app start is a primary indicator that work is afoot -- is if it's a critical security update. Otherwise do something less obnoxious.

Add that to Julie Zhuo (Designer @ Facebook) doing the same thing just a few hours ago and it makes for a very curious confluence, in both cases diminishing the immediate credibility of the articles.

Is this actually possible? You couldn't change the original transaction without the private key, nor can you spend the results of it until it is in an accepted block chain block, no? Am I wrong?

If you don't serve the market, there are a lot of people who very quickly will.

I have mixed feelings about this. While they may have mulled over this game for a year, it remains a relatively simple idea and execution (compared to most other mobile apps). Threes has always seemed a little odd to me given that it was endlessly pitched on HN by people who seemed to believe that the authors are owed some debt of gratitude (even before the clones appeared), while endless rich and innovative apps languish on the market. I'm not saying they don't, but the way they were singled out seemed incredibly strange.

There is something in this story about the value of ideas. For years we've heard that ideas are worthless, and execution is everything. In this case the execution was very easily cloned, and such is the case with most games and apps now, and the real novelty was the idea. So where does that leave that equation? Is the idea still worthless because the execution was cloned? Does the idea now have value? Etc.

The argument is that a better user experience was abandoned in favor of a worse user experience that generated more impressions per user.

The argument is that an experience that Dustin Curtis liked better was a better experience. Maybe the victorious layout really was liked by more people, just as more people clearly like a 4" (or greater) smartphone screen than 3.5".

This sounds contrived. Being the skeptical sort we should all be, there is no reason to believe the sources (if you believe they exist) regarding supposed cynical reasons they didn't proceed with a considered UI.

Maybe Facebook found that people really actually liked the other variant better? Or maybe they were just ambivalent about it, and if we've learned anything about widely deployed social media sites, it's that you need a really, really good reason to change things.

And to add just a bit more on the "contrived" notion: My Facebook feed looks very similar to the first page, with big, colourful pictures dominating my news food. If my network had people posting short twitter-like missives, I suppose it would look like that. Outside of trivial CSS differences, the only real variation is that I don't have the confusing iconography down the left, instead using that massive area of white space for descriptive text.

When Google originally started doing this it was essentially to open people's eyes to the capabilities of HTML. Lately, however, it has just been excessive. In this case it isn't even particularly clever: Click on stuff and stuff happens. If you had to actually align planets or build real molecules / atoms, then cool, but just clicking on highlighted things is not interesting.

A rule that apparently was seldom written down given that it was highly illegal.

Job's simply asked that Google's recruitment department please stop.

By emailing the CEO of Google. Jobs knew exactly what he was doing, and what the outcome would be. And boy, what an absolutely embarrassing response by Google.

This is a growing anti-web trend -- the tendency of web properties to only self-link. I assume someone somewhere has actual metrics justifying this, but it's the antithesis of what the web is about, but it's exactly why the only links in this article are to other Bloomberg Business Week articles.

Given the facts of this case thus far, you might be overdoing it with the outrage. Of course details of the lives of the pilots are being poured over given that every indication includes one of their involvement.

I don't think anyone thinks the plane blew up. At some point it likely just ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean.

The simplest possible solution with the facts that we have now is that one of the pilots (one of the pilots wife and children moved out of the family home the day before liftoff) wanted to commit suicide (taking many victims with him), but for some reason wanted to leave a mystery. Perhaps relating to insurance in some way -- hoping the black box would never be found that revealed any of the actions. Their tactic might have been to continue flying into no-return range in such a way that they didn't have to fully admit to what they were doing until it was too late.

It is terribly crass to make someone a villain when they might have been simply a victim, but of all the possible explanations that is all that seems to fit right now. That someone wanted to leave a mystery, and intentionally crashed in a place and way where it was incredibly unlikely that they would ever be found, and it turns out that only a communications handshake and some technical excellence led to it possibly being found.

SVG is based on XML, I don't think I've ever seen XML and 'astonishingly concise' in the same sentence before, congratulations for being the first.

The rudiments of the vector description is extremely concise. That it is XML is superficially irrelevant, and if you really think the text markers are so important, consider it a highly compressible binary format via GZIP. Ultimately it doesn't matter.

I've never seen any metric that holds SWF as being more efficient than real-world SVG.

Was the idea really validated? Is their business model "get on the front page of HN daily"? If not, absolutely nothing was validated.

SVG is astonishingly concise. Most renderers are remarkably efficiently. It is very gzippable.

Your criticisms are based upon nothing.

Piece of unsolicited advice - Stop declaring everything a strawman or propaganda. It does not strengthen your argument.

The situations we are talking about are actually more akin to professional athletes or sought after writers -- employers are actively seeking them out and recruiting them, at escalating wage levels, because they offer potential multiples of value to the company over "just any paper qualified candidate". Compare this to, for instance, auto-assembly or steel-working, where the difference in company value between resources is largely a wash.

We are specifically talking about the tech corridor right now. My home base is in the Toronto area but I seldom deal with Toronto area clients because the environment is dismal here: The pay is terrible, the product is terrible, and the mentality is of the "replaceable cog" variety, every project failing just enough until it's replaced by an innovative product made elsewhere. A union here might make sense because the situation already is pretty miserable. The same is true of the United Kingdom, to respond to another commentator. My comments about union specifically relate to the hyper-competitive, hyper-innovative and excellence seeking, silicon valley area.

But unions almost always concern themselves with such things. I may be attacking a "strawman" (ergo, how virtually every union on the planet operates), but humorously the salvation is just as much of a strawman, no?

I'm not "repeating" anyone's propaganda. I've worked in union situations before. I understand the ramifications of unions. As someone who tends to do quite well in this field, unions would be very deleterious for me personally: Unions are as much if not more about "equality" between union members, even where equality is measured by specious metrics (such as seniority), as it is about the employee/employer relationship.

The AMA is not a union by any traditional metric. It is a professional association. If a doctor is lured to a hospital for enormous sums of money, the AMA has absolutely no say over it. Nor do they dictate that another doctor has to be offered the job because they've been practicing for two months longer. Nor do they dictate that the doctor has to be paid for scale grade 7E because to do otherwise would cause resentment among other doctor's.

It would be great to have a professional association (presuming it didn't become too involved in its own enrichment). No thanks to unions.

"this will strengthen the understanding that this type of stuff is exactly why you want strong unions"

Unions are fundamentally socialist. That isn't using socialism as a bad word, but as a factual description of the fundamental fairness and equality notions of union. In many situations it provides protection and balance between the employee and employer.

Does that really apply to highly paid employees who are actively recruited as standouts? The ones paid far above many of their peers because they're at the high end of the curve?

Unions are the antithesis of the solution. Indeed, the union approach would be the same problem (if not worse). There would be no standouts. No exemplary talents. Unions would mandate the specific lowest common denominator compensation and conditions.

Again, I see the value in some places, but it is woefully ill-suited for this situation.

Professional associations -- ala doctors and lawyers -- is more suitable for this field. Unions are not something most would benefit from.

A cartel are competitors who privately agree to essentially not compete, and this can include on the production side (which in this case are tech workers). The unavoidable, and intentional impact of that is wage suppression. This isn't a "maybe", this is absolute certainty: A rising Google upset the apple cart by offering more than those other companies were, and everyone else was sour that they'd have to start paying more to keep their employees. This agreement, without any doubt at all, took money out of the pockets of tech workers.

I'm generally a fan of Google, but I have a negative opinion of Eric Schmidt. So many times he says and does things that seem so fundamentally detached from real life.

EDIT: Just wanted to add that the hero of this story -- the only one who actually saw that it was wrong and probably illegal, was Edward Colligan, then the CEO of Palm - http://pando.com/2014/02/19/court-documents-reveal-steve-job...

As mkohlmyr mentions, it is unfortunate that MongoDB is offhandedly dismissed, however by the second paragraph of the linked article you have to appreciate how such hostility comes about.

But what is it that SQL databases could not solve which lead to the evolution of NoSql databases...{some "big data" changes to the world}...Which means processing huge amount of data. Which SQL databases were never designed for.

Firstly, specialized data storage and retrieval, including unstructured or document oriented, existed long before SQL did. Your filesystem is just such a system. Everything old is new again.

And secondly, a citation is required for the SQL databases "were never designed for" huge amounts of data claim. To start with, a definition of huge is necessary to make such a claim. 1GB? 1TB? 100TB? There are SQL solutions that work with all of those with ease. Many of the largest databases on the planet are humming away on SQL systems right now. SQL is abstract from the underlying platform, so if you have a cluster of 100 machines each in front of 1000 storage arrays each in front of 100 SSDs, it doesn't suddenly become "NoSQL".

SQL databases are generalized solutions. They generally do not solve specific, individual problems as well as precisely engineered solutions, which is why giant companies like Google, with extremely precise needs (e.g. index the web) have solutions that do a much better job for their purposes. Does that apply to your needs at all, though? Are you looking at your specific requirements, engineering precise storage and retrieval that is optimal? Probably not. Saying "MongoDB is under the umbrella of NoSQL, and NoSQL also kind of encompasses highly specialized solutions from industry leaders, so it will work for my startups contacts databases" is very, very poor, misleading reasoning. But we see it all of the time on HN in regards to solutions like mongodb. Which again is how you get responses that might seem hostile.

Karma/Comment is a poor metric, I think, because it encourages the strike attack comment style.

If I post something and people post counterpoints or questions or concerns, I will respond. But the truth is that from a pure karma average perspective, by far the best action would be to simply leave the threads hanging, the single post floating at the top of karma heaven. That works great from a pure karma perspective, but it subdues conversation because every point is a single attack.

It also encourages the stealthy comment editor. While Paul mentions this, it is something that happens regularly -- people make a comment, someone responds unfavourably, and the original person subtly edits their comment to make them look unfairly attacked. This is a specific problem on HN given that quoting is generally discouraged. So everyone piles on the downvotes and upvotes, respectively, to right this seeming injustice.

Karma on HN is easily gamed, as it is elsewhere. It is unfortunate when we care too much about it because it leads to completely artificial conversations.

Alternately, he is lying. It sounds crass to outright say such a thing, but it is suspiciously convenient that Arrington draws attention to himself under the pretext of having explosive information relating to a current hot story, all with mysterious unnamed sources.