Hm... you're right. Those are very insightful. Unfortunately, the two examples you came up with are 3 months apart, and fake steve posts new blog entries all the time. My experience has been that every time I see a link to one of his posts, and I read it hoping that this time he'll impress me, I keep being disappointed.

However, I notice that the two posts you point out are much more business related than technology related. Since the real fake steve is a business reporter, perhaps he shines when he's in his element and falls flat when he strays out of it.

"Unfortunately, the two examples you came up with are 3 months apart, and fake steve posts new blog entries all the time."

You don't like most of his posts, but it's also the case that most of his posts are not on the HN front page. And thus, we have the value proposition for Hacker News: instead of filtering based on the author, filter based on the votes here.

But then how do you explain the popularity of this post? It was completely vacuous, but is still at 13 points as I write this.

It's all statistics. My suggestion is that HN is supposed to be a better filter than just ignoring bloggers who infrequently post good things.

And this off to a long digression about the opportunity cost of reading the bad articles vs. the benefit of reading the good ones and on and on...

But yeah, it's not perfect. If anything, if there were no articles you disliked on the front page, then HN would probably be too conservative a filter.

It involves Paul Graham.