corresation

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.

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.

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‽

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

Your criticisms are based upon nothing.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.