

The Pitchforks are Coming - enjalot
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html#.U7Iy5I1dXgR

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illini123
I'm curious to see if this only grows worse given the continued automation of
industries like manufacturing that have traditionally been the backbone of the
American middle class during the 20th century. Not so much that jobs won't be
there, but they will require more advanced skills and less employees, thanks
to "software eating the world."

Building the case for raising the minimum wage is an interesting one to be
viewed objectively (not that it ever is), but I think it's also too early to
tell with Seattle what the long-term outcomes are.

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alttab
If capitalism works, it will solve that problem. In other industries there are
talent shortages. Maybe markets will be created on making tools to raise the
relative skillset of a displaced workforce?

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illini123
One can hope, and I would sincerely like to think that new markets within
manufacturing or other "old" industries are going to emerge. Off-shoring isn't
the cheap solution it once was. Then again, I tend to be very critical of the
belief that other industries have "shortages": [http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-
work/education/the-stem-crisis-i...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-
work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth)

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dang
[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=pitchforks+are+coming#!/story/fore...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=pitchforks+are+coming#!/story/forever/0/pitchforks%20are%20coming)

~~~
kosei
To be honest, this is one of the problems I have with HN. If there's a decent
article but it goes relatively under the radar, I'll never see it. And there's
no system in place to give an article a "second chance". It seems like based
on the algorithm in place, if it doesn't take off immediately, the article
will never get traction.

~~~
dang
Thanks for writing that. It's definitely a problem that too many good stories
fall through the cracks on HN. If all the good stories were able to reach the
front page even briefly, I'm convinced that the story quality on HN would be
much higher. So this problem is actually my primary focus these days when I
have time to work on the code.

You're a bit mistaken about there being no system to give second chances right
now. If an article hasn't had significant attention within about the last
year, we don't treat reposts as dupes. That already helps quite a lot.
However, the ideas that we're hoping to implement around this are different
and, if they work, will have a more dramatic effect. So I hope you'll be
willing to wait and see.

Now for the bad news. I'm afraid we don't agree that this "pitchforks" piece
is a decent article. To me (qua moderator) it looks like a low-substance
political riler-upper by an author who has been circulating the same message
(including through HN) for a while now and happened to score a post on
Politico, a questionable site for HN to begin with.

Qua reader, by the way, I have a different reaction. I kind of like that stuff
and I find the root question very interesting. I mean the question of whether
the postwar social order which has been so stable is threatened by current
macroeconomic developments. But (qua moderator again) I think any HN
discussions on that need to be seeded with higher-quality material.

So the reason you were frustrated in this case is not HN's dupe detector, it's
that a moderator is more or less calling an article you like off-topic for HN.
My thought was that since
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7953608](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7953608)
did have _some_ discussion, we could just treat all the reposts as dupes.
Maybe that was overly finessey.

~~~
kosei
Thanks for your response. Glad to hear you're looking for a solution, and I'm
very interested in seeing what ends up getting changed. I wonder how many
people are actually looking at the "new" page vs. the front page, as I would
imagine that an incredibly small number of people are the ones that end up
being responsible for whether an article falls through the cracks or not.
Personally, I rarely look at articles on the new page, so I expect that there
are quite a lot of articles that do fall through the cracks for me.

Appreciate the input on the article in particular - I thought it was an
insightful look as a Seattle local who has been puzzled by the $15 wage
minimum for quite some time. I definitely see the point of it being more off-
topic, but I'd argue that the author's background helps that cause (I have
seen plenty of articles about random tech luminaries' opinions on somewhat
off-topic items).

Regardless, thank you again for writing a reasoned reply to add context.

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kosei
As a local Seattleite, this is the first logical explanation I've heard for a
$15 minimum wage, and it has given me a reason to change my mind on the
policy. I don't know how it will play out (I don't think anyone does), but I
hope he's right.

