
Tell HN: Launch HN Test - gruseom
This is dang testing something. Please carry on.<p>Edit: bah! you guys upvoted it and ruined my test. I think I can cancel that out.<p>Edit 2: I&#x27;ve changed the title from &quot;Launch HN: Test&quot; so that this thread doesn&#x27;t appear on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;show" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;show</a>, where it didn&#x27;t belong.
======
dang
Ok, since this is getting attention, I'll explain.

Launch HN posts for YC startups are one of three formal things that HN does
for YC
([https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20launch&sort=byDate&type=comment)).
The others are job ads for YC startups, and orange usernames for YC alumni—but
only when displayed to _other_ YC alumni, which always generates "why is my
username not orange" emails. But I digress.

Launch HN posts are like job ads in that they get an initial front-page
placement, usually somewhere between #8 and #10. (I think job ads start a
little higher). Then they fall down the page. Unlike job ads, though, launch
posts can be upvoted and commented on. Once they've gotten their initial
placement they function like regular stories. Occasionally the community finds
one particularly interesting and it gets upvoted higher. This recent one spent
quite a while at #1:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616857](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616857)
([http://hnrankings.info/22616857/](http://hnrankings.info/22616857/)).

We started doing the Launch HNs three years ago. I was worried that the
community would hate them because we were taking additional front page space
for YC. (Our intention was to make it so that a launch post and a job ad
wouldn't appear at the same time, but I never ended up writing that code, so
sometimes they do.) But that hasn't ever come up. I think it's because launch
threads are intrinsically more interesting than job ads (see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767319](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767319)
downthread for more on that).

All this time, the initial front-page placement of launch posts, unlike job
ads, has been done manually. That is, founders have had to email us and we've
manually jigged the post onto the front page. The problem with that is that
you have to be awake to do it. I don't _want_ to be awake to do it, especially
because startup founders tend to be businessy, bustling types who are all
bright-and-early, while my schedule drifts ever deeper into the darkness as
the few moorings I had remaining to the rest of society dissolve in this time
of social distancing and self-isolation, which were basically my bread and
butter to begin with
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUlBWNDW72E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUlBWNDW72E)).

Until now, I've told founders to post at Pacific 10am and email us, because
that's roughly when I get going in the morning. Tomorrow, though, there are
two. One is a fintech startup in Latin America who want to post at 9am. And
the other is Peter Roberts, who's going to do another immigration AMA
([https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=proberts](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=proberts)).
Peter is on the east coast, and wants to get going at 8am Pacific, which is
late for him and (ungodly) early for me.

So tonight I got frustrated enough to write some code to deal with it.
Frustration reaching a tipping point and boiling over is my gateway into the
code these days. My goal is for startups to be able to post their launches,
and occasionally for pre-scheduled submissions like Peter's (which are rare),
to end up on the front page independently of whenever I went to sleep the
night before.

This code turned out to be a lot more complicated than I anticipated. The
patch ended up adding a hundred lines of Arc. A hundred lines of Arc! Do you
have any idea how many lines of Arc that is? I just looked through the history
and the last commit that added that many lines of code was over two years ago
when we got Arc to compile to JS. Obviously this change needs to be thoroughly
tested, so after testing it on my laptop I deployed it to production and
decided to do a couple of sanity checks live. One was to post a test Launch HN
using my old account gruseom, which is the founder account for Skysheet, the
spreadsheet startup that Scott and I had 10 years ago (and which I still think
about every day, but I should avoid digressing again). The code I wrote has
some logic in it for cofounder accounts. One thing it's supposed to do is
email all the cofounders when a Launch HN post has made it to HN's front page,
so they will be ready to engage with commenters. Anyhow, this test post was
the OP. The good news: it got placed on the front page in the way that I
intended. The bad news: none of the emails were received. God fucking shit
fucking goddamnit I knew those emails wouldn't work...I mean, _dang_.

(Edit: actually that's not what happened.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22772667](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22772667))

My intention was for this thread to remain obscure, then get placed briefly on
the front page by the new code, at which point I'd get the emails and
immediately delete it. I didn't think it was very likely to get noticed in the
middle of the night here, especially when posted by what ought by now to be an
obscure account, but oh well.

I think that covers everything. Hopefully you all will see those two auto-
placed posts on the front page tomorrow morning because I do not intend to be
awake 5 hours from now. (Edit: it worked!)

~~~
fyfy18
One thing I always wanted to ask if why do job ads not allow comments? I'm
guessing its to prevent negative comments/trolling (we get plenty of 'this
will never work' on Launch/Show posts), but at the same time I feel like
comments on job ads could be a good way for the founders and existing
employees (tell us why you as a meager developer are excited to work there!)
to interact with the HN community.

~~~
_-___________-_
Job ads in the "who is hiring" threads generally only attract comments of one
of a few types:

"I applied to this place and they never got back to me"

"Thanks, I applied"

"Please add salary/remoteness/interview process to your job ad"

"You have a typo in your text/email address/website URL"

~~~
h0h0h0h0111
The latter two comments seem pretty useful feedback though

~~~
bryanrasmussen
number 1 is pretty useful feedback for me, if they don't respond to people who
apply I don't intend to take time to make a good cover letter and adapt my CV
to highlight how I would be a good fit for the job.

~~~
laumars
As a hiring manager I can assure you that is not always practical. If someone
makes it to an interview, even if it's just a first stage telephone interview,
then I'll readily give feedback. If some sends a CV and then asks for feedback
then I will also happily provide feedback if time permits). But recruitment is
a heavily time consuming process already and some positions can receive dozens
or more CVs so I don't have the time to reply to every single candidate and
explain to them "Thank you for applying but unfortunately we've had better CVs
through." Likewise I've never expected that when applying for other jobs
either.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
ok, but I would think like this:

looking for a job is a heavily time consuming process, and going to a new job
is a risky process. I'm too well-situated to take that time or risk on any
thing that seems off. I would have to be desperate to change that calculation.

If a company does not reply I assume there are potential reasons:

1\. company is disorganized, just as a company would penalize me for seeming
disorganized I will certainly do the same with a potential employer. The point
of a company is in some ways to be more organized than individual humans; it
is, after all, an organization. If it can't or won't be organized I won't have
anything to do with them.

2\. Company is rude. Treating someone badly when you have no power over them
is a warning sign never to let the company have power over you.

3\. Company does not have good tools setup to automate responses to people
whose applications it has decided not to go further with - which is a subset
of company is disorganized.

So I guess there is a mismatch between our goals and needs in the requirement
process.

~~~
dsr_
#3, especially: if your company has sane mail tools, it can autorespond to
every single application with a variant on this:

Thanks for applying to $COMPANY.

We will get back to you by $(TODAY + 7) if we want to start a conversation.

Sincerely,

A. Robot

~~~
withinboredom
I generally give companies a week or two to reply. If they don’t ever reply, I
never apply there again. Or I’ll apply and ghost them years later. Several
times.

~~~
throwanem
This thread is a great generic example of why job posts don't enable comments.

------
astatine

      Is this a Launch?
      No, this is a Test.
      Did it work?
      It should.
      Dang!
      What?
      The one thing that can ruin the test - it happened. Upvotes.
      Quite gruseom.
    

Sorry - time hangs heavy some days.

------
Hitton
I'll use this as an opportunity to ask something.

Are there any stats how many active users does HN have, on how many servers it
runs, on which database etc.?

Because I have recently wanted to look at my older saved/upvoted
posts/comments on reddit and found out that you can look only at last 1000
posts and it does various other things to save resources. HN doesn't seem to
do things like that and still feels much snappier than reddit (yes reddit has
much more users, but still impressive imho).

~~~
dang
Reddit is 100x bigger. It's not just that we aren't in their league...our
league is not in their league. So I feel embarrassed at the comparison.

It's hard to count active users because you have to define them in order to
count them, and we make a point of not tracking people that much. We can count
accounts and unique IPs, and that's about it. But it's basically about 5M
readers a month, give or take, as far as we can tell. It grows linearly, with
large swings. If you step back 10 feet from the graphs and squint, it's
basically a straight line for the last 10 years. We like it that way; we
wouldn't want to go full Haskell and avoid success at all costs, but we don't
want hockey-stick growth either. HN is not a startup!

It runs on one server. Actually the app server (written in Arc) runs on one
core. But we have some caching in front of that for logged-out users.

~~~
bor0
> we wouldn't want to go full Haskell and avoid success at all costs

Can you elaborate on that statement? To me, it implies that going with Haskell
avoids success, but I might be missing something. If that really is the
implication, can you explain?

~~~
dang
Oh! That's the Haskell motto:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=haskell+%22avoid+success+at+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=haskell+%22avoid+success+at+all+costs%22&oq=haskell+%22avoid+success+at+all+costs).
I'd never troll so hard as to make something like that up, only just enough to
quote it. I love it as a perfectly-cut gem of self-deprecating humor.

It has had different interpretations over the years. Simon Peyton Jones
described its origins here:
[https://books.google.com/books?id=2kMIqdfyT8kC&pg=PA283&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=2kMIqdfyT8kC&pg=PA283&lpg=PA283&dq=haskell+%22avoid+success+at+all+costs%22&source=bl&ots=MmaswaOHvD&sig=ACfU3U2qMftjytmLpDQfX1ysHhujXiyxDw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjswbDk9czoAhWwHjQIHQJIAFEQ6AEwCnoECAsQMA#v=onepage&q=haskell%20%22avoid%20success%20at%20all%20costs%22&f=false).
But that interview was already several years after the fact. See also
[https://web.archive.org/web/20150419060144/http://www.comput...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150419060144/http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/print/261007/a-z_programming_languages_haskell/):

 _When you become too well known, or too widely used and too successful [...]
suddenly you can’t change anything anymore._

 _The fact that Haskell has up to now been used for just university types has
been ideal [...] Now, however, they 're starting to complain if their
libraries don’t work, which means that we’re beginning to get caught in the
trap of being too successful._

 _What I’m really trying to say is that the fact Haskell hasn’t become a real
mainstream programming language, used by millions of developers, has allowed
us to become much more nimble, and from a research point of view, that’s
great. We have lots of users so we get lots of experience from them. What you
want is to have a lot of users but not too many from a research point of view
– hence the avoid success at all costs._

Does anyone have the original slide where he used this line? It would be
interesting to see what contextual clues were there at the time.

Later it turned out to be a syntactic pun:
[https://twitter.com/simonmar/status/246335257677271040](https://twitter.com/simonmar/status/246335257677271040).
The official interpretation seems to be "Don't make success your top priority,
because success may compromise things you care about more", whereas the
hilarious version would be "Whatever you do, make sure you don't succeed."

Haskell connoisseurs can add info. That is literally all I know about it, or
more, since I just Googled half of it. I do recall reading those interviews at
the time, no doubt via HN.

~~~
bor0
TIL about most of this. Thanks for the detailed explanation.

------
mothsonasloth
Hi dang

This was a good test but it failed some key characteristics to make it an
excellent test message.

You didn't put foo or bar anywhere in the test message.

There was no Cthulhu phrases.

Plus there was no pi or the numerical answer to the universe and everything.

I trust you will take this onboard for the next test.

~~~
battery_cowboy
Also, how does he know that number-containing strings will work if the title
isn't "Test123"??

~~~
_-___________-_
"0123Test" is a better number-containing string for testing, to catch out
things that try to interpret the string as a number first and then as a string
if that fails. For example, JS's insane parseInt function will give you 123
for "0123Test".

~~~
yread

       > parseInt("0123Test")
       123
       > 0123
       83
    

parseInt is actually the adult in the room

~~~
TeMPOraL
In a way. The convention is that 0123 is "123" in octal.

~~~
yread
Yes, I know that's why I even tried it in console as I was a bit surprised
that parseInt doesn't do octal.

Why does js even support octal? I never found octal particularly useful. Speak
hexadecimal or die

~~~
sweeneyrod
Because C does.

------
etherio
Since apparently someone else posted their launch here, I guess I will too
lol. This thread is really interesting :).

I'm launching www.devol.io -> a social community for coders. The user base is
quite small but I hope we can build it and grow it into something cool!

------
ilaksh
Were the emails normally being sent manually through some provider, but now
going from a mail program on the server?

If so, you might consider using SendGrid or something like that with their
API.
[https://sendgrid.com/docs/API_Reference/Web_API_v3/Mail/inde...](https://sendgrid.com/docs/API_Reference/Web_API_v3/Mail/index.html)

If not using a service, would be interested to hear what configuration (DKIM
or whatever) was necessary to add to your existing mail setup to get it to
work.

Although I am just totally speculating on what you were talking about.

~~~
dang
I realized sheepishly this morning why the emails didn't go through: because
the placement code never actually executed. Or rather, it did, but it turned
into a no-op because the post was already ranking higher, due to user upvotes,
than the rank (#10) where the code would have placed it. I forgot that I'd
added that check.

So my complaint turned out to be nonsense, partly because it was 3am or
whatever, and partly because "wtf? swear, profanity, curse...oh wait" is my
normal debugging process. Just not usually in public.

------
pmiller2
[https://i.imgur.com/ofCsS2O.png](https://i.imgur.com/ofCsS2O.png)

~~~
dang
I tested it plenty in a dev version, but you never know.

~~~
pmiller2
I figured. Just taking advantage of this somewhat unique opportunity for a
little harmless trolling. :)

------
exikyut
Unsure why this has not been clarified yet:

HN now has its own
[https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/92dd8/test_post_pleas...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/92dd8/test_post_please_ignore/)
!

Yay. Really. :D

------
moneytide1
Is dang an acronym or does it represent the word we say when disappointed with
a certain outcome?

~~~
dang
I picked it because (1) it's my first name plus surname initial; (2) it was my
email address at my first job; and (3) it's what you say when you make a
mistake—so yup, you guessed it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494093)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18513120](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18513120)

~~~
gargs
Whoa! I love the second link! Is there an orchestrated horizontally-scaled
secure decentralized web service I could use to bookmark all the dang
cartoons?!

~~~
DonHopkins
The best one I remembered from being taped to my mom's fridge, but I just
couldn't dig up, was of a big dejected bird standing in front of the open
refrigerator, saying:

"Dang! Somebody ate the middle out of the daddy longlegs."

------
davidajackson
Very cool, how is this product different than
[https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/02/20/samsung-galaxy-
find...](https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/02/20/samsung-galaxy-find-my-
mobile-1-notification/)

------
oliv__
I'd been waiting for this!

------
dt3ft
Never let a good crisis go to waste: I'm launching
[https://20-things.com/](https://20-things.com/) :) Could use a good load test
;)

~~~
dang
HN always likes new communities. But don't do this:

 _New account registrations are currently either closed or very limited_

If you do that, the psychology goes like this: "I wonder what this is?"
(click) "Ooh, a new social community! I like those!" (reads further) "What do
you mean, new accounts are closed or very limited? What if _I_ want to join?
Why are you gatekeeping me? Damn you!"... except with words stronger than
'damn'.

Once you're ready to let anyone sign up, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll
help you out.

~~~
dt3ft
Thank you, the registrations are now open but each signup incurs a cost (for
the SMS) and the budget is currently limited hence the notice. I'll get in
touch asap.

~~~
_-___________-_
Sending even tens of thousands of SMS is very cheap, just how limited is that
budget? :)

~~~
dt3ft
A few hundred people with US numbers should be able to sign up, but sending
SMS overseas is much more expensive. For example, sending to Switzerland:
$0.069 per SMS.

~~~
jmiserez
That's insane, but in line with what other (local) sms gateways charge here.

But do you really need my phone number?

~~~
dt3ft
I have experience with building a very large community where registration was
based on e-mail alone. Racism & general hate don't even begin to describe the
things that came along with anonymity and disposable e-mail...

~~~
_-___________-_
There are plenty of services for anonymous, disposable phone numbers.

~~~
dt3ft
True, but far fewer than disposable e-mail.

------
boosthelp
Ok, before the party is over, checkout another test launch [0]. We really hope
to grow a truly helpful community and will appreciate any feedback about the
messaging on our website too! [1]

[0] [https://www.patreon.com/boosthelp](https://www.patreon.com/boosthelp) [1]
[https://boost.help](https://boost.help)

~~~
dang
I don't begrudge people trying to take advantage of this thread, which was an
ill-defined mess to begin with, but you've done a couple things here which I
should comment on.

First, please don't delete and repost the same comment. It gives the
impression of trying to pump it up in the rankings, which would not be a nice
community behavior.

Second, something I tell people all the time by email: on HN it's an
antipattern to have your username be that of your company or project. It
creates a feeling of using the site for promotion rather than participating as
a person. The community reacts better when your username represents you as a
human. You don't have to use your real name, just something to communicate
that you're there as a person, not a brand. If you'd like to change your
username, we can do that for you via hn@ycombinator.com.

~~~
boosthelp
Thanks for the kind note. The comment was removed and re-posted here as this
thread seemed more appropriate for such comment (i.e. in a mood similar to
this[0] comment).

EDIT: And thanks for taking time to repeat yourself. Just few hours ago I've
been thinking that most of us (unfortunately) will have to actually make some
well-known mistakes to learn from them, even if we've been warned about such
misdeeds beforehand repeatedly ;-)

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767218](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767218)

------
ghego1
Good times

------
bryanrasmussen
maybe the test should have been flagged. Did we fail by upvoting?

------
moneytide1
Is there a way to delete my profile and all its content?

~~~
moneytide1
Permanent Record

~~~
moneytide1
Replies are locked after one fortnight? I'm keeping this one alive because it
is directly above the "Space Engineers" comment.

~~~
moneytide1
I have this dilemma, where I am reluctant to pursue creating this "virtual"
experience on SE. Years ago I spent a few months familiarizing myself with the
engine and the programmable block limitations. It took me dozens of hours just
to create the simplest of scripts. Learning curve, I know, but eventually I
just did not think that I was adding that much value to society by spending
hours of my own time and money trying to make a video game more engaging.

I still think about it often, the possibilities of the game engine, and
perhaps it is because now it is spring time in my hemisphere and I feel guilty
grinding away on a computer with some artificial goal, while the sun is
beaming down all around me at a higher angle in the sky - constantly improving
conditions for planting and growing lifeforms.

Either space engineers is such a long term endeavor and I am being impatient,
or I am wavering in ability focus and commit.

Now this update every two weeks will be permanent and carry more weight,
forcing me to dedicate more consideration to its position amidst my comment
history "story".

~~~
moneytide1
Haven't touched the game in weeks. But today at my factory I finally had a
conversation I've been waiting to have for years ("Lagrangian point 1 will be
where we build the space port")

------
neokya
It works ;)

