Just to give some context about the genesis of LN, here are some tweets by Salvatore:
dudes the time for YC to be replaced by something
open and not privately owned has come, and I want
to help in some way
http://twitter.com/#!/antirez/status/124256931970949120
I mean not YC the company, but the news site: news.ycombinator.com
http://twitter.com/#!/antirez/status/124257007988510721
First step, I want to code some Redis based fast
replacement of the code base. Guess what?
Not written in Arc ;)
http://twitter.com/#!/antirez/status/124257497946140673
Second, let's make the code base open source.
Finally I'll get a linode instance for the first year,
and put it into some domain.
http://twitter.com/#!/antirez/status/124257713659191296
p.s. I know that Reddit is open source, but I want to
write a Redis clone so that it can make a good
use case at least ;)
http://www.tweetdeck.com/
Note: site will not be mine, once I put it
online + github I want to create a "core team"
from different companies / countries.
http://twitter.com/#!/antirez/status/124259611896315905
if you wonder about why "lamer" news, one of the
things I like less of HN is how they turned the
"hacker" term into almost a joke...
http://twitter.com/#!/antirez/status/124264048555606016
@rbucker: @antirez that makes much more sense.
And I agree with that. News dot yc is a conflict
of interest. Sort of.
http://twitter.com/#!/rbucker/status/124263894058414080
@rbucker exactly what I think... for instance YC
funded companies job postings are special news that
are "sticky" or alike.
http://twitter.com/#!/antirez/status/124263563782144000
@dvirsky lamernews has a meaning actually, it is
like Cusano philosophy "I know that I don't know".
Makes sense IMHO in the hacker culture.
http://twitter.com/#!/antirez/status/124265164546650114
Funny, pg's handling of the site has always been amazing to me. He appears to truly go out of his way to ensure he doesn't get in the way of the community, but just there to stop fights from ending up in the hospital. Even when the topic of discussion might not be one he wants to have on his site.
Several recent-ish negative stories (Dropbox security, Air BnB apartment damage) about YC companies really demonstrated pg's commitment to an open forum and really helped earn a ton of respect for pg and his commitment to this community. Within reason we were all able to say what we wanted about the companies and have a vibrant discussion (sometimes argument) with each other and often with the founders themselves.
If I have to see a job posting for a yc company every once in a while as the price for what appears to be a great and truly open tech/business forum so be it.
I'm not really sure what the point of this is other than to write a news/discussion site. If that's all it is, cool, hack away. But I don't get the weird counter-culture fight the man vibe that seems to run through it.
Several recent-ish negative stories (Dropbox security, Air BnB apartment damage) about YC companies really demonstrated pg's commitment to an open forum
Funny you mentioned that. A few days after I posted a few of criticisms of dropbox in one of those threads I was hellbanned. All of my posts on that topic had positive point scores, one was at even 50+ points and sparked a fair bit of discussion.
I won't pretend that all I ever posted with my old account was deep wisdom and insight, some of the comments sucked outright, but very few are gray and given the timing I don't know what else I that I had posted that could have possibly been the reason for that ban.
If there is a single person that at the same time: 1) Influenced positively my life a lot. 2) I don't know. This is Paul Graham. I have a lot of respect for him, and he did something very important for our community, it was an inspiration for many.
Now he is doing great things for the startups community. While I don't like that IMHO HN is polarized, I still think YCombinator is one of the most significant phenomena of the latest years in our field.
But still I think it is legitimate to think that this kind of news sites are important enough that can't be polarized, that should be handled by many people (I want to create a consortium or alike otherwise lamernews would be like HN, with a single vision, but just worse since Paul Graham is smarter and with more resources than me).
Another goal of LN, not the site but the code base, is to provide to people a good code base to create this kind of sites for other fields using little money. Once those kind of sites start becoming big scaling them is apparently non trivial, but with LN this should be pretty different, we'll be able to do some math later when the site gets busier or when the code base is used for other bigger sites, but I believe that LN code base can serve a lot of traffic with little hardware, and the BSD license allows to use the code base in more contexts.
So I don't have nothing against PG, YCombinator, the community here, I just thing that at this point we understood that news sites for programmers are so important that there should be a "third party" involved in running them, without ADS, without job postings, without a big percentage of users being from a particular incubator, and so forth.
p.s. also if you ask me, I don't think PG is biased and kills stories against its startups, the things I don't like about how the site is handled are: the unilaterality of decisions, not fixing the site performances, and that PG did not resisted to the temptation of using the site to post job postings (you should try to realize how a huge value this is for YC however, startups are made of hackers).
Good to know. I too think that HN can sometimes get on weird, polarizing, issues for too long: cult of Apple/Gruber, why Haskell/Lisp/etc. is better than anything else ever and if the world just knew this we'd claim our rightful place among the stars, what some random mildly known guy on this site has to say about some random topic, etc. and not enough of things of actual hacker interest like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3065619
Dudes that's incredible, hacker news guys removed my blog
post from the home page. Truly lame.
https://twitter.com/#!/antirez/status/122310866728271872
I think the blog post was this:
What's wrong with the iPhone 4s, and why Jobs is not my hero
-> http://antirez.com/post/iphone-4s-and-jobs.html
https://twitter.com/#!/antirez/status/122302491734978561
We didn't remove his post. It only got 3 points. That's not enough to stay on the frontpage long. In fact at most times it's not even enough to get on the frontpage.
I think a chunk of HN consists of Apple and Google aficionados(nothing wrong with that, we're all technology guys with strong opinions here), so I notice that anything critical of them either tends to neglected even if it's newsworthy or tends to get heavily flagged(so you see a story with 50 points posted 3 hours ago at the bottom of the page and stories with less points posted more than 3 hours ago on top). People (mis?)use the flagging as a way to get things off the front page rather than only as a way to vote down spam and unrelated content.
Same with the comment section, people get a little sensitive and trigger happy with the moderating. Does not happen with every story obviously, but the trend is definitely there.
I believe this explains his frustration more than some hidden agenda by mods to censor things. It's still a democracy, even if a little skewed with the community biases.
BTW sure fire way of getting karma is to pile on MS :)
PS: PG, can we get some stats on OSes/Broswers used on HN? There's a couple of stats compiled by sites that were linked that show ~40% OS X usage, so just curious. And if those can be correlated with karma(respecting privacy, of course), we could get even more insight into the community.
It's a cool piece of code, and an extremely valuable example application for Redis, and a useful package. But instead, let's definitely talk about the drama that's attached to it.
It's obvious that for a lot of HN participants, the site isn't fun unless we can divide everyone into heroes and villains, or at least shirts and skins.
> It's obvious that for a lot of HN participants, the
> site isn't fun unless we can divide everyone into
> heroes and villains
Do you think this is specific to HN?
Most news stations, for example, seem to me to be all about dividing the world into heroes and villains.
Also, do you think this is something that can be changed? My initial reaction is that this kind of black-and-white thinking is part of human nature, stemming from our need to apply our own morality to the events that occur around us.
Sorry about that I didn't want to feed a flame with new fuel, I just wanted to add some context to the topic which is "LN the community" and not the software behind it (already discussed in another thread).
Still if you think my comment is inappropriate downvote it.
"for instance YC funded companies job postings are special news that are "sticky" or alike."
I didn't know HN did sticky. These articles are voted up out of general interest level.
Cool to see something like this tried and wish you luck, but this kind of reminds me of Diaspora. I think when you closely base your product on something else, you need an exponentially better value proposition. I don't think "being open" is a huge selling point, and really the whole motivation is explained in less than a tweet.
The community here might be more sensitive to openness than other communities, but HN is generally seen as impartial/neutral anyway.
I really wish they'd enable comments on those. It feels like we're not trusted to comment responsibly regarding jobs for YC companies. In most cases, there'd be no reason to leave a comment, except to ask about details of the job that might be of general interest, which seems like a legit thing to do.
First, those comment threads were often toxic; for instance, they tended to host deliberate and pointed efforts to unmask companies that hadn't launched yet.
Second, I think it's totally reasonable for YC to provide HN perks to YC companies, and if that's going to happen, I prefer the overt perks to the more subtle ones.
Third, public comment threads are a crappy venue for having conversations about a job. If you want to know more about a job, contact the person who posted the ad. If the ad sucks, let them write better ad copy.
Finally, for the HN demographic, these are some of the best job advertisements on the entire market. They're a clear win-win.
It is possible that I have hired more people directly off HN than any non-YC company, and probable that I've hired more people from here than most YC companies have. I don't feel like I'm getting a raw deal at all. I'm perturbed by the degree of entitlement on display on this thread.
> I'm perturbed by the degree of entitlement on display on this thread.
I'm fine with those postings, what with it being PG's site and all, so that's not really what I'm talking about. I just think the postings would be better with comments for the same reason everything else is. They can have bright purple headings to make them more visible to everyone for all I care, if some method to make them stick out is desired.
I don't recall those threads being nasty, but perhaps that's been crowded out of my head by the two or three things in my life more important than a particular variety of posting on HN. I think nastiness should be rooted out in a fairly blunt way: if people are being lame/immature about companies' job postings, they're likely going to be lame about other stuff as well.
#2 is something we're in agreement on.
> public comment threads are a crappy venue for having conversations about a job.
Yes and no. I think there are some kinds of questions and answers that might be useful to all applicants, and I think most people here are smart enough to figure out the difference between what ought to be public, and what is best addressed to the company in question via private email. For many of these companies, it may be the first time they've ever sought to hire someone, so it's entirely reasonable that they don't nail the posting 100%. A helpful comment or two might also help the companies.
Jobs never had comments. They're not ordinary items like stories and comments; they just get displayed similarly on the frontpage. You may be thinking of times when people posted jobs as ordinary posts.
When YC cos did that it was by mistake. A job listing submitted as if it were a story would not end up on the jobs page. We're now careful about telling everyone to submit jobs as jobs.
I believe PG had a comment in which he explained the ads(usually job ads) which start at position 3 and work their way down but don't have any comment section. I am not sure if those are provided to YC companies only, but that was spoken of as providing ad revenue.
I am all for open and new sites and all that, but I do recognize the need to generate revenue to run something that we all enjoy and derive value, free of cost. So I have absolutely no problem with these barely noticeable ads(which still provide value to readers because they're about startups looking for people to give jobs to).
This way, it won't end up dying like code.google.com or other free services.
Coming to LN, I might be visiting the site but I am bit skeptical of "throw it on a VPS and github and lets see what happens". Something more concrete is appreciated.
