> In the wake of all this drama, a blog post titled "Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth" went viral and hit the top of Hacker News. Which you might have missed, because Hacker News — which is owned by Y Combinator — seems to have manually dropped the post lower in the rankings to suppress its visibility.
Is this true? I never thought HN moderated content critical of itself
8 of the current top 10 stories have been on the front page for longer than the submission that is critical of ycombinator and every single one of them has vastly fewer upvotes and comments. It's not even close, the story that is currently in position 6 has 1/4th the upvotes and 1/10th the comments. It has been on the front page since its submission.
It is impossible for the velocity, given any reasonable common sense examination, for the upvotes on that post to be greater than the story that was nuked after 2 hours.
There is no submission on the front page, some of which have been on the front page for over 24 hours, that has more upvotes, comments, or any conceivable rate of upvoting or commenting that even approaches 1/10th of the nuked story.
There is one submission that has an average of four upvotes per hour.
Assuming that upvotes fall off precipitously after leaving the front page, which I would say is a safe assumption, the nuked story had an upvote rate of several hundred per hour.
There's something fishy going on and that smell isn't the strong odor given off by Salt Water Dimmers, a submission to a barren wikipedia page about an obsolete technology with 13 upvotes and 5 comments that debuted on the front page, and has been there for several hours.
I'm not joking. On the front page of HN for several hours is a link to a 200-word wikipedia article about dimmers used in stage productions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687950
For what it's worth, stories about Boom (a ycombinator joint) SEEM to get nuked extremely rapidly when non-VC non-techbro domain experts start chiming in about what their chances for success actually are and how there's a 50% chance they're the next OceanGate and a 50% chance they're just a scam that got way too big for its britches.
Is this supposed to assauge the concerns of the public? Is dang not employed by, and thus a representative of, Y Combinator? There is every reason to believe he is directly responsible for protecting the interests of the company.
"Company investigated Company and found that Company did nothing wrong"
I don't really care about your concerns. If you are willing to lie for an employer we are ethically distant. I've seen no indication dang is willing to do that either and seen him being very open about things he didn't need to be. Also the way ownership works isn't so simple anymore as HN is YC. More like YC is HNs major sponsor these days.
I would hardly consider "moderating a public forum in accordance with your employer-mandated job description guidelines" to be "lying."
"dang" is a detail--the point is, if someone is being cut a paycheck by a company, the public is well within reason to believe that person has a job obligation to favorably represent the interests of that company.
The flags on hn are extremely powerful, so I don't doubt this. Just a few flags obliterate a post with tons of upvotes. It wouldn't take many people to kill it, and it doesn't require a conspiracy
I will frequently flag posts that are rage bait or where the comments are just the same few people arguing. I haven't flagged this one because I commented in it but it's a very low value post.
It's gossip rage bait to feel the feelings of superiority in the writers community vs VC land. It doesn't dive into any of those things, if it did that could be valuable, it's just reporting events to drive feelings.
I'm sure nobody has hard proof either way, but there's certainly an ongoing pattern of the symptom. This place only exists to promote YC, so you can decide for yourself which is the simplest explanation.
I thought the whole point of download-only games is that they are not borrowable/lendable/resellable, so wouldn't allowing one-time only writes defeat the purpose?
I might be suffering from imposter syndrome, but I feel like I'm not the right audience for "taking advantage of boredom".
I feel people who benefit from this "diffuse state" are those who already have a base level of competence in their field or challenging problems they're trying to solve, and so boredom gives their brain an opportunity to express creativity in that domain.
For me, my brain is just "quiet" when bored. It doesn't come up with "novel ways to solve problem X", or "a brand new idea". When it is at all noisy, it is mostly regurgitation of thoughts I've already had before, replays of conversations from the past week, mundane things like that.
I think this is a learnt skill. If you're not constantly engaging with new material, asking questions on what you're reading, learning with intent, then your brain isn't going to evolve from this baseline on its own randomly.
I say this as someone trying to move the needle towards this same thing.
Some days I am suprised at my motivation to learn new things, and questions I ask / relationships I form - much more so when i've been putting in time deliberarely practicing how I learn each day.
For me it depends on the projects I worked on intensly. After months of delivery, I sometimes stumble upon some example that might trigger an idea later on when I can't fall asleep that gives me new insights of some of those projects.
Your comment takes an (unfair IMO) position that it somehow matters what country the OP was in. It's not like the auth systems are designed for higher scrutiny in specific countries. There is more than one way to confirm identity, but somehow BigTech and Co keep assuming a happy path environment for you.
Case in point: my US bank insists on sending an OTP to my US number (and US number alone) for any transaction, making it impossible for me to move money when abroad. The problem exists in the other direction too, my foreign account only allows verification thru one mechanism. It's really frustrating.
I worked in the payment card industry for awhile a few years back. There are entire countries that are blocked by card providers due to fraud.
Unfair or not, it actually makes a difference. I was in a neat position to see some of the attempts in real time. It blew me away how much attempted fraud there is. Think of it like spam email - it's that bad.
I was the operator of a webserver for a small B2B shop for a number of years. We only had a couple dozen local customers, we hand-delivered custom orders with a dedicated truck. If you weren't local, there was nothing on that website that would have mattered to you.
But there were on the order of 50x more attempts from bots trying to log into our Wordpress instance from India (all illegitimate) than from actual customers. It was ridiculous.
Similar situation for a local small business I’ve worked for. Typically I’d respond to contact form spam with a notice to the source network. US-registered networks tended to reliably address the problem while IN- just ignored me, if their contact information worked at all.
SMS on roaming can be a hit or miss. I travel internationally every year and I am always worried that some SMSs wont reach and it happens from time to time. I especially hate those product/services that only do SMS based 2FA.
It's weird, regular SMSs do come through, as far as I know. It's hard to tell as I don't get many SMSs, mostly iMessage and Whatsapp. I'm on AT&T, and something about automated messages from those 5-6 digit numbers never show up when you want them to.
Just FYI (because your OTP hell was my OTP hell until recently) if you fly to another country, disable roaming in the phone, and don’t make outbound calls, your phone will receive these OTP messages for free with most US cell providers.
"Learning How to Learn" BY Dr. Barbara Oakley really changed my perspective towards learning in my late 20s. I was starting to feel (of my own accord) that I was starting to lose/had already lost the cognitive function needed to learn as intensely as I had during my undergrad years. This course flipped that idea on its head, and gave me the tools and mental model to pick up learning new (and hard) things again.
Yeah. I liked that course too. I heard it mentioned on the radio and it was a pretty short course if I remember correctly. The only thing I really remember from it is "Pomodoro is Cool" and "If you're stuck on something mental, go take a walk for several minutes."
> armed with a new toolbox of Latin names for fallacies, eager students all too often delight in spotting fallacies in the wild, shouting out their Latin names (ad hominem!; secundum quid!) as if they were magic spells. This is what Scott Aikin and John Casey, in their delightful book Straw Man Arguments, call the Harry Potter fallacy: the “troublesome practice of invoking fallacy names in place of substantive discussion”.
I've long wondered about doing online debates (which usually end up in shit throwing) where an independent moderator or bot detects and mentions fallacies.
But I think in practice it would mean no arguments would hold weight anymore.
Anyway, the main problem I think is not logical fallacies, but people not debating in good faith, and / or having a fixed opinion already. I did read about a trick, starting a debate by asking "What will it take to convince you?"; depending on the answer, you won't even have to bother.
I mean there's no debating with the anti-science movement(s) because they put facts into question, for example. I mean being skeptic is not a bad thing, but what will it take to get past the skepticism?
Or to put yourself in their shoes, what will it take to convince you that, for example, the earth is flat? (I mean it's OBVIOUSLY more like a dinosaur, but let's not go into that).
Isn’t a debate by definition two sides trying to convince a 3rd party which side is correct. The sides involved in the debate will never back down.
A discussion on the other hand is when both sides just try to reach the “best” conclusion. Unfortunately all too many things are debates and not discussions…
A bot that detects logical fallacies would be amazing for journaling. Would be really interesting to stream of consciousness into a text document and have the computer put red underlines under questionable premises or conclusions.
Picking very specifically on the builder pattern: the whole point is to solve one or more of the following problems:
1. creating complex objects and having them valid at creation
2. many optional arguments for an object's construction
3. similar types for object construction
For e.g. in Java you might see something like:
Point p = new Point(10, 0, 5); // (x=10, z=5)
Point q = new Point(10, 2); // (x=10, y=2)
which may be problematic because
1. y needs to be specified explicitly to 0, because you can't expose an overloaded constructor that takes x and z (that would clash with the constructor that takes x and y
2. It _may_ not be evident that new Point(10, 0, 5); passes x, y and z in that order
3. It ties the constructor to the implementation. You can never expose a Point(double radius, double theta) constructor because that would clash with the Point(double x, double y) constructor.
The builder would solve all of these problems:
Point p = Point.newBuilder()
.setX(10)
.setZ(5)
.build();
Python however doesn't necessarily need this pattern because idiomatically solves all three of these problems by providing
1. named arguments, and
2. default arguments
so you could have:
p = Point(x=10, z=5)
q = Point(10, 2)
t = Point(radius=5, theta=45)
I feel the post completely glosses over this by providing a single super-class with the appropriate constructor, and overriding the methods in the sub-classes. What if I just have a single class that I want a builder for? I don't think it showcases the builder pattern at all, just method overloading in classes.
Is this true? I never thought HN moderated content critical of itself
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