I find this "anti-promotion" attitude to be doing a disservice to this HN community for a few reasons.
Clearly, this whole website is funded and exists in part to promote YC's portfolio companies, as evidenced by "Launch HN" threads getting auto-front paged whereas "Show HN" plebians have to earn the upvotes from /new (which most agree required an exceptionally good post and a lot of luck to even get that goodness noticed). And we're not talking promotion of a few posts, YC is now doing multiple batches a year and has hundreds of companies per batch meaning we're seeing a LOT of promotion / advertisements on this site coming via Launch HN threads as well as jobs ad threads.
I don't think Xerox park would have done as well if 5% of the people get got the opportunity for a microphone in the auditorium every week and the other 95% did not. That would seem like a caste system. I understand that YC funds this website so the caste system is inevitable but I don't see why moderation should further stratify it - unless you're prioritizing advertising YC companies over a great community.
Next, I see this "HN is not for self promotion" do a lot of downstream damage on the community in the sense that it's much better for big, existing trillion dollar companies than smaller players. If a small bootstrapped startup writes a blog post and mentions there product, people will complain about "blogspam" and "this blog post is really just an ad for a link at the end". But if Google or Amazon have a new announcement for a new product, nobody complains that it's an advertisement, even though it's often as much or more one. The end result is that the website tends to focus more "corporate" news than "hacker" news as a downstream consequence of a well-meaning "no self-promotion" rule.
Finally, as we've discussed over email, the rules around self-promotion are extremely opaque and in many cases algorithmically enforced by closed algorithms. This leads to a lot of confusion around what's allowed and a lot of ambiguous favoritism.
I understand this site is called "Hacker" news and there's some mystique around the "hacker" building "just for fun" , the purism around intellectual curiosity that you don't want tainted by dirty commercialism. I just think that once the website has decided it's going to be the media arm of one of the most powerful venture capital firms in the world, the ship has sailed.If people really want pure tech news, they should go to https://lobste.rs/ . I've personally found in recent years quality of interesting conversation is much higher on /r/saas, Indie Hackers board, and Small Bets campfire, as well as various Discords, all because they allow self-promotion and don't encourage the "self-promotion police" who frequently show up aghast someone would try to make money on the internet (unless it's their daddy FAANG employer).
Another rule I've seen in various places be very effective is a simple guideline to contribute 10x as much non-promotional content as promotional content. If someone only posts links to their projects and nothing else, I see how that gets spammy. But if someone regularly contributes they should get a pass. I understand that's partially how the submission system works via algorithmic enforcement, but , see above about its opaque and ambiguous nature.
Show HN is a "place" for self-promotion but it's a pretty bad place if 99% of submissions get entirely lost and ignored and I think you should encourage more places for promotion without inflicting a caste system where only YC companies and certain golden children get special rules.
Overall, HN's guidelines against self-promotion are too rigid, there's too few opportunties for small players to promote, which makes the discussion here less egalitarian, more corporate, and less interesting. You'd be better served encouraging more self-promotion in threads like these.
There’s simply no “HN is not for self promotion” policy. You’re asked to not use your account primarily for self-promotion, and repeats are allowed, so you can roll your dice multiple times on your Show HN already as long as you’re otherwise a good contributor to the community and only do it sparingly. Flooding another topic with commercial promos simply turns it into another https://news.ycombinator.com/show, what’s the point then?
As for YC companies getting Launch placements, well too bad, it’s their site, you’re free to leave and start your competing one. I assume most users aren’t bothered — I seldom notice them and hardly ever click on them. I notice job ads more.
One thing I do like: When people call themselves out -- "hey, we buy this software... or I work for this company and you might like this software"... then they share some software that is relevant to the discussion. I rarely see those kinds of contributions downvoted due to their transparency. Plus, I learn about lots of interesting companies and solutions that way.
Grindset self-promo tactics being pervasively, overly represented in the content submissions and discussions here are the number one reason I take very long breaks from the site.
More genuine conversations are intensely welcome, so if that takes overt guard rails, so be it. If the only enthusiasm someone really wants to share is about their capitalist endeavors, count me out.
> Grindset self-promo tactics being pervasively, overly represented in the content submissions and discussions here are the number one reason I take very long breaks from the site.
"Grindset": I never saw that before. I guess it is a combination of grind plus mindset? Very cool. It rolls off the tongue nicely.
> "Early adopters will get discounts / free plans."
If you include this then you're not even validating to the extent that you think you are. Because you're validating that people will sign up to use it for a discount / free, which doesn't necessarily mean anyone will pay full price for it.
> What's interesting about this is the minimum defense frequency is based on what the strongest hands you can possibly have in that situation are and the opponents possible hands do not even factor into it.
This is actually not quite true. MDF is purely a formula based on pot size and the bet size (pot size / pot size + bet size). The fact that it doesn't consider various ranges is why it's not really useful - it was a simplified formula used to try to understand the game before solvers existed.
There are situations where your opponent can bet any two cards profitably and you do have to fold - imagine they bet the size of the pot, but have the better hand 99% of the time, you're simply forced to let them bluff the 1% of the time they're bluffing. MDF is a pre-solver concept and not an especially useful concept in the modern game.
I'm pretty sure mdf applies to rivers when you are last to act. I'd be interested in being proven wrong however if you have solver output that shows it. I remember studying solver output and seeing it in action.
I know that before the river there are range advantages that make defending mdf a losing play.
What's true is that equilibrium strategies typically converge to solutions where the better makes the caller indifferent between calling and folding. In the toy example I've given where the betters range is so strong, the caller should always fold, the better now has an incentive to add more bluffs to the range to take advantage of the folds. Then the caller will want to call more. This might converge to the MDF which might be what you're suggesting, assuming we started with ranges that could have enough bluffs given the runouts.
If you open up the solver, and give one player only Ace-Ace as their starting range, and the other player a pair of twos, and the board Ace-Ace-Three-Three-Three, then the pair of twos will fold 100% on river and will not call at MDF.
I think another way to say this is that MDF works only if you're in a spot where you have hands that are strong enough to call. If you play every hand, and you see every river in that 100into100 situation, you shouldn't call with 50% of your hands because your hand range is too wide for that to be profitable.
So you can't make a ton of mistakes say "MDF" and call off, you have to have done the right things in previous streets to end up with a range that can call at MDF. That range (and those street actions) require an understanding of GTO (and the adjustments needed when someone isn't playing GTO).
Within solvers, you can do something called "node locking", which means you "lock" a tree in the game node to play a fixed strategy. You would typically lock it to play as you suspect your opponent plays. This lets the solver calculate the optimal exploitative solution against your specific oppoents.
Piosolver, the first public solver and the one mentioned in the article, has this feature.
However, what often happens is if you lock one node, then several other nodes in the game tree over-adjust in drastic ways, forcing you to lock all of the, which may be infeasiable. As a result, Piosolver recently introduced "incentives", which gives a player in the game an additional incentive to take a certain action . For example, you may suspect your opponent calls too much and doesn't raise enough, so you can just set that incentive and it will include that in its math equations and give you something similar to an exploitative solution with a much simpler UX.
This feature was literally just introduced a few months ago so it's still very much an active area of research, both for game theory nerds, and people trying to use the game theory nerd research to make money !
I want to see strong AI used in video games, especially strategy games. People often retort that strong AI is not fun; it's too challenging and that's not what players want. But once we have a strong AI we can adjust its goal function in fun ways. What you're describing is effectively the same, and it's the first time I've seen this used in a strong AI.
I do personally dislike that GTO became the nomenclature , as I prefer "theory-based", since it causes this confusion, but trying to fight it at this point is hopeless because GTO is the search term people are using. And when people say they "play GTO" they usually mean "equilibrium" rather than "optimal against my specific opponents" which is "exploitative".
If you actually watch what the top players advocate for, everyone suggests you want to play exploitatively. However, there's one equilibrium solution and effectively infinite exploitative solutions, so equilibrium is a reasonble starting point to develop a baseline understanding of the mechanics of the game. It's tough to know how much "too much" bluffing is unless you know a baseline.
Furthermore, if you "exploit" people by definition you are opening yourself up to being exploited so you need to be very careful your assumptions are true.
Also, with solvers like piosolver, you can "node lock" (tell a node in the game tree to play like your opponent, rather than an equilibrium way plays), but there's many pitfalls, such as the solver adjusting in very unnatural ways on other nodes to adjust, and it being impractical to "lock" a strategy every node in the tree. There's new ideas called "incentives" which gives the solver an "incentive" to play more like a human would (e.g. calling too much) but these are new ideas still being actively explored.
Rock paper scissors is frequently used to explain GTO but it's not the best example because equilibrium in rock paper scissors will break even against all opponents, but equilibrium poker strategy will actually beat most human poker players, albeit not as much as a maximally exploitative one.
There's two other huge pieces this article glosses over:
1) It's as impossible for a human to play like a computer in poker as in chess - in fact far more impossible, because in poker you need to implement mixed strategies. In chess there's usually a best move, but in poker the optimal solution often involves doing something 30% of the time and something else 70% of the time. The problem is that, not only are there too many situations to memorize all the solutions, but actually implementing the correct frequencies is impossible for a human. Some players like to use "randomizers" like dice at the table, or looking at a clock, but I find that somewhat silly since it still so unlikely you are anywhere near equilbrium.
2) Reading someone's "tells" live is still a thing. While solvers have led to online poker to decline due to widespread "real time assistance", live poker is booming (the 2024 World Series of Poker Main Event just broke the record yet again) , and in person in live poker, people still give off various information about their hand via body language. From the 70s to the early 2000s, people were somewhat obsessed with "tells" as a way to win at poker. Since computers have advanced so much, it's fallen out of favor, but the truth is, both are useful. It's totally mistaken to think that advancement in poker AI , GTO , and solvers have rendered live reads obsolete. In fact, in 2023, Tom Dwan won the biggest pot in televised poker history (3.1 million) and credited a live read to his decision, in a spot where the solver would randomize between a call and a fold.
Yes indeed glad you noticed! Been too addicted to that godforsaken game at points so figured borrow some of its qualities for my studying apps...in general I'm interested in gamification + studying.
The technique of journaling as you work is sometimes called “interstitial journaling” and I became a big fan of it as a way to help focus as well as keeping track of what I was working on.
I made a tool to associate those notes with a color coded project and timestamp:
It ended up being unintentionally similar to an invoicing time tracking tool a freelancer might use but the use case Im interested in is more personal productivity.
Can’t say the project has generated much interest outside my own personal use but I find it very nice to track notes as I go and then easily see how much time I spent on a given project. You can also add a #hashtag in the notes and then filter by that hashtag in the calendar view.
Completely free in case anyone else finds it helpful!
People underestimate how much cultural baggage influences things.
I'll give a very simple example. I did a few SWE interviews in 2020, and several companies did the initial screen over the phone, and the on-site over Zoom.
In both cases it was a remote interview. There was no reason not to do both over Zoom. The only reason was that the previous process was a phone interview and then an in-person onsite, and they realized they had to replace the in-person on-site with Zoom, but they didn't think to replace the phone screen. If you started from scratch it makes no sense though.
In this case, the whole origin of the Leetcode interview is "we're going to hire the smartest people in the world.". You can dispute whether that was true back in 2009 but it was certainly part of Google / Facebook's messaging. Now, in 2024, I think it has morphed much closer to a standardized test, and even if people might begrudgingly admit that, there's still the cultural baggage remaining. If a company used a third-party service, they'd be admitted they're hiring standardized candidates rather than the smartest people in the world. Which might be an "unknown known" - things that everybody knows but nobody is allowed to admit.
I definitely agree that this industry, for all of its self-proclaimed freethinking and innovation, is rife with cultural baggage. Allowing for an independent standardized interview step would defy the not invented here syndrome that many leading corporations ascribe to, that their process is best. Not to mention reducing friction for applicants (by don't repeating your Leetcode stage) is inimical to employee retention incentives, that is preventing them from shopping around for new employers. So me saying that we oughta have a standardized test to save everybody's time is more wishful thinking than anything.
This is definitely a factor. "You don't understand, we have a really high bar and we only hire the best people" is a bit of a meme in recruiting circles because you will never ever ever ever not hear it on a call.
I don't think we found it a barrier to getting adoption from companies though - perhaps because "we're a really advanced company using this state of the art YC-backed assessment" satisfies that psychological need? Unclear.
> but it was certainly part of Google / Facebook's messaging.
It entered the online cultural zeitgeist before that, with Microsoft talking about their interview processes, and indeed early interview books were written targeting the MSFT hiring process that many other companies copied afterwards.
I graduated college in 2006 and some companies still did traditional interviews for software engineers (all soft skills, and personality tests, no real focus on technology, except maybe some buzzword questions), and then you had the insane all day interview loops from MSFT and Amazon.
Back then, Google famously only hired PhDs and people from Ivy Leagues, so us plebs didn't even bother to apply. In comparison, Microsoft would give almost everyone who applied from a CS program at least a call back and a phone screen.
What’s ironic is that Michael Seibel has discussed many times on the YC podcast that you should avoid building whatever’s hot for VCs because their attention tends to change every year but you’ll be stuck building for a decade.
2020 was remote work, 2021 was web3, now we have the big LLM boom.
Honestly it seems there’s a lot of advantages to “riding a wave” and a lot of advantages to being contrarian. But if raising money is your priority I do think you should ride the wave. Being contrarian sounds romantic, but don’t expect funding from people who disagree with you.
The most charitable thing I’d say about YCs AI focus is it’s hard to think of a startup idea that couldn’t benefit from AI in some way.
Honestly, I think any person or organization that bought in to the blockchain hype should be barred from making any financial decisions of consequence. If they bought into a scam as obvious as the blockchain crap, they're clearly not capable of holding any real responsibilities.
Tbf I feel remote work really improved significantly in the past years, though I don't know if the contribution from those startups matters or not. Web3 and blockchain is a moot, there's little to no practical reason to have them.
AI though, will be very useful, at least a good one. Theoretically, AI can swim in a good ocean of company documentations and save time searching. They can help doctors diagnose a ct scan faster (if not already).
I find this "anti-promotion" attitude to be doing a disservice to this HN community for a few reasons.
Clearly, this whole website is funded and exists in part to promote YC's portfolio companies, as evidenced by "Launch HN" threads getting auto-front paged whereas "Show HN" plebians have to earn the upvotes from /new (which most agree required an exceptionally good post and a lot of luck to even get that goodness noticed). And we're not talking promotion of a few posts, YC is now doing multiple batches a year and has hundreds of companies per batch meaning we're seeing a LOT of promotion / advertisements on this site coming via Launch HN threads as well as jobs ad threads.
I don't think Xerox park would have done as well if 5% of the people get got the opportunity for a microphone in the auditorium every week and the other 95% did not. That would seem like a caste system. I understand that YC funds this website so the caste system is inevitable but I don't see why moderation should further stratify it - unless you're prioritizing advertising YC companies over a great community.
Next, I see this "HN is not for self promotion" do a lot of downstream damage on the community in the sense that it's much better for big, existing trillion dollar companies than smaller players. If a small bootstrapped startup writes a blog post and mentions there product, people will complain about "blogspam" and "this blog post is really just an ad for a link at the end". But if Google or Amazon have a new announcement for a new product, nobody complains that it's an advertisement, even though it's often as much or more one. The end result is that the website tends to focus more "corporate" news than "hacker" news as a downstream consequence of a well-meaning "no self-promotion" rule.
Finally, as we've discussed over email, the rules around self-promotion are extremely opaque and in many cases algorithmically enforced by closed algorithms. This leads to a lot of confusion around what's allowed and a lot of ambiguous favoritism.
I understand this site is called "Hacker" news and there's some mystique around the "hacker" building "just for fun" , the purism around intellectual curiosity that you don't want tainted by dirty commercialism. I just think that once the website has decided it's going to be the media arm of one of the most powerful venture capital firms in the world, the ship has sailed.If people really want pure tech news, they should go to https://lobste.rs/ . I've personally found in recent years quality of interesting conversation is much higher on /r/saas, Indie Hackers board, and Small Bets campfire, as well as various Discords, all because they allow self-promotion and don't encourage the "self-promotion police" who frequently show up aghast someone would try to make money on the internet (unless it's their daddy FAANG employer).
Another rule I've seen in various places be very effective is a simple guideline to contribute 10x as much non-promotional content as promotional content. If someone only posts links to their projects and nothing else, I see how that gets spammy. But if someone regularly contributes they should get a pass. I understand that's partially how the submission system works via algorithmic enforcement, but , see above about its opaque and ambiguous nature.
Show HN is a "place" for self-promotion but it's a pretty bad place if 99% of submissions get entirely lost and ignored and I think you should encourage more places for promotion without inflicting a caste system where only YC companies and certain golden children get special rules.
Overall, HN's guidelines against self-promotion are too rigid, there's too few opportunties for small players to promote, which makes the discussion here less egalitarian, more corporate, and less interesting. You'd be better served encouraging more self-promotion in threads like these.