It’s a neat number.
It is the maximum value of an unsigned 16-bit integer.
replies(1):
It is the maximum value of an unsigned 16-bit integer.
What happens if he gets downvoted then? Will it wrap around to the HIGHEST KARMA? :)
Dang has an incredible pulse on the conversation & zeitgeist of Hacker News.
He has a keen sense of what the community's current group-think on various investment opportunities are, places a trade on the exact opposite outcome and has made hundreds of millions of dollars so far.
In all seriousness though, I'll bet he could quit HN and then spin up a consulting service helping companies get to the top of HN (what you should post, when to post, etc.) and make a tidy 7 figure income that way.
It's an imperfect system of power.
Thank you for a wonderful website where I have learned so much for so many years!
It is a pointless number in a database collected over decades that gains nothing. Even if anyone here got 69,420 karma points, it is still point-less.
69,420 Dogecoins would still be worth more than 69,420 HN karma points or even 374,000 HN karma points.
That's 1111 1111 1111 1111 in binary
16 bits
Putting aside the overflow, if you got HN to pick three arbitrary karma milestones without communicating, they would probably coordinate on the 8bit, 16bit, and 32bit unsigned int maxes. Dang is the sole moderator for HackerNews and does amazing work in this role, so this karma milestone (while meaningless and worthless in itself) functions as a Schelling point to celebrate the effort he’s put in over the years and how much we appreciate his stewardship of the site.
For anyone wondering
Interestingly, I'm finding it hard to shake that initial visual image, even though I know it's wrong. Brains are weird.
Thanks again Dan for being so patient and building one of the best online communities ever to exist.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
Chuck didn’t reply, so George swung round in his saddle. He could just see Chuck’s face, a white oval turned toward the sky.
“Look,” whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
Can you name any alternatives that you’ve enjoyed more? Genuinely curious.
(when (is (karma "dang") 65535)
(add-karma "dang" -65536))
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494093
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494440
bonus credit to DonHopkins https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18513120
I still have issues with the community-at-large, but certainly not dang. He's someone thanklessly making the best of an impossible job to do.
Edit: @Doreen comment was not meant in any way derogatory, my apologies. Much respect for you, I’m on your Patreon and have learned so much from you [1]. I will be more thoughtful before replying.
I don't like the mob thing either but it's how large group dynamics on the internet work (by default). We try to mitigate it where we can but there's not a lot of knowledge about how to do that.
Dude, just chill. It's a joke and it's mostly about me.
Are there people whose upvotes count for more than others? Or are these actively suppressed? Either way, it makes it hard to have important/robust conversations when the people seeing them gets suppressed
Re the second bit: there aren't any accounts whose upvotes count for more, but if accounts upvote too many bad* comments and/or get involved in voting rings, we sometimes make their votes not count anymore.
* By "bad" I mean bad relative to HN's intended purpose as defined here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Relative to that, "bad" means snark, flamewar, ideological battle, etc. — all the things that zap intellectual curiosity.
A lot of people who are stomping mad are mad because they think, for example, that you personally flagged #Thing and don't realize that's not how that works. A lot of that -- the best antidote is calm, cool education without getting cranky, etc.
In my experience and similar provisos.
I have a lot of karma and an account over a decade old. So I probably have nothing to worry about. But is agreeing with comments killed by down vote really a red flag?
> is agreeing with comments killed by down vote really a red flag?
On the contrary, that's a good contribution and we hope everyone will do it when good comments (that don't break the site guideline) have been unfairly downvoted.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
p.s. It's always the good users who worry about these things!
Thanks, dang.
I like writing songs, but usually get stuck partway through. Maybe I'll write a song about HN and not finish it :)
I have the exact same thing. I check a comment three times, it looks fine. Hit 'reply', the page refreshes and I spot a whole raft of things that are wrong with it. Very frustrating. Maybe a 'preview' button would help?
i was mad about it at the time tho lol
As far as moderating HN goes, from one point of view it's a perverse undertaking and the short answer is that the job matches my neuroses. From another point of view, it has been a growth opportunity—the options are either to let it drive you insane or grow. From a third point of view, I sometimes think that trying to assemble a large group on the internet into a curious organism is a worthwhile thing to try.
It also has some advantages which would be hard to give up. I don't think I could go back to a job where I didn't have creative control. I could imagine doing a startup again.
What authority do 'top karma people' have?
I have 25,772 karma, for what it's worth, and you have 2. I don't think there's anything I can do here on HN that you can't do?
(Hah, and I just noticed that my account is two days older than dang's!)
The ongoing thread remembering Bob Lee is filled with that quality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35457341.
The question was about the person.
To explain a bit more:
On the one hand, you need a critical mass of people to have a discussion. On the other hand, large group dynamics seem to be a problem.
HN is generally many multiples larger than the critical mass for the former, at least on the front page. Attention drops off a lot if you go further.
So as an experiment, you could do something like 'rendezvous hashing' to show each user a random 10% subset of submissions. (If you want to gradually introduce it, run the experiment on 20% of the users only, but show them a 50% subset, so that each of the longer tail items still gets 10% of total users? You can play with the numbers.)
You could make this opt-out, too, so that people don't create ten accounts in the hope of seeing everything. Direct links would also still work.
It may be that there's a level-up here that we haven't achieved yet. But answering complaints and pushback is such a big part of what I do, and takes so much energy, that I'm scared to make more of the admin stuff public. I know it would explain things and have a settling effect for some; but others would misinterpret the information and get even more riled up by it. What the total effect of such a change would be is impossible to predict, but if it were 10x of the latter (the nightmare scenario), I'm not sure my heart could take it.
Practically all milestones are arbitrary. But humans like patterns so much they create them if they don't already exist, including counters with various periodicity.
Questions like this baffle me. Have you really never met a human and really have no idea at all why they mark various periods along the sequence of anything that increments?
Or did the particular number in this case not happen to ring any bells and you thought it was a random number?
So the two answers are "because humans do that" and "the number is not random, and is especially not random to anyone involved with computers"
There are a few places in the code that consider karma but IIRC it's never more than 500 (the downvote threshold). It's actually on my list to add more goodies for higher levels - maybe something like linkifying URLs in user profiles - but it would not have anything to do with authority on HN itself. We want the best comments and the best arguments to 'win', not skew things in insiders' favor.
Edit: to expand a bit lest that seem snarky - what I mean is that maintaining the current system takes so much energy that there's precious little capacity left over for creative exploration. This is a problem.
It's the only way to be sure.
From an admin point of view it's tricky because (unless I'm high on koolaid?) this is a major technical development, so genuine advances are happening all at once. Too many for me to keep up with.
Newer, widely purposed tech that hasn't taken hold yet is the one I see most often. Where people have invested non-trivial time. Eg the rust crew which I choose as an example because I quite like rust so I'm not bashing the tech here.
There are bogus "here's a cool library/app/thing" articles which get to the front page where I scratch my head and then discover "oh, it's boring as hell but in rust." I see people expressing legitimate points of view (which I frequently disagree with) about cases where C might be a better choice or where a rust re-write doesn't buy the user much that are immediately massively downvoted. It's mob mentality, is it organised or self-organising? Doesn't matter either way. Makes rustaceans look pretty stupid though. And yes you can do this for non-rust stuff and it happens. And it's easy to see why. You invest a ton of time into a tech you really want it to succeed to maximise the payoff for doing so.
What do you do to counter it? Anything at all?
HN is gamified on karma - an idea taken from slashdot with a mildly different implementation but a really good idea that has been under-applied accross the web. In this game popular in the zeitgeist massively trumps interesting, well written, thought provoking and well supported. Sure by the time you've got 50 points you probably should stop caring and you've got karma to burn to be thoughtfully unpopular, but if you take the time you probably want that seen and it's the stuff you want to see - which is kind of the point.
The other question I have is why has there been next to nothing here (that I've noticed - maybe I missed it?) About the twitter files revelations and their importance or lack thereof? Intervention? If so please would you share the thinking behind it?
The point being, to suggest what you could do differently requires a clue on what you actually do now, which I'm not at all sure I have.
From then on, whenever a user takes an action on the site (posting, commenting, voting, flagging, etc.) they are prompted to provide an explanation as to how their action contributes to the community. All actions and their transparency notes are stored in this log.
Make it so that it can be skipped, but where applicable the action is delayed, marked with a sigil, and down-weighted.
Re the Twitter stuff: there have been quite a few major threads. They also attract a ton of user flags. I'm personally open to the topic but the chalice is so poisoned that I'm not sure HN can discuss it in an interesting way, and interestingness is what we're going for here.
Also, a lot of the high karma accounts got there by posting links, or just by grinding their way up by posting a lot of comments, or because they're 'famous' for something. Karma doesn't represent any sort of unusual power or authority. If you think it does you're reading too much into it.
What's not clear to me in your comment is what we would be testing for. If you're going to A/B test different front pages, what's the fitness function?
I contacted HN awhile back after reading PG’s essay on Schlep Blindness for the 18th time while noticing how janky Paul’s website had become.
I was hoping to receive an answer as to why such powerful information wasn’t being displayed better. Instead, I received a reply back from Daniel which sparked laying the groundwork for a prototype.
I’ve made a ton of progress, and I’m currently building out content for an upcoming release here on HN.
I plan to post a SHOW HN for Elegant around May 27th, a significant date for Wordpress lol.
Again, thank you for everything you do and have done Daniel!! Much appreciated!
For example, I might contemplate translating the guidelines into a few major languages (emphasizing in an intro that the site is in English and the translated guidelines are only intended to ease the onboarding process for a global audience). I think a lot of people fail to grasp how multicultural HN is and that a lot of dust ups are rooted in cultural and language barriers.
In terms of moderator action: we might downweight ChatGPT topics (for oar against) if they seem repetitive rather than significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). But we don't downweight posts that are critical of YC companies—or rather, we do so less than we would downweight similar threads on other topics. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
The other aspect (which is hard for a lot of people to admit) is that trolls often have good points. They're mostly standing up for things that have been excluded by the majority.
Edit: they're also usually not trolls, in the sense of deliberately trying to stir up drama. Mostly they're people with strong feelings who (let's call it) underestimate how they come across to others.
Are you sure there aren't abuses from your portfolio companies managers/employees to flag negative stories? I imagine Sam, for example, knows exactly what he has to do to get ChatGPT criticism guided off the stage.
Edit: for example, do you know what happened with this story? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35245626
This is a very interesting/important topic. This was a new topic. It was really hot in the first hour, and just got smashed off the front page.
In vague terms, the idea is to suffer less from 'how large group dynamics on the internet work (by default)' while still having enough eyeballs per front-page submission to have a discussion.
Now how would we operationalise that? A simple measurement is to check whether engagement per submission is having a longer, fatter tail. But that would be merely something that's easy to measure, not something we directly care about.
You'd need to have some proxies for drawbacks of 'large group dynamics on the internet'. Perhaps check civility of discussion or so?
> [...] but mostly people got pissed off that they were seeing random stuff on the front page.
I guess if you'd want to check again, you'd either have to educate people better (ie better PR) or you'd have to be more sneaky.
An idea for the latter: instead of restricting users to 10% of submissions, as a test run you can reduce them to 80% of submissions. That way the front-page would still look pretty similar to before and you wouldn't drive people too far into the long tail of submissions. Of course, any effect you could measure would also be weaker.
What did you measure (or hope to measure) when you ran this experiment a few years ago?
It works quite well. I'm much more true to myself and get into fewer combative situations. I bet it would reduce complaining to mods on HN as well. The site could still use points exactly the way it does behind the scenes, but users would be less concerned about their own status.
I dunno, something about the text-only medium seems to keep a lot of junk at bay.
I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868928 (Dec 2019)
Quite sure. That is, there may be managers/employers of $companies trying to flag things, but being a YC portfolio company doesn't make that any easier. And yes I'm sure that Sam can't do that. (I also know that he wouldn't try, but that's a separate point.)
Re the FAQ: it doesn't give a detailed explanation (we can't do that without publishing our code) but it summarizes the factors comprehensively. If you want to know more I need to see a specific link. Speaking of which:
Re https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35245626: it was on HN's front page for 4 hours, and at some point was downweighted by a mod. I haven't checked about why, but I think most likely it was just our general approach of downweighting opinion pieces on popular topics. Keep in mind that the LLM tsunami is an insanely popular topic—by far the biggest in years—and if we weren't downweighting follow-ups a la https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., it would saturate the front page every day.
Actually we tend to not do that moderation on randomwalker posts (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=randomwalker) - because they're basically always excellent. But a certain amount of randomness is inescapable and randomwalker posts do great on HN most lot of the time. If we made the wrong call in this case, so much the worse for us and I'm genuinely sorry.
It's ridiculous that this impromptu feedback session is happening here in a sub comment of a trivia thread that many users will just overlook. Feedback and community engagement should be an ongoing, (semi-)formalized process, not an ad hoc, once in a blue moon type of thing that will have been buried under a deluge of garbage by tomorrow morning.
HN has its annoying bros but it has many bright spots (generally tech posts are almost always enlightening). Hating it sometimes is understandable, but there is a time and place for that and it certainly isn't in this thread of all places!
Helped out, I think. Along with carefully practicing not escalating and picking when to just not comment.
In general downvotes seem like a relatively poor feedback mechanism because there's no shared agreement on how they should be used. This [1], perhaps ironically flagged, post offered feedback on why people downvote, and it's just all over the place. Even if there are guidelines, people will be people. At least with something like clear adjectives, the percent of 'intended' feedback would be higher.
I use old.reddit.com and have a heavily filtered r/all for general news (which I could do without), and specifically participating in discussions that are almost entirely text around what may or may not be a text post.
Other people use it like an image board or video feed.
I do agree that reducing the amount of media can mitigate junk, though.
How would one know if flagging wasn't abused? I've had comments flagged that get unflagged a day later. Were there any consequences for the person who flagged the post?
Precisely why would publishing (the relevant part of) the code be a problem? Twitter did it just a few days ago, and they aren't even known as an information hub of the open source world, plus they face a lot more public scrutiny for everything they do, to put it mildly.
Take what is currently the two front pages (i.e., the current front page, and what you get to when you click "next" from the front page). Then randomize out of that set and show it to the user.
You could do that for any value N, perhaps even a fractional N (1.2, 1.5, etc.) to see how much of an impact it has.
Instead it sounds like you took /newest posts and randomly placed them on the front page. These may be completely or nearly completely unvetted, so it's not surprising to me people reacted to that. (Granted, this is with the benefit of hindsight and so on.)
Stepping back a bit, I'm not sure any of this will meaningfully change the "mob" dynamics of HN. But HN attention is so focused right now, I do think spreading that out might have an impact. Right now, posts tend to die off quickly and sometimes I wish discussions would live on a little longer than they do.
I definitely empathize with feeling that any change could make things dramatically worse.
It's really weird how two of the most important platforms of the open source world (HN and GitHub) have no feedback process in the commonly accepted sense. Every niche Python package has an issue tracker nowadays where problems are collected, discussed, and often resolved, with the synergy of the community of users. But the grand systems underlying all of this are somehow exempt from needing anything like that, and "email the moderators" is good enough? I don't buy that, sorry.
Either way, though, I don't want to publish that part of our code for two reasons: I fear that it would make HN easier to game/mainpulate, and I fear that it would increase the number of objections we have to deal with. It's not that I mind dealing with objections in principle, but a 10x increase would bury me.
If I could say anything, it would be to stand by your TOS and limit political threads. We are here for tech related news. That’s what HN is great at.
10 years now on HN.
I ask this with the greatest amount of respect: Is it possible that you're taking that "mission statement" a little too seriously here?
I'm a casual HN user and I open the front page 3-4 times per day. Roughly 50% of the topics tend to be well-written but ultimately standard blog posts from random technologists on fairly standard technology topics.
Some of it is indeed interesting, and what's interesting of course depends on the reader, but I think it's safe to say that most people won't open the front page and be utterly blown away by how incredibly interesting every single post is.
Considering this, silencing a lively discussion because it might not meet certain, ultimately subjective, criteria of "interestingness" seems excessive. To be clear, I don't want to see the front page dominated by a single topic every day, but it pains me when discussions containing (among other things) thoughtful comments are effectively hidden from view in a matter of minutes because an algorithm or a moderator thinks we'd be better off reading about how someone has connected their dog's heart rate monitor to their car's entertainment system using a Raspberry Pi.
Thanks for confirming this. There was some speculation last year about partial shadow bans for voting,* and it's good to hear an authoritative answer.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317059
When this happens to an HN account, is it permanent or can it be reversed if the account stops upvoting "bad" comments? If it's permanent, affected users would like to know. Evaluating comments and determining whether they should be voted on can take a long time, and the affected users could save a lot of time if they knew that their votes would never count again.
- the voting behaviour is just like reddit or rather just as bad - it is herd voting, flippant voting (but I really don't think how this can be fixed; maybe it can't be - but that is how it is to be honest and maybe it's time we acknowledged it)
- there is a sense of "aura/legend" attached to certain users, I find it maybe a bit extra weird because I am not from the US (later about it), and maybe not from the "in" crowd that I can't understand the why of it (I would not have known even if I knew of those users) - useless/meaningless/contentless comments get upvoted and reach the top -- not showing showing rank/voting might be a great idea imho (again, I really don't know how this can be fixed or whether this has to be fixed)
- HN seems like a "US only" forum largely, maybe that's the intention, I am not sure. I mean some comments and even posts just make it look like everything and everywhere works as it works in the USA
- Brigading or soft-brigading either just happens or maybe allowed as well - esp. on political threads - maybe just do not allow politics at all (no exceptions!) or those might need extra attention. I mean there is no point in allowing a political post when it ends up just getting raided. Also I often feel political posts specifically about USA are more kosher than political posts about other places.
- Encourage non-technical discussions more (but with the exception of political posts :P) - personally my best experiences on hn have actually been on non-tech/sw/hw posts really
One of the things I like about hn is its simplicity but maybe wouldn't mind "sections" or "categories" for different types of posts. Again this has its own trade offs.
I mean it's not so bad and whatever is bad maybe cannot even be fixed.
Re "certain users": I don't see it that way! I'd prefer this to be a place where anyone can post about anything, and if their comment is insightful, that is what matters.
Re "US only": last I checked, US users were only 50% of the community. It may be less than that now.
Re brigading: it's definitely not allowed, and we've worked a lot on trying to stop it, but it's a hard problem.
Re non-technical discussions: I couldn't agree more, and we work hard to encourage that. Even to the point of various secret agendas.
Re sections or categories: no, I don't think that's in HN's DNA. For better or worse, this site is organized around a single front page that everyone sees the same way. Past explanations here if anyone is interested: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
But there is this pattern where these discussions get hashed out either (a) when someone misbehaves and dang posts a reply to remind them about the guidelines or (b) like this, we have an impromptu comment thread on HN's mechanisms. In either case, the content gets buried pretty quickly and we're relying essentially on human memories to keep this institutional knowledge alive.
I wonder if it would help to explicitly collate this information somewhere. Think, something parallel to the guidelines. But the guidelines answer the question, "how should I behave on HN?" whereas this would be answering "how is HN run?" (Or perhaps, how is it not run.)
It's a half-baked thought, so don't take it too seriously, but I figured I'd mention it.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying it is interesting. There are all too many ways in which it is not. I just mean that that's what what want it to be, and try to help it be. Even though we fall short.
Connecting a heart rate monitor to a car does sound kind of interesting to me though! but not with a dog - that sounds too close to abusive. But I could imagine someone making a biofeedback system where their heart drives their car or something. That would ba a great HN post.
And either ban "this is offensive" comments or politics altogether.
Re politics: it's not possible to ban that altogether, nor would it fit HN's mandate of intellectual curiosity to do so. For past explanations see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If there are questions I haven't answered there, I'd be happy to answer them.
If anything, HN threads reward people who comment early. I’ve noticed the users with most karma are also extremely online and comment on a lot of threads early. If the thread becomes popular, their comments get more views and karma than someone who comments later. Even here, HN tries to mitigate this effect by giving every new comment in every thread and sub-thread a few minutes at the top when it’s new. This encourages people to comment even if they’re late to the party.
More could be done like removing the list of top users or moving profile karma a couple of clicks away, but HN does more than most websites to de-emphasise power users. That’s why I comment here and not elsewhere.
There are many variations of this feedback system, but comments randomly interspersed in unrelated discussions, never to be found again, is not one of them. And neither is a private mailbox.
I know that's problematic because it depends on us seeing things and manually doing them. I'd love to automate it—not just because it would be fairer but because it would be less work for us! But I don't know how to write code to do that.
Well I'm astounded that you let people "user flag" the story showing the evidence of government intervention in social media "moderation" which until it came out was a rank conspiracy theory. It's deeply controversial and upsetting for large numbers of people who would rather it were not true and I'm one of them. I would definitely rather it if it wasn't true about the suppression of a true story in the lead up to the election. I would definitely rather it wasn't true that the FBI, CIA, NSA etc were getting involved where they really should not. But it is true no matter how much I dislike that it is. It should be discussed widely and nowhere more so than here - it's our industry. How bad is it and how concerned should we be about it is a vital discussion, not be "user flagged" to be out of bounds. I completely understand that a noisy and vocal minority used to think Elon could do no wrong and his farts smelled like lavender and yet we had reasoned, sensible discussion here about his efforts in the Thai cave rescue. Nowadays a noisy and vocal group think Elon is in league with everything that is evil and shout it to the rooftops. Still we are likely to manage.
You didn't say it outright but I would take you at your word you, as in HN didn't moderate the story away and I would like you to confirm in the face of what we now know about pressuring moderators.
If it's "user flags" that did it are you being gamed on that? How do you know?
Would that be happening if it made Trump look like more of a crook than he is which plays to my prejudices just like 90+-ish % of those here? Zeitgeist. Major story that affects us as people, our community, many of our startups and specifically HN, which seems like it would be subject to similar pressures?
The major threads? I never saw them and I come here too often! ;-)
I'm also not sure that an internet forum like HN is a good fit for the issue tracker model—but that could just be rationalization on my part.
Yes, and I also do it, but very rarely and as an exception (and I am strongly in the position of "sniping weakens the system").
The issue is that it is possible that the censor may have misunderstood and missed something that was not clearly expressed.
And, ironically, even interestingness can get repetitive. When I see a post titled "How I made Netflix' video decoding on Android 25% faster", I know that I'm going to find a war story where some silly hardware bug was preventing proper cache management or something. It's interesting in a way, and if I read the full post I'm going to learn plenty of new things – but at the end of the day, I've seen (and done) it all before. Not this particular bug of course, but this type of story.
What I'm really looking for is ideas and thoughts that are completely new to me. Not just in their particulars, but in their general direction. That's very difficult to find. And "dissenting", "controversial", and "offensive" opinions are an absolutely crucial part of finding it, in my experience. A "sort by controversial" feature like Reddit has would be a godsend for HN.
(if anyone didn’t get the reference.)
Apart from the obvious (content not worthy of vote) it could also be due to timing: arriving late on popular posts (like this one); posting at times when the majority of HN is not active here (I'm posting from Europe). But I didn't think that effect would be huge...
Anyway, point is that 200 karma is a lot in my experience. Either I'm doing this HN thing quite wrong, DanG is doing it superbly, or "soon" is quite a stretch. Perhaps all three simultaneously?
Well, I should’ve joined sooner, because I stay up way too late every night catching up on the world through HN. I’ve not found a more intriguing and interesting place on the internet, and I‘ve been online nearly every day of my life since 1993.
This post is an incredible testament to the community that’s been built here, and to you, dang. Here’s to karma forever and a sincere thanks for all you do.
Don't you get tired of answering the same questions again and again, and rebutting the same arguments year after year? I can't imagine not being able to just write "Duplicate of #3845" and close the issue.
Well, that's essentially identical to what I suggested if you specialise it to 50% of submissions visible per user.
But yes, I agree that this would be an interesting experiment.
However it's easy enough for us to suggest experiments; and much harder for dang and friends to run them.
It's the discussion below that I particularly enjoy even though I'm very much a lurker, the strong moderation and quality community feel adds massively to some complicated (for me) topics.
For the philologist, from around 1780, The chapter of accidents: a comedy by Sophia Lee.
> Jacob: Dang it, doan't I zeay, I'll tell thee present...
> dang it, I thought at first I ha' zwounded...
https://archive.org/details/chapteraccident00leegoog/page/n4...
...But I also immediately think of Gary Larson.
It is one of the sites and start and end my day with - if I find myself using the site more than that I know I'm either bored or stressed and try to do something about it.
Some of them are not exactly idle: just a few hours ago I submitted a piece about an epidemic of "voice scams", AI boosted: the idea was that it is not simply "intellectually interesting", but important, urgent and pressing, and especially calling for the awareness of the community.
I have put some consideration on the matter to come up with proposals, but no good idea yet.
This could go after the reply button, before it, before the comment box even. Or, to get fancy, positioned based on karma (a little more in the way when it's low, more out of the way as it climbs).
No functional change.
I've found myself delete a lot of less useful comments when I stop and say "is this really helpful? Or am I trying to 'win' a discussion".
It's also really hard to discuss because the ability of the average user to comprehend nuance seems to have gone down, instead pattern matching things to the nearest cliche. I've seen time and time again what should be a nuanced discussion having users mentally replace nuanced statements and facts with more readily accessible clichés.
I have no simple solutions to that issue, inspiring that kind of nuanced discussion would likely need it to explicitly gamified (e.g. having a specific award/karma that people can give out for someone else understanding the nuance of something someone else said and an equivalent down vote for rounding something off to a cliche) and even that probably wouldnt work.
You know that what you're saying is "I can't imagine not being able to show the user a middle finger?", right? Because that's how it usually feels on the receiving end. You mentioned StackExchange upthread; the identifying meme of SO and SE family is "closed as non-constructive" and "closed as duplicate" - that is, how absurdly many good topics are killed or blocked this way for no discernible reason.
For Dan, I imagine the amount of work is the same. He could be clicking[0] to close ticket #12346 as duplicate, and making it clear to the entire HN userbase that user 'TeMPOraL just wasted his time by having the audacity to ask question without first searching[1] through prior #12345 issues. Or, he can just make a few keypresses to insert a canned paragraph into an e-mail[2] - resulting in me getting my answer/scolding directly into my inbox, but more importantly, in me feeling heard and respected as an individual contributor, as well as being reassured HN is moderated by someone who cares. Not to mention, I can always reply if I believe I'm being dismissed too early, without risking to create a stink.
Same amount of work, completely different outcomes.
--
[0] - In some crappy modern issue tracker WebUI. Like the GitHub one you mentioned. Or Gitlab.
[1] - Via some crappy, eventually-consistent Elastic Search-backed search form.
[2] - Or, these days, he should be able to forward the e-mail to DanGPT, with an annotation like "doesn't work, gtfo, hash table in the sky", and DanGPT would then produce a few polite and informative paragraphs, based on the forwarded e-mail and maybe automatically pulled comment history. I wouldn't really mind to be on the receiving end, even if I learned this is how the reply was written. It's still much better than "Closed as duplicate" or "WONTFIX" or "LMGTFY".
So having a public issue tracker reduces the number of issues the maintainer has to respond to, because it enables (certain) people to answer their own questions by looking at what has been discussed previously.
There are very good reasons for why issue tracking is now the standard for 99% of open source projects. It's not about having fancy web UIs, it's about the process itself.
I visit hacker news so that I can avoid current affairs news, but all too often non "hacker" stories appear on the feed and it feels like they shouldn't have made it out of New
Regardless, congrats Dang. You've done a great job moderating Hacker News, and somehow keeping the peace all these years later.
Or just make the user karma a simple average over all their posts and comments. Anything but a straight number that goes up each time!
I use my own karma display as a way to check if its likely i have new replies.
To the mod' who is going to have this message in his suspicious pile because of a four letters word I put in there on purpose: thank you !
I meant that, remaining on the assumption that the users will upvote submissions thus determining the perceived degree of importance, the fast flow of the news makes important ones go lost. Extra mechanisms to facilitate that "somebody notices the important" should be there.
This said, other mechanisms that differentiate submissions besides user upvote are not impossible.
As said, I do not have good proposals at the moment, but surely if I come up with anything sound I will contact you and present the idea.
There's no easy way to distinguish between "hacker" and "non hacker" stories because different people evaluate these expressions completely differently.
My friend, have you noticed in these few years that I believe in particular attention to words? :)
It was pretty easy: Etymonline, which is part of my few core references as "dictionary of meaning" (as opposed to "dictionary of use"), gives the first clues at https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=dang . Then I looked for the original text and checked the details.
If the purpose of this site is exchange of ideas (rather than personal interaction), who wrote something should never matter. Only what was written matters. Discussion threads become collectively sourced arguments rather than ego battles. Take the identity of posters out of the equation.
In the rare cases where it matters (e.g. "Show HN" threads where the author offers to answer questions), it should be no problem for people to explicitly identify themselves ("author here"; this is mostly already happening anyway).
I imagine the same kind of users would also use the Algolia-powered search bar at the bottom of (almost) every HN page to search for prior discussions on a topic. Even if a topic shows repeatedly over the years, Dan always replies with at least a fresh summary next to a link to prior issue - as a result, there's a really good chance you'll hit gold when you search for it.
> So having a public issue tracker reduces the number of issues the maintainer has to respond to, because it enables (certain) people to answer their own questions by looking at what has been discussed previously.
I feel it's important to recognize the limits of the analogy. HN threads are not a product. Dan is not a maintainer. People's questions and complains are not issues. Moderating a discussion group is all about human connection[0].
Now, I do believe a lot of the things Dan writes should be collected, edited, and published as an updated FAQ. I get why guidelines are vague, and why not everything is spelled out, but if the amount of repetitive moderation work it creates is keeping Dan at capacity, then maybe it's worth it to extend the FAQ a bit.
> There are very good reasons for why issue tracking is now the standard for 99% of open source projects. It's not about having fancy web UIs, it's about the process itself.
I may be too cynical, but I think the reason is mostly path dependence: this is what Github shipped with when it took the world by storm. It was both streamlining and dumbing down/functionality reduction of systems people used prior (Redmine, Trac, and then earlier systems) - but very convenient at entry level. So people adopted it, and now are used to it, and bend it way beyond its performance envelope, for things like long-term issue database or LARPing project management. Or keeping a community - issue trackers and OSS projects are too drive-by for that.
Point being, most of those reasons don't apply to HN moderation, and issue trackers are a poor fit for this in general. If we had to do it somehow, I'd prefer a meta.news.ycombinator.com board that's running Lobsters clone (because it's like HN but supports tagging threads, which would be useful here). But I feel that not doing anything fits HN better - this is a community, not a corporation; not everything needs to be streamlined. There are strong social side effects to having people just talk about things.
--
[0] - I think. Dan has much more experience and a better perspective on this.
Also when someone does say something I agree with but that does not contribute ("most grass is green") I wouldn't want to reward them with a +1 agree either, just punish with -1 doesn't contribute.
I'd argue that in this case it's also in the interest of the community to downvote, since the comment adds more noise than it contributes to the discussion. In the end it's a ranking; if other comments are better worded and clearer, everything else being equal, they deserve to be higher up.
I think that would underscore that what appears to be a conversation between two people is not. That's important and I think often lost in online discussion. If UserX doesn't reply they might have been persuaded to UserY's position and one way of signaling that is to not reply. Meanwhile there's very likely someone who will read a well reasoned and backed up comment and nonetheless disagree, and they're most likely to reply given their disagreement. More so in the age of bots. The aggregate effect is for discussions to be weighted harshly negatively to the point of destructively.
Edit-I'm not very aware of the "famous user" effect. Sure there are usernames I recognize, but it's few, and the UI doesn't seem to give them much weight. I 'worry' more about the criticality of the site.
Because flagging also affects visibility it's clear that many users simply use flagging as a kind of "super downvote" which it presumably isn't meant to be. Their goal is to suppress interesting discussion of interesting things uncomfortable for their world view, not to clean up spam. I always read with showdead on because the sheer quantity of interesting, useful posts that get flagged is well beyond the value of the flagging mechanism.
HN seems to be stuck in a form of circular reasoning in which flags are taken as a sign that some people are (or claiming to be) upset, therefore the discussion won't be "good", so it is OK to suppress it, which then encourages people to flag things. But this just empowers aggressive minorities who weaponize their own feelings to shut down interesting debates for everyone else. It seems counter to the mission.
A simple fix: put the ability to flag behind a very high karma threshold, write out a clear policy for how it's meant to be used i.e. what is considered rule breaking and what isn't, then take away flagging privs for people who consistently flag things that don't meet the policy.
It really speaks to this community's desire to have an enforcer to praise that dang is so worshiped here. I can respect the restraint it takes for dang to, having been given such a blank check by the community, not run amuck with it.
dang explains most of the privileges / thresholds in various comments over the years:
Karma > 30 enables flagging and vouching privileges on posts and comments. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14697607> & <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24134548>.
Karma > 500 enables downvotes on comments. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10224653> (Posts cannot be downvoted.)
Sufficiently negative karma causes an account's comments to be autokilled. Threshold not specified. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16409493> (Profiles can also be banned specifically by moderators, e.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35426426>.)
The 100 profiles with the highest karma are listed on the leaders page: <https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders>. Currently the 100th-ranked profile has 40,270 karma. There's no special privilege other than being listed, no member lounge or secret handshake.
(You can figure out most of this by searching for dang's comments with appropriate keywords, e.g., "by:dang karma threshold", which turns up most of these. I'd also looked for "vouch", "downvote", and "flag" specifically. <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>)
So I post a well-researched article that refutes something the parent says. There's no reason that should be downvoted past 1.
- On HN someone downvotes it because they don't like the article
- On Slashdot someone downvotes it because they don't like the article. The pick "-1 flamebait" as the reason because "I disagree" isn't available, and because they are happy to lie. Then someone else metamoderates - "is this flamebait Y/N?" they say it isn't. The moderator then has their moderation judged as unfair and their moderation powers limited.
It would probably require hiding comment scores though - otherwise it'd be easy to observe how the multiplier changes and game it.
It reminds me of my former neighbor's dating strategy. A few times I used Python and the HN API because I was interested in the average karma per submission for top users and whether it matches my own opinion about their post quality. It led me to believe maybe a good metric for limiting the number of submissions someone makes: daily submissions allowed = average karma per submission (once you've reached 20 or 100 submissions)
It's not something I can relate to---why people do this shotgun thing; shoving a mound of potentially interesting (and often not self-written) articles in hope that two or three land on the front page. The karma doesn't do anything except give you validation that your contributions "mattered", but if you repost someone else's work (or even your own from the past) you're basically getting validation that other people might care about this thing you care about... which feels empty, to me.
I personally can't develop something technical and interesting more than once per week, and then I doubt how many users want to read about my really obscure and often futile interests (automating cloud publishing of ABC files, trying/failing disassembling an obscure DOS game, random SCAD files for one-off minor life improvements, buggy Python libraries for poker/tailoring/instrument tuning, learning just enough to almost push a stylus driver for two unpopular Linux laptops)
Mostly, I like reading the articles by people who do something technically cool and new and put a lot of effort diving into that thing and sharing its secrets, like this CAN injection post. The expectation is that those users can only post a few times a month unless doing cool stuff and writing about it is their full-time passion/job. Another expectation is that there are enough of these people that the front page can stay full with technically cool/new posts.
The third---and by far, the hardest---expectation is that great* (by my own flawed definition) posts need to be promoted reliably and without bias from /newest to / while also working to reject only-fanboy-/self-voted content or poor quality wikipedia links and seventh "own repost" in four years and New Yorker articles about hip-hop...
I used to flag bullshit articles right away, but they arrive like waves on the beach, and I've learned to filter past the stuff I dislike rather than bother losing some unseen privilege because I get put on a "user who flags too much for bad reasons" list.
To elaborate my skimming: in this moment, there are two reasonably popular but reasonably "not so techy" Wikipedia articles in the front page 30. There are two non-tech (historical) posts---one by a hit-or-miss "often poster" and another by someone who basically only posts non-tech/historical subjects---although in this case, once every two weeks. Five users I recognize as "I post all the damn time" users, although I only consider one of those in the "I post all the damn time and it's annoying" camp. I instantly recognize one repost, but it's one I would find interesting if I saw it for the first time. The majority is stuff I find appropriate for HN, and a minority of that is stuff I personally find interesting. If I get two or three decent articles on the front page and one from /newest, that's still 20 minutes of content that I enjoy, and the HN status quo gives me this.
"GPT, express all the above thoughts and sentiments but only using 30% of the characters I used and with far fewer personal pronouns."
Ideally this would be a moment to think about whether the contributions meet the guidelines or otherwise move discussion forward.
Edit: to be perfectly clear, I’m asking people to justify their contributions.
> “From our perspective, the big surprise is how little control we actually have. We have to play our cards very carefully and very wisely, or even that control will sort of evaporate,” Gackle said. “There’s often a strong wish to solve these contentious problems by changing the software, and, to the extent that we’ve tried things like that, we haven’t found it to work. What does seem to work better is personal interaction, over and over and over again, with individual users. That, case by case by case, seems to move the needle. But it’s very slow.”
> “If we’re trying to change something deep, the ingredient is time,” Bell said. “Patience allows us to be ambitious—to imagine people being more kind to each other, for example. It sounds kind of crazy.”
It might sound crazy but it seems to work. Thanks much Dan and Scott for all the time and effort.
I'm tracking in my head a few hundred of users. I don't know the exact number because I never made an written list. Some users make consistently good comments in some topics, and it's an important signal for a discussion.
For example. ColinWright is a mathematician like me. I usually skim the math posts but he reads the whole post. So when he make a comment in that post it's usually accurate. If he says that in page 3, second paragraph there is a huge error, I just go to page 3, second paragraph and there is surely an error.
Nobody is perfect, but some users have earned a good reputations in some topics. I classified others as clueless enthusiastic, others as troll/morons/crackpots. Other are just unclassified. It's topic specific, so I may think a user makes good comments in one topic and regular comments in other topics. (I don't remember any case of good comments in one topic and really bad comments in other topics, but I have no formal list to check, it's just a fuzzy memory list in my head.)
1. Remove non-hacker type content (i.e. news concerning the death of the Queen and anything Trump). Or move it to an off-topic list that doesn’t appear on the front page or other lists. It’s not in the spirit of the site, and I come to this site to avoid it. I treasure the actual hacker discussions on this site and feel like those articles do not add to or even diminish the value. Plus many of those stories that make it to the front page tend to be very focused on America / the English-speaking world.
2. Remove karma or deemphasize it. Discussion is important. Arbitrary numbers are not and (unintentionally) influence how people engage.
3. Add a higher barrier of entry. It’s great how you have to earn 501 karma before you can downvote. Perhaps up that limit and/or require a year old account. Prevent new accounts from posting for a period such as 3 months. This would allow people to pick up on the culture and etiquette before they begin commenting; like an apprentice studying under a master before beginning his own work. I’d even consider adding a simple quiz to create an account. Something that proves you’re a hacker in spirit. The purpose of all this is to prevent the website from stooping to Reddit standards and keeping the quality of content high. Those who engage in discourse on this site should be here because they really want to be part of the community and are willing to jump through a few hoops.
4. Create smaller communities. Find a way to group people across time zones into smaller pockets. A classic issue on Reddit is that smaller subreddits for niche hobbies are often great until they reach critical mass. Past a certain number of users, the culture is lost and everything appeals to the lowest common denominator. If hn is to grow too large, perhaps there could be a way to artificially divide it up.
5. Increase the damn font size!
Thanks for all that you do :)
This ongoing "you are posting too fast" notification has significantly impeded my participation in meaningful conversations. For instance, during a recent debate on the implications of artificial intelligence in the job market, I found it challenging to effectively engage with other users due to this restriction. Similarly, in another thread discussing the merits of various statistical approaches to a subject, my contributions were stifled by the same limitation.
I kindly ask that the administrators of Hacker News consider adopting a more flexible approach to managing user interactions. This approach should accommodate the occasional expression of strong opinions while preserving a respectful and productive environment for all community members.
(Ironically, this very comment was subject to the "you are posting too fast" limitation, which is why I could not respond sooner.)
It is as interesting to me as those "here is how we run StackOverflow" articles
No newfangled complicated k8s I'm guessing :P
72. hn_throwaway_99 51136
A particularly respectable throwaway account. :)
We do need a way to distinguish participants so we can correlate replies to earlier comments of the same participant; otherwise it's way too disorganized as you don't know which voice is which.
Revealing usernames eventually is right, I think, because clicking through to see how that person describes themself (job, hobbies, etc) is an interesting dimension to their comment.
It makes everyone wonder, was this a 'mistake'? Or was it that once-in-a-rare-occasion that YC chooses to cash in its good reputation to suppress a discussion that will cost its friends? It sounds like all they need to do is ask one mod to take care of it, and it goes away pretty quickly.
Also, for better or worse, I think people put more effort into making things (including written comments) that are attached to their identity in some way, so usernames increase quality.
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33076053 - Oct 2022 (68 comments)
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30459276 - Feb 2022 (64 comments)
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018-20) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482 - April 2021 (255 comments)
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 - June 2020 (266 comments)
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292361 - June 2019 (25 comments)
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 - Feb 2019 (183 comments)
Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973 - Feb 2018 (391 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35326541 certainly posted, and would have shown up on both /newest and /asknew. But it wouldn't have ranked on /ask (or not for long) because the upvotes on it were mostly dropped by our anti-voting-ring software. It looks like that was a false positive. I'm sorry! We don't know how to write anti-abuse code that doesn't have false positives.
Oh yes - it's probably the worst part of the job. But I think it's necessary for community because people respond differently when they're getting personal attention.
It's still my intention to build a canonical set of explanations for each common question and then mostly refer people to those. I've inched toward that over the years via HN Search links to my post moderation comments (which I know can get a bit annoying).
Even then, though, the mechanism will just be standard comments in ordinary threads, because that's how conversation takes place here, and people will always want to have personal conversation with the mods.
Users also tend to respond better when they get a detailed explanation of specifically how their post(s) broke the guidelines. Unfortunately, that sort of explanation is super expensive to produce—in time, energy, and stress. I don't have what it takes to do it in every case, which is a pity, because it tends to work. Here's an example from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35403143.
Long term, we need better feedback mechanisms to let people know that they've broken the rules, and which rules, and for how long they might be in the bad dog box.
I'd be happy to take the penalty off your account - you've been a valuable and valued contributor for many years. Unfortunately I'm still seeing flamewar comments in your feed. I know that people have strong and valid reasons for posting that kind of thing but we just can't have that on HN, regardless of how right someone is or how legitimately they feel. It leads directly to this place burning itself to a crisp and preventing that from happening, or at least trying to stave it off, is our #1 job.
What I tell people in this position when they email us is that if they want to build up a track record of using HN as intended, they'd be welcome to email again after a while and we can take another look and hopefully remove the rate limit.
Can you link me to that?
> The world is filled with people/organizations who do the right thing almost all the time, but then use that clout to do a bad thing when it really matters.
That's a good point! but it's also an irrefutable charge. In fact, someone who behaved perfectly forever would be no less accusable of this. Btw I'm certainly not saying we behave perfectly—but we do take care to moderate HN less, not more, when YC-related interests are part of a story (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). That's for reasons of self-interest as much as anything else. It wouldn't make sense to risk the global optimum for local gains.
> It sounds like all they need to do is ask one mod to take care of it, and it goes away pretty quickly.
People are going to feel like that's happening no matter what we do, but FWIW, we don't do that. We do downweight submissions as part of moderation practices that have been established for years, but a YC person doesn't have any more clout over that than you do, if you happen to email us and ask us to take a look at a particular thread (pro or con). And we always answer questions about what happened when people ask.
Btw if you feel like that randomwalker article is still relevant and can support a discussion of something specific and interesting—that is, not yet-another-generic-AI thread—go ahead and repost it and let me know, and I'll put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it will get a random placement on HN's front page at least for a while (how long depends on how the community reacts).
> automating cloud publishing of ABC files, trying/failing disassembling an obscure DOS game, random SCAD files for one-off minor life improvements, buggy Python libraries for poker/tailoring/instrument tuning, learning just enough to almost push a stylus driver for two unpopular Linux laptops
That all sounds great to me! with the possible exception of the first one - depends on how tricky/unexpected the details there would be.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080115223854/http://ycombinato...
Dred's HN CSS Madhackery: <https://pastebin.com/gLXiqKyd>
Dred's HN CSS Madhackery -- Dark Mode: <https://pastebin.com/6PF3dCXH>
Recent local tweak highlights mod comments as well:
/* Highlight mod(s) */
.comhead .hnuser[href="user?id=dang"],
.comhead a:link.hnuser[href="user?id=dang"] {
color: #ff6600;
color: #dd5500;
}
The other HN superpower, available to anyone with an email account regardless of karma, is to email the mods. That's how I started interacting with dang, and still do generally a few times per week/month, mostly for mundane stuff (titles, link disambiguation), occasionally to vouch killed stories, or to point out spammish or hostile behaviour (rarely on the last, flags really do most of the work here).
(I'm familiar with ... all or nearly all of it, but a one-stop-shop for HN features and behaviours is quite useful.)
The points= parameter is quite useful, and one I'd either not known or forgotten. E.g., posts with >100 votes: <https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100>
I don't have any info on whether it's mostly new accounts or randomly anyone that is likely to post rule breaking stuff so I'm aware I'm guessing on a lot of this.
Being able to turn it on for a particular thing makes sense (e.g. any political story) - my first thought on top of your suggestions is
* Show if under X karma
* Show if discussion has more than N flagged comments
Things seem to work pretty well here, hopefully there's some tweaks that don't change that but lower the burden for you and others.
There are a lot of stores that trend to number 1 in under an hour that end up disappearing completely from the front page, moving near the bottom, or flagged to death, within a couple of hours because it’s just not quality content for this forum.
I don't know what you mean by "no value outside of to YC" but I think—in fact I know—that HN has added massive value to lots of people's lives, and not just by providing interesting reading material. I know this because people tell me how HN changed their life, and I also know that HN changed my life (long before I started as a mod).
The same bait (sensationalism, indignation) that makes many users upvote those posts is what makes other users flag them. This rise and fall has always been the pattern on HN—it's one of the cycles of life here.
Right now, it's super sensitive where a little signal does a lot right at the beginning.
Stories rocket to the top because they're new and got a number of quick votes. The curve needs to be smoothed out so that things don't lurch to the top.
Edit: I've been around here for a little while. It used to be awesome to see things jump to the top (used to have a lot lower volume of posts and users), but the audience has changed a lot, and I think things need to be adjusted a bit to slow the meteoric rise aspect. Good content will surface.
Part of the issue is HN is too broad. Whatever goes here, really. Communities that work are focused on specific things.
I can't, but really? Every major announcement from them has been top of page. And I don't disagree with that being the case. ChatGPT is THE story of 2023 tech, and their announcements are important to the tech industry. I just like all the discussions around this hugely important topic to be given the same freedom to succeed.
Thanks for the discussion.
Maybe instead karma it could just say 'Moderator' or something funny like, 'A cog that keeps the HN turning in the right direction '.
Or, do it prestige style, every time you loop around, you get +1 prestige.
Glad to have you around and hope to meet you one day in the real world over a cup of tea! ^^
As far as I know that's not accurate, or even close.
We're not playing favorites; all we care about is that the most interesting stories get the front page time, since there are many more submissions than space on the front page.
You've unfortunately been posting some of these yourself - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35429902. Can you please not? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and we have to ban accounts that keep doing it.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.