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On January 2011 I read about Bitcoin as a lurker on HN. I thought it was quite a novel idea, but needed to prove its worth to the world. I didn't want to take

by BenoitP 10y ago

On January 2011 I read about Bitcoin as a lurker on HN. I thought it was quite a novel idea, but needed to prove its worth to the world. I didn't want to take part in it, use it, as I saw no direct benefit to me; and without an underlying economic activity, buying Bitcoins was a purely speculative Ponzi scheme. I came to learn - through HN - about Silk Road and how people were using it to animate their illegal endeavours. Bitcoin had economic sense, so in April I bought 50 euros worth of it, to give it a try. Price went from 7euros/BTC then to 500euros/BTC now. It has been, and will ever be, my single best return on investment. You just can't beat 70x. HN has literaly made me richer. Had I invested 1k euros 2 months earlier, my life would have taken an entirely different meaning. It has taught me the importance of being bullish on novel ideas. HN made me discover the Oculus Rift; HN made me see the unbelievable rise from the kickstarter to being bought 2B$ a year and a half later. I have been trying out a lot of great things thanks to HN. To me, it is an early warning system about the best the future can offer. ----------- It seems to me that the bitcoins of nowadays are getting buried in noise, or are no longer here. Frontpage is covered with common law, societal problems, short lived news events, click bait, and my-framework-is-better-than-yours. I am not diminishing the importance of general news, but this is not the venue for it. Where is the good stuff? Why don't I hear more about initiatives like RISC-V (which is arguably hardware's linux moment)? Why don't I hear more about way to do some CRISPR editing mysaelf as a side project (which is arguably DNA's linux moment)? HN is pivoting slowly towards mainstream general tasteless news; and my source of living in the future and doing interesting things in it is drying up. ----------- So, my plea to you, Dang, is: could we have public, explicit, ruthless, white-list-style, displayed-right-next-to-the-post-button definition for flagging content? My take on it: * It must be about the future getting materialized. * It must have a strong technical aspect, on which HN members can readily start to work on. * No news events of any kind, even nation-wide ones like terrorist attacks. * No societal articles. Not even about the gender gap, which is greatly affecting us all. * No baseless day-dreaming about what the future could be. (How many of these can we have about "AI"?)

dang 10y ago
That's a good story and an illustration of HN's influence at its best. There are many such stories, which is wonderful. Our job as caretakers is to optimize for curiosity, so we want as many of them as possible. People's visions of what HN should be are not all fully compatible, so going far in one direction would be to choose a local optimum over a global. In some ways the global optimum (or our best approximation thereof) satisfies no one, which is a little weird if you think about it. I'm pretty sure this isn't true though: > HN is pivoting slowly towards mainstream general tasteless news That's one thing we're in a position to prevent and that we put a lot of effort into. Perceptions of how HN used to be in the past are pretty unreliable; there seems to be a strong nostalgia bias in most such reports.

by BenoitP 10y ago

dang 10y ago

That's a good story and an illustration of HN's influence at its best. There are many such stories, which is wonderful. Our job as caretakers is to optimize for curiosity, so we want as many of them as possible. People's visions of what HN should be are not all fully compatible, so going far in one direction would be to choose a local optimum over a global. In some ways the global optimum (or our best approximation thereof) satisfies no one, which is a little weird if you think about it. I'm pretty sure this isn't true though: > HN is pivoting slowly towards mainstream general tasteless news That's one thing we're in a position to prevent and that we put a lot of effort into. Perceptions of how HN used to be in the past are pretty unreliable; there seems to be a strong nostalgia bias in most such reports.