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HN's cool but it's just one forum among a million others. The moderation is good though sometimes arbitrary. That's a lot easier for users to accept when they k

HN's cool but it's just one forum among a million others. The moderation is good though sometimes arbitrary. That's a lot easier for users to accept when they know why they are getting positively/negatively moderated, which is a good reason for more openness. But at the end of the day it's a forum, the moderators have the final say, that's the contract you agree to in using it.

tptacek 9y ago
If you don't like the way this site is edited, stand up an m1.large, hook Rails up to an sqlite database, and build your own. You'll be two generations of technology ahead of HN. The freedom to take other people's private belongings and repurpose them to your own ends is no real kind of freedom at all. But that's ultimately what you're yearning for when you allude to the Empire of Napoleon.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  I'm not complaining. HN is about the best of what we've got. My Napoleon reference was the slobbering nature of the comment, which is so pro-moderation as to lose objectivity.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    Sorry, it's probably the tenor of the whole thread I'm responding to, not you in particular.
  - grzm 9y ago
    Something I find frustrating in discussions like this is a tendency for expressions of gratitude or appreciation to often be dismissed as uncritical, as if the only meaningful act of criticism is that of finding faults or flaws. In such an environment it can be very difficult to express reasons why someone likes something or finds benefit in a way that others read as something other than fawning: particularly when you know that's how it's going to be read. There are reasons people continue to frequent HN as a news aggregator and comment on the site: it has some uses and benefits to them. 'sillysaurus3 does list a number of reasons supporting their position. If they're expressing a bit more joy and appreciation for your taste, dismissing that as "slobbering" seems quite harsh and unnecessary. Phrasing it as "pro-moderation" in an arguably pejorative manner likewise derails. A quality site, one I find personally valuable, requires moderation. If I'm in favor of a particular site and value its moderation efforts, I'm going to be "pro-moderation". If I actually find it valuable, enjoyable, and a benefit, I'm going to be appreciative, and maybe at times effusive. Have I lost objectivity in such a case? I'd like to think we're more human than that.
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      You're right. I edited the original to be kinder. Thanks.
      - sillysaurus3 9y ago
        Try not to remove context like that. My reply looks quite strange now. :)
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Antirez tried, with lamernews: https://github.com/antirez/lamernews/blob/master/app.rb https://github.com/antirez/lamernews/blob/master/app.rb Diff that vs HN circa 2008: https://github.com/evanrmurphy/SweetScript/blob/master/arc3.1/news.arc https://github.com/evanrmurphy/SweetScript/blob/master/arc3.... Lamernews seems like just another HN clone, but back when it was launched it was a serious attempt at being a competitor. They probably came closest to pulling away a significant chunk of HN. I started to use it. Then I ran into missing features. Little quality of life stuff. I forget what they were, but the whole site felt noticeably harder to use. So I stopped using it. It's so tempting to think "HN is so simple. Just throw Rails at the problem and you can wipe the floor with them." But Lamernews was 2,964 lines of Ruby, and only managed to contain about 60% of the features. news.arc is 2,616 lines. And I don't care what anybody says: if you sat down and forced yourself to read that code for a week straight, you'd find it is actually quite readable. It's terse because it's for getting shit done.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    I'm not saying you'll be as successful as HN. Lobste.rs, which is run carefully by thoughtful people using software which is probably better than HN's, is much less successful. But that's the point.
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      You said you'd be two generations of tech ahead of HN. I know it was tongue in cheek, and I'm not calling you out. I'm nerding out about how much functionality pg managed to pack into so few lines of code. And it all worked! No data loss, no massive security problem, and the last time HN was down for >24h was because pg manually edited the database and accidentally created a circular comment chain. One way to look at the situation is that pg's original vision for arc failed. Arc was supposed to be what Clojure turned out to be. But even though HN alone is the one significant Arc project, what a project! The world was made materially better thanks to it. And I don't think they could've pulled off HN in some other language. There was too much work for one person to do to be distracted by the thousands of details a modern webdev needs to stay on top of. I think it's possible to do the same thing for modern webdev. Arc's goal was to be a reliable foundation for building webapps. It comes with a user+admin system out of the box, for example. Every Arc app does. I've been playing around with hooking up AngularJS to it, because unlike React or Angular, AngularJS can operate purely in HTML. You normally never want to do that -- usually you want to set up controllers and such. But when you control the language, you end up being able to give it the Babel treatment: the output looks complex, but you get all the features of a modern frontend site. Initial experiments were quite promising. And from there, it's easy to just emit JSX instead. React? Angular? Sure, whatever. It's treated as compiler output. (Indirect sourcemaps are funny... JSX compiles to minified JS, whose sourcemap points back to the JSX. But if Arc spits out JSX, you'll want a sourcemap from JSX -> Arc as well. It's sourcemaps all the way down.)
sillysaurus3 9y ago
If Dan and Scott were kings, they would be fucking epic. Best monarchs ever. It's hard to think of anyone who cares more about fairness, but clever enough to decide for themselves. And they're usually right. I think I can count on one hand the number of mistakes they've made that even remotely mattered. And from a strategic standpoint, that number is effectively zero. There are probably a bunch of people behind the scenes, and they deserve lots of credit too. But there is something incredible about being able to post a dozen moderation comments every day for years without ever being so mistaken as to provoke community backlash. It would be really easy for them to offer an offhand opinion, or just make a bad call, and suddenly have people up in arms about it. They're also some of the most humble people. Both of them have done some really amazing work and have cool hobbies. But I've sort of had to pry that info out of them over years. http://github.com/gruseom/numen http://github.com/gruseom/numen - Dan's project. JS REPL for emacs. It took another four years for anyone to even come close (https://github.com/NicolasPetton/Indium https://github.com/NicolasPetton/Indium) as far as I know. https://github.com/sctb/lumen https://github.com/sctb/lumen - Scott's project. A self-hosted Lisp that compiles and runs in both JS and Lua. The whole codebase recompiles in about one second flat when using LuaJIT. But like, that's maybe 5% of the cool stuff they've done. There's just no outward sign -- they don't bother with blog posts or any kind of self-promotion. So yes, all hail the kings of lisp.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Was not aware of those projects or their backgrounds - thanks for those links.
- observation 9y ago
  I'd rate Dan and Scott highly as rulers, and I've been banned before. I have some qualms about some systematic things, but it's a broad philosophical dispute and not the running of HN. In governance - there is no way to 'win' anyway. I wish every leader had to be a forum moderator of very different groups of people, but we seem to select for whatever the opposite of that is no matter the political predilection.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  (FWIW, the parent edited their comment significantly. They made a comparison to Napoleon / kings. I didn't just say that out of nowhere.)

tptacek 9y ago

If you don't like the way this site is edited, stand up an m1.large, hook Rails up to an sqlite database, and build your own. You'll be two generations of technology ahead of HN. The freedom to take other people's private belongings and repurpose them to your own ends is no real kind of freedom at all. But that's ultimately what you're yearning for when you allude to the Empire of Napoleon.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
I'm not complaining. HN is about the best of what we've got. My Napoleon reference was the slobbering nature of the comment, which is so pro-moderation as to lose objectivity.
- tptacek 9y ago
  Sorry, it's probably the tenor of the whole thread I'm responding to, not you in particular.
- grzm 9y ago
  Something I find frustrating in discussions like this is a tendency for expressions of gratitude or appreciation to often be dismissed as uncritical, as if the only meaningful act of criticism is that of finding faults or flaws. In such an environment it can be very difficult to express reasons why someone likes something or finds benefit in a way that others read as something other than fawning: particularly when you know that's how it's going to be read. There are reasons people continue to frequent HN as a news aggregator and comment on the site: it has some uses and benefits to them. 'sillysaurus3 does list a number of reasons supporting their position. If they're expressing a bit more joy and appreciation for your taste, dismissing that as "slobbering" seems quite harsh and unnecessary. Phrasing it as "pro-moderation" in an arguably pejorative manner likewise derails. A quality site, one I find personally valuable, requires moderation. If I'm in favor of a particular site and value its moderation efforts, I'm going to be "pro-moderation". If I actually find it valuable, enjoyable, and a benefit, I'm going to be appreciative, and maybe at times effusive. Have I lost objectivity in such a case? I'd like to think we're more human than that.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    You're right. I edited the original to be kinder. Thanks.
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      Try not to remove context like that. My reply looks quite strange now. :)
sillysaurus3 9y ago
Antirez tried, with lamernews: https://github.com/antirez/lamernews/blob/master/app.rb https://github.com/antirez/lamernews/blob/master/app.rb Diff that vs HN circa 2008: https://github.com/evanrmurphy/SweetScript/blob/master/arc3.1/news.arc https://github.com/evanrmurphy/SweetScript/blob/master/arc3.... Lamernews seems like just another HN clone, but back when it was launched it was a serious attempt at being a competitor. They probably came closest to pulling away a significant chunk of HN. I started to use it. Then I ran into missing features. Little quality of life stuff. I forget what they were, but the whole site felt noticeably harder to use. So I stopped using it. It's so tempting to think "HN is so simple. Just throw Rails at the problem and you can wipe the floor with them." But Lamernews was 2,964 lines of Ruby, and only managed to contain about 60% of the features. news.arc is 2,616 lines. And I don't care what anybody says: if you sat down and forced yourself to read that code for a week straight, you'd find it is actually quite readable. It's terse because it's for getting shit done.
- tptacek 9y ago
  I'm not saying you'll be as successful as HN. Lobste.rs, which is run carefully by thoughtful people using software which is probably better than HN's, is much less successful. But that's the point.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    You said you'd be two generations of tech ahead of HN. I know it was tongue in cheek, and I'm not calling you out. I'm nerding out about how much functionality pg managed to pack into so few lines of code. And it all worked! No data loss, no massive security problem, and the last time HN was down for >24h was because pg manually edited the database and accidentally created a circular comment chain. One way to look at the situation is that pg's original vision for arc failed. Arc was supposed to be what Clojure turned out to be. But even though HN alone is the one significant Arc project, what a project! The world was made materially better thanks to it. And I don't think they could've pulled off HN in some other language. There was too much work for one person to do to be distracted by the thousands of details a modern webdev needs to stay on top of. I think it's possible to do the same thing for modern webdev. Arc's goal was to be a reliable foundation for building webapps. It comes with a user+admin system out of the box, for example. Every Arc app does. I've been playing around with hooking up AngularJS to it, because unlike React or Angular, AngularJS can operate purely in HTML. You normally never want to do that -- usually you want to set up controllers and such. But when you control the language, you end up being able to give it the Babel treatment: the output looks complex, but you get all the features of a modern frontend site. Initial experiments were quite promising. And from there, it's easy to just emit JSX instead. React? Angular? Sure, whatever. It's treated as compiler output. (Indirect sourcemaps are funny... JSX compiles to minified JS, whose sourcemap points back to the JSX. But if Arc spits out JSX, you'll want a sourcemap from JSX -> Arc as well. It's sourcemaps all the way down.)

sillysaurus3 9y ago

If Dan and Scott were kings, they would be fucking epic. Best monarchs ever. It's hard to think of anyone who cares more about fairness, but clever enough to decide for themselves. And they're usually right. I think I can count on one hand the number of mistakes they've made that even remotely mattered. And from a strategic standpoint, that number is effectively zero. There are probably a bunch of people behind the scenes, and they deserve lots of credit too. But there is something incredible about being able to post a dozen moderation comments every day for years without ever being so mistaken as to provoke community backlash. It would be really easy for them to offer an offhand opinion, or just make a bad call, and suddenly have people up in arms about it. They're also some of the most humble people. Both of them have done some really amazing work and have cool hobbies. But I've sort of had to pry that info out of them over years. http://github.com/gruseom/numen http://github.com/gruseom/numen - Dan's project. JS REPL for emacs. It took another four years for anyone to even come close (https://github.com/NicolasPetton/Indium https://github.com/NicolasPetton/Indium) as far as I know. https://github.com/sctb/lumen https://github.com/sctb/lumen - Scott's project. A self-hosted Lisp that compiles and runs in both JS and Lua. The whole codebase recompiles in about one second flat when using LuaJIT. But like, that's maybe 5% of the cool stuff they've done. There's just no outward sign -- they don't bother with blog posts or any kind of self-promotion. So yes, all hail the kings of lisp.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
Was not aware of those projects or their backgrounds - thanks for those links.
observation 9y ago
I'd rate Dan and Scott highly as rulers, and I've been banned before. I have some qualms about some systematic things, but it's a broad philosophical dispute and not the running of HN. In governance - there is no way to 'win' anyway. I wish every leader had to be a forum moderator of very different groups of people, but we seem to select for whatever the opposite of that is no matter the political predilection.
sillysaurus3 9y ago
(FWIW, the parent edited their comment significantly. They made a comparison to Napoleon / kings. I didn't just say that out of nowhere.)