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http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=michaelkscott http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=michaelkscott Notice his karma is lower than his highest ranked post righ

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=michaelkscott http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=michaelkscott Notice his karma is lower than his highest ranked post right now. In a now deleted post he claims he lost 900+ karma overnight. Be warned guys. If you post here the chances of you getting hellbanned are non-zero. EDIT: And if anything like that happens on a mass-scale and PG doesn't have a transaction rollback in the wings...

mikecane 15y ago
>>>Be warned guys. If you post here the chances of you getting hellbanned are non-zero. I don't see anyone here criticizing HN or its community practices. We're just all trying to figure out what's been happening.
- unimpressive 15y ago
  No, I mean the spammer/cracker megadownvoting you into oblivion. (And if you come to any other conclusion as to what's behind this after seeing that, I'd love to hear it.) EDIT: Well, like another poster stated, they could have been linking a whole bunch of spam links with attractive titles to exploit the HN link glitch to garner the dude the 900+ downvotes. But I'm not sure you can get 900 clicks that way...
  - mikecane 15y ago
    Yeah, seeing Polls submitted under various accounts and at least one person losing karma points makes me wonder if that's likely too. If it's done, we'd be able to appeal because it wasn't done for legitimate cause by those with the power at HN.
tomjen3 15y ago
PG can't roll back, because he isn't using a database backend. As for being hellbanned, well I have 3 after my name for a reason.
- unimpressive 15y ago
  >PG can't roll back, because he isn't using a database backend. I was afraid of that... May I ask why? Too much resource usage? Arc doesn't have a DB API?
  - Estragon 15y ago
    Who cares, really? It's all play money.
    - unimpressive 15y ago
      Well of course. I don't really care about the Karma. If I got spammed to death I'd just make a new account. I was just wondering because it seems like an odd design decision. I wanted to know the rationale behind it.
  - abtinf 15y ago
    Via email, I asked PG about this 7 years ago. me: "I've read in your essays that you (and yahoo) chose to store all your information in files rather than a database. I am curious if you would make the same decision now that excellent oss databases are available (mysql, postgresql, etc)." PG: "I'd do the same thing. It was a huge win to use alists (a lisp construct) and just write them to files. Then if anything went wrong, or data formats changed, I could just munge the raw files. Nothing was wired in."
    - unimpressive 15y ago
      Thank you for answering. At the same time however, I'm not really sure what to think about that. On the one hand future proof is a massive win. On the other no rollbacks seems like a risky way to operate. I hope he keeps regular backups of the data files.

mikecane 15y ago

>>>Be warned guys. If you post here the chances of you getting hellbanned are non-zero. I don't see anyone here criticizing HN or its community practices. We're just all trying to figure out what's been happening.

unimpressive 15y ago
No, I mean the spammer/cracker megadownvoting you into oblivion. (And if you come to any other conclusion as to what's behind this after seeing that, I'd love to hear it.) EDIT: Well, like another poster stated, they could have been linking a whole bunch of spam links with attractive titles to exploit the HN link glitch to garner the dude the 900+ downvotes. But I'm not sure you can get 900 clicks that way...
- mikecane 15y ago
  Yeah, seeing Polls submitted under various accounts and at least one person losing karma points makes me wonder if that's likely too. If it's done, we'd be able to appeal because it wasn't done for legitimate cause by those with the power at HN.

tomjen3 15y ago

PG can't roll back, because he isn't using a database backend. As for being hellbanned, well I have 3 after my name for a reason.

unimpressive 15y ago
>PG can't roll back, because he isn't using a database backend. I was afraid of that... May I ask why? Too much resource usage? Arc doesn't have a DB API?
- Estragon 15y ago
  Who cares, really? It's all play money.
  - unimpressive 15y ago
    Well of course. I don't really care about the Karma. If I got spammed to death I'd just make a new account. I was just wondering because it seems like an odd design decision. I wanted to know the rationale behind it.
- abtinf 15y ago
  Via email, I asked PG about this 7 years ago. me: "I've read in your essays that you (and yahoo) chose to store all your information in files rather than a database. I am curious if you would make the same decision now that excellent oss databases are available (mysql, postgresql, etc)." PG: "I'd do the same thing. It was a huge win to use alists (a lisp construct) and just write them to files. Then if anything went wrong, or data formats changed, I could just munge the raw files. Nothing was wired in."
  - unimpressive 15y ago
    Thank you for answering. At the same time however, I'm not really sure what to think about that. On the one hand future proof is a massive win. On the other no rollbacks seems like a risky way to operate. I hope he keeps regular backups of the data files.