7 ms·

Ask HN: Why are there two Job Ads at the top?

• unreal37 12y ago
  Y-Combinator companies have always had the ability to post jobs to Hacker News. 2 side-by-side may be rare but not unheard of.
  • minimaxir 12y ago
    The job ads have a linear decay applied to them (I think it's -1 rank every 15 minutes) to keep things fair. The fact that the two ads have held for #1 and #2 spots for hours is very unusual.
• ojbyrne 12y ago
  Hacker News is run by YCombinator (you notice there are no ads in general - i.e. no obvious monetization?). YC companies get to run job listings. The fact that are 2 near the top is probably due to yesterday's Demo Day.
  • minimaxir 12y ago
    Neither of the startups were announced at the S14 demo day, though. (PollEverywhere is S06, BoostedBoards is S12)
  • capex 12y ago
    The point is their unusual ranking at the top, as users can't vote on these links.
• minimaxir 12y ago
  It should be noted that HN's job ranking typically algorithm works by starting the job ad at #4, and using linear decay at about -1 rank every 15 minutes to have the job ad gradually fall off the front page (can't find the source unfortunately; it was said months ago) The fact that 1) the ads appear at #1/#2 and 2) the ads are not falling down the front-page rankings leads me to believe that the issue is a bug in HN and not an intentional implementation. EDIT: As of now, the two job ads have disappeared from the top of HN, which gives an indication that it was a bug. Software QA skills at work! :)
  • danso 12y ago
    Or maybe part of it is an intentional implementation? If HN is interested in monetization (or at least, boosting YC-affiliated companies), maybe the change is to allow job ads at the top position...and this change in code broke the linear decay model. OT: I don't see why job ads shouldn't be at the top...in fact, I'd almost prefer that, in the way that Reddit anchors ads to the top...so that user who don't care can quickly get used to the top item being a job ad...as opposed to having to filter out job ad vs. posting in the rest of the list. OTOH, that would make it difficult to figure out how to let job ads slide off of the page via linear decay, if the policy was to affix job ads at the top and show them nowhere else (aside from the jobs link).
    • ampersandy 12y ago
      Personally, I'm totally ok with more prominent job postings from affiliated startups. As long as there aren't, say, more than 3 posts at a time I'm fine with them sitting at the top of the front page.
  • dang 12y ago
    > starting the job ad at #4 FWIW, job ads start at #6. I think you're right about the decay but I haven't looked at the code. You were certainly right about the bug.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• DanBC 12y ago
  > Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • zo1 12y ago
    How does this submission/question not fit the description of the news guidelines as you posted: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. And seeing as it's gotten 86 points, I'd say there are at least some people that find it interesting.
    • danielweber 12y ago
      It's obviously not the only rule. "What people find interesting" is like a minimum height requirement, not an "anything goes" rule, or else we would be 100% cats. Many communities get taken down by meta-discussion. HN has been very hostile to it in the past, with some good reason, but also to detriment, as the readers and the moderators lose empathy for each other. 'dang comments are doing well to lessen that divide. (FWIW, I think this topic is a good discussion. I didn't upvote but I'm very parsimonious with my story upvotes since I don't have a downvote button.)
    • DanBC 12y ago
      > How does this submission/question not fit the description of the news guidelines as you posted: Because the answer is obviously along the lines of "they were tweaking something and they broke something but now it's fixed".
      • zo1 12y ago
        Sure, perhaps to you, or people that have been here longer. However, I had absolutely no idea. I didn't even know that HN was taking paid advertisements for job postings, and putting them "somewhere" on the top.
• danielweber 12y ago
  Quite often I read Job Ads that don't mention the location at all Please, please, please, please, please, a million times, please, tell us the location of the job. Not everyone lives in SF or wants to move there. Maybe some people think that saying "YC14" ought to tell us all the location, but it doesn't. Or make it explicit policy that YC jobs are always in SF unless said otherwise, so those of us who live someplace else can just categorically ignore them.
• pavlov 12y ago
  Job ads that don't mention the location are a pet peeve of mine too. It's not uncommon to see ads where you have to infer it from the description of perks: "We offer the unique chance to sit in an amazing chair in our hip shared office in the fashionable dungeons below Moscone Center".
  • zhte415 12y ago
    A peeve, but also a positive: A job ad which does not thoroughly think out the initial questions a potential applicant may have is cut in half (arbitrary) by any potential applicant. Likewise a multitude of other simple factors. Good job descriptions are... descriptive, and one that isn't is one easily dismissed. Take away: If it if full of fuzz, avoid it, or ask huge amounts of questions.
• dreamweapon 12y ago
  If they're going to blast these ads into the backs of our eyeballs, we should at least get a chance to discuss back at them. For example, about the fact that one of them presents the following as a "perk": 1.1 mile [sic] from Mt. View Caltrain Which makes for like, what, a 90-minute commute[1] from your $3300 crashpad in the Mission? On good days? That's some life they're trying to dangle in front of us. [1] Door-to-door, not counting time spent picking up your $6 artisan latte and/or dropping off your fancy dog at the dog cleaning shop.
  • mischanix 12y ago
    Ah, don't worry about that, working 18 hours a day you'll hardly remember the commute!
  • danso 12y ago
    Yeah I don't think that's going to happen...mainly because that would greatly reduce the value to the ad-purchaser...they're interested in hiring someone, not igniting one of the various archetypical debates about startup culture. And also, it would greatly increase the burden on HN moderators, and in such a way that it would be a lose-lose situation when it comes to credibility. If you allow comments, you allow the possibility of not just well-intentioned debate, but trolling (thanks to HN's generous account-creation policy)...which means, heavy-handed moderation at certain points. Which would you prefer: across-the-board, default policy of not allowing direct comments...or HN mods constantly having to justify the removal/downmodding of trollish comments against endless conflict-of-interest accusations?
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
      • danso 12y ago
        I think that horse has pretty much sailed from the barn ever since Paul Graham, founder of YC, announced he was going to create Hacker News, and put it as a subdomain of "ycombinator.com"
    • 12y ago
• dang 12y ago
  It's a bug. We'll fix it. Edit: Fixed. Sorry! This was a side-effect of a change I made foolishly late last night. I forgot that jobs aren't ranked the way stories are, so the code that normally pushes them down was temporarily disabled. There wasn't any (intended) change to how job posts work.