tacos

There's a difference between being a prick to fellow community members versus being tough on submissions. I rank myself in the top 5% regarding expertise on a few topics that come up here regularly, and most (not many, most) of the submissions are simply tragic. To enter a thread late with a hundred young people politely chatting about something that's completely wrong or completely plagiarized says quite a bit about your ability to maintain decorum. But I don't think it's quite as flattering regarding your ability to maintain quality.

Googling a machine learning or signal processing technique from 40 years ago, seeing a link to HN on the first page of Google results that gets it wrong, and having the only comment that actually provides counterpoint or correction missing because you pushed a magic button? I can't believe that's the impact either of us are looking for with regards to contributing to world knowledge.

Likewise I increasingly find myself reading the top comment then scrolling down and squinting at the dimmed out bottom comment. Half the time it's someone being an idiot. The rest of the time it's useful counterpoint or something correct but imperfectly phrased. Groupthink and tone-policing-by-committee may be a bigger problem than someone who dares to use the adjective "flaming" to qualify the nature of errors in a submission.

I too hate dealing with the stack of complaints at the end of a long day, and I too hate seeing the same names causing trouble. It certainly is hard to remain impartial given even a small number of people who are obsessed with the "report misbehavior" button or, worse, those who harbor grudges and abuse the feature. In general those people need to toughen up and the people who are causing the grief need to turn it down half a notch. But HN, in technology and in personnel, lacks the nuance necessary to correct and communicate evolving community standards.

There's nothing more boring (and more damaging) than a public debate around a moderator's standards versus a popular user who bumps against the edge on occasion. Out of respect for your work (and my time) I'm stepping out as that's precisely where this is headed. Good luck with the site, I'm all too aware of the effort you put into it.

The "several flaming errors" were previously mentioned here and as comments on his website (not by me). To detail them again could also be construed as piling on. You are reading this thread outside the timeline in which it occurred and taking the most negative possible connotation of my actions.

Even in this thread people can't quite decide where my remarks lie on the spectrum. (I assure you this is not some game I'm playing to test the waters.) Likewise in a previous thread your banhammer was overruled by the community.

I personally think you're overreacting (calling me a "genuine asshole" ... really, dang?) but I don't wish to cause you any additional stress by being an unintentional canary in this coal mine. I will however deduct a few points for waiting for the thread to die, zeroing out an upvoted comment containing useful information, then banning my account at 1am on a holiday weekend. I know you abhor off-topic meta discussion but, as a fellow moderator who handles forums far larger and friendlier than this one, that's pretty weak. Good luck, you have my word that I won't reappear under a different name.

And so it ends. The mere act of partnering with Yahoo indicates desperation and signals poor decision making.

I'm not sure I understand HN's fascination with this site but this is not a good sign for those who claim to use it in these never-ending threads.

Yup, not buying it. Too cutesy, too impersonal, too obvious. This is a team effort. And not a very good one.

> It's just impossible to "bid" on traffic via Facebook and win out over companies that have far bigger budgets

Not my experience at all. Also, have you seen their hyper-local ad-targeting options? As in, draw circles around neighborhoods, then choose "parents" who are interested in "children's clothing"?

You can easily reach thousands of people with a $5/day budget. They'll even provide the stock photography for free.

Perhaps not the most neutral source for information. I found their summaries of paywalled articles to be a bit... misleading. They'll sell you Swarovski crystals and Himalayan salt lamps though.

> The next Gawker will be decentralized and it may follow the Wikileaks model or even publish on the dark web.

There are plenty of ways to publish someone's sexual preference or sex video and you don't need to evoke Wikileaks.

Likewise I doubt the marketing maven for the next Adam Sandler movie will be paying in Bitcoin for a site takeover of a .onion domain, no matter how many celebrity nudes and confidential Sony documents it leaks.

I worked there. Ways we solved these sorts of problems include: hardening the other side of the API/HAL when appropriate/possible, simplifying the driver model so that mere mortals could write drivers, writing our own drivers and overwriting known buggy ones for companies that couldn't get their shit together (usually network vendors), adding workarounds to the OS not to use certain features of certain cards, flying external engineers to lavish parties and our driver development labs and compatibility labs and providing one on one engineering development assistance from senior kernel developers, providing free testing of drivers for known problems before release, rolling fixed drivers into Windows updates, providing marketing funds as reward for fixing problems, and not using NVIDIA in the Xbox 360 after using them in the original Xbox as punishment because they were personally responsible for over 80% of blue screens in Windows for the preceding five years.

Sadly the motivation was often to ignore the data or watch it get spun by some jackass with the exact wrong agenda. It's just software, there's always a way to fix things if you really want to.

Citation?

For me the issue comes down to whether or not Microsoft does anything useful with this data (probably not, if 20 years of NVIDIA blue screen driver failure logs, Windows 8 and OneDrive are any example of how 'big data' impacts Microsoft product quality) versus how many comments I have to read where joeblow52 is personally offended that Microsoft dares to learn what his compile time plus 999,999 other compile times, divided by a million, equals.