Edit: bah! you guys upvoted it and ruined my test. I think I can cancel that out.
Edit 2: I've changed the title from "Launch HN: Test" so that this thread doesn't appear on https://news.ycombinator.com/show, where it didn't belong.
Launch HN posts for YC startups are one of three formal things that HN does for YC (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). The others are job ads for YC startups, and orange usernames for YC alumni—but only when displayed to other YC alumni, which always generates "why is my username not orange" emails. But I digress.
Launch HNs are like job ads in that they get an initial front-page placement, usually somewhere between #8 and #10. (I think job ads start a little higher). Then they fall down the page. Unlike job ads, though, launch posts can be upvoted and commented on. Once they've gotten their initial placement they function like regular stories. Occasionally the community finds one particularly interesting and it gets upvoted higher. This recent one spent quite a while at #1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616857 (http://hnrankings.info/22616857/).
We started doing the Launch HNs three years ago. I was worried that the community would hate them because we were taking additional front page space for YC. (Our intention was to make it so that a launch post and a job ad wouldn't appear at the same time, but I never ended up writing that code, so sometimes they do.) But that hasn't ever come up. I think it's because launch threads are intrinsically more interesting than job ads (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767319 downthread for more on that).
All this time, the initial front-page placement of launch posts, unlike job ads, has been done manually. That is, founders have had to email us and we've manually jigged the post onto the front page. The problem with that is that you have to be awake to do it. I don't want to be awake to do it, especially because startup founders tend to be businessy, bustling types who are all bright-and-early, while my schedule drifts ever deeper into the darkness as the few moorings I had remaining to the rest of society dissolve in this time of social distancing and self-isolation, which were basically my bread and butter to begin with (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUlBWNDW72E).
Until now, I've told founders to post at Pacific 10am and email us, because that's roughly when I get going in the morning. Tomorrow, though, there are two. One is a fintech startup in Latin America who want to post at 9am. And the other is Peter Roberts, who's going to do another immigration AMA (https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=proberts). Peter is on the east coast, and wants to get going at 8am Pacific, which is late for him and (ungodly) early for me.
So tonight I got frustrated enough to write some code to deal with it. Frustration reaching a tipping point and boiling over is my gateway into the code these days. My goal is for startups to be able to post their launches, and occasionally for pre-scheduled submissions like Peter's (which are rare), to end up on the front page independently of whenever I went to sleep the night before.
This code turned out to be a lot more complicated than I anticipated. The patch ended up adding a hundred lines of Arc. A hundred lines of Arc! Do you have any idea how many lines of Arc that is? I just looked through the history and the last commit that added that many lines of code was over two years ago when we got Arc to compile to JS. Obviously this change needs to be thoroughly tested, so after testing it on my laptop I deployed it to production and decided to do a couple of sanity checks live. One was to post a test Launch HN using my old account gruseom, which is the founder account for Skysheet, the spreadsheet startup that Scott and I had 10 years ago (and which I still think about every day, but I should avoid digressing again). The code I wrote has some logic in it for cofounder accounts. One thing it's supposed to do is email all the cofounders when a Launch HN post has made it to HN's front page, so they will be ready to engage with commenters. Anyhow, this test post was the OP. The good news: it got placed on the front page in the way that I intended. The bad news: none of the emails were received. God fucking shit fucking goddamnit I knew those emails wouldn't work...I mean, dang.
(Edit: actually that's not what happened. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22772667)
My intention was for this thread to remain obscure, then get placed briefly on the front page by the new code, at which point I'd get the emails and immediately delete it. I didn't think it was very likely to get noticed in the middle of the night here, especially when posted by what ought by now to be an obscure account, but oh well.
I think that covers everything. Hopefully you all will see those two auto-placed posts on the front page tomorrow morning because I do not intend to be awake 5 hours from now. (Edit: it worked!)
If job ads were threads, each thread would be a generic referendum on the company. Worse, it would be the same referendum over and over.
Job ads are boring, so there wouldn't be anything to discuss other than how one feels about the company, and that's boring except to people who have strong feelings on the topic, and strong feelings on the internet tend to be negative, so the threads would fill up with negative generic comments.
I believe that the hivemind resents boring things, such as submissions where the only new information is "X is hiring", so it gets cranky and fills the vacuum with indignation, basically as the only way to amuse itself in the absence of anything interesting to discuss. It doesn't want to, it just doesn't know any better way to have fun in a vacuum. In practice, what this would look like in a job thread is "I applied in 2015 and never heard back", plus—if there has ever been a negative story X about the company—every variation of X, X, X, repeated increasingly snarkily.
Actually, it's worse. Building a business is a long hard slog. One needs to hire more often than one has scintillating new information for the community to have fun discussing. Therefore, each successive job ad would be even more boring than the previous one, leading to monotonically increasing resentment. Repetition is the enemy of curiosity.
Launch posts don't suffer from this dynamic because by definition, the startup is new, so there's something new to discuss.
"I applied to this place and they never got back to me"
"Thanks, I applied"
"Please add salary/remoteness/interview process to your job ad"
"You have a typo in your text/email address/website URL"
Yours are the only comments I always read.
Thanks for all the stuff you do. Wouldn't have thought you coded too! That's good to know.
I've also had to do tests in production occasionally and hope nobody notices! Good that your code wasn't tied up to the number of upvotes, otherwise you would have a different problem on you hands!
Did you do any study on HN stats and where its audience is coming from ?
> Did you do any study on HN stats and where its audience is coming from?
I did that 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521
I keep meaning to rerun that analysis. I saved the code for it using the trick described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22516834.
It's like a million!
Couldn't have put it better myself. Thanks for the work you do!
Is this a Launch?
No, this is a Test.
Did it work?
It should.
Dang!
What?
The one thing that can ruin the test - it happened. Upvotes.
Quite gruseom.
Are there any stats how many active users does HN have, on how many servers it runs, on which database etc.?
Because I have recently wanted to look at my older saved/upvoted posts/comments on reddit and found out that you can look only at last 1000 posts and it does various other things to save resources. HN doesn't seem to do things like that and still feels much snappier than reddit (yes reddit has much more users, but still impressive imho).
It's hard to count active users because you have to define them in order to count them, and we make a point of not tracking people that much. We can count accounts and unique IPs, and that's about it. But it's basically about 5M readers a month, give or take, as far as we can tell. It grows linearly, with large swings. If you step back 10 feet from the graphs and squint, it's basically a straight line for the last 10 years. We like it that way; we wouldn't want to go full Haskell and avoid success at all costs, but we don't want hockey-stick growth either. HN is not a startup!
It runs on one server. Actually the app server (written in Arc) runs on one core. But we have some caching in front of that for logged-out users.
Can you elaborate on that statement? To me, it implies that going with Haskell avoids success, but I might be missing something. If that really is the implication, can you explain?
This was a good test but it failed some key characteristics to make it an excellent test message.
You didn't put foo or bar anywhere in the test message.
There was no Cthulhu phrases.
Plus there was no pi or the numerical answer to the universe and everything.
I trust you will take this onboard for the next test.
I'm launching www.devol.io -> a social community for coders. The user base is quite small but I hope we can build it and grow it into something cool!
If so, you might consider using SendGrid or something like that with their API. https://sendgrid.com/docs/API_Reference/Web_API_v3/Mail/inde...
If not using a service, would be interested to hear what configuration (DKIM or whatever) was necessary to add to your existing mail setup to get it to work.
Although I am just totally speculating on what you were talking about.
So my complaint turned out to be nonsense, partly because it was 3am or whatever, and partly because "wtf? swear, profanity, curse...oh wait" is my normal debugging process. Just not usually in public.
HN now has its own https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/92dd8/test_post_pleas... !
Yay. Really. :D
https://i.pinimg.com/564x/f8/74/40/f8744035e15d69eb8fd4c70de...
New account registrations are currently either closed or very limited
If you do that, the psychology goes like this: "I wonder what this is?" (click) "Ooh, a new social community! I like those!" (reads further) "What do you mean, new accounts are closed or very limited? What if I want to join? Why are you gatekeeping me? Damn you!"... except with words stronger than 'damn'.
Once you're ready to let anyone sign up, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll help you out.
- no probs registering from the UK
- the site refers to a "20-Things Mascot", but I see none
- when logged in, my user name isn't displayed to remind me of who I am; sad to say this is useful for me nowadays
- in the "about" section, it says, "...specifically designed with our users limited free time in mind." I'd have preferred "... users' limited free time ...".
- er, that's it, with thanks and encouragement :-)
Access denied
What happened?
This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks.
Looks like you got what you wanted...
[0] https://www.patreon.com/boosthelp [1] https://boost.help
First, please don't delete and repost the same comment. It gives the impression of trying to pump it up in the rankings, which would not be a nice community behavior.
Second, something I tell people all the time by email: on HN it's an antipattern to have your username be that of your company or project. It creates a feeling of using the site for promotion rather than participating as a person. The community reacts better when your username represents you as a human. You don't have to use your real name, just something to communicate that you're there as a person, not a brand. If you'd like to change your username, we can do that for you via hn@ycombinator.com.
EDIT: And thanks for taking time to repeat yourself. Just few hours ago I've been thinking that most of us (unfortunately) will have to actually make some well-known mistakes to learn from them, even if we've been warned about such misdeeds beforehand repeatedly ;-)
