It's because they've achieved darling status on HN, which is what happens when a startup has founder/product/community/technical/intellectual fit and knows how to write.
I wrote a longer description of this phenomenon at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070287 (in the bottom third of the comment, starting with "Stripe succeeded on HN" - skip the tedious stuff before that).
There was also an entire thread about this a few weeks ago:
This is inspiring, and let's look at why so many of us have the impulse to figure out what the flaw or missing part of the story is.
For me, it's because I hadn't done something so cool at 17. That makes me think, huh, I wonder if I'm not a "natural born engineer". I start going through my life story so far and beating myself up for playing too many video games, or not going deep enough on my interests.
Then I start thinking about the ways my life is different from his. I start to feel resentment about the opportunities I didn't have, the resources that weren't available. What could I have done if things had been different?
Next I start to resent how society scores us on things that can contribute to the economy, or things that look particularly cool, and things that we accomplished at a young age.
And then I start to imagine the difficulties that this young inventor will have. "Oh yes", I think, "He'll find out soon enough what the REAL world is like."
And these thoughts are not who I want to be. But I can reflect and learn something about myself from them. And I can choose to go another way.
I can decide that, if a 17 year old kid with the right resources and a crazy idea can make something really cool, then I, as an adult with more experience and resources can make something at least as cool if I want to. And I'm going to. It's not like my life is over because I'm older than 17.
And if this article is making you spiral with insecurity, I hope you make a similar decision. A decision to be inspired instead of intimidated.
You seem to share a common statistical misconception about success rates. If 10% of startups succeed, that doesn't mean that if you start a startup, your chances of succeeding are 10%. They are either much higher or much lower.
This is clearer if you consider a statement like "10% of men are over 6 feet tall." There's no one who has actually has a 10% chance of being over 6 feet tall. 10% of people have a 100% chance, and the remaining 90% have a 0% chance.
For the sort of person who has sufficient drive to get rich at all, starting a startup is a much more reliable way to do it than the overall success rate implies.
My take on the whole China issue is this: no country actually cares about humans rights or any of that stuff but only about their national self interests and that most people do not actually care about humans rights, but only about their own personal self interests.
China is a rising power in the world and wants to at least be the primary power in its region (maybe the world, who knows), and the USA as the primary power in the world and the region wants to keep its position. The US and China also have a symbiotic relationship, China would not be able to be in the position it is today if not for American purchases, and Americans would not have the quality of life they currently enjoy if they did not have Chinese manufacturing.
Both countries know they cannot be openly hostile to each-other without huge ramifications so they use proxy conflicts to try to secretly bludgeon each other and propagandize their own populations. Americans can propagandize their population with HK, Taiwan, concentration camps, no freedom and Chinese can propagandize their population with drone strikes, Century of humiliation, US Imperialism... Nobody, except the misled population (who are being propagandized) or extremely dim-witted subsets of elites (who are doing the propaganda, and go high of their own supply so to say) actually care about these issues.
I do not think this will be as hot as the last cold war since the US and China are way more interdependent than the US and the USSR and the way to make sure that this semi-cold war will not turn into a hot war is to not trying to break the interdependence, but to strengthen it.
Such articles are welcome and have been part of HN from the beginning. If people don't comment when they have nothing to say, so much the better. Would that were the case with every thread!
Part of the DNA of Hacker News is a polymathic sensibility. That comes from pg, who's interested in a lot of things. Diversifying the subject matter here is why Hacker News exists, as you can see from https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html. That's the origin of the phrase "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity", which became the mandate of this site.
It isn't that we "can't talk on here", it's that threads are flameprone and vulnerable to initial conditions. If the initial condition is, say, a cheap swipe with 'fascist', the discussion is likely to flare into ideological battle. That gets the blood pumping but otherwise benefits no one. Overheated political rhetoric, such as your comment contains, isn't much better. All it generates is more of the same, from people who either share your feelings or don't. None of that is in keeping with either the spirit of this site or its rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), so it's off topic here.
What initial conditions make for good discussion? Two things: first, a substantive article that contains information rather than just rhetoric. Flamey rhetoric is a sugar high and our minds need something to chew on. Second, initial comments that earnestly engage with the information in the article (as opposed to potshots or pre-existing talking points). When those things are present, politicized topics can be ok for Hacker News. They can still degenerate into flamewars, though, in which case they become off topic again.
Edit: dismayingly, it looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle, which violates the site guidelines, and gotten nasty in the process, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17323529 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17323169, which I probably would have banned you for had I seen it.
We ban accounts that do these things, for the same reason: it degrades the site well below the level needed for not going up in flames. Would you please stop using HN this way?
There is more to it than that though, what do the North Koreans actually want? They want a federal Korea with two systems, two leaders, united as one country and with a seat at the U.N. for that one country. A united Korea would be a true world power within a generation, with GDP and population that would outshine all but one of the security council permanent members. None of the North's weapons point at the South, I think the North just want the USA out of the peninsula and for there to be an orderly reunification process without external interference.
The South also expect unification to happen one day, it not being a hostile takeover.
A united Korea with nuclear weapons would be deserved of veto rights at the U.N. and I don't believe the U.S. wants someone else at the top table. So a war is very much being fought, Korea can't be allowed to be united!!!
It is easy to condemn the crazy Kim guy and slag off North Korea but I think that we are the ones propagandised against as much as them. In all my decades of watching and reading the news I have not once been told what the goals of the respective sides are regarding unification. None of these newsreaders have told me the implications of a united Korea either. I wonder if the U.S. is at war to keep Korea divided, as opposed to keeping their South Korean buddies safe from those crazies up North.
I also think that North Korea is okay to censor out capitalism in its many advertised forms from the web since they are very much under siege/at war with the U.S.A. Would you want your people to be using electronic devices that the CIA could 'Arab Spring' a faux revolution from? Would you want your population drowning in fake news? Is it really that bad to just ban the mainstream media?!? To Ad-Block everything, for everyone? Is access to Facebook or being able to tweet now a human right?
If the international community wanted to resolve North Korea it could be simple - unification - let Korea become a united country with the U.S. taking their tanks out, sorting out their issues by themselves with those pesky nukes swapped for a top seat at the U.N.
I'd be surprised if increased load has a negative effect on 1.1.1.1's performance.
We run a homogeneous architecture -- that is, every machine in our fleet is capable of handling every type of request. The same machines that currently handle 10% of all HTTP requests on the internet, and handle authoritative DNS for our customers, and serve the DNS F root server, are now handling recursive DNS at 1.1.1.1. These machines are not sitting idle. Moreover, this means that all of these services are drawing from the same pool of resources, which is, obviously, enormous. This service will scale easily to any plausible level of demand.
In fact, in this kind of architecture, a little-used service is actually likely to be penalized in terms of performance because it's spread so thin that it loses cache efficiency (for all kinds of caches -- CPU cache, DNS cache, etc.). More load should actually make it faster, as long as there is capacity, and there is a lot of capacity.
Meanwhile, Cloudflare is rapidly adding new locations -- 31 new locations in March alone, bringing the current total to 151. This not only adds capacity for running the service, but reduces the distance to the closest service location.
In the past I worked at Google. I don't know specifically how their DNS resolver works, but my guess is that it is backed by a small set of dedicated containers scheduled via Borg, since that's how Google does things. To be fair, they have way too many services to run them all on every machine. That said, they're pretty good at scheduling more instances as needed to cover load, so they should be fine too.
In all likelihood, what really makes the difference is the design of the storage layer. But I don't know the storage layer details for either Google's or Cloudflare's resolvers so I won't speculate on that.
I looked at this a couple weeks ago. The numbers depend on how you measure 'user' and 'location'.
Silicon Valley: 5% - 14%;
US: 32% - 56% (including SV);
Europe: 28% - 35%;
Canada/Australia/New Zealand: 7% - 8%;
India: 2% - 7%;
China: 0.5% - 3% (including Hong Kong). From European countries, the UK is 5-8% (of the HN total), Germany is 4-7%, France is 1-3%. The Dutch and Swiss are stereotypically stable at 2% and 1% respectively.
These ranges include measures like logged-in-ness. If you only look at total users then SV is less than 10%, and the US comes out less than 45%—or even as low as a third, depending on what's specifically measured.
If there's one thing I wish I could do to improve HN, it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically.
Unsophisticated people read an article like this and think: Gosh, I better eat honey for breakfast! People a little more sophisticated think: Hey, this is anecdotal evidence! Yeah, we know that. But is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article? Is it not at least a source of ideas for things to investigate further?
The problem with the middlebrow dismissal is that it's a magnet for upvotes. The "U R a fag"s get downvoted and end up at the bottom of the page where they cause little trouble. But this sort of comment rises to the top. Things have now gotten to the stage where I flinch slightly as I click on the "comments" link, bracing myself for the dismissive comment I know will be waiting for me at the top of the page.
Under a Communist party dictatorship, you don't vastly consolidate power, purge tens of thousands of people on supposed corruption charges, disappear prominent business leaders, curtail numerous freedoms, alter the power structure of the party and its influence wings (such as the youth league), and build yourself up as the new Mao or Deng Xiaoping - if your intention is not to seize control for yourself. Xi Jinping was never doing all of that just to hand power to the next leader and it certainly wasn't for the benefit of the Chinese people.
He's their new dictator, most likely until old age removes him. He'll rule China for 20 years.
The short list of people that should be terrified of what's obviously coming next: Jack Ma, Pony Ma, Robin Li. The next step in power consolidation, is to begin taking over greater government control of Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu. It will be necessary to reduce Jack Ma's economic power in China, ultimately these giants are a challenge (or potential challenge) to Xi Jinping's dictatorship. Alibaba + Alipay is increasingly becoming the center of China's economy, more and more of that economy is flowing through those entities.
Prediction: Jack Ma won't last more than another three to five years in his current prominent position. Economic power always falls by necessity to the kind of political power that Xi Jinping increasingly wields.
Make no mistakes I have my own bias. But the more interesting point to consider is that, as the article points out, Chinese government is actively trying to build trust with the people. Yes, every government tries to do that, but not many actually succeed. See http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/05/23/chapter-1-national-and-e...
Yes, there are corruptions and scandals every now and then, but those culprits get dealt with whenever a large percentage of the people are concerned about it. So in the end, majority of the people are indeed happy with the government.
So having said all of these, yes, my comments come across as propaganda to you, but consider it the other way round, would you defend your government's controversial policies? In other words, are you willing to "spread propaganda" out of your own will for your government's policies (on abortion, taxes, immigration, surveillance laws)? Chances are, about half of the population would not (based on approval ratings and voting patterns).
So you see, while some countries focuses on having people constantly challenging and keeping the government in check, others focuses on building trust between the government and the people. And hence, to answer your question, yes, it's propaganda, but I do it out of my trust in my government. That is something I see most foreigners struggle to understand because it goes against their belief.
Think of it another way, every government is simply trying to make their country great, and that includes making people happy and maintaining their mandate. Just because one approach is different from the rest, does not mean it is ill-intended or evil. There is no reason at all for any government to do something unpopular with majority of people. The only chance for something bad to happen is when the government is completely out of touch with the people. It happened a few times in the past in China. It is happening now in the U.S. But I don't see it happening in China any time soon.
Holy shit man. This was literally my experience with Accenture. I worked side-by-side with them on a massive IT project. Their team was like 60 liberal arts grads willing to work 80 hours a week configuring some COTS software and 4 managers making sure they don't go home. I think they just use India now instead.
'Censorship' has become more pejorative than informative, but you're right that users are downvoting and flagging comments; I think pretty fairly. Wherever moderators have intervened (in any way that affects comment visibility), we've posted comments saying so. That goes for the previous threads too.
Not every kind of comment is welcome here. HN is trying for higher-quality discussion. (Trying and failing, of course. But we can always fail better.) Comments that destroy the possibility of higher-quality discussion should certainly be flagged—otherwise the community is hostage to every kind of trolling.
One of the most negative habits is in my opinion the failure to read a comment charitably (to make an effort to interpret it in the best possible light). Instead, people often tend to misread or miserunderstand what's being said, only to use the opportunity to write a "correction" based on that false impression. A worse flavor of the same problem is a misunderstanding that is then used to justify outrage or personal annoyance.
That's what I find worthy of being changed, and I will certainly make an effort to read comments more charitably as well.
Overall though, and I realize this is quite anecdotal, rampant negativity - especially about things other members of the community have created - seems to have gotten less common recently.
Not necessarily. If we see some sign that the user is turning over a new leaf, we're happy to give another chance. The purpose of banning isn't to cast anyone out, it's to preserve a place for civil, substantive discussion. I sometimes hear people defend uncivil comments by saying that other people shouldn't be so fragile. But it isn't individuals who are fragile—it's the community.
Plenty of users have gone from being banned or penalized to being positive contributors on HN. Once someone understands why the rules and moderation are the way they are, things almost always go fine. It's not, for example, about "needing to sugarcoat everything", "avoiding uncomfortable truths", or any of that kind of explanation. It's about the extreme weakness of the social contract on the internet.
> You guys realize that just because you get to walk down to the Blue Bottle with your 8-of-10 girlfriend and her Kate Spade purse to buy $4 scones
This is a form of name-calling, which you did again below ("people who'd rather play WoW and binge watch mindless Netflix shows") and which the site guidelines ask you not to do (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). It lowers the quality of discussion, so please don't do that.
Edit: perhaps it would be helpful to try to articulate how these things lower the quality of discussion. The point isn't that people are bad for breaking the rules. Nor does moderation exist to punish or shame bad behavior. Rather, think of it as more like an optimization algorithm. We're trying to optimize HN for signal/noise ratio, and need everyone to participate.
When you let loose a bunch of insulting images and denunciations as part of an argument, that feels satisfying because you're (temporarily) expelling something unpleasant out of your personal system. Unfortunately, though, now it's circulating in the community system. Among readers who happen to disagree with your view of the topic, some will inevitably feel like the insults and denunciations are directed at them, and react accordingly. The discussion then proceeds along two channels: one about the topic, and one about sending and receiving insults. From an HN point of view, that second channel is noise, not signal. Worse, it tends to overwhelm the first and to keep escalating.
This isn't as bad as a direct personal attack, but it's still destructive of discussion quality. The solution, IMO, is to recognize that we all have these irritants circulating in our system and we're each responsible for processing them instead of dumping them into the commons.
The only thing moderators did to this post is turn off the flags on it so it would go back on the front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173595). We did that in response to emails: polite emails, I might add, making the case for the article and the thread. Had you written a polite email instead of posting a drive-by (and completely bogus) attack, you could have contributed to that outcome yourself.
One good thing came of this. When I read your comment, it occurred to me to add "Presume good faith" to our provisional list of new HN guidelines.
Your comment is the worst thing I've seen on HN in a while, and the users who upvoted it should re-read the site guidelines and send themselves to bed without supper. If you want to destroy this community completely, you couldn't pick a much better device.
It should be obvious that smearing another user like this is a bannable offense here, regardless of how wrong you think they are. It poisons the discourse while purporting to defend it, for obviously political reasons of its own. That's unacceptable, even in a thread as thoroughly degraded as this one. Please don't do anything like this on HN.
If you look, you'll notice that I scolded the other user as well for abusing HN for pure politics. That is a bannable offense too. Instead of both sides breaking HN's rules and going at each other, I have a suggestion: neither of you do it.
I am sorely tempted to ban you both to set an example, but on principle we try to warn people first—it's hard to ask users to give each other the benefit of the doubt if we don't do it ourselves. But I can't say steam isn't coming out of my ears right now.
I wrote a longer description of this phenomenon at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070287 (in the bottom third of the comment, starting with "Stripe succeeded on HN" - skip the tedious stuff before that).
There was also an entire thread about this a few weeks ago:
Ask HN: What's the Deal with Tailscale? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31957059 - July 2022 (47 comments)