So here's HN in 2012: the Hiring Thread, which leads this month with a chorus of comments about how effective HN has been for finding people awesome jobs or companies awesome candidates, is at the bottom of the front page just a few hours after submission.
Meanwhile, "Occupy Portland's Dec 3rd Tactic to Neutralize Police" is at the top.
It's unsurprising. The kinds of people who are interested in Occupy protest tactics are very vociferously interested. The kinds of people who are interested in the hiring thread aren't nearly as engaged with that topic (or, those who are aren't numerous). "Real", on-topic HN threads are at a systemic disadvantage to advocacy topics like Occupy.
1) To the best of my knowledge, I've never gotten a gig out of the freelancer thread in the past six months, although I am a full-time freelancer. The thread is essentially a list of facts and does not expose me to any new ideas, which would be forgivable if I consistently got gigs out of it, but I do not. As for its cousin the Hiring Thread, I am not nor do I know anyone actively searching for full-time employment (quite the opposite, I know dozens of desperate employers who are desperate for a reason). Job inquiries seem to follow me everywhere I go: to developer events, to my various inboxes, to my phone, etc, and many developers in the tech hub in which I live share the same sentiment. This may be a local phenomena, but it is my experience.
2) I am not an occupier (and FWIW not really a fan). The article was not overly political. It discussed protesting from a tactical point of view and exposed me to a new idea (which may very well be an old idea to others). It is of personal interest because I have been working on pathfinding lately, and this is, essentially, a distributed pathfinding implementation. I wonder if there is a reasonable attack on this kind of strategy or if the strategy is applicable to other protests (Arab Spring, etc.) I think that the discussion quality and level of improvement to my life is going to be a lot higher on this article than on the hiring thread.
I don't participate in the freelancer thread (which is a new development) but I don't so much have to make the case for the Hiring thread, since (like I said) it leads this month with testimonials about how awesome the hiring thread is.
The quality of discussion on this article is already poor. That's also not surprising, because while the ostensible topic (tactics) is interesting, it's an advocacy article on an advocacy site and is mostly a coatrack for Occupy --- so, again unsurprisingly, it's not allowed for anyone to question the idea on this thread without starting a debate about the value of Occupy.
Think about it for a second and realize that any political story can be shoehorned into a "tactical" narrative; horse-race politics (which I follow like my siblings follow White Sox Baseball) are also full of tactics; there's a whole NYT subsite for political nerdery (fivethirtyeight) --- I highly recommend it, but would flag most 538 stories submitted to HN as well.
The argument that any given political story is "something that hackers would find interesting" and not "just politics" is as old as the site. There is also an infinite number of arrangement of cat pictures that satisfy the literal definition of "interesting to hackers". I concede immediately that the guidelines --- I think unfortunately so, and to the clear detriment of the site --- are squishy on this point; it would be better if they simply said "NO POLITICS EVER". They don't. But this is an advocacy piece for Occupy and it is pushing good stuff off the front page of the site.
I did not say that the hiring thread is a total waste of time for all involved, as it is clearly not. But when you solicit "So how has the hiring thread worked for you?" you are not within a mile of a representative sample.
One can make the very same argument that you made about this thread--the sort of people who are interested in the hiring thread are vociferously interested, as either employers or employees, their very livelihood and life satisfaction for years may substantially hang on a comment in that thread. If we are talking about articles that are colored with commercial self-interest or bias, that is the very definition. I would posit that there is a silent majority who are relatively satisfied with their current employment, who read a few comments to see if anyone is hiring to do orthographic drawing theory or NLP in Erlang or topology or [obscure area of research interest] and failing that alt-tab back to Vim to work on arbitrarily less exciting yet still interesting projects.
I don't necessarily disagree with you that it wasn't a particularly high-quality article, that we can do better. But I would not hold out the hiring thread as the example we should follow.
> The argument that any given political story is "something that hackers would find interesting" and not "just politics" is as old as the site. There is also an infinite number of arrangement of cat pictures that satisfy the literal definition of "interesting to hackers".
That is a bit of a red herring.
We geeks have pretty much addressed the technical challenge of "infinite number of arrangement of cat pictures" and have delivered. It is hardly an urgency, at this point. You wanna see cat pictures? I'm sure there are an equally infinite number of image sites, and various frameworks for creating yet even more.
Today, as technologists, we are very likely to find ourselves employed by financial institutions, security services, military, various "social" big brother platforms, and, corporate media. We are, each and everyone, enablers, for better or for worse.
To discuss larger, relevant, sociopolitical matter and events here on HN, with a focus on the tech dimension, is not merely an 'idle interest' for the subset of us that do very much care if it is "for better or worse".
[edit/ps: to be clear, I am addressing the OP's general remark and not this specific article.]
From your comment, I'm still not clear what your exact objection is to the article. You appear to be complaining that an 'Occupy' thread is rated higher than a 'hiring' thread, yet don't explain why you feel that the Occupy thread doesn't 'gratifies one's intellectual curiosity' the way a 'hiring' thread does.
I recognise that the 'hiring' thread is valuable to some people on HN and am glad that the post appears, however for me, the 'hiring' thread does very little to 'gratify my intellectual curiosity' - I'm fortunate enough to have a job and so the thread has almost zero value for me personally.
The 'occupy' post did satisfy me intellectually - I don't have a position on the politics either way, but the explanation of 'battle tactics', how they developed by non-military people and how they can be used 'on the street' was intellectually interesting.
My politics are closer to Occupy's than to the Tea Party's, by a big margin. I'm not asking you to flag the story because I have a problem with the politics.
I'm asking you to flag this story because the argument for it being on the site is a slippery slope that also includes the fundraising dynamics of the Iowa GOP caucus.
Like I said earlier: stories like this have a systemic advantage over most real "hacker news" topics. A "Comparison of 6 USB Stick Micro Dev Boards" --- unquestionably more germane to the site than this --- is welcome by everyone, but passionately supported by few. Occupy (or Tea Party) advocacy is largely unwelcome on the site by charter, but passionately supported by enough people to peg stories to the top of the front page.
The result is a site that looks more like 2008 Reddit than 2008 HN. In fact, because HN is doing such a good job attracting the Slashdot "Your Rights Online" crowd, we're seeing more and more stories for which Reddit threads are better than HN's.
I used to think the big problem with 'pg's guidelines were that it was squishy about politics; it should, I thought, be rewritten to say "No politics, no religion, no cute pictures, ever." I still think that. But the better thing for the guidelines to say is even simpler:
I agree with your 'no politics' stance (although does SOPA opposition fall under that?), however, I read the article more as a 'tactics developed by accident' than a Occupy advocacy thread. I guess we have slightly different thresholds on the same slippery slope.
Having said that, I definitely prefer an article on micro dev boards than protest tactics.
Paul Graham clearly likes the SOPA threads. I pick my battles. He owns the site, he's entitled to use it to advance his causes. (My politics overall are leftish, but my politics on SOPA aren't within a mile of the rest of HN).
SOPA seems about as directly relevant to internet startup business as an issue can get. It's not tax or social policy or political campaigning... it's impending legislation that affects the way people have to configure their servers.
So I would support a ban on most political discussion here as long as the very few relevant things like SOPA are exempt.
> The 'occupy' post did satisfy me intellectually - I don't have a position on the
> politics either way, but the explanation of 'battle tactics', how they developed
> by non-military people and how they can be used 'on the street' was
> intellectually interesting.
Read The Art of War (I would recommend some annotated version, can't point to an specific one since I'm only familiar with spanish translations). Then go take part in some picketing, and please please write an article with factual and accurate data about tactics. Mail me, count with my upvote and I'll participate on any discussion related to tactics. This blogpost is factually wrong and amateurish as a discussion on tactics, also full of wishful thinking apologetic of naive ideas about the military power of large groups of protesters.
It's a few hours old, and arguably the most productive recurring thread on the site. Subjectively (but you can take my word for this), the hiring thread used to be pinned to the top for a day --- I presume this was not because of something 'pg punched into a REPL.
> on-topic HN threads are at a systemic disadvantage to advocacy topics like Occupy.
Maybe most HNers are already pretty happy with their jobs and are not looking? I didn't even click that link. Should I have? Now you made me feel guilty.
I clicked on the Occupy link because I think they found a pretty neat trick on how to oppose the riot police. Regardless of your support for the movement, don't you think figuring that out is pretty interesting?
HN generally seems to have become overtly political, especially in its submissions (that make it to the front page).
SOPA obviously has relevance to HN, so I don't mind that at all, but with increasing frequency, political submissions pop up, and I'm sure the submitters are enabled by the amount of upvotes they get with little to no input from mods/admins who clarify HN's stance on political submissions with no relation to the site's field of interest.
I don't mean "HN is getting more like reddit" as a slur, but the lines between the two are becoming more blurred, and the two serve better as separate entities with different topics of interest rather than some soon-to-be-merged hivemind on political matters.
Huh, suddenly very important political discussion is "off-topic"? I'll admit, it isn't standard fare for HN, but I'd say, that's a good thing, not a bad thing.
This comment (verbatim, "Oh engineers. Shirking morality again.") is an extremely elegant statement of why political threads, even when they "gratify the intellectual curiosity of hackers", are terrible for HN: they generate comment threads that consist of or are repeatedly sparked by comments like this.
I have a related but different complaint about them: political threads are bad because they bring out a chorus of rose-tinted nostalgia about how HN is going down the drain, is "becoming Reddit", etc., etc. I only hope that y'all copy/paste them instead of wasting effort on writing a new comment to that effect each time. ;-)
Meanwhile, "Occupy Portland's Dec 3rd Tactic to Neutralize Police" is at the top.
It's unsurprising. The kinds of people who are interested in Occupy protest tactics are very vociferously interested. The kinds of people who are interested in the hiring thread aren't nearly as engaged with that topic (or, those who are aren't numerous). "Real", on-topic HN threads are at a systemic disadvantage to advocacy topics like Occupy.
Flagged, for whatever good that will do.