* Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question? That's because their claims are nearly always false. If users could look at the actual record, their perennial sob story of perfectly reasonable behavior struck down by bullying censors would evaporate. *

When that kind of response comes from the site's moderator, I really don't see the level of toxicity improving any time soon.

It's likely statistically factual, but in context it's just another of the "mean, stupid things" that Paul Graham called you out as being here to address. And you appear to have done nothing to investigate whether the previous user's post was factually correct before slinging personal accusations.

If this gets me hellbanned too, so be it. Conversation and community on this site is a toxic mess that leaves people afraid to post anything. The main good thing is following users like patio11 and tptacek.

http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hack...

I'll go ahead and call Dan a friend, display my "not a shill for YC" bona fides, vouch for Dan as not a toxic person, and go on to criticize him for being so concerned about the appearance of toxicity that he's backing down on an issue he should stand his ground over. If he says HN moderation won't hellban someone for criticizing a YC company, take it to the bank.

I feel compelled to add: the accusation seems baseless. Over the several years I've been participating in these forums I cannot remember a single instance of anyone getting hellbanned or otherwise penalized just for criticizing a YC company.

You may be right. I'll look at the comment later and see if I should have written it differently. There's no time to reflect just now.

I try hard not to let personal irritation leak through in my HN comments, but I do fail at it. The most I can claim is a willingness to correct mistakes.

It's wildly inappropriate to lob a blanket accusation of fraud against every single person who has ever complained about your moderation.

People have wildly divergent views as to what's appropriate, what's a little rude, and what's over the line. This means that even if you really truly believe that there was NEVER a mistake made during moderation, that some people will truly believe what they said.

Good moderation requires a ton of empathy and kindness.

It's probably a lesson to me that the one time I didn't hedge by saying "almost" or something like that, someone objects to my "blanket accusation". Actually, I originally wrote "almost never" (or something similar). But then I realized I couldn't actually remember a case where someone provided a specific link to back up his or her grand claim of why they were banned. So in a fit of impetuousness I lopped off the "almost". I did leave in "nearly always", though.

> Good moderation requires a ton of empathy and kindness.

I try, but don't always succeed. Thanks for the reminder. I appreciate it.

Keep in mind that people might not want to link the example to associate their current account with a banned account to avoid getting banned again.

I appreciate your willingness to see both sides and think of a good-faith interpretation here. That's the Principle of Charity which HN can use a lot more of. However, the users in question are typically quite accomplished at making throwaway accounts for specific purposes. Several have done so in this very thread.

There's no way, barring some freak outlier, that we banned anyone for criticizing YC or a YC-funded startup. If someone really did feel that way, nothing would be easier to clear up. The real issue, in the overwhelming majority of cases, is repeatedly flouting the HN guidelines.

For what it's worth.. I don't even read that much, and I've not been here for that long, but I often was impressed by how much you actually do engage and do seem to care, a lot, to do right by everyone, in public. To say you lack empathy and kindness as a moderator in general would be just silly. I say this as someone who strongly dislikes hellbanning and even grey text (I still think slashdot nailed it with voluntary, customizable filtering), so you know I mean it :P

I disagree! (with your pre-edit, reading "It's not that you expressed yourself poorly").

That's exactly what happened here. (And maybe Daniel can edit his comment.)

Daniel does a really good job, and is extremely responsive by email and on here. It is obvious where he wrote "Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question?" is borne of deep frustration. He would like to follow those links and improve the site, but can't. It's obvious that his comment is written out of frustration.

Let's be very clear: hellbanning is the worst and rudest thing that exists on any respectable Internet forum. Hellbanning literally wastes hours of the time of people who contribute great insight for free. The comments on this site are good and provided for free by people. Hellbanning turns this goodwill on its face, like a goodwill jar you can put bills into but which go into a furnace.

Daniel (and PG) knows very well that hellbanning is a nuclear weapon and the rudest thing that any Internet forum can possibly do, that is actually being done.

You have stories of people only learning they were hellbanned after literally taking the time to email someone a link to something thoughtful they had written. A lot of hellbanning has been (historically) in error.

It is one of the main reasons that I would never consciously leave a comment up if it reaches -3, even if I stand by it 100%, it's important, and the community happens to be wrong in its groupthink and I clearly have explained why. I would delete it instead.

Note that I have learned this behavior, and so have other contributors on this site.

It's one of the things that makes this site great.

So even though it is a nuclear option and the worst, rudest thing that any respectable forum does, in the sense that time is money literally stealing from users, and stealing donations at that and throwing them away, at the same time it is one of the things that allows this site to function as one of the best sites on the planet.

So you can bet that Daniel is extremely serious about following hellbanning claims and improving this process. It is difficult and he walks a very fine line.

He's doing a fantastic job at present in a very difficult undertaking. Kudos, Daniel, and keep up the good work. I can read your comment for what it is :)

"It is one of the main reasons that I would never consciously leave a comment up if it reaches -3, even if I stand by it 100%, it's important, and the community happens to be wrong in its groupthink and I clearly have explained why. I would delete it instead."

I am confused. Your preferred path is to avoid conflict such that you would rather delete than be disagreed with? If your opinion differs from groupthink, you would make it go away? I guess that is similar to not posting in the first place (because of groupthink you disagree with) , just retroactive.

Probably better than my not posting in the first place :)

His point, one that I strongly agree with, is that the threat of being hellbanned for comments that get downvoted is enough to stifle discussion on HN. Honestly, how often do you see passionate debate in HN comments?

> Good moderation requires a ton of empathy and kindness.

Which is sadly lacking among many, if not most, moderators of online communities across the net. I'm not saying that's the case with dang; in fact, I wouldn't know. But it's a thankless job that is akin to working in a call center without pay. It takes a strong personality to keep one's head above the layer of filth floating atop the waters of discourse.

I do know, and Dan has an enormous amount of empathy and kindness. But it is a hard job, it takes a toll, and I think this thread demonstrates how much he's willing to re-visit what he's said. (Even though I'm quite sympathetic to what Thomas said upthread.)

I agree with this, but I think it's worth noting that the prompt here was someone making a specific claim. One doesn't need to believe they have made no mistakes to be certain they've never made a particular mistake, and there's significantly less room for differences in interpretation (though that's not to say there's none).

I was responding to this part of dang's post:

If users could look at the actual record, their perennial sob story of perfectly reasonable behavior struck down by bullying censors would evaporate. So they make new accounts and post statements designed to be unanswerable.

I interpreted that as dang attributing essentially every complaint to malice, and simultaneously dismissing all other explanations.

A misleading summary, since you're the one who introduced the idea of "malice" and "fraud". Dan's claim admits to HN users who believe they've been hellbanned for criticizing YC companies. Yours doesn't.

> I try hard not to let personal irritation leak through in my HN comments, but I do fail at it.

we are all, for good and for bad, unavoidably human.

I don't even think that answer was even that bad, especially when compared to the parent. Here was a wild and personal accusation with no support at all, not even anecdotal, and pretty toxic itself.

Replying courteously even to baseless and ranty accusations is probably a good idea, but I can't say I'd blame someone for not doing it.

I see the mod(s?) deal with this kind of conspiracy accusation almost on a daily basis, and I can definitely see how patience can wear thin when every nut does that. Dang implying that this accusation was baseless was probably rash, but that's the only thing I see even remotely out of line here.

Moderation is a pretty thankless job, and like sysadmins, people never appreciate you for getting things to work right when they work right. The definition of success is invisibility to users. But the second it goes even a bit wrong, it's a shitstorm. Here's yet another piece of empathy that one needs to consider.

At a minimum, one could start an American company, which could at some point start a Japanese office (with all the accordant overhead in terms of paperwork and politicking, including the usual risk of immigration taking a dim view or otherwise filing your paperwork in the "do not pass go" column).

How closely that approximates the desired scenario with regards to e.g. hiring and social signalling is another question. It would presumably be bounded by the status of e.g. Microsoft Japan, which is in turn bounded by Sony. Which is to say, not as good, but possibly good enough for most intents which don't involve hiring new grads shoulder-to-shoulder with Sony.

Yeah, that is the easiest way to do it, and I think with Abe's supposed promises to favor/help startups, this would be a good time for something like that to fly with a 1-5 person "company"

It's easyish to derive to good accuracy from the accelerometer signal alone (which I believe is always available).

Great example of issues I would probably never catch if I tried to implement all of this in-house. It just wouldn't get that level of attention once it was already working.

"Oh, that's easy, I could implement all that in a weekend" - One, no. And two, no. Problems are always deeper than they seem, and it's usually the extra 90% that determines how well it works.

Archive it and move on with my life.

The work is generally entangled per the terms of your contract. If you want to do anything particular with it, the contract needs to cover that.

Specific things you may be thinking of:

* Showing off "portfolio samples" based on incomplete work - this is apt to annoy clients if you're not careful with it, and any given portfolio sample is unlikely to make or break your ability to land clients. If you think it might, you need to take a hard look at your sales process.

* Code reuse - this should be something your contract already covers for all projects. This code is mine, I am licensing this particular configuration of it for you to use based on specific terms, and assuming that you complete your end of the contract (i.e. pay me).

Well here's the essential bits in Python. I leave turning this into an actual CLI as an exercise for the interested reader.

    from requests_oauthlib import OAuth1Session
    import json


    keys = json.loads(open(keyfile).read())
    #  {"TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY": "blah_blah_blah",
    #   "TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET": "blah_blah_blah",
    #   "TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN": "blah_blah_blah",
    #   "TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET": "blah_blah_blah",}


    def twitter():
        return OAuth1Session(keys['TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY'],
                             client_secret=keys['TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET'],
                             resource_owner_key=keys['TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN'],
                             resource_owner_secret=keys['TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET'])


    def tweet(status, reply_to=None):
        endpoint = 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/update.json'
        data = {'status': status}
        r = twitter().post(endpoint, data=data)
        return r.status_code


    def tweet_with_image(status, imgfile, reply_to=None):
        endpoint = 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/update_with_media.json'
        data = {'status': status}
        if reply_to is not None:
            data.update({'in_reply_to_status_id': reply_to})
        r = twitter().post(endpoint, data=data, files={'media[]': open(imgfile, 'rb').read()})
        return r.status_code

Optimizely takes minutes to sign up for - and they're always looking to make that easier, and to make more people aware of the value they provide. In contrast, the expertise to conduct tests that alter revenue outlook takes somewhat longer to develop.

Sure, people could go out and spend the time to learn just about anything. In practice, they won't, because that's competing with all the other anythings they could be doing.

Sell the thing that actually has significant barrier to entry.

You take care of the easy thing too, because making the client spend meaningful attention on something that would take you five minutes is just silly, and you're there so they don't have to worry about that stuff. But sell the hard thing.

The fundamental error with trying to fix such marketplaces via another marketplace is that contractors are typically far better off relying on repeat business and some elementary lead prospecting, while project owners are better off relying on networking and repeat business.

Your target market is thus (more or less) restricted to people who don't yet meet that level of experience and professionalism. You get the contractors that have no existing clients and no clue how to approach companies, and you get the project owners who are out to get bargain-basement labor and firmly believe they'll be the one poster who gets lucky and finds a contractor who works on the internet yet is too inexperienced to realize what that means for their billable rates.

This is still a potential market, but you've lost the more desirable end of the pool before you even leave the gate. And even if that is the end of the pool you want to provide value to - you can provide far more value by helping them move upstream, rather than trying to stamp out another marketplace which is a bad solution from its conception.

Exactly. Server-side vs. client-side rendering of HTML is just another optimization choice.

Is it more important to shorten the time to display the current request, or to shorten the time for new pages to be rendered? Single-page apps marginally increase the current request's time-to-render in exchange for improving navigation between pages. For some purposes that provides a significant benefit, other times it doesn't.

I do programming like I do algebra. It's a tool I use to solve problems.

Mind you, it's a tool I'm very good with, and that I get intrinsic enjoyment from when using it. But I don't do it 24/7, and I also get intrinsic enjoyment from woodworking, soldering, cooking...

Some people are invested in getting you to believe a narrative where coders code, all the time, 80 hours a week even if you don't pay them, like they're one-dimensional widgets instead of people. If anyone tries to feed you that line, I'd take a good hard think about why.