I voted this story up. The question I try to answer in deciding whether to upvote a story is this: is the story important to hackers? Castro retiring is a major event. It's not on a par with the fall of the Berlin Wall, say, but it's more important than nearly everything that's gone on in the US Primaries, to pick an example. My guess is that it's more interesting to most hackers than the unoriginal me-too lists of "Top ten mistakes startups make" that still regularly populate Hacker News.
I personally tend to try to apply the standard of whether it's of importance or interest to hackers in particular, rather than to human beings in general.
Major news stories are, of course, of importance to everyone, but I personally would rather have a hacker news which is focused on hacker-ish stuff.
I think we have different standards. In 10 years, will anyone remember any of these? Only Castro and Kosovo might qualify. I certainly wouldn't even considering upvoting any of the rest. They're ephemera, and I agree with you that they're not of great interest to hackers.
They're all more important than the '10 things every startup should know' link in the grand scheme of things.
The other problem is that it doesn't pass the "make me smarter or inform me of something I didn't know" test. It's a piece of information I already knew, as did anyone else that is in any way connected to TV, radio or other news sites.
The test I'm applying is not whether the stories are more important in the grand scheme of things. I completely agree with you - that test is not the right test to apply. The right test, in my opinion, is how interesting a story is to hackers. And on that criterion, my original judgement was that the news of Castro's resignation merits an upvote.
With that said, your point about how widely distributed a story is elsewhere is an interesting one. I'm not sure I completely agree - the Microsoft offer to buy Yahoo wouldn't have made it onto Hacker News under this criterion, for example.
Part of the reason for wanting stories like this to appear on Hacker News isn't so much to be informed of the existence of the story, but rather for the quality of the discussion provoked by the stories. There are certain commenters whose opinion of Castro's resignation I'd far rather hear than some talking head on CNN.
Aha! Now we're getting somewhere: I was thinking the same thing about commentary - that's the only valid reason to have a widely visible story here.
However, I think that commentary on MS/Yahoo is far more relevant here than anything about Castro can possibly be. Indeed, Castro commentary is very likely to lead down the reddit road.
You may be right. In the large, I'm optimistic that it's possible to set up a forum where sensible discussion of hot button issues like politics is possible. Certainly, HN offers good initial conditions for achieving this: a great base of intelligent commenters who mostly seem able to have intelligent conversations with one another, even when they disagree. But maybe HN isn't the right place to be attempting this.
There are a few examples of online communities expanding so fast that original users no longer find them intellectually stimulating. Is there a single root cause? Are users so overconfident in their mutual abilities to discuss off-topic content safely, that they mistakingly end up allowing their own communities to kick themselves out; is it the fault of the design of the community software and system/processes; or, could it be that the community grew too quickly?
As somebody who enjoys this community a lot, I want to know that if 1,000 people start posting random URL's tomorrow, that not only would software filters stop junk from getting through, but that the community would step up and moderate itself because, albeit this is Hacker News, algorithms are never perfect: we are going to have to use our brains to make sure the site is still focused (or re-focused) regardless of how interesting an article might be.
On the other hand, there are good signs this may not necessarily happen to Hacker News. It's very possible that Digg, Reddit, and newcomer social news sites will be enough to satisfy the needs of most users. This site could be like a chess club in that it's open to everybody, but most people wouldn't care.
At the same time, one has to admit that if a social news site continues to address every topic on earth, it could get to the point where as the content becomes more similar to that of Digg or Reddit, there would be an exponential increase in new registrations daily of users looking for the next big thing. These users would then vote up new types of stories and change the site in a very short time. I think I read that one can't grow a team by more than 25% in number per year, or one will have a team that has lost qualities of the existing group--this is likely a major factor in retaining consistency and focus for this community, too.
I'm not connected to a TV, radio or other news sites. This is my primary news source and I don't mind if occasionally an article like this makes its way to the top. OTOH I understand this doesn't belong on HN. But I wouldn't start violently complaining about it.
Why can't I just have a button to dismiss a story of the front page? Not downvote it, just make it disappear from MY homepage?
Why can't I just have a button to dismiss a story of the front page? Not downvote it, just make it disappear from MY homepage?
It would be easy enough to do, but my gut tells me it would be a mistake, because it would make it easier for the site as a whole to deteriorate. As long as everyone has to see every story, there's a lot of pressure not to have bad stuff.
Paul Buchheit dislikes optional settings in software for similar reasons. He thinks they're usually just a way to punt on hard design decisions. Nearly everyone is going to use the defaults anyway, so you should just work hard to make those are right.
Well, with no ability to downvote I'm not sure how forcing everyone to see every story keeps the quality high. And there are certainly no incentives to prevent submission of low quality stories (as far as I'm aware). Just spam away and hope something will get upvoted.
But from a reading perspective once I read a story (and maybe some of the comments) from the front page I no longer care about it. Something I'll want to follow the comments (but to make that easy an option to see which stories have new comments instead of having to squint at the number of comments would work better anyway).
So usually over half the stories on the home page are links that I don't care about (either I upmoded them or want to ignore them and don't care to follow the comment thread).
Maybe this forces people to follow the new stream (of which an RSS feed would be extremely helpful).
But the guy was talking about a hide button, not a "hide it before I even see that it is there" (if that's even possible) button. Am I misunderstanding this?
I'm positive at least 20% of the stories do not appeal to each person, but the stories in that 20% are different for each individual (see what I mean?)
Lack of interest towards a subject matter in an individual at a specific time doesn't necessarily denote lack of suitability for the subject for HN.
Personally I'm getting quite irritated at the need to eyeball-scan the news because I'm rather keeping up with the new articles so I visit often but I always have like 15 stories I already decided I wouldn't check out...
No one here is "complaining violently". Everyone has been quite civil so far. I like that about this site.
It's your choice not to follow other news sites. Something like cnn, bbc, etc... is a much better place to stay abreast of current events than yc.news.
Whats relevant to the world is still relevant to us hackers. We might be a special population interested in something like MSFT's bids on Yahoo, but we're just as interested, (as you can see by this upvoted thread) in the happenings of the "real" world outside of our digital cages.
The set of things that matter, in world terms, far more than what Paul Graham thinks of trolls, or startup school, or memcached is large enough that it could easily crowd out the 'hacker news' without breaking a sweat, as this page suggests: http://www.ft.com/world
I don't see what the problem is with taking this kind of story elsewhere.
It's not a bad story or uninteresting, just that first this one...then a Musharraf one, then another one about the US primaries, and on and on. All of them more important than the regular fare here. And after a while, the value of the site is diluted in terms of its original purpose.
Come on David don't be so negative. Just because it might have happen on another site doesn't mean it will happen here. Like I said before, I can't vote the article up to the frontpage, takes more than one person.
He's right to worry. I worry too. And in fact our abuse detection code is suspicious about this story, because so many of the first upvotes were from newly created accounts.
HN has a different news focus than other sites, and we're trying to protect its identity by saying that certain topics, while important, should not be discussed here. In short, we're trying to prevent the reddit effect.
Hey, don't take it personally, I would have made the same comments whoever posted the story, and you're right that you only submitted it, it also took a bunch of people to upvote it. No one here but pg can really force anyone to do anything, so I'm just asking, and trying to explain why.
(BTW, even though I disagree with you, I upvoted you because a 0 or a -1 is more than enough to indicate disapproval).
Hackers are generally interested in the world around them, particularly things related to freedom (personal, intellectual, or otherwise). It doesn't get much bigger than this. How could this possibly be irrelevant? If its irrelevant to you, you must live in a bubble.
With that as an out, you can basically say that anything goes. I guess 'irrelevant' wasn't the best word. Let's say that I don't think it ought to be here, for the reasons outlined in the other comments.
I think it is sad that we are discussing weather or not the story should be in HN. I would rather like to see a smart discussion on the actual event from all the smart people here. For starters: what is going to happen to cuba now? Should the embargo end?
I can't see that it should end immediately -- the conditions under which it was started are still in place. However, it's probably a good opportunity to start negotiations with whoever takes over -- a gradual lifting of the embargo in exchange for democratic reforms, release of political prisoners, a timetable for free elections etc.
The conditions didn't change (ergo the embargo failed in it's intent) only causing more economic problems for the people you claim to be trying to save, and you want to keep it up?
No, I want to see it lifted, in exchange for democratic reforms.
Whether or not it was a good idea in the first place, it's in place now, so lifting it is one of the few carrots which the US can offer the Cuban regime. It seems silly to give up that carrot without extracting some sort of concession, particularly as the post-Fidel government may be more amenable to compromise.
If the US were to unilaterally lift the embargo without any movement by the Cuban government then it's not clear whether that would accelerate or decelerate the cause of human rights. However, making a deal has got to at least be worth a try, assuming our goal is a Cuba where people can speak freely, travel freely, own property, vote in freely contested elections, use the internet, and start businesses (to bring the topic back round to something marginally relevant to HN).
Yes those are our goals, but they will not be achieved by maintaining an embargo as the last 40? 50? years have shown... You can't just force or pressure countries into "democracy", that is not the way it works, there are more than enough examples in recent U.S. history that hint at this...
Even if you could, the whole premise of the embargo is flawed I think.. it only makes the cuban government look like a "martyr", in this case to the imperialist whims of the U.S. etc.
Whether it's interesting in its own right or not is not the issue. The subject matter is of a political nature, and doesn't really afffect or concern the technical community moreso than any other demographic group. Shouldn't this sort of thing be left to mainstream sites? In any event, most readers proably check other news sites, so this just seems redundant.
This is indeed big news. He's been in charge for almost half a century. Now what? Will his brother manage to keep control? Considering his age everybody must be plotting to take over the reins. Slow reforms or another revolution?
This is just so boring, I (and I guess others too) don't give a flip if he's retiring or whatever! There is no point in posting this to HN, everyone knows that the we don't like such stories here. Hence, the debate is futile.
