Shouldn't there also be a few "control" challenges sprinkled in where all three are the same color and there's no "right" answer? If the test is implemented well and/or there is no human bias (either from the previous question or from the positioning of the circles), then you'd expect to see a uniform distribution of answers on the control. If there is bias (e.g. some innate preference for the top circle (say)), that should get adjusted for in the final analysis.
This feels like a particularly derogatory take on the OP's wife's home country, which is ironic given that TFA is about "horrendous dentistry" in the US. Literal comment from the article
"Dentists are not required to learn how to place implants in dental school, nor are they required to complete implant training before performing the surgery in nearly all states."
"I was frankly stunned at how bad some of these dentists were practicing,” Prisby said. “It was horrendous dentistry."
The whole article is about whether a “dentist” is qualified to place implants by performing oral surgery. [1] The coloquial term “dentist” does not actually carry information about what procedures an individual is qualified to perform. Trying to compare “dentists” from different countries with different training and regulatory regimes without getting into the specifics of what those trainings and regulations are is going to mislead you to false equivalence.
[1] In the U.S. the basic DMD/DDS is referred to as a “dentist” but does not perform implant surgery. At minimum that would require extra training. The article is extremely sloppy about clarifying what qualifications the individuals who performed the procedures on Becky Carroll have. We don’t know if those individuals were unqualified or qualified and practicing poorly.
> In the wake of all this drama, a blog post titled "Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth" went viral and hit the top of Hacker News. Which you might have missed, because Hacker News — which is owned by Y Combinator — seems to have manually dropped the post lower in the rankings to suppress its visibility.
Is this true? I never thought HN moderated content critical of itself
"Less" doesn't mean "we don't moderate at all"—that would be too big a loophole. "Less" means "do what we normally would, but not as much". That way we can keep the front page reasonably close to the site mandate while still having a consistent approach to conflicts of interest.
For example, if a story is the kind of thing we'd normally downweight off the front page (e.g. because it's a typical opinion piece or drama that isn't intellectually interesting), then "do what we normally would, only less" might mean that the article ends up halfway down the frontpage, whereas normally we'd downrank it off the frontpage altogether.
This approach goes back to the first morning that pg was showing me how he moderated HN and it was literally the first thing he said to me, before I had a chance to grab a chair. He kind of barked it actually - 'whatever you do, don't do that!'
10 years later, it has held up well: it's a simple rule, easy to be both transparent and consistent about, that addresses one of the hardest aspects of running a site like HN. It doesn't work perfectly (nothing on HN can work perfectly, for the simple reason that different segments of the community want different things) but I find it hard to imagine a better tradeoff.
This doesn't stop people from jumping to inaccurate conclusions (such as "HN mods suppress bad stories about YC" when in fact we do the opposite), but it does mean we can answer questions in good conscience, which is vital not only to community goodwill but also our own morale.
The thread reached the top of Hacker News, then went to #15. It spent 5 hours on the front page, which is a lot longer than it would have if the topic hadn't been YC-related. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732846 for more.
The article only states that the post was deliberately lowered in the rankings to reduce its visibility. "Is this true" ? What your explanation is hinting at, although you're not saying it outright, is that "Yes, that's true." The graph posted below speaks for itself.
If you (or anyone) wants an accurate view, you can't just look at one graph. You need to take into account that moderators are downranking stories on HN all the time. HN is a curated site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If we weren't downranking stories all the time, the frontpage would be completely different—like a garden when there are no gardeners weeding it. The site would basically be all drama, all the time.
That article was of the type that we'd normally downweight off the front page, since it wasn't substantive or intellectually interesting in the way that the site mandate calls for. Since it was about YC, though, we cut the amount of downweight. The post went from #1 to #15 instead of (say) #55 or whatever. #15 on HN's front page is far from "disappeared". It's still a prominent position, and the post continued to receive a lot of attention and traffic that it otherwise would not have.
> What your explanation is hinting at, although you're not saying it outright, is that "Yes, that's true."
I wouldn't say so. The reason for downweighting the post was that it wasn't a good article for HN. The reason for downweighting the post less was that it was about YC. You can call that "deliberately lowered in the rankings" but it's equally true to say "deliberately heightened in the rankings". It depends on which baseline you're comparing to. Relative to the baseline of standard practice on HN, the post was heightened, not lowered.
Is that clearer? I'm not asking you (or anyone) to agree with, like, or approve of how we moderate HN but I would like the details to be understood.
8 of the current top 10 stories have been on the front page for longer than the submission that is critical of ycombinator and every single one of them has vastly fewer upvotes and comments. It's not even close, the story that is currently in position 6 has 1/4th the upvotes and 1/10th the comments. It has been on the front page since its submission.
It is impossible for the velocity, given any reasonable common sense examination, for the upvotes on that post to be greater than the story that was nuked after 2 hours.
There is no submission on the front page, some of which have been on the front page for over 24 hours, that has more upvotes, comments, or any conceivable rate of upvoting or commenting that even approaches 1/10th of the nuked story.
There is one submission that has an average of four upvotes per hour.
Assuming that upvotes fall off precipitously after leaving the front page, which I would say is a safe assumption, the nuked story had an upvote rate of several hundred per hour.
There's something fishy going on and that smell isn't the strong odor given off by Salt Water Dimmers, a submission to a barren wikipedia page about an obsolete technology with 13 upvotes and 5 comments that debuted on the front page, and has been there for several hours.
I'm not joking. On the front page of HN for several hours is a link to a 200-word wikipedia article about dimmers used in stage productions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687950
For what it's worth, stories about Boom (a ycombinator joint) SEEM to get nuked extremely rapidly when non-VC non-techbro domain experts start chiming in about what their chances for success actually are and how there's a 50% chance they're the next OceanGate and a 50% chance they're just a scam that got way too big for its britches.
The bias on the site is really terrible. It's not always YComb itself so much, but all the valley stuff.
As with anything you have "the powerful people" who have opinions on what critiques are "fair", and will demand them communicated with perfect decorum.
Additionally, people are aware of how it will "look". In a way they don't care, but in reality there's always an appearance people prefer to keep.
Anyway actually break out some pointy critiques, and they'll get mad.
The flags on hn are extremely powerful, so I don't doubt this. Just a few flags obliterate a post with tons of upvotes. It wouldn't take many people to kill it, and it doesn't require a conspiracy
I will frequently flag posts that are rage bait or where the comments are just the same few people arguing. I haven't flagged this one because I commented in it but it's a very low value post.
It's gossip rage bait to feel the feelings of superiority in the writers community vs VC land. It doesn't dive into any of those things, if it did that could be valuable, it's just reporting events to drive feelings.
Is this supposed to assauge the concerns of the public? Is dang not employed by, and thus a representative of, Y Combinator? There is every reason to believe he is directly responsible for protecting the interests of the company.
"Company investigated Company and found that Company did nothing wrong"
> There is every reason to believe he is directly responsible for protecting the interests of the company.
Yes, but the way we do it is different from the common assumption because we want to optimize HN's value for YC globally rather than overreacting to any particular story.
HN's value to YC consists of the community, and the community only exists because of goodwill and trust. To jeopardize that for the sake of suppressing a particular story (even if the article is false and/or sensational and/or shallow, silly or whatever) would be a super dumb tradeoff, so (as my son once said when he was little) "that what we not do".
I understand the skepticism, and of course you're free to disbelieve any part of what I say. All I can do is explain to people what we do and how we think about it, answer questions when asked, and hope that this is good enough to keep the bulk of the community happy.
I don't really care about your concerns. If you are willing to lie for an employer we are ethically distant. I've seen no indication dang is willing to do that either and seen him being very open about things he didn't need to be. Also the way ownership works isn't so simple anymore as HN is YC. More like YC is HNs major sponsor these days.
I would hardly consider "moderating a public forum in accordance with your employer-mandated job description guidelines" to be "lying."
"dang" is a detail--the point is, if someone is being cut a paycheck by a company, the public is well within reason to believe that person has a job obligation to favorably represent the interests of that company.
> and he has never given me any reason to doubt his integrity
in other news: man kills his family, neighbours swear they were a normal happy family, It's totally unexpected, we never would have thought something like this could happen
past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior if and only if nothing else changes.
not speaking about dang specifically, but IMO it's a bit different to not do something when it benefits your reputation and to not do anything when it can harm your job safety.
I'm sure nobody has hard proof either way, but there's certainly an ongoing pattern of the symptom. This place only exists to promote YC, so you can decide for yourself which is the simplest explanation.
I thought the whole point of download-only games is that they are not borrowable/lendable/resellable, so wouldn't allowing one-time only writes defeat the purpose?
I might be suffering from imposter syndrome, but I feel like I'm not the right audience for "taking advantage of boredom".
I feel people who benefit from this "diffuse state" are those who already have a base level of competence in their field or challenging problems they're trying to solve, and so boredom gives their brain an opportunity to express creativity in that domain.
For me, my brain is just "quiet" when bored. It doesn't come up with "novel ways to solve problem X", or "a brand new idea". When it is at all noisy, it is mostly regurgitation of thoughts I've already had before, replays of conversations from the past week, mundane things like that.
I think this is a learnt skill. If you're not constantly engaging with new material, asking questions on what you're reading, learning with intent, then your brain isn't going to evolve from this baseline on its own randomly.
I say this as someone trying to move the needle towards this same thing.
Some days I am suprised at my motivation to learn new things, and questions I ask / relationships I form - much more so when i've been putting in time deliberarely practicing how I learn each day.
For me it depends on the projects I worked on intensly. After months of delivery, I sometimes stumble upon some example that might trigger an idea later on when I can't fall asleep that gives me new insights of some of those projects.
Your comment takes an (unfair IMO) position that it somehow matters what country the OP was in. It's not like the auth systems are designed for higher scrutiny in specific countries. There is more than one way to confirm identity, but somehow BigTech and Co keep assuming a happy path environment for you.
Case in point: my US bank insists on sending an OTP to my US number (and US number alone) for any transaction, making it impossible for me to move money when abroad. The problem exists in the other direction too, my foreign account only allows verification thru one mechanism. It's really frustrating.
I worked in the payment card industry for awhile a few years back. There are entire countries that are blocked by card providers due to fraud.
Unfair or not, it actually makes a difference. I was in a neat position to see some of the attempts in real time. It blew me away how much attempted fraud there is. Think of it like spam email - it's that bad.
I was the operator of a webserver for a small B2B shop for a number of years. We only had a couple dozen local customers, we hand-delivered custom orders with a dedicated truck. If you weren't local, there was nothing on that website that would have mattered to you.
But there were on the order of 50x more attempts from bots trying to log into our Wordpress instance from India (all illegitimate) than from actual customers. It was ridiculous.
Similar situation for a local small business I’ve worked for. Typically I’d respond to contact form spam with a notice to the source network. US-registered networks tended to reliably address the problem while IN- just ignored me, if their contact information worked at all.
SMS on roaming can be a hit or miss. I travel internationally every year and I am always worried that some SMSs wont reach and it happens from time to time. I especially hate those product/services that only do SMS based 2FA.
It's weird, regular SMSs do come through, as far as I know. It's hard to tell as I don't get many SMSs, mostly iMessage and Whatsapp. I'm on AT&T, and something about automated messages from those 5-6 digit numbers never show up when you want them to.
Just FYI (because your OTP hell was my OTP hell until recently) if you fly to another country, disable roaming in the phone, and don’t make outbound calls, your phone will receive these OTP messages for free with most US cell providers.
"Learning How to Learn" BY Dr. Barbara Oakley really changed my perspective towards learning in my late 20s. I was starting to feel (of my own accord) that I was starting to lose/had already lost the cognitive function needed to learn as intensely as I had during my undergrad years. This course flipped that idea on its head, and gave me the tools and mental model to pick up learning new (and hard) things again.
Yeah. I liked that course too. I heard it mentioned on the radio and it was a pretty short course if I remember correctly. The only thing I really remember from it is "Pomodoro is Cool" and "If you're stuck on something mental, go take a walk for several minutes."
[1] https://docs.openwebui.com/