Comment by capableweb
4 years ago
A collaborative resource with more information about undocumented/norms on HN: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
> Personally, I’d stay at 3. I’d also wait at least a day between re-posts (and try re-posting at different time slots).
Wow, that's not how I parsed the very same reposting rules. If I'm about to submit something and I found an older submission with the same URL, my personal rule is that it should be older than a year ago before I'd submit it again. Three posts with the same URL for three consecutive days seems a bit too much.
> Hacker News is moderated mainly by dang aka Dan Gackle (pronounced ‘Gackley’). He’s not of asian descent
??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
> > Hacker News is moderated mainly by dang aka Dan Gackle (pronounced ‘Gackley’). He’s not of asian descent
> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
"Dang" is a surname in Vietnam, China, and elsewhere [1], which has led to subthreads like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dang_(surname)
Cue the “You’re not Chinese?!?” joke from Seinfeld…
https://youtu.be/CsKpShq2X6s
> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
Call me a fool, but it's never occurred to me that he wasn't. I've always pictured him as a Chinese gentleman, a sort of Confucian scholar in 0s and 1s holding up the mortal world to ancient standards of virtue.
I might come across as reading far too much xianxia, and that would be accurate.
> my personal rule is that it should be older than a year ago before I'd submit it again
That's indeed the rule, but only when the story has had significant attention (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
When a story hasn't had significant attention in the last year (or a bit longer), it's ok to repost a small number of times.
Past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
China has not many surnames I think? A little google search showed that dang is one of them. ``` Chinese : The surname Dang comes from a branch of the ruling family of the Zhou dynasty (1122–221 bc) that spread to the state of Jin and the state of Lu. The character now also means 'political party'. German: from an old personal name Tanco, a cognate of modern German denken 'to think', Gedanke 'thoughts'.
```
So I'm guessing if you're from a country where that is a regular surname, you might assume it's like that and not DanG, so yeah I guess that happens
I don't know about China, but in Vietnam there are 14 family names which account for about 90% of the entire population.
Roughly 40% of all Vietnamese people are called "Nguyen", which makes it one of the most common family names in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_name#Family_name
I remember a developer blog that had that lastname!
Also Diane in Bojack Horseman surname! Guessing she's of Vietnamese ascent!
1 reply →
I always thought he was of Vietnamese descent. Today I learned. I'm kinda glad that bit of information was added to an otherwise very mathematical post.
> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
I agree, the paragraph is strange and at best reads like a non-sequitur.
Then again I always associated the username "dang" with the word "dang", which I thought it was an amusing (and appropriate) choice of name for a moderator.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/dang
> Then again I always associated the username "dang" with the word "dang", which I thought it was an amusing (and appropriate) choice of name for a moderator.
Right; it took me forever to realize that "dang" was "Dan G" and not just a word. Especially since HN usernames can have mixed case, so he could have picked "DanG" (which... I still would have probably read as a funnily-formatted word but it'd be more of a hint:]). Though for all I know he predates HN supporting uppercase in names, and stylistically I can totally see preferring lowercase.
> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
Not just that, but for some time you could observe subthreads accusing him of being a chinese subversion of HN in china related discussions.
There's been a lot of misguided moderation that happens to be in favor of China. Earlier in the pandemic, the left bought into the propaganda that the lab leak theory etc were racist. I attribute the pro-China moderation to good intentions and ignorance.
I don't know if you're talking about HN, but what you're describing there is not the dynamic here.
1 reply →
I just assumed he had some intense business interests involving trade with China. He has had a heavy moderation hand when people are critical of the CCP or for example what was formerly thought of as the conspiracy theory about COVIDs likely lab leak origin. He seems to have come around a little bit on this maybe he read about the Uighurs or who knows.
It's true that I/we come down heavily on nationalistic flamewar, slurs, and groundless insinuations about spies and shills and bots and manipulators and all that kind of thing. But this isn't related to China—it follows clearly from the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and is the same whichever country or group is at issue.
Guidelines-breaking comments do frequently appear about China, but that is a function of geopolitical and media trends, not HN moderation. The way we moderate such comments has nothing to do with my/our personal views about China or any other country. If you stop and think about it and you know the HN guidelines well, this shouldn't be that hard to believe. The vast majority of these moderation calls are not borderline.
From a moderation perspective, everything in the above paragraph is obvious. From a user perspective, it's often impossible to communicate, because whenever someone has a strong feeling about $topic, their view about moderation is determined by their feeling about $topic. If they see us moderating something they agree with, they jump to the conclusion that we're secretly in cahoots with the opposing side. Of course the opposing side does the same thing.
2 replies →
OT pretty much — but not completely: My daughter had a wonderful first grade teacher of English descent named Emily Chewning. The kids called her "Miss Chew." On the first Parent-Teacher night many parents were surprised to learn that "Miss Chew"/[Chu] wasn't Chinese.
> Wow, that's not how I parsed the very same reposting rules.
Some posts get reposted a lot see this website for example https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lihaoyi.com some were posted 7 times.
This thing is that almost any well written (and not too much technical) post can reach the frontpage it only requires 3-4 people who like the post enough to upvote it during the first 30 minutes. As a result reposting works for those kind of content. And as it is not forbidden, people do it
Either I missed it or it does not mention "posting too fast" feature, which is very annoying, because if you commented on something you can be restricted from commenting on another, unrelated topic.
It's extremely annoying. It doesn't give you any indication how you triggered it, nor does it give you any indication how long you need to wait until you can post normally again.
What's more, since the people who wrote the code for this feature are pretty smart, it's hard to believe these two things are oversights.
Edit: In response to a now deleted comment on how this feature is intended to be annoying, because your contribution was deemed harmful, but not ban-worthy, I say this:
I disagree that this approach is correct in that case. If you want to discourage certain behavior, then, on a site such as HN, you should treat your users as adults and tell them what you don't want them to do. Simply locking them out for an unknown amount of time, for unknown reasons, is just going to drive them away. This is just basic operant conditioning. Presumably, driving the user away entirely is not the result one wants a significant portion of the time.
Interestingly, I have never hit this. I heard about it before, and I have sometimes posted a fair number of comments over a fairly short amount of time too, but somehow I've never hit any limit on this.
This leads me to believe that in most (though perhaps not all) cases people are probably posting short comments. Nothing wrong with that sometimes, but overall it's the sort of thing HN tries to discourage, which isn't a bad thing IMHO.
3 replies →
It's beyond annoying. It's disrespectful as hell. Hacker News lets users waste time composing a question or answer, and THEN says they can't post when they try to submit it.
I always read it as dang! the exclamation! There should have been a spoiler alert. Oh, well -
>Three posts with the same URL for three consecutive days seems a bit too much.
The article is talking about stories that haven't got much attention. You can infer it from the quoted text mentioned just before the 3 rule:
>If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
Dang is a Vietnamese surname (I know more than one "Dang"), which is why I also assumed he was Asian.
Interesting how that page doesn't cover shadow muting. If too many of your comments hit -4 in too short a time period you'll get nothing but "you're posting too fast" messages for several hours, possibly a day.
You get this regardless of score I think. I was excitedly posting on a Dune thread the other day with all comments +4 and still got told to settle down lol.
Mine were spaced over an entire day. They just happened to be consecutively downvoted.
4 replies →
Something not mentioned in either article is how karma is handled on submissions. 1 comment upvote = 1 karma point, but 1 submission upvote isn't. E.g. this [0] post got 286 points but the submitter only has 118 karma. Also, what's the deal with the "prev" and "next" buttons that just appeared in the last few minutes?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28996500
I suspect that I might be part of the reason for the prev and next buttons. HN has bad accessibility when it comes to screen readers and following the parent/child relationship between comments. Some time ago I answered to the wrong person for the wrong reason and a commenter said that they will ask the HN staff for a solution. If my case was not unique, those comments might be the answer. In terms of accessibility, those buttons are not as good as using the semantic html <li> tag, but they help somewhat.
I don't think it is anyone in particular, it is hard for everyone to follow threads where there is an extended subthread. This makes it easy to follow the discussion you care about when a subthread goes on a tangent you don't care about (or flamewar, etc.). I am super excited to see it and would have missed it for a while if not for this discussion.
Edit: Oh yeah, there has been that tiny collapse button for a while, I somehow never got into the habit of using that one and forget it is there. I wish there was a setting to use the words "up vote" "down vote" and "collapse" rather than needing to pixel hunt :/.
These were added sometime in the last day or so, I believe.
I always assumed he was from the Far Side, not the Far East.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026166
it took me ages to realise dang was actually his first name/surname initial tho i get the handle's other meaning is intentional.
> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
I don't see how it matters whether he's Asian or not. For all I care, he could be a sentient pineapple tree and it wouldn't matter at all to my HN user experience.
This would be quite fascinating, as pineapples don’t grow on trees. Your point is well-stated, nevertheless.
I thought he was asian lol, cause dang is an asian name