Comment by jacquesm
11 years ago
Where there's people working there are bound to be mistakes. Don't sweat it, this is a free service after all and the service level for a non-advertising supported free service is absolutely incredible. I'd be more than happy to pay for HN as it is, you guys are doing a better job than most paid services when it comes to customer support, uptime and courtesy combined.
Hacker News is most definitely supported by ads. Perhaps you just don't realize it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
Sure, and Harvard is supported by ads, you just don't realize it.
(sell an education->create wealthy people->ask them to contribute->get endowment whose returns account for the largest source of its operating revenue[1])
but I find your semantics frankly ridiculous. yes hacker news belongs to ycombinator. but you can't just use the word ad however you want. No, not everything's an ad, and in particular you can't 'buy' a job ad on HN. It's not a good description of the situation.
[1] http://www.harvard.edu/about-harvard/harvard-glance/endowmen... "The endowment remains the largest source of revenue supporting the University budget."
I'm fairly certain those companies don't pay for those job listings.
Just because they give them out for free (to a very small specific group of companies) doesn't mean they don't have value.
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Well, they are YC companies so they pay YC with a pretty significant portion of their equity.
Are you the same switz from #r/GlobalOffensive?
Seriously. I use HN as my "am I connected to the internet?" check, as it always loads instantly even when Google takes a while.
I personally use : http://perdu.com (up since 1998) Which translate into:
Lost on the Internet? Don't worry, we will help * <----- you are here
What fast IP do you use when you suspect you're connected to the internet but can't resolve DNS? I'm looking for a good non-Google IP (because China)
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I'd love to see their stats. They have basically 0 content and I hit them 10 times a day.
Hah, glad it's not just me. It's also the thing I hit if I'm trying to think of what I was doing/am idle for a moment... typing 'news.' just seems to flow from my fingers if they're unoccupied.
There used to be a race between Google news (news.google.com) and Hacker News to be the top suggestion for me, hacker news has pulled away to a strong lead recently.
Ctrl-T, N, Enter :/
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Yep, same for me. I'll be staring at the screen in thought, then up pops a Hacker News tab.
I have this habit too and it's deeply disturbing. Actively fighting it!
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I use HN because I can never trust whether anymore whether Google is really loading from a remote source or is just doing some aggressive caching magic (or whether Chrome just has the Google homepage baked in now).
In terms of uptime, HN has been hosted on a single server (until recently... I saw mention of a failover server). If you are just looking for a lightweight site to load, example.com is great.
Might want to spread that out over a few sites. Any one can go down.
Alexa's top 10 sites is usually a pretty good set.
it's perhaps worth remembering the service isn't 100% altruistic... though I agree it is indeed awesome and I'd probably be happy to pay for it too.
Could you give some good examples of 100% altruistic?
These are probably debatable, but I'd suggest Wikipedia and Archive.org would come close.
groklaw.net was close enough for me.