Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page - <AUTHOR> http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-removes-from-the-front-page/ <comment><USER2> The story the OP is complaining about was flagged by users. Moderators never saw it (edit: wrong, we put 2010 on the title by mistake, see downthread [1]). Had we seen it, we would have turned off the flags. There's a long tradition of people looking at HN data and posting about it. Edit #2: since the 2010 thing was our mistake (an accident of sleep deprivation by the looks of it!) I've invited foob to repost the original article using the second-chance mechanism described at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380) and the links there. I think he's planning to do that tomorrow.

The [flagged] annotation only shows up on stories that are heavily flagged, i.e. enough to kill the post. User flags have downweighting effects long before that.

Story rank on HN is determined by upvotes, flags, software, and moderators. Moderators downweight stories to the degree that they don't fit the site guidelines. This doesn't happen by upvotes alone, unfortunately; certain stories routinely get tons of upvotes regardless of how good they are for HN—e.g. anything sensational, indignant, or meta. If we didn't have a compensating factor, those stories would dominate the front page every day and HN would no longer follow its primary rule: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". Of course that means HN is subject to our interpretation of what counts as "intellectual curiosity". HN has always worked that way; before we did it, pg did, and he trained us to do it so it would work as before. There's no way around the need for moderator intervention on a site like HN—the clue is in the word 'moderator' itself: left to its own devices the system runs to extremes and it needs a negative feedback loop to dampen it.

When YC is involved, we do this less than usual as a matter of principle. When HN itself is involved it's a little bit different, because the hypnotic power of all things meta causes HN upvoters to go into an upvoting trance. Meta is basically crack, so we routinely downweight such posts—but only so much, to compensate for the crack effect. That's what I've done here, which is why the post is now at #7 rather than #1. It should probably be lower, but I want to illustrate the point that we intervene less, not more, when judgments about ourselves are involved. As a further example, a moderator actually turned off software penalties and user flags on this post this morning, which is probably why it went to #1 in the first place. That's more than I would have done but it shows how seriously we take that principle.

None of this is new information, btw. I've posted about it plenty over the years and am always happy to answer questions.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20downweight)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20countervail)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20constitutional)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20curate)

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13858850](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13858850)

<comment><USER3> If you don't mind answering, is there a reason [flagged] doesn't show as soon as it starts to downweight?

<comment><USER4> Do you want it show right away? I assume that showing it right away (as soon as possible) will only cause it to fall off even faster and fewer people bother to look at it and possibly upvote it.

I assume that similar to HN meta stories resulting in upvoting trances, seeing [flagged] leads to ignoring the submission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Obligatory pimping of a tool I use (not mine, though): [http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/)

Shows stories which have hit the front page ever, in the order of their posting. If it's currently on the front page, the link is orange. If it's not, it's black. It's very interesting to watch how frequently highly upvoted and commented posts turn black, while their temporal peers remain.

Anecdotally, there appears to be trend of positive/neutral news about YC companies remaining on the front page the longest, the latest shiny technology sticks around for awhile longer than average, and pretty much any negative news disappears almost instantly.

For example, as of this instant in time, there is an article about Angular2 which remains on the front page while more highly upvoted and commented articles about laptop security, AT&T discrimination, and a Nintendo Switch CVE discussion are all gone from the front page.

<comment><USER6> > For example, as of this instant in time, there is an article about Angular2 > which remains on the front page while more highly upvoted and commented > articles about laptop security

For front page rankings time matters more than total votes. A submission with 10 votes can be ranked higher than one with 50 if those 10 votes came in minutes rather than over the course of a day. It's not surprising that controversial submissions that get less up-votes (and more flags) don't get ranked as high.

<comment><USER7> > For front page rankings time matters more than total votes

Yes, but it's not the only thing at stake because you often see more recent and more up-voted posts being below older and less up-voted ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As much as I like HN, I'm not a big fan of the secrecy around moderator interventions - what gets censored, what posts get re-titled, etc.

I can understand they might want to keep the ranking algorithm and anti-spam techniques secret, but stuff that are manually censored by a moderator should be indicated as such, maybe by some automatic message like "This post was removed due to [reason]".

Some websites manage to fight spam while remaining reasonably transparent (eg. StackExchange, where pretty much everything is documented - flags, closing reasons, edits, etc.).

<comment><USER9> I've got my account (with 9+k point) banned. Which is, of course, annoying, but the most annoying thing was the comment left by moderator "we banned". How about "I banned"? Faceless corporate "we" does not look well. There was also a lie about warning which never happened, but hey, "not lying" is not in the guidelines, so… And while some of my comments might be harsh I sometimes wonder if overzealous moderation leads us to creation of some kind of Stepford here.

<comment><USER10> To be fair, sometimes this is a security feature so that folks don't go off hating one individual moderator. I've seen this in games more often, but I imagine it works out here as well. It sucks for normal folks, but sometimes that's the way it works.

<comment><USER11> If they want to 'protect' the moderators they should use more neutral language focusing on the actions. You can easily say "This account has been x" instead of "We've x this account" or "x has been changed to reflect y" instead of "We've changed x to reflect y". It's less personal, but that's the point.

<comment><USER12> I think that works best; a moderator is / should be only a member that happens to be responsible for maintaining the site's user behaviour policy and tidiness of articles posted, and thus decisions shouldn't be an "I" or "we" thing, but "the site". Of course, that's an utopia and no amount of rules will cover every situation.

<comment><USER9> It may sound stupid, but it'd make me feel better if moderators still used "I" even if otherwise completely anonymous. Still add human touch and personal responsibility to the act even if there is no way to call some particular person out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The site is being crushed by traffic right now -- but without reading the article, I've also found that some stories that I thought were important that were scrubbed from HN's front page just about as soon as I saw it (when I doubled back to read the comments)...

While I realize I'm not entitled to explanations, some transparency would be appreciated. Maybe it could even be automatic, whenever a mod removed something forcibly from front, they could leave a comment and it'd show up on some page?

[EDIT] - After reading the article, if a mod did indeed take down the post because it discussed reverse engineering the rank algorithm, I think that's pretty naive. Security through obscurity isn't a thing, and the better response is just to make a better algorithm, not try and suppress knowledge about it.

I say this naively myself, as I've never had to maintain a ranking algorithm with these many users who depend on it (or any at all for that matter), but surely the problem isn't intractable?

<comment><USER14> > Security through obscurity isn't a thing, and the better response is just to > make a better algorithm, not try and suppress knowledge about it.

Obscuring an algorithm or making it more tedious to reverse may not make it perfectly secure, but that's not the goal. It's not like actual information security, where loss of the encryption keys means your product is broken or your database is on the Internet. You're just trying to minimize the workload on humans who act as a back-up for the few posts that slip through.

If an email spam detection algorithm was public, spammers could precisely craft their content to slip through. If the heuristics for showing a CAPTCHA were public, bots could automate their requests to avoid it. If a ranking algorithm was public, people who might financially benefit from the front-page traffic could force content there through vote rings and sock puppets.

If the algorithm is secret, far fewer will be able to do so, and this small fraction of abusers can be handled by humans.

<comment><USER15> Once it's public (even unofficially), people will begin to rely on the current implementation and then complain if it is ever tweaked or changed. They build towards the value it grants and then complain that the value was arbitrarily stolen from them.

<comment><USER16> That's for sure. I rarely visit SEO websites or forums, but the few times I did I saw lots of complaints from people who seemed to think that Google owed them something after tweaking their page ranking algorithms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I can comment on the "Books that Aaron Swartz read, loved and hated" story. OP posted that link to HN and it made the front page. The story was soon flagged by the community (people viewed it as Amazon affiliate spam) and it fell off the rankings. When the moderator dang noticed that the story had been flagged, he decided to restore it ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13840869](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13840869)). So yeah, that explains why this particular story fell off the front page quickly but does not have any [flagged] or [dupe] tags attached now.

I've learned that it's best not to jump to conclusions based on what you think is true (however sound your analysis might be). Always ask the other side(s) for an explanation. In this case, you could have sent an email to the mods asking for an explanation. If you find their response unsatisfactory, go ahead and write a post explaining why.

<comment><USER18> FWIW, the post does acknowledge that:

> There are also a few articles that are thinly veiled affiliate spam. For > example, the ShelfJoy links about books that Aaron Swartz and David Bowie > loved fall into this category. They get called out in the comments for being > very low-effort lists of Amazon affiliate links.

<comment><USER17> OP uses this story as an example of having "moderator fingerprints on them" i.e moderators censoring posts, which is not true. What happened was the opposite : the moderator uncensored a post flagged by the community.

<comment><USER19> Well, the author tried to account for that by saying that normal flagged posts don't go down near as fast.

If what is being said in other threads is true, high karma accounts clicking flag could push a post off the front page without showing the "flagged" tag, then that could be an explanation instead. Which would then mean that maybe these high karma users have too much power.

<comment><USER20> > Which would then mean that maybe these high karma users have too much power.

And on top of that are allowed to use HN as a platform to ask other users to jump to their aid in flagging stories they don't like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Other theories:

\- This is a bug / happens randomly; you just noticed it because you were looking (i.e. as you analyse this data); all the posts it's happened to before and since went unnoticed. That's supported by the evidence of your analysis; most of the results don't look any different to other posts.

\- It's not the link, but the related activity. Presumably if you're running analysis on HN data, there are a lot of HN requests coming from your machine. Maybe any posts made by your IP are therefore treated as suspect (i.e. the sort of protection you'd expect to avoid automated posting or upvoting... just without that extra sophistication). Perhaps the other posters had something similar... Would be good to see if any of those posts were by the same author; as that may add weight to this theory.

\- Other variables... Maybe the algorithm has rules which cause this behaviour under some conditions; e.g. posts made the previous day (not 24 hours ago; but rather before midnight UTC / something like that) lose weight when midnight hits; so posts made moments before suddenly lose enough score to knock them off the top spot; whilst those which had more score before midnight, or were posted just after survive... Many other possibilities such as this may exist; and we'd only know by looking at those variables in the data... What else is common about the posts which are in your post's club vs those which aren't?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points! I use the official Hacker News API [1] and my requests come from an ip address that is completely disconnected from my personal account. Even if the API usage were a red flag, there would be no way to automatically connect it to me.

You're definitely right about there being miscellanious rules in there. Something that I mentioned in passing in the article is that many stories exhibit a significant drop in position once they're 15 hours old. If you look closely at the typical story trajectories you can also see various other jumps of about 10-30 positions which I would guess are triggered by these various rules.

The stories listed in the article exhibit very different behavior where they jump hundreds of positions instantaneously. It's absolutely possible that this is triggered by some automatic mechanism but if that's the case then there's an enormous amount of signifance being assigned to the corresponding rules. If there's some random component to the ranking then I highly doubt that it would be responsible for jumps of this magnitude.

I try to emphasize in the article that I do think it's possible that there's a hidden flagging threshold that's responsible and that the data can't tell us with certainty whether or not that's the case. I just personally find it unlikely that that's what happened for all of these stories. If you ran a site like Hacker News then would you put an admin link next to each post that pushes it off of the front page? I know that I would.

[1] - [https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I didn't understand why the guy's PayPal story was removed from the front page -- the one about PayPal seizing a $40k USD balance without warning, allegedly due to a 2% chargeback rate over several years of doing business and hundreds of thousands of dollars in successful transactions.

I thought that the point of HN was auto-moderation? Perhaps now that HN has seen great increases in popularity, the quality of content has to be more carefully controlled, lest the quality of posts on the HN front page slowly enter a death spiral towards that of reddit.

"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." ― George Carlin

<comment><USER23> I don't think the Paypal story was "removed". That story is now on page 2. Yesterday, it stayed on the front page all day. It's decay from the 1st page to the 2nd page a day later seems comparable to other stories with ~200 comments.

The author's meaning of "remove from the frontpage" means _abruptly_ disappearing from the front page and you still don't see it in the subsequent 6 or more pages.

<comment><USER24> Right. Stories that get buried fall from the front page to, like, the 50th. Not to the 2nd.

<comment><USER25> That's not quite true. "Buried" just means "gravity has been increased." Sometimes the gravity is adjusted massively, which moves stories to the 50th page. But it's very common for stories to go from page 1 to page 2. Even more common is to go from rank ~5 to rank ~29.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A few months ago I wrote a tool that scrapes HN and detects moderator activity (and provides interesting stats in general). I posted it twice and it didn't receive much attention, and the database storage requirements starting to get out of hand, so I killed it. It seems like an appropriate time to bring it up again. The source code is here:

[https://github.com/SirCmpwn/hn-transparency](https://github.com/SirCmpwn/hn- transparency)

Some screenshots:

[https://sr.ht/WBEt.png](https://sr.ht/WBEt.png)

[https://sr.ht/30Tv.png](https://sr.ht/30Tv.png)

If there's interest, I can put this back up and start pruning old data so it's more maintainable. The data I collected shows a lot of questionable moderator activity and a lot of abuse of flagging. I'm also unhappy with HN sending all comments on paywalled posts (which are against the rules) to /dev/null, when they're usually at least willing to talk about things.

<comment><USER27> _I wrote a tool that scrapes HN and detects moderator activity (and provides interesting stats in general)._

Sounds great! It might be good to distinguish between "moderator activity" (which to me implies that a human reads and makes a decision) and "moderation activity" (which covers automatic adjustments such as the frequently faulty "flame detection algorithm").

 _If there 's interest, I can put this back up and start pruning old data so it's more maintainable._

Yes, I think it would be very useful to have this available.

<comment><USER26> >Sounds great! It might be good to distinguish between "moderator activity" (which to me implies that a human reads and makes a decision) and "moderation activity" (which covers automatic adjustments such as the frequently faulty "flame detection algorithm").

Unfortunately this information isn't made available. More analysis of the data is necessary to identify trends that can be used to distingish these.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Historically, the mods have not killed a post for discussing Hacker News meta, although on occasion they apply a penalty to meta submissions. (the original post only had 32 upvotes, which is enough to get swallowed)

Indeed, HN recently allowed a post that _advocated gaming the system_ because it encouraged debate: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362)

A conspiracy theory, even backed by data, is not the best application of Occam's Razor.

<comment><USER29> Presenting the facts out of context isn't helpful. The original post might have "only had 32 upvotes" but, as mentioned in this article, it received about 20 in less than an hour. More than enough to get to the front page, where it was steadily receiving more upvotes until it just vanished. The post was not "swallowed".

<comment><USER28> "20 in less than an hour" is not a fast velocity.

<comment><USER29> It was enough to get on the front page.

The point is that the post wasn't swallowed in the usual sense. We now know that the original post fell drastically because it was being flagged by users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Don't forget that HN tries to detect vote fraud.

So some articles might simply disappear because the OP asked too many friends for upvotes or because of false positives.

<comment><USER31> Does HN actually suffer this? I know its done on Reddit and by who in one case; just having a family member active in politics gets you good insight how many sites they try to manipulate.

I was hoping that HN's flag system would sufficient for the community to self censor. Perhaps we need a flag on comments too, something you can't see. I would also prefer that posts don't transition through the lighter grays as they get down voted but disappear completely once the dead threshold is met. That would prevent some piling on that does happen

<comment><USER28> > Does HN actually suffer this?

Oh yes. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13749685](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13749685)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's very interesting to note the number one pulled story: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741276](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741276).

If you take a look at the comments, it's theorized there that the story got pulled not because of moderator action, but because people abused the flagging mechanism. Given the content, and given the principal person under discussion, this seems pretty likely to me.

<comment><USER33> In the comments you link to, dang _is_ the moderator, so he isn't theorizing when he says:

> It is the usual tug of war between upvotes and flags

<comment><USER32> Good point :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The main problem I have with this is that similar to Reddit, HN is advertised as open-minded, free-talking place by the team themselves.

When you then secretly censor stuff, because it doesn't fit your agenda, be it politically or financially, it makes you look even more like a hypocrite.

Branding yourself liberal while employing fascist methods (censoring and banning) seems to be a trend, not only on the internet.

<comment><USER35> Ive noticed a lack of Assange, Wikileaks and Snowden discussions up in here.

CIA Vault 7, like 1 thread or something, yeah right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The list of stories the author claims "have moderator fingerprints on them" does not seem to have any kind of common pattern at all which would support such a claim.

Edit: to be clear, with common pattern I mean the topics of the submission (obviously they have one common pattern, which is dropping out of the front page quickly). They do not reveal some secret agenda moderators might follow or something like that.

</comment><comment><USER37> Apparently I'm going to go against the flow to say that I'm perfectly fine with the way HN is moderated. In fact, I think the moderation is probably the reason why I come here. If magazines, TV shows, and journals have editors, it seems completely natural to me that a quality website should have one too.

More often than not, keeping a community from turning into 4chan requires some heavy moderation (reddit's AskHistorians comes to mind, with entire threads nuked at once), and it's often a thankless job. I'm happy that HN managed to keep it's overall spirit, and I thank the mod team for that.

</comment><comment><USER38> I predict that one of the biggest issues in tech over the next few years will be 'silent moderation.' Tech companies like to present the illusion that it is all 'just an algorithm' but that is deceptive.

Silent curation and other practices like shadow-bannning are unethical and symptomatic of a mentality that seeks to avoid confrontation. If things go well we'll see more transparency over time. A good start for a site like HN would be to create another page that shows just the titles of the submissions rejected (no links). People can google for those titles if they are interested.

</comment><comment><USER39> I wrote in detail in 2013 about how the Hacker News algorithm works and the penalties that can drop stories from the front page. My analysis was based on reverse engineering the algorithm from observed behavior and comparing with the published Arc code. This latest analysis seems kind of reinventing the wheel.

[http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking- really...](http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really- works.html)

Interestingly, my 2013 article also suddenly dropped off the front page. Apparently it somehow triggered "voting ring detection" and was penalized. (I'm not part of a voting ring of course.)

</comment><comment><USER40> Cache/Mirror: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://sangaline.com/post/the- stories-that-hacker-news-removes-from-the-front-page/)

<comment><USER41> Archive: [http://web.archive.org/web/20170313124045/http://sangaline.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20170313124045/http://sangaline.com/post/the- stories-that-hacker-news-removes-from-the-front-page/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I don't think I understand your figures correctly, because none of them (except the last) seem to show any significant drop. There's a drop of about 10 positions in one of them but I wouldn't call that particularly significant, and it even climbs back up after twenty minutes or so.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry if I didn't make this clear enough in the article but all of the stories in "Suppressed Story Trajectories" either drop off by hundreds of positions or disappear completely after their plotted line ends. They all match the criteria laid out in the previous paragraph. I used a larger y-scale on the last figure to show the full trajectory because that was a special case where the story didn't disappear completely and the trajectory after the jump was relevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> [http://hnrankings.info](http://hnrankings.info) is a nice UI to see this happening in real time.

Here is an example of three submissions, two flagged enough to get kicked off the front page (for poor use of sources on a contentious topic) but not get marked as 'flagged':

[http://hnrankings.info/13714928,13714987,13715552/](http://hnrankings.info/13714928,13714987,13715552/)

</comment><comment><USER44> I find this sort of conspiratorial meta complaint boring and (IMHO) off topic. I didn't flag it, but I'd understand if others did.

<comment><USER45> It seems to me that it's healthy if we as a community are able to discuss issues with how the community is policed. Some may find it boring, but I'd argue that it's useful.

<comment><USER46> I agree. I thought the write-up was fair and reasonably level headed.

If something popular (and surely by definition of being on the front page it is) is suddenly removed, people are bound to be interested in the reason why? Was the source discredited? Was it just a copyright issue? A simple filter for spiked stories would be good, just with a note on the reason why.

Of course HN don't have to implement this, but it would be of benefit to the community.

<comment><USER47> But the answer is always going to be "users flagged it", or "the flamewar detector was triggered", or "the vote ring detector was triggered". And advice is always going to be "if you notice something unusual email the mods to discuss it, because they can fix it if you send them an email; they might not see it if you leave a comment in a thread".

<comment><USER46> My point is you don't notice every post that gets removed and there is currently no transparancy on the reason why.

HN doesn't have to be transparent, it's just a site with it's own agenda (by that I don't mean evil agenda, but it is there for a reason) but if you want to grow the community, I think clearly identifying why things were removed is a reasonable thing to ask. If every one it marked "flagged by users" I'd worry that there is no manual intervention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I'm pretty happy with the way HackerNews handles posts and can only recommend to them to aggressively moderate in the future, too.

There are way to many toxic users, trolls, shills, astro-turfers, voting rings, paid advertising, political organisations, disinformation campaigns, and other 'special interest' parties on the Net to be able to do without strong moderation.

<comment><USER49> "There are way to many toxic users, trolls, shills, astro-turfers, voting rings, paid advertising, political organisations, disinformation campaigns, and other 'special interest' parties on the Net to be able to do without strong moderation."

That you worry about these things on the internet instead of real life (like the ones in our government) is rather telling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> > The stories that Hacker News removes from the front page (sangaline.com)

is : [http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker- new...](http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-news-ranking- algorithm/)

</comment><comment><USER51> Conversely, I've wondered how some stories (e.g., [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13857880](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13857880)) hit the top of the front page with only a few points.

Edit: Thanks all. I get it now :)

<comment><USER52> Protip: every post hits the front page. Some posts just stay there longer.

<comment><USER53> Not every story. But some stories are cherrypicked by the mods to be shown for a short time in the front page. It's like a second chance for some good submissions.

Old explanation by dang: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Paul-ish Could it be that moderators see things we can't, eg vote manipulation and astro-turfing?

<comment><USER54> Possible and very likely

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I had, in the past, found that a post was deleted. I was so enraged by that action that I had abandoned HN for almost a year. It wasn't my post. But, I found the action arbitrary. I do understand that it is important to keep the spirit of HN and actively discourage posts that might take HN the same way as infinite other internet forums. Since the guidelines cannot be clearly interpreted, there will always be some controversy about what should or should not have been removed. This case is different though, because the post was down-voted out by the community.

</comment><comment><USER56> Interesting. Another aspect of HN that I've noticed are stories that are not censored but actually promoted. Some time ago, I've noticed that some stories were few hours old and had 4 votes yet they were in top 15 position on HN. I never understood how that's possible without some kind of manipulation.

I've collected some of these anomalies. Peruse them and analyze them in this album:

[https://imgur.com/a/6OvnE](https://imgur.com/a/6OvnE)

Maybe OP can find a pattern in these.

<comment><USER53> Some stories are cherrypicked by the mods to be shown for a short time in the front page. It's like a second chance for some good submissions.

Old explanation by dang: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Mention "unions" or "professionalism" or anything that involves giving the _actual value that a developer produces to the developer_ and the story will disappear very quickly. Maybe that's because of the mods or maybe it's because of the flagging by readers who have the pro-state-capitalist argument so ingrained in them. Whatever it is, it biases Hacker News in a bad way.

</comment><comment><USER58> This is why we are working on Mineranker, an open source newsfeed and ranking platform: [https://github.com/francisypl/mineranker](https://github.com/francisypl/mineranker)

If you are interested in more open newsfeed ranking systems, check it out.

</comment><comment><USER59> It's probably a combination of flagging and other factors. Obvious the mods aren't going to want to make their algos transparent. Flagging removes story completely but perhaps mods have the power to bump a story off the page but without flagging it.

</comment><comment><USER60> It seems to me that the stories (all headlines read as controversial, as do the texts that I dug into) are removed due to flagging by users.

It would seem to me that if you're looking to grind your political axe, this is not the best place to do so.

</comment><comment><USER61> Does anyone know why some posts have a rel="nofollow" in the link? (not just these no-comment ycombinator promotional posts)

I asked this before and a mod said I should ask again via mail, but never got a response from email@example.com.

<comment><USER53> At some time, the post with few upvotes (perhaps < 5 or something) had the rel="nofollow" attribute to discourage spammers to get a "follow" until the post was flagged. I'm not sure if that is still the current criteria or if they are using some additional signal to enable/disable the "nofollow" attribute.

Probably the mods don't want to disclose the complete criteria, because it may change constantly without warning. Try to send again an email again, but I guess you will get in the reply only a general idea of the system.

If you see something horribly misclassified, try sending an email to the mods.

<comment><USER61> Thanks, that's reasonable and makes sense!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> @foob, thought you might be interested in this "visual front page" of HN [https://www.sizzleanalytics.com/HackerNews](https://www.sizzleanalytics.com/HackerNews)

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm glad I saw this here. HN has some of the strangest draconian moderation of any website i've ever visited.

Though, i'm continually driven back here because of the insanely high quality of the comments here.

</comment><comment><USER64> I still browse HN daily, but I lost confidence in the moderators after I posted an article that trended rapidly with an interesting, useful discussion and then suddenly dropped off the front page.

I asked the moderators why this happened. Their explanation was that the article I posted was a duplicate, and therefore created a distraction for readers who wanted to comment on new material. This struck me as total bullshit, but I tried to be constructive and proposed a method of merging multiple threads on the same article. I never got a response.

</comment><comment><USER65> >> That's about 2.1% so it's not a particularly common occurrence but it is happening on a daily basis.

I would say that 1/50 front page stories being buried _is_ particularly common.

</comment><comment><USER66> This is called "burying" and it is unremarkable. (This story is likely to be buried.)

The stories that are buried are not appropriate for the front page. The reason you come to Hacker News is because it has a better front page, with better comments under it, than other places. You experience the benefit of this editorial intervention each and every day.

I've had a story buried as it was gaining a lot of traction very quickly: this one. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11920431](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11920431)

The quality of the comments was inordinately low and it didn't look like it would be improving, which is the reason it was buried.

No complaints from me around this. You can email the moderators if you want to know their reasoning. (I'm not one.)

People here need to understand and be thankful for the extraordinary and ongoing work that the moderators do every single day to keep this place an appropriate place for interesting, deep discussion along the editorial lines chosen. It is not a democracy (see: reddit) but I find the moderators generally extremely fair.

As far as I understand the moderators bury tons of stories (often political, link-bait, etc), which do however get traction quickly until they do so. It is easy to get traction through click-bait.

Generating serious discussion is harder. For example, this title promises "the stories that Hacker News removes" \-- but is not really about the stories that Hacker News removes. For example the author does not analyze the comments under them or see why it derails or is not a good contribution to HN.

It is more of a click-bait title is bait-and-switch, and is designed to generate easy outrage.

There's nothing remarkable here despite the traction this story is getting. It is part of the hidden workings that keep HN great. Dan and Scott (the moderators) do an extremely good and thankless job keeping the principles of this place alive.

You have no idea how hard they work and I've seen them make difficult and intricate decisions. (Sometimes as simple as detaching a thread that was derailing an important discussion.) In my opinion this story does not belong on the front page.

<comment><USER28> > I've had a story buried as it was gaining a lot of traction very quickly: > this one. > [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11920431](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11920431)

I would have flagged that submission if I saw it since it's flamebait.

<comment><USER66> That's not what flamebait means, you likely mean clickbait. There's nothing to disagree with there - all commenters agreed that lightweight sites are great. The title was also completely true.

But you are right, it was inappropriate. My point is there were 43 upvotes in a matter of a few minutes (and more coming) but it was not generating good discussion. The top comment:

>>hyperbovine 269 days ago [-]

>>Loads instantly, looks fine on mobile, the thing(s) you are probably interested in are linked right from the front page. As usual, Buffet is onto something here.

>>> walrus01 269 days ago [-]

>>> Looks fine in Lynx, too!

>>> [http://imgur.com/yAEimmZ](http://imgur.com/yAEimmZ)

Which is why I submitted it. I simply thought it was interesting.

However, although all the comments agreed with it (there was no flaming) and it was getting traction, the comments were simply not very high quality or generating any good discussion. It simply wasn't worthy of the front page despite getting voted there organically. I have no problem with it being buried.

<comment><USER67> I think flamebait is the correct word, because the discussion would have just ended in the usual "modern web" complaints interspersed with people saying that these things have legitimate uses, and so on and so on. They're never productive discussions, just full of ranting and flaming.

<comment><USER66> But as you can see, no one in the discussion actively disagreed with anyone else. (No one flamed anyone.) It just wasn't very substantive and the reason it was buried.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Good writeup. Ironic that this story is #1 on the front page now.

</comment><comment><USER47> This blog suggest that moderator action must have been necessary, but seems to say that flags are unimportant.

I disagree. Just a few flags can cause a story to drop off the front page.

<comment><USER20> HN is like reddit where the 'downvotes' on a story outweigh the upvotes 30 to one or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I've been wondering what happened to this story, which was doing better than most but didn't appear anywhere on first 15 hn pages.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12557020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12557020)

[https://twitter.com/trottiest/status/779036903517491200](https://twitter.com/trottiest/status/779036903517491200)

<comment><USER2> It set off the HN flamewar detector. That's a software penalty that kicks in when discussions get overheated relative to upvotes. We eventually turned that penalty off on it.

<comment><USER69> Interesting. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Interesting discussion, and therefore, logically, interesting post. Oddly, I begin to wonder whether a variation on a bet system wouldn't be useful. Flagging or up-voting don't come with any cost attached. The only current cost I can see is related to pissing off a group or sub-group, which is not conducive to productive exchange. Just a thought from someone who has never flagged anything.

</comment><comment><USER52> There's a subreddit for pages that get deleted from their front page. There's often good discussion around those pages and it's usually for a good reason they were removed. But sometimes there does appear to be real bias. It'd be nice if I could see what sort of stuff is getting removed and be able to discuss why.

</comment><comment><USER71> Some of those links are closed for voting for some reason. It seems that you can upwote the rest (including this "Stories that HN removes..." thread) but the vote count will not change anyway. Maybe is just a bug, maybe not. I don't know.

Updated: Probably just a bandwidth issue. After 20 minutes the vote count is changing again.

</comment><comment><USER72> Afaik there is a mechanism to remove flame bait articles. If a link gets too many comments too quickly, it gets removed.

<comment><USER73> If that's true, that seems like the sort of thing that would lead to a ton of false positives getting flagged for removal. I'm sure big news events like the Wikileaks Vault7 release would generate lots of comments. Doing a quick search on HN, I see the top posts related to Vault7 have <15 points and no more than single digit comments.

I find this worrisome. Vault7 is the type of thing that I would expect to generate significant discussion here.

<comment><USER74> It's been covered to death here. There were at least half a dozen posts on that in the last week that made over 200 points (the main one at 2697).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810015](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810015) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13824032](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13824032) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13844389](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13844389) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811914](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811914) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13813160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13813160) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13840544](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13840544)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> I've had one post removed from the top spot on the front page: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576041)

I origionally posted with the title "For a moment, I thought bing was down" or something (I don't remember the origional title). The title was later changed to:

Title: "Bing doesn't support SSL" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576041)

Later, the story was was removed entirely after I wrote the following comment:

" Actually, it's been like this a really long time. I just noticed, that HN stories which have nondescript titles fare better, so I decided to conduct a little experiment. 1st spot on the front page seems to confirm my hypothesis. " [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576342](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576342)

I certainly understand why the mods removed the "story", but at the same time, I felt that the discussion of the "non-descript title bias" would have been an interesting one to have.

<comment><USER75> It seems like Hacker News doesn't like hackers, given the downvotes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> I had something that was removed from the front page of reddit and hn nearly simultaneously in 2011 - and I hadn't posted it on either, it was just my content. I saw it in the logs; some giant cliff.

I've always wondered if there's cross collaboration since then.

</comment><comment><USER47> If you notice something weird happening with your submissions you should email the mods. They're happy to explain what's going on and to have a look to see if the flags are fair.

</comment><comment><USER77> Hacker News is nothing but a censored echo chamber, pretending otherwise at this point is pure ignorance. Anything that doesn't fit the narrative will be beaten down or removed.

<comment><USER78> If it's ignorance, then it's not pretense :)

In any case, I don't necessarily disagree, but I've yet to see good evidence of the shadowy cabal, rather than user-directed flagging. I mean, just look at the list in the article: does it point to any kind of "beating down stuff that doesn't fit the narrative"?

<comment><USER79> I mean at some level, completely understandable/expected that the community at news.ycombinator.com will have the corporate/VC dick up its ass to a degree.

And not always a bad thing, even if I think this place could use a GNAA troll every now and then. I don't need 10 cynical articles about big tech every morning. Those views need to be heard but at some point it's not interesting to me, that's not the stuff that keeps me refreshing HN while I should be programming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Transparency is nice but most social news sites don't care for it.

If there was a middle ground it probably would be a section where you can specifically view threads that were removed from view.

</comment><comment><USER81> A useful data point missing from the article would have been the moderator's response to an email inquiring as to the story's history.

</comment><comment><USER73> I would like to see a monthly version of this post, similar to the recurring "Who's Hiring" that happens every month.

</comment><comment><USER82> Was it critical of Google or one of the other mega corps? I've noticed oftentimes info that is disappears quickly on here.

</comment><comment><USER83> My universities firewall blocked the link :(

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice article. Not so nice to rip the HN comments and display them below the article.

</comment><comment><USER84> I guess the acid test will be what happens to this post. If the first one was removed via manual intervention for whatever reason, then this one surely will be too.

</comment><comment><USER85> I think it was removed because of the blatant linking to your site, considered spam by most of us

<comment><USER28> Hacker News encourages original content as long as it is high quality/people aren't spamming it every other day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> I didn't find this particular OP to be as enlightening as its current upvote count suggests, but the previous post that was supposedly disappeared was very interesting and well-written. Considering how many upvotes this OP gotten, the purported short-shrift the previous post got was fortuitous ;)

</comment><comment><USER87> The rules here do seem to be petty and arbitrary, modding people down and banning accounts because the management object to the opinions expressed therein.

<comment><USER2> If you're going to accuse us of something that awful you ought to supply links so (a) we can answer and (b) people can make up their own minds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Posting on a social news site is a privilege, not a right. I've had stuff removed from Reddit and a few from Hacker News that got flagged after going on the front page...I've had stories on Reddit that got many upvotes and still removed just as it was going viral because the mods didn't like it...it's just the way it goes. It def. can seem unfair at times. No question about it.

<comment><USER88> > Posting on a social news site is a privilege, not a right.

I certainly don't share the sentiment. There are lots of places I or other people can visit and post to, what makes this particular site commend _value_ is precisely the community and user-base it has fostered over the years. Thus, I believe that this kind of _meta_ discussion does provide considerable value to the community.

<comment><USER89> It may be a privilege, but in this case my reading Hacker News is a privilege for _them_ , and not their right. And I want to know what stories are manually suppressed in order to decide if i still grant them that privilege.

Also, check out Tim Berner Lee's article about the internet being hijacked by the likes of Facebook and Google in order to understand why your 'I am grateful for the privilege' attitude is wrong...

Edit: argh, I attached this to the wrong post. I was responding to paulpauper of course.</comment></comment></comment>


"This app is for rich people. [Not for] poor countries like India and Spain." - <AUTHOR> http://variety.com/2017/biz/news/snapchat-evan-spiegel-only-for-rich-people-anthony-pompliano-1202028526/ <comment><USER2> Frankly, and I ask this as a citizen of Spain's poorer neighbor, even if he did, so what? Should he have said "resource constrained countries" or "countries with negative cashflow situation"? Or should he care on an ethical basis whether people in those countries use Snapchat or not?

He's right. We're fucking poor and so we make for lousy consumers.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc)

</comment><comment><USER3> An article predicated on hearsay... Not really much substance.</comment>


Show HN: An easy way to optimize routes - <AUTHOR> https://routible.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've been a longtime reader of PG articles and just joined startup school.

I accidentally started a pest control company out of university and we scaled to 10 employees in one year. I had no clue how to run a pest control company.

It was a mess running the company and thought of a software that could make operations easier.

So we built our initial MVP, a large EV car company from the Valley (take a guess) signed up and broke our MVP a few times. We rebuilt the software in a scalable manner and added route optimization among other upgrades.

[Redacted] is the easiest way to optimize routes that enables mobile service fleets to complete more appointments every day.

If you are interested in trying out our software, please email me at [redacted].

Appreciate any feedback.

</comment><comment><USER2> Interesting concept! And the website is very clear, clean and well designed. My only feedback is when you said "optimize routes" I didn't know what you meant. I'd add more context into your one liner - ie "an easy way to optimize driver routes" or something along those lines.

Curious - How did you get that "ev car company" to test your software?</comment>


Ask HN: What's the daily schedule of a Hacker (you)? - <AUTHOR>

Hello to fellow hackers,
I am recently hatched out of my geek shell and have started doing real work (that brings me money). I am doing this for a month now (a long time if you work (sit in front of computer) for 12-16 hours a day).
I would love to know how the battle-tested hackers manage their day.
I mean at what hours you work?
What after that?
What time you give to read books?
When do you learn new things?
How do you manage side projects?
If you are a freelancer, you'd  know of the vacuum b/w two projects. How do you tackle that?
My experience: Earlier I used to read books all the time, start doing things with new/old different technologies, get bored and leave them half-way, jumped to next. Now I got a mentor who gives me work to do. I love my work and spend almost all my time on it. Yes, I did have a kind of burnout. It lasted for a small time (a week or two), but now I don't do my "work" project 16 hours a day, just 10-12 hours. But I am struggling to get time for reading books and learning new things. I am doing javascript primarily, I want to continue my python projects along with it, but I am unable to manage it. So I am asking here how other's do it. Don't be mean okay? <comment><USER2> My morning ritual is getting up at 6 am and do 30 min of jogging, after that I schedule 30 min of learning which includes reading a book, reading a tutorial or just watching some speakers on Youtube. After that I do 10 min of planning and I start work. I use the Pomodoro technique. I do not work more than 8 hours/day and you shouldn't too. Try to allocate time to learn and improve yourself every day. Hope that helps.</comment>


Why is ADHD more common in boys than girls? - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/why-is-adhd-more-common-in-boys-than-girls-92151 <comment><USER2> This ignores evidence that ADHD is not a rigorous diagnosis. Even the CDC map shows that educational institutions that are more authoritarian report far higher cases.

[https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/prevalence.html](https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/prevalence.html)

Attention is earned from students, not allocated by adults.</comment>


Facebook News is off to a rough start - <AUTHOR> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/pretty-much-no-one-has-seen-facebook-news-yet-but-its-off-to-a-rough-start/ <comment><USER2> While the article could have spent its time going into specific critiques of the sources Facebook chooses to include, citing a quote from a Verge article and then listing a large assortment of tweets that are longer than the rest of the editorial content hardly counts as a decent article. Are there other sources that cover this topic more robustly?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/newsonomics-will- facebooks...](https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/newsonomics-will-facebooks- new-news-tab-be-a-milestone-or-millstone/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Between this and the slow-selling Facebook Portal, I can only assume the C-Suite doesn't realize the problematic images the brand now evokes.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think Facebook understands what "news" is.

Mark Zuckerberg is quoted as saying "Part of having this be a trusted source is that it needs to have a diversity of views in there, so I think you want to have content that represents different perspectives." If "diversity of views" means "covering a wide range of people and topics", sure. But Breitbart isn't doing that — they're covering mainstream politics from a far-right perspective with sensational and often false articles.

No one objectively reads Breitbart and thinks it's in the same league as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Facebook is basically eroding our political discourse in order to kowtow to a vocal minority of conservative users and talking heads.</comment>


The Shortest Research Paper Ever Published - <AUTHOR> https://sparkonit.com/2019/05/05/the-shortest-research-paper-ever-published <comment><USER2> _"Euler proposed that the equation, a^n + b^n = c^n doesn't hold true if the value of "n" is greater than "2". Then in 1966, two mathematicians L.J. Lander and T.R. Parkin came along and swiftly overturned his claim with a counterexample: 27^5 + 84^5 + 110^5 + 133^5 = 144^5"_

That's mixing Euler's claim that you need to sum at least n n-th powers to get another n-th power ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_sum_of_powers_conjec...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_sum_of_powers_conjecture)) with the (less general) Fermat's last theorem ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_last_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_last_theorem))

The example in the paper disproved Euler's conjecture, but did nothing about Fermat's.

</comment><comment><USER3> Euler proposed that the equation, a^n + b^n = c^n doesn't hold true if the value of "n" is greater than "2". Then two mathematicians came along and overturned his claim with a counterexample: 27^5 + 84^5 + 110^5 + 133^5 = 144^5

Is it me or there's something wrong with that paragraph? x)

</comment><comment><USER4> >Euler proposed that the equation, an + bn = cn doesn't hold true if the value of "n" is greater than "2".

This is wrong. That is Fermat's last theorem, which is true. Euler's conjecture is related but more general:

>for all integers n and k greater than 1, if the sum of n kth powers of positive integers is itself a kth power, then n is greater than or equal to k:

        a1k + a2k + ... + ank = bk ⇒ n ≥ k

</comment><comment><USER5> See also

      Conway and Soifer, " Can n^2+ 1 unit equilateral triangles cover an equilateral triangle of side > n,say n + ε?" American Mathematical Monthly (2005).

which is two words and two figures.

Annotated so that it's understandable: [https://fermatslibrary.com/s/shortest- paper-ever-published-i...](https://fermatslibrary.com/s/shortest-paper-ever- published-in-a-serious-math-journal-john-conway-alexander-soifer)

</comment><comment><USER6> There is a story in a similar spirit about showing that one of the supposed Mersenne primes (2^67-1) was in fact composite -- (probably apocryphally) by simply doing the arithmetic by hand on a blackboard during a talk.

For more details, see:

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_prime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_prime)

\- [https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/2105/whats-the- famou...](https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/2105/whats-the-famous-story- about-a-mathematician-who-gave-a-talk-without-saying-a-w/2106)

\- [https://mathoverflow.net/questions/207321/how-did-cole- facto...](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/207321/how-did-cole- factor-267-1-in-1903)

</comment><comment><USER7> Numberphile did a video on short papers: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvvkJT8myeI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvvkJT8myeI)

</comment><comment><USER8> It's fun but not very interesting. A real research paper would explain the method they used to find this examples. Even only a few lines if the method is already known.

<comment><USER9> "A direct search on the CDC 6600 yielded"

That's probably enough description of methodology for many people here to reproduce the results, right? :)

<comment><USER10> I wouldn't even know where to start looking for a working CDC 6600.

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't either. But I guess I don't consider a CDC 6600 specifically to be critical to the methodology. I just meant that a lot of people around here could certainly write a computer program for direct search of the sum of four fourth power integers. It seems like this might even be one of the problems on Project Euler...?

<comment><USER10> I was just pretending to misunderstand as a joke.

You did make me curious, though. The numbers are fairly small. I implemented the dumbest possible brute force search for all combinations of numbers 1-255. On my laptop, it found 133^5 + 110^5 + 84^5 + 27^5 = 144^5 in about 50 minutes.

I'd guess that this laptop is something like 100,000 times faster than the CDC 6600, so that dumb search would have taken about a decade. However, you can get at least a couple orders of magnitude improvement with some simple improvements.

<comment><USER11> I took it down to under 5 mins on my old Macbook by memoizing exponentiation and aborting calculation/addition/comparison of later terms if the earlier sum exceeded the result.

<comment><USER12> Very nice! For comparison, here is a Prolog program that uses CLP(ℤ), constraint logic programming over integers, to search for solutions:

        solution(Options, Vs) :-
                A^5 + B^5 + C^5 + D^5 #= E^5,
                Vs = [A,B,C,D,E],
                A #>= B, B #>= C, C #>= D,
                length(_, Exp),
                Upper #= 2^Exp,
                portray_clause(Upper),
                Vs ins 1..Upper,
                labeling(Options, Vs).

The speed of this program depends a lot on the Prolog implementation, and also on the options that are used to specify the search strategy.

With this program, one can find a solution within one minute even with rather slow Prolog systems on (current) commodity machines:

        ?- time(solution([bisect], Vs)).
        1.
        2.
        4.
        8.
        16.
        32.
        64.
        128.
        256.
        % 609,346,692 inferences, 57.855 CPU in 58.197 seconds (99% CPU, 10532282 Lips)
        Vs = [133, 110, 84, 27, 144] .

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's an even shorter one:

Upper, Dennis. "The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of "writer's block"." Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis 7.3 (1974): 497.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/pdf/jab...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/pdf/jaba00061-0143a.pdf)

<comment> frosted-flakes The reviewer comment is hilarious:

> _COMMENTS BY REVIEWER A_

> _I have studied this manuscript very carefully with lemon juice and X-rays > and have not detected a single flaw in either design or writing style. I > suggest it be published without revision. Clearly it is the most concise > manuscript I have ever seen—yet it contains sufficient detail to allow other > investigators to replicate Dr. Upper 's failure. In comparison with the > other manuscripts I get from you containing all that complicated detail, > this one was a pleasure to examine. Surely we can find a place for this > paper in the Journal—perhaps on the edge of a blank page._

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Link to a previous post that talks about short papers - including this one. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15737611](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15737611)

</comment><comment><USER15> Surprised no one linked to this well-known preprint by Asher Peres.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0310035](https://arxiv.org/abs/quant- ph/0310035)

</comment><comment><USER16> How do you discover these number in 1966?

</comment><comment><USER17> sure, but the paper could have included the code ... :)

</comment><comment><USER18> That's just poor research.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's probably about what we did to stop the global warming so far</comment>


Microsoft Surface Book 2 15-inch Review - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/12167/the-microsoft-surface-book-2-15-inch-review <comment><USER2> Very interesting bit about power draw:

> The 100-Watt AC adapter included with the Surface Book 2 is not quite > powerful enough to keep the system fully charged under a high load such as > this, so you can see there is some power draw from the battery (the green > line in the chart) which is leveraged to make up the difference. Over time, > the battery drops to about 95% charge, at which time the system drops the > GPU clock a bit to prevent draining the battery any further. Not all games > are going to run into this issue, but certain games will require more power > from the GPU and CPU than the power input can handle. However, the battery > will never completely be drained, as the system doesn't let it get out of > control.

Dishonest designs like this should be punished by consumers, in particular, considering that the Surface Book tablet battery is already a critical part of the laptop (it's comparatively small, and it's hard to replace).

<comment><USER3> Many, if not most, desktop-replacement laptops with 4+ cores are thermally limited on compute, and will throttle back under extended high load. I see it as a compromise of the form factor rather than dishonesty per se.

<comment><USER4> This isn't a case of thermal limiting - this is a case of the power supply being literally unable to supply enough power to run the system at its full capacity. If I can't use that 1060 at full power for more than 5% of the battery capacity, _even while plugged into the wall_ , isn't that misleading?

<comment><USER3> The limiting factor might be different but the effect is the same. A rose by any other name would leave you just as disappointed.

(I'm not certain that the limiting factor is actually different, FWIW. Dissipating 100W from a laptop isn't easy. Macbook Pros limit at 80W AFAIK. If the power supply could keep up, I'd expect it to get too hot anyway.)

<comment><USER5> Dissipating lots of heat from a laptop isn't that hard, it's just that the tradeoffs take the form of gaming laptops because the laws of thermodynamics are not shaped by consumer preferences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Each time anything Microsoft Surface I link #nailer's comment from 7 months ago [0]:

>One import thing with all Surface laptops that most people don't know:

>> Support is limited to the country you purchased the device in.

>Eg:

>\- If you buy an Apple laptop, and need a repair, they'll fix it if it's in warranty, regardless of where you are.

>\- If you buy a Microsoft laptop, and need a warranty repair done in a different country, Microsoft won't help you.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14400873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14400873)

<comment><USER7> _If you buy an Apple laptop, and need a repair, they 'll fix it if it's in warranty, regardless of where you are._

In my own experience this isn't the case, unless you mean AppleCare.

Anecdote: bought mbp in Shanghai Apple store and was informed that it was only covered in China unless I bought applecare, so I bought AppleCare.

Similar experience picking up some gear in Hong Kong one time ...

Not that my mbp ever gave me an ounce of trouble tho!

<comment><USER8> China might be an exception: I bought an iPhone in SF 1 year ago and had it repaired in a German Apple Store after calling the French customer support 1 month ago.

<comment><USER7> Maybe this is one of those things where they'll do it for you but don't make a contractual commitment to it ...

Maybe a way to boost AppleCare sales too :-J

<comment><USER9> They did it for me (Slovenia, UK) and I've never bought AppleCare in my life. In my case they even once made an exception to cover my defect when I was two weeks late after deadline to report it.

Edit: I think I misunderstood your comment. Yes, good service like this would make me more likely to buy AppleCare to extend it (even though I haven't yet).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a Surface Book from last year (performance base, i.e. dedicated GTX970 GPU). It is a wonderful machine from design to the incredible amount of hardware they manage to pack into it.

A big issue everyone should be aware of though is that it is limited in its ability to drive external displays. I bought it (and use it) as a desktop replacement, but I was quite disappointed to find that to drive even two external displays at 4K it is necessary to drop the refresh rate to 30hz on both. It would be interesting to know if this has been resolved with the new iteration.

I ended up buying two DisplayLink devices, and am now running three external displays at 4K (and 60hz), with only the main monitor being run by the Surface Book GPU.

I am overall really happy with the machine, as a portable development machine it is a monster that looks and feels fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER11> Can't help they missed a trick by not including Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports on this (plus a few regular USB 3 ports). Seems like a strange omission, and would have smashed the MBP... as long as you can get past not having MacOS.

<comment><USER12> I used to own the really annoying MacBook Pro mid-2016, and after 11 months I've still had to find something to connect via USB-C.

Do a lot of people use it?

<comment><USER13> In this case, the USB-C port is where you connect an external display

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/CHOETECH-Thunderbolt-Compatible- Mac...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/CHOETECH-Thunderbolt-Compatible-MacBook- ChromeBook/dp/B01M02FLYO)

edit - random USB-C to HDMI cable :)

<comment><USER14> Sure, but mini-displayport can do that just as well. The promise of USB-C is the ability to have a generic docking station, but I've not seen a lot of Macbooks using docking stations, and the Surface Dock is really nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Microsoft's Surface kit is the stuff Apple should be making. The Surface Studio is a better iMac than the iMac.

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface- stud...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface- studio/overview)

<comment><USER16> Implying that the operating system does not mean anything to users, that is obviously false.

<comment><USER17> Implying that Windows 10 is worse, that is obviously false.

<comment><USER16> Actually it is if you like non interrupted UX on a OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a Surface Pro 4 owner, the design is great but the drivers are awful and the entire thing feels hacked together software wise. I need more convincing. A colleague with a Surface Book suffers the same fate. Sadly I won't be buying Apple either, as two new touchbar Mac Pros I've had have reliability issues (sticking key on one, crashes from the Thunderbolt driver on another).

Can't beat the previous gen Macbook Pros for reliability, user experience and ruggedness.

<comment><USER19> Hmm. I own a Surface Pro 4 too, and I have a completely different experience. I love it and use it very often. It already _almost_ replaced my "big" Lenovo laptop as my working machine.

Doing everything on the Surface Pro that I also do on the bigger laptop - Programming, writing, image editing, ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Let's hope the screen holds up better than it's little brothers [http://flickergate.com/](http://flickergate.com/)

</comment><comment><USER21> I wish I could find a laptop with:

\- a none-nerfed NVidia GTX 1080 GPU

\- more than two hours of battery at full load

\- not a complete piece of garbage otherwise

I could deal with absolutely everything else on my own. Weight won't be a problem, as I'll be putting the thing in a backpack. The actual screen won't be a problem, I'll be plugging in a VR headset. Keyboard and trackpad aren't an issue, I'll be using VR controllers. I just want a max-spec VR rig that I can wear on my back for more than 2 hours. And if I'm not in VR, everything comes with USB-C now, so I should be able to setup a dock to my 4K monitor and good keyboard and mouse.

Hell, forget the battery. I'll hack together a DC powerbank on my own; it's not that hard. I just want full power and not-garbage WiFi and audio drivers.

But I've yet to find this computer. I've found a bunch of VR-ready laptops that creak under their own weight if you lift them by the corner, or they throttle the GPU even when plugged in, or they can't stay connected to a WiFi network for more than 4 hours, or they pick up EMF over the speakers from all over everywhere. I'm sorry, but if I'm going to be spending more than $3000 on a computer, I expect it to work and not break itself.

<comment><USER22> How are you planning on wearing this on your back? You need to exhast more than 200W of heat, you can't just put that into a backpack!

The battery required would be larger than the FAA will allow on an airplane; the limit is approximately 100 watt-hours and not surprisingly the largest battery I've ever seen in a laptop is 99 watt-hours.

<comment><USER21> Backpacks are easy to customize with sharp knives and duct tape, and you're assuming one battery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Below 2kg 15" laptop with a 1060 6GB? Hot damn impressive.

<comment><USER24> If only it had come with a 32GB of RAM option then this would be my dream laptop.

<comment><USER25> My laptop runs fine for development and all I need on 8GB. 16GB would be a waste.

What are you guys doing making you need 32?

<comment><USER24> I do a lot of 'small data' analysis. Being able to simply load my datasets into R or Python and start playing around with them is very important. Even if my initial data set is only ~4-5 GB in memory I can quickly end up with 4 or 5 different copies in memory when testing different approaches. Obviously I can work around memory limitation by using on-disk data structures, avoiding copying data and being careful with only keeping the most important data in memory, but the less I have to think about that sort of stuff the faster and easier it is to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It has only 16GB of RAM like the MacBook Pro!!!

<comment><USER27> Microsoft and Apple don't want to use power hungry regular DDR4 RAM, they use low power DDR RAM. LPDDR4, which supports 32GB, has been repeatedly delayed by Intel. We probably won't see 32GB "thin and light's" until 2019.

[https://macdaddy.io/macbook-pro-limited-16gb- ram/](https://macdaddy.io/macbook-pro-limited-16gb-ram/)

[http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/09/20/delays-in-intel- ca...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/09/20/delays-in-intel-cannon-lake- processor-rumored-again-may-impact-32gb-macbook-pro-plans)

<comment><USER28> As I understand it, and I may be wrong, the power usage of DDR4 compared to LPDDR3 under load is not that much higher, but the standby mode power draw is a lot higher, so the real reason is standby time and thinness.

Anecdata: I have a 32 gb RAM laptop (thinkpad t460p) and battery life is excellent while actively but lightly using it, but I charge it every day so I don't know what standby time is like. Also, while it is light and compact it is absolutely not thin.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, according to the article I linked to regular DDR4 RAM uses around 30% more power while in use and totally destroys standby time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Still no word on availability outside the US I'm guessing?

The 15" SB looks like a stellar machine, but given MS's non-worldwide support and the history of variable reliability of the Surface line, it doesn't look like a good idea to import it when you don't live in the US, the only country where it's currently available.

<comment><USER30> It's available from the Microsoft Store in Europe, probably will take time until it's available from third party retailers as it was only released last month:

UK from £1499 [https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/d/surface- book2/8MCPZJ...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/d/surface- book2/8MCPZJJCC98C/7B49?icid=PDPBuyBox-Surface-Book2-091117_en-gb)

DE from €1749 [https://www.microsoft.com/de-de/store/d/surface- book-2/8mcpz...](https://www.microsoft.com/de-de/store/d/surface- book-2/8mcpzjjcc98c/BXGX)

<comment><USER29> > It's available from the Microsoft Store in Europe

No. The links you provide are for the 13.5", notice they all specify a 1050 and make no mention of a 15" option unlike the US store[0].

The article and my comment are about the 15" machine, which is literally only available on the US storefront (not even the Canadian one[1]) with no word whatsoever that I could find (so far) as to its eventual availability outside the US.

[0] [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/d/surface- book-2/8MCPZ...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/d/surface- book-2/8MCPZJJCC98C?icid=Cat_Surface-NavLink3-SurfaceBook2-102517-en-us)

[1] [https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/store/d/surface- book-2/8MCPZ...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/store/d/surface- book-2/8MCPZJJCC98C?icid=SurfaceCat_Nav3_SurfaceBook2_101717_en-ca)

PS: comment formatting on HN is a pile of garbage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Have only skimmed the article, but it reads as something people would write about a MacBook Pro 5-7 years ago.

Is it time to switch back to Windows?

<comment><USER32> No, because Microsoft does things like this:

"For about eight days, some versions of Windows 10 quietly bundled a password manager that contained a critical vulnerability in its browser plug in, a researcher said Friday. The flaw was almost identical to one the same researcher disclosed in the same manager plugin 16 months ago that allowed websites to steal passwords." [1]

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/12/micro...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/12/microsoft-is-forcing-users-to-install-a-critically-flawed- password-manager/)

<comment><USER33> As opposed to this?

Anyone can login as "root" with empty password [1]

[1][https://www.wired.com/story/macos-high-sierra-hack- root/](https://www.wired.com/story/macos-high-sierra-hack-root/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I was hoping it was going to not have a keyboard, to be detachable. This is what I am in the market for, since I carry a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and use 'Synergy', the ideal is to have a high end i7 machine that is just a big tablet. I hoped this product would be it, to compliment my main laptop and be a secondary screen that has its own CPU.

<comment><USER29> > I was hoping it was going to not have a keyboard, to be detachable.

You were hoping for a device to be an entirely different device with no connection to its name whatsoever? The Book line is a laptop series with a low-autonomy detachable display.

What you're looking for is the Surface Pro, or an HP Spectre.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Still no 4k display. :(</comment>


Database Version Control - <AUTHOR> http://techportal.ibuildings.com/2011/01/11/database-version-control/ <comment><USER2> Interesting article, although it doesn't mention Ruby on Rails, which I believe has a fairly successful model for solving the described issues in schema management.

<comment><USER3> Or South, the de-facto standard data migration tool for Django.</comment></comment>


If Steve Jobs applied at Apple today, there's no chance in hell he'd get hired - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/03/if-steve-jobs-applied-for-a-job-at-apple-today-theres-no-chance-in-hell-hed-get-hired/ <comment><USER2> He wouldn't get hired at any company, thats why he built one!

</comment><comment><USER3> If they think they want this type of employee; they might be better served getting him/her through an acquisition of a start-up rather than hiring someone through a resume and an interview.</comment>