daenz

It sounds like you're saying you'd consciously be a better parent to a clone because you know it is a clone.

Regardless of the source of the problem, the end result is the same: not enough people. Cloning treats that symptom even if it doesn't address the source. But yes, you're left with a new problem: who will raise these new people? If it came down to it, the state. Or the state would assign children to couples.

>So this whole random idea of overpopulation is alarmism over nothing.

Underpopulation is what I was referring to. Some countries have extremely low birth rates, and stabilizing them is important.

>If I were raised by my parent-clone I would have matured faster and been more skilled at playing baby-roulette with a natural child.

This is leaning heavily on the assumption that your personality is primarily a product of your genetics, and not of your life experiences. Outside of relating on physiology, what makes you think you would understand their reactions to unique life experiences at such a young age?

Speaking as someone who had a dramatic personality shift from early trauma, I don't think that what you hypothesize is true.

Ethics aside, it would probably be good to conquer the population size problem. Then people can stop fighting about birth rates and immigration.

State-funded email with E2EE. Every citizen gets an email address. You don't have to use it (and it will probably suck compared to competitors), but you'll have it as a permanent fallback address. And presumably it will come with some legal protections and due process.

I think it's important to consider the context for this advice, which is introduced in the opening: dwindling funding and competition out to kill your company.

Presumably, the advice that follows is a direct result of those constraints. However, if you don't have those constraints, I don't think you need to grind yourself to the bone.

Yes, there will always be competition looking to eat your lunch. Is getting to market first and fastest the most important thing? Depends on the product. All-encompassing social media platform? Yes. High quality saas tool? Perhaps not. In most markets, there's always room for competitors, and even if you become an underdog, producing stable, affordable, high quality software can make you a serious competitor to a company 10x the size who is constantly breaking things and pissing off their users.

I understand they can do whatever they want, and I also know the relationship between YC and HN. They could make job posts blend in even more, artificially boost YC-positive content, and weigh down YC-negative content, and they would be totally within their rights, and if we don't like it we can leave.

I think I understand why you are defending HN. You see how a small community grew to what it is now, and all of the unpaid work that went into that. I don't think that is in conflict with the idea of being super transparent (to the point where it's obvious to everyone) about things like sponsored posts. It's clearly not obvious to everyone.

You make a good point about the hiring threads. I agree those are evidence that YC is making an effort to support non YC startups.

A dark pattern has nothing to do with whether they're justified in doing it (for instance, because this is a free site). The submissions could be marked with "YC Sponsored Post" they're still totally justified in doing it, but it would be less of a dark pattern than it is now.

Thanks, I read it. I don't mind the no-commenting rule tbh, if the submission was tagged as "YC Hiring Announcement" To me, the submissions currently feel like they're trying to present themselves as organic content. I understand you think differently. It would cost YC nothing to explicitly tag them though and put the whole "dark pattern" criticism to rest.

I understand your point, but it's not evidence for the opposing belief. And it cuts both ways, not just one way...people who think that it's a dark pattern but also don't care to engage.

Upvotes are a signal of support for an idea in the community. Whether strong or weak is debatable, but implying that they mean the opposite because of all the people who didn't care to vote is silly.

A lack of public support for an idea is not evidence for support for the idea, so I'm not sure why you would even bring up the hypothetical "whole bunch of us" that secretly feel the other way.

The top comment in this thread is the claim that it is a dark pattern, and many of the children comments are supporting that, so maybe consider that your perspective is not the majority one, or it's at least not as clear as you suggest.

I disagree that it's a false accusation. YCombinator benefits financially from putting their job postings on the front page, I think we can all agree on that. You seem to disagree that it's "manipulation" to make their job posting look nearly identical to a normal, organic user submission. I think it is a subtle dark pattern and explained my reasoning.

Special posts given special statuses are by definition not normal HN submissions, so representing them as nearly identical to normal HN submissions is misleading.

My definition of "HN submission" is "something that any member of the HN community can submit." You seem to be using a different definition that excludes the vast majority of the HN userbase.

>they simply look like every other submission because that's what HN submissions look like.

But they're not HN submissions, that's the point.

>If they were made to stand out you'd likely be complaining that they get even more preferential treatment because they stand out.

No I wouldn't, but thanks for telling me how I would feel.

I'm not "hyperventilating", I am attempting to answer your question...no need to be rude. Clearly it's a matter of opinion about where the line of "dark pattern" starts.

If we're going by formal definitions, here are a few[0]:

  More broadly, dark patterns supplant "user value...in favor of shareholder value".

  a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills

The hiring posts are deliberately made to look like every other submission, with the exception of not being able to comment on them. So in that way, they're misleading about what they are. They don't really trick users into doing anything, unless you count clicks from users who think they're about to engage with actual community content.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern

It's very cool, but from an auditing perspective, it's a nightmare. As a reviewer, I can't reason about the code in the same way that I could reason about human code, since there is no coherent formulation of the accomplished task. I can't say "why did it apply CORS to the entire flask app?" and expect reasoning that will fulfill my objective as a reviewer.

So while it could help blast out large swaths of code quickly, it still needs an expert at the wheel to be accountable for the changes to reviewers.

It's not condescending for someone to imply "I live somewhere important, you live somewhere unimportant" ?

Phrased another way, if someone came in for an interview and said "I'm from Laketon, Indiana", do you think it would be appropriate for the interviewer to say "Oh, you're from the middle of nowhere." ? I don't think that would be appropriate at all.

Just because you don't want to live there, doesn't make them "middle of nowhere" is my point. That's an extremely common elitist attitude that I see among tech people who look down their noses at people in rural communities.

>And no, "too bad, go live in the middle of nowhere" isn't an acceptable answer.

As someone who grew up in a small town, do you understand how condescending this is? People have homes there, have families there, work hard and live decent lives. Just because they live at a pace you're not accustomed to, doesn't make living there some kind of hellish existence. Many would say the same about a filthy, overcrowded, crime-ridden city, of which I've lived in several across the US.

There's a post office 5 miles away[0], where there are plenty of businesses that you could work at. Let's not be dramatic.

0. https://goo.gl/maps/y3dERcUkD7wMLzEW8

you have direct control over that.

>This is one of the most important moments in all of art history.

I agree, but not for the reasons you imply. It will force real artists to differentiate themselves from AI, since the line is now sufficiently blurred. It's probably the death of an era of digital art as we know it.

1) That's not what circular logic is. Circular logic would be if I said "they don't want to consider it because it's harmful and it's harmful because they don't want to consider it."

2) You asked me why I thought people don't want to consider that possibility, so it's pretty dishonest to now say the premise on which my opinion is based has no basis. If you were arguing in good faith, that's what you would have started with, eg: "People aren't avoiding it" not "Why do you think they are avoiding it."

They don't want to consider the possibility of X -> if they're wrong about X it would be harmful.

Where's the cycle?

Why would they? It just undermines peoples confidence in the institution, with no gain. That's the lens that these kinds of things are looked at through. Better to just quietly alter the messaging.