Always happy to oblige.

Take the case of Reddit. Programming reddit used to be the place where smart programmers used to hang around and have quality discussions about the subject they care about the most, but the simple fact that reddit supported other kinds of news/content in the form of subreddits made the site a place for a lot of funny, worthless and snarky comments. Now people are more interested in taking sides in worthless arguments (about Joel Spolsky?) than serious productive discussions.

Remember that I am not ranting about the quality of the users of reddit, but what I am trying to say is that reddit as a community has become bloated. Of course reddit does have a lot of brilliant hackers as users, but the place is not like what it used to be. I doubt that there can be serious (programming) discussions in reddit anymore. Reddit is becoming more of a Digg than anything else.

Meanwhile Hacker News is trying very hard to prevent the same thing happeneing to them. It is a low-traffic news site for programmers that has very high quality content and committed contributors. A few days ago the site was mentioned in some social websites (including reddit) and a lot of traffic came in, and guess what they did? Here is what Paul Graham suggested:

"We’ve had a huge spike in traffic lately, from roughly 24k daily uniques to 33k. This is a result of being mentioned on more mainstream sites. I hope this spike will subside, like past ones have. In the meantime I may temporarily hack a few things to make the site faster, like putting fewer results on threads pages.

You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang than women who create sites to get hired by Twitter."

That is a very bold step to take, and worth it if you take the quality of the content seriously.

It is not that the people using programming reddit and hacker news are different. Even if the same person visited both the sites, he will be more inclined to post funny remarks in reddit while he will give serious opinions in hacker news. Not that there is something bad in being humorous, but being too much funny is kinda annoying.

Taken from http://www.diovo.com/2009/04/broken-windows-theory-online-co...

As a Swedish citizen this sends shivers down my spine. Since we have a rather weak constitution with little division of power we've relied on the good faith and judgement of our officials to avoid corruption, which has worked pretty well so far.

But now, to send people to jail, fully aware that he's affiliated with stakeholders in the case, that's just sickening.

Okay, swedish prisons for intellectual property offenders probably have a summer camp atmosphere to it, but that's not really the point. To take someones liberty should not be taken lightly.

And the spate of Erlang articles which followed pg's quoted post was one of the funniest occurrences on Hacker News, ever.

There's a much higher standard here for humor than other sites. Things that are really, truly funny, especially while also being sublimely clever are often modded higher than all surrounding comments.

No, I just changed the name for a bit.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575487

"Programmers don’t like coding, they like problem solving."

While that's true for me to some extent, but what I also noticed is that I really like doing is building things. When I'm not coding, I woodwork, build RC airplanes, or find something else to work on.

The only time this site's name was really a problem for me was when I made the mistake of mentioning my business in a google-meaningful way on here (e.g. "business-name is targeted at the construction industry"), and google picked up my comment here as being higher rated than our website itself!

This was back in the days when we didn't have that much google-juice, and so the result was that hapless architects would search for "business-name" and find that the first result was a site called "Hacker News" which said that "business-name is targeted at the construction industry".

Needless to say, that was not exactly the best impression to make. Fortunately, pg was extremely gracious and altered the comment to remove the name of my business when I asked him.

I am not an anti-Microsoft person, but after having used Linux now without even Windows installed for two years straight, it is actually mentally painful to use Windows.

Yeah, use whatever works best for you -- but using Windows these days feels like I'm on my Big Wheel when I was three years old. In a rubber room.

Seriously? How on earth could this have not been uncovered long ago? I know that the pbay lawyers are really good, I wonder if they knew this all along and held it as a card in case they lost.

I mean, the judge is not just a member of a Swedish org campaigning for more strict copyright, he's on the board! Absolutely amazing, I can imagine him chuckling and rubbing his hands together when he had the opportunity to hear the case.

I do. I like Windows a lot. I'm completely platform agnostic and I've used all 3 major platforms at various times but I always come back to Windows.

I think there's a quiet majority of people out there who are perfectly happy with Windows but they don't tend to talk about it, whereas you do tend to get a lot of outspoken Mac and Linux users who are willing to both champion their platform as well as bash Windows at any given opportunity.