Anyone who understands Bitcoin and who has been in SV since 2006 (small set, I know) is familiar with the “Hacker News Window,” that is - the range of discussion allowed by the registered users who vote comments and stories up or down. It was birthed after Reddit, partly from the same patron, pg1. The assumption underlying these democratic systems is the same as any other type of Rousseauian nonsense, that being that what the majority wants is good, and what it doesn’t want is bad.
To acknowledge the fact of the HN window is to acknowledge the intellectual poverty of HN2. If you seek the truth about anything, do not seek it on HN. Waste your words down the filthy latrine of any HN discussion and for your trouble you will drink the “social media” hemlock. Seek truth from individuals with blogs and gpg keys, hosted on their own servers, with their own IP addresses.
- Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, the man who went from this essay entitled “What You Can’t Say” with “Now imagine comparing what’s inside this guy’s head with what’s inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs.” to this self crit (is it a self crit, actually? He does a good job in here of recontextualizing the excerpts used in the hatchet piece ) entitled “What I Didn’t Say” (well obviously the stuff you can’t say!) with “I also care about increasing the number of female founders, and a few weeks ago proposed that YC organize an event to encourage them.” Perhaps he should write another essay entitled “What You Must Say In Order To Continue To Receive Fiatola From The Great Inca.” [↩]
- Poverty Indeed. The idea of HN is to take a shortcut - to replace a tree (the root of which being roughly Θαλῆς) with weighted set of unconnected nodes. The weights of course are an illusion. [↩]