It's a prenouncement sort of thing and the convention is to discuss such things when they actually happen mostly because otherwise you end up having the same discussion N times. 'preparing to notify' is classic announcement-of-announcement and those get downweighted routinely.
thank you sooooo much for sharing this, because I've been on here for what seems like forever and never had this explained... resolves one of my bigger gripes about behaviour of the ranking algorithm, I only wish details / stories like this were more widely shared
Shrug, it helps reduce "unwanted" content in the community.
I'm sure it depends on a few different factors (upvote, comments, possibly keywords).
Mods can also pin or de-list stories as they see fit.
It also depends who does the flagging, more karma == more power. If one abuses the function I imagine mods can / will [silently] neuter the account to have less (or no) effect.
There was also an interesting story recently about hacking HN ranking. The author created a bunch of accounts and got stories delisted from the frontpage by having too many noob accounts give a story an upvote over a short time period, apparently this triggered an anti-spam mechanism.
At some point it seems like a waste of time with poor ROI. You can make a story go away, so what? It's not like it'd work indefinitely, if it became widely abused the mods will catch on and modify the system.
I think the goal of HN is to have fun and interesting conversations, and connect with people. Excessive manipulation would be harmful with no real upside.
It also depends who does the flagging, more karma == more power.
Pretty sure this is not true.
The easiest way to 'manipulate' what's on the front page is to just send the mods an email about posts that could use a bit of a downward shove. Pre-announcements, dupes, etc regularly get tossed out. The front page would be all dupes and rage if that didn't happen.
100%, I email Dang quite frequently when I see fucked up shit. Not sure whether he likes me or not, because I've also been the source of problems sometimes. Nevertheless, he's consistently polite and helpful :)
As for the flagging, it's what I've seen claimed but don't know for sure. Thank you for the reality check, @pvg!
what's wild is that since the Twitter layoffs last week, recruiter messages on LinkedIn to my account have gone from ~10/day consistently to 0 since the announcement.
On that note Metas Bay Area HQ is the old sun campus. The back of the Facebook sign at the entrance still has the Sun Microsystems logo as a sort of reminder that nothing is permanent.
Nothing in the article supports the "large-scale" qualifier in the title. There's also no link from Reuters to to the alleged WSJ report, but that is unfortunately par for the course.
I could understand a title like "Meta is preparing layoffs this week", but not the one used by Reuters. Alternatively, the Reuters report could include details possibly contained in the original WSJ article. Or maybe "Meta is preparing to layoff thousands this week" as others have reported.
If it's only 2,000 and the workforce is 65,000 strong, that's 3.1% of the workforce. Is that large-scale?
Kind of a blanket comment and seems a bit spiteful and unfair. Granted interviews at those companies could use a refresh and there are probably “leetcode” programmers there for sure, but there’s also plenty of talented developers at those companies.
Did a ton of leet like coding in high school and forgot most of it. Pretty irrelevant to most jobs. Unless you build low level tooling then you really dont bubble sort on a daily basis.
1. Anecdotally these layoffs seem to have affected mostly non-technical roles.
2. The US produces 65,000 [1] CS graduates each year. This doesn't include immigration and people who go into tech having graduated with non-CS degrees.
The layoffs are significant in their local context but I wouldn't think they're large enough to perceptibly affect much on the ground for SWEs.
Good luck to all my ex-Metamates, I hope it's not as deep a cut to the bone like what Elon did with Twitter. I'll be shocked if Twitter doesn't suffer multi-day outages by the end of the year given how deep some of the cuts sounded.
