Interesting post... I have submitted my response here: http://tinyurl.com/cdb8qx

Sure. Whenever a group has a specific reason they need more time to decide, we've always given it to them. We once interviewed a startup that got an acquisition offer right in the middle of YC interview weekend. Not only did we give them a couple weeks to see how things played out, we advised them on negotiating with the acquirer.

Um, I realize that the audience here is mostly university students, but do we really need frat house language in our submission titles now?

I'm not really offended, but would you say that you "had a chubby" for a new feature around the boardroom table, with women present? It would be nice if we could keep this site a little more esteemed than the sad excuse for language found on most of the internet.

EDIT (Obviously, the editors have changed the title.)

Dear lord, did i just spend 5 minutes reading what was 90% almost religious in nature praise with 10% viable information?

This article is patently useless. Let me sum it up for you in 3 sentances. Apple 3.0 sdk = could be good. Android sucks with viruses. The iphone is so superior to everything ever.

I'll take the other point of view, as a) I haven't noticed this become problematic and b) engage in it myself, on occasion.

My reasons, which I will write here to avoid having the world caught in a loop:

1) HN community norms require comments to be short and minimally formatted to avoid causing consternation on the thread. (People get upset if you do anything which causes line formatting to change. Big blocks of text which requiring scrolling past are right out.) Not all worthwhile thoughts are pithy and minimalist.

2) Keeping content on HN is perhaps a passable solution for the HN community, but the nature of the evolving discussion plus the fact that Google can't tell which comments are the 1% gem-like insights and which comments are the bottom 20% means that, from the perspective of the 99.999..% of humanity which isn't here, nothing on this site ever happened.

3) Troll might be the wrong D&D monster: lets try a dragon, with a horde of about 100,000 misc. coins, gems, art items, and magical items, and no filing system to speak of. (Oh, except you can call items back if you remembered to make note of their True Name.) Seriously -- permanence of comments leaves something very much to be desired. I know my favorite comment ever is http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469940 . You know how I found that? I Googled for the place offsite where I quoted him, and then followed the link back to the original.

4) A disinterested rational observer would note that over the course of a day the #1 story generally generates about 4,000 pageviews, almost 100% from highly technical ad-blind people, many of whom have noscript installed. Previous experience with that sort of audience leads me to believe that the economic value of an HNlanche is about $1 if that. As a get rich quick scheme it is inferior to Amazon Turk. (Posting articles is only a tool for SEO to the extent that a cynical, picky audience believes you are producing linkworthy content. I think anyone who gets a link here clearly put in enough work to deserve it.)

5) Linking out (and linking in) has salutary effects on preventing intellectual incest, groupthink, and ivory tower-ism. Or, to be blunt: when people talk about HN on their blogs its an opportunity to be exposed to a new community of readers as something other than a group of Erlang advocates with immense superiority complexes.

6) People have often requested a "super-upvote" or some similar method of signaling that a particular comment is significantly more important than the background noise. Posting offsite is a zero-programming-required implementation of a self super-upvote: it says "I thought what I was about to say was so important I went to the trouble of taking this offsite." Given that people do it very freaking seldom, that is a decent first approximation for "Wow, he sure feels strongly that this post adds value".

I find it interesting that the reports tend to consistently state that college prestige is indeed important for students from lower income families. I found that to be enormously true, myself. I am from a working-class background -- did my undergraduate degree at a state school, and found it boring and, really, a waste of time -- much like high school. But I also think now that a lot of this was my own fault -- I had no idea how to approach college, and how to really make it work for me.

Later, I then did a graduate program at an Ivy League school -- and the scales fell away from my eyes. The most important thing I learned there, I think, was how successful people work in the world -- how to resourcefully make the most out of every opportunity, how to seize the initiative, how to make connections. I have the feeling that if I hadn't been brought up in the class I was, I would have inhaled these things at my parents' knee -- as it was, it took me much, much longer than it should have; but it was an enormous lesson, and almost worth the ridiculous student loans I now owe. ;-)

(I am also by no means saying that an Ivy League school is the only place for lower-class kids to learn how to work the world -- far from it! I was just not talented enough to figure it out myself, and the experience made all the difference in the world for me.)

Exploding offers are a sign of desperation, but they also serve to filter out young entrepreneurs who have a modicum of business sense.

The VC firm that extends an exploding offer and won't negotiate it is guaranteeing that they'll only fund companies that aren't very good at business.

A few years ago I wrote:

It seems to me that a company that accepts an exploding offer is demonstrating a remarkable lack of basic business aptitude. Every building contractor in New York knows you request bids from five or ten plumbers before you award the contract. If a plumber said, "I'll do it for $x, but if you shop around, deal's off," the contractor would laugh his head off and throw the plumber out on the street. Nothing sends a stronger message that an offer is uncompetitive than refusing to expose it to competition. And that's for a $6000 kitchen installation. Getting $10 million in funding for a business is the biggest and most important deal in the life of a company.

(http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/VC.html)

It's incoherent rambling. Extremism. You do know who RMS is, yes?

His overriding concern as an ongoing basis is that people should have the freedom to tinker with software - to be able to read, improve, share the programs we are running.

He's not arguing that you're falling into a personal, small scale 'trap' like you will get your finger stuck or something, but that whole groups of people who care may not have noticed this set of events sneaking past them.

Or that this is yet another area where we should care, but don't, and that should change so that if you do care, you can do something about it.

No end users care.

That maybe true, but it shouldn't be true.

I think the majority just care if something solves their problem, rather than if its open source or not.

Exactly the problem - this week I saw an end user called us up asking us to help get some information out of a program they run. Luckily, it runs on a popular database backend. Unluckily, it's proprietary closed source software and there is no documentation of what the database tables and fields mean or how they are used.

They bought it because it "solved their problem". Now that lead to other problems. Problems which are both completely predictable (information stuck in artificially limited proprietary system) and avoidable (use artificial-limitation-free documented open system).

And on a more general level, promote the use of such across the entire computing industry so such programs become available.

Honestly, it was more powerlessness. How could we compete with an acquisition offer? Integrity depends more on how you behave when you have power.

I feel like this post is just an OSX fan ranting about how he likes his hot keys in this spot instead of that spot.