<story><title>Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public</title><text>Fortunately this email made it through my spam filter. Looks like they want to take on LinkedIn and are planning to seed it by making existing accounts public unless you opt OUT within the next week:&lt;p&gt;Hey [redacted],&lt;p&gt;I’m excited to announce that we are expanding the reach of your Triplebyte profile. Now, you can use your Triplebyte credentials on and off the platform. Just like LinkedIn, your profile will be publicly accessible with a dedicated URL that you can share anywhere (job applications, LinkedIn, GitHub, etc). When you do well on a Triplebyte assessment, your profile will showcase that achievement (we won’t show your scores publicly). Unlike LinkedIn, we aim to become your digital engineering skills resume — a credential based on actual skills, not pedigree.&lt;p&gt;The new profiles will be launching publicly in 1 week. This is a great opportunity to update your profile with your latest experience and preferences. You can edit your profile privacy settings to not appear in public search engines at any time.&lt;p&gt;Our mission is to build an open, valuable, and skills-based credential for all engineers. We believe that allowing Triplebyte engineers to publicly share their profiles and skills-based credentials will accelerate this mission.&lt;p&gt;Thanks,&lt;p&gt;Ammon
Co-founder &amp;amp; CEO, Triplebyte</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>TAForObvReasons</author><text>&amp;gt; those comments don&amp;#x27;t get flagged out of future HN search results.&lt;p&gt;Triplebyte is a YC company and HN is a YC site, so economic interests are aligned with nuking highly critical comments</text></item><item><author>nabilhat</author><text>Assume for a moment I&amp;#x27;m a bad-faith, nosy employer who reads HN on a Saturday morning.
All it takes for me to match up my little stack of current employee&amp;#x27;s resumes is a person&amp;#x27;s city of residence, skills, and employment dates. If I&amp;#x27;m that kind of employer, that&amp;#x27;s enough to raise my red flags. If prior employers are named outright, that&amp;#x27;s a 100% ID. If employment dates are paired with employment location, that&amp;#x27;s a 100% ID.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve known employers like this. I&amp;#x27;ve worked for employers like this. Employers are already monitoring social media. Third party services are paid by employers to monitor for staff that might be looking at other jobs. Recruiters make it their mission to know who&amp;#x27;s looking and what employers are likely to need their services in the near future. This is much of why trust and discretion is the most important asset on both sides of hiring related activities.&lt;p&gt;Triplebyte burning down their reputation as a recruitment avenue is one thing. Locking job searchers into reputation and livelihood risks inside Triplebyte&amp;#x27;s own reputation dumpster fire, on the friday before a holiday weekend, during historic unemployment levels, in the middle of a fucking pandemic, is unforgivable. The CEO showing up in person with hamfisted gaslighting (seriously?) in the middle of this self made disaster makes me hope those comments don&amp;#x27;t get flagged out of future HN search results.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s a natural assumption, but if you think a step further it&amp;#x27;s not hard to see why it&amp;#x27;s false: you shouldn&amp;#x27;t optimize for local optima, especially if doing that would ruin your global optimum. When you have a goose that lays golden eggs, don&amp;#x27;t risk the goose for an egg.&lt;p&gt;YC&amp;#x27;s economic interest in HN is having it be a happy, thriving community. That dominates all other considerations put together. A fast way to ruin that would be to destroy the community&amp;#x27;s good faith by suppressing negative posts about YC or YC startups. In addition to being wrong (we wouldn&amp;#x27;t want to belong to such a community ourselves), it would be dumb.  If anyone wants more explanation there are posts about HN vis-à-vis YC&amp;#x27;s business interests going back years: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;hn.algolia.com&amp;#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;amp;page=0&amp;amp;prefix=false&amp;amp;query=by%3Adang%20yc%20business%20interests&amp;amp;sort=byDate&amp;amp;type=comment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;hn.algolia.com&amp;#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;amp;page=0&amp;amp;prefix=false&amp;amp;qu...&lt;/a&gt;. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;hn.algolia.com&amp;#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;amp;page=0&amp;amp;prefix=true&amp;amp;query=by%3Adang%20curiosity%20optimiz&amp;amp;sort=byDate&amp;amp;type=comment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;hn.algolia.com&amp;#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;amp;page=0&amp;amp;prefix=true&amp;amp;que...&lt;/a&gt;, which describes the simple way we try to optimize this (simple in principle, though not in execution). And see &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;two-hn-announcements&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;two-hn-announcements&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; from 2015 about HN&amp;#x27;s editorial independence.&lt;p&gt;(Edit—because I&amp;#x27;ve been wanting to write about this for some time and this may as well be the place:)&lt;p&gt;The above is the answer I always give to questions of how HN serves YC&amp;#x27;s business, because it&amp;#x27;s true and it&amp;#x27;s solid economics. It&amp;#x27;s the right answer to give to anyone who&amp;#x27;s looking at the question through a cynical economic lens (as we all have been trained to do) since it basically says &amp;quot;we can be even more cynically self-interested by not doing that&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;However, I also always feel a little bad after giving that answer because it&amp;#x27;s not the deeper truth. The deeper truth is that we just feel this way. HN and YC grew up together. In a way they are siblings, and one doesn&amp;#x27;t exploit one&amp;#x27;s sibling. Or, to switch metaphors: because HN and YC grew together, the connections between them are complex and organic, like the connections between brain hemispheres. If you get in there and start snipping and moving things around, you&amp;#x27;ll probably lobotomize yourself.&lt;p&gt;If you want a hard-nosed business reason for how HN makes money for YC, one is: it leads to people starting startups that wouldn&amp;#x27;t otherwise exist, and it leads to YC funding startups that it wouldn&amp;#x27;t otherwise get to fund. That&amp;#x27;s how HN adds to YC&amp;#x27;s core business (edit: but see [1] below). I use that reasoning to explain to people why we don&amp;#x27;t need to sell ads on HN or do other things to monetize it or drive growth. Again, though, it doesn&amp;#x27;t capture how I (and I think most at YC) really think and feel about HN. The deeper truth is the two have always been together and we can&amp;#x27;t imagine them otherwise.&lt;p&gt;In other words, the value of HN to YC is intangible. That affects how we operate HN. If the value were tangible, then snipping things and moving them around and generally being bustling and managerial would be the way to go, or at least the most likely thing that people inside a business would do. But since it&amp;#x27;s intangible, all that kind of thing gets supplanted by a general feeling of &amp;quot;this is good, don&amp;#x27;t fuck it up&amp;quot;. Since the main indicator of whether we&amp;#x27;re fucking it up or not is the community, the way HN can most add value to YC is by keeping the community happy. Happiness means interest (HN is supposed to be interesting) and trust (a community can&amp;#x27;t exist without trust).&lt;p&gt;This is not a paradise that will last forever—it&amp;#x27;s a historical accident that an internet forum ended up in a sweet spot vis-à-vis the company that owns it, where the business is better off optimizing for the forum being good and happy than by banner ads or growth hacking. But we all know that it&amp;#x27;s an honor to get to be stewards of a community in that way, and while nothing lasts forever, we want to keep it going as long as possible, and maybe longer than one could reasonably have thought possible.&lt;p&gt;[1] edit: for some reason I forgot to mention the three formal things that HN also gives to YC: job ads for YC startups, Launch HNs for YC startups, and displaying YC founder usernames in orange to other YC founders. See &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=23293437&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=23293437&lt;/a&gt; for more.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public</title><text>Fortunately this email made it through my spam filter. Looks like they want to take on LinkedIn and are planning to seed it by making existing accounts public unless you opt OUT within the next week:&lt;p&gt;Hey [redacted],&lt;p&gt;I’m excited to announce that we are expanding the reach of your Triplebyte profile. Now, you can use your Triplebyte credentials on and off the platform. Just like LinkedIn, your profile will be publicly accessible with a dedicated URL that you can share anywhere (job applications, LinkedIn, GitHub, etc). When you do well on a Triplebyte assessment, your profile will showcase that achievement (we won’t show your scores publicly). Unlike LinkedIn, we aim to become your digital engineering skills resume — a credential based on actual skills, not pedigree.&lt;p&gt;The new profiles will be launching publicly in 1 week. This is a great opportunity to update your profile with your latest experience and preferences. You can edit your profile privacy settings to not appear in public search engines at any time.&lt;p&gt;Our mission is to build an open, valuable, and skills-based credential for all engineers. We believe that allowing Triplebyte engineers to publicly share their profiles and skills-based credentials will accelerate this mission.&lt;p&gt;Thanks,&lt;p&gt;Ammon
Co-founder &amp;amp; CEO, Triplebyte</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>TAForObvReasons</author><text>&amp;gt; those comments don&amp;#x27;t get flagged out of future HN search results.&lt;p&gt;Triplebyte is a YC company and HN is a YC site, so economic interests are aligned with nuking highly critical comments</text></item><item><author>nabilhat</author><text>Assume for a moment I&amp;#x27;m a bad-faith, nosy employer who reads HN on a Saturday morning.
All it takes for me to match up my little stack of current employee&amp;#x27;s resumes is a person&amp;#x27;s city of residence, skills, and employment dates. If I&amp;#x27;m that kind of employer, that&amp;#x27;s enough to raise my red flags. If prior employers are named outright, that&amp;#x27;s a 100% ID. If employment dates are paired with employment location, that&amp;#x27;s a 100% ID.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve known employers like this. I&amp;#x27;ve worked for employers like this. Employers are already monitoring social media. Third party services are paid by employers to monitor for staff that might be looking at other jobs. Recruiters make it their mission to know who&amp;#x27;s looking and what employers are likely to need their services in the near future. This is much of why trust and discretion is the most important asset on both sides of hiring related activities.&lt;p&gt;Triplebyte burning down their reputation as a recruitment avenue is one thing. Locking job searchers into reputation and livelihood risks inside Triplebyte&amp;#x27;s own reputation dumpster fire, on the friday before a holiday weekend, during historic unemployment levels, in the middle of a fucking pandemic, is unforgivable. The CEO showing up in person with hamfisted gaslighting (seriously?) in the middle of this self made disaster makes me hope those comments don&amp;#x27;t get flagged out of future HN search results.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wolfgang42</author><text>Regarding HN’s policy on discussions of YC companies: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=23280121&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=23280121&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;What &amp;#x27;nabilhat is talking about is the way the Triplebyte CEO’s comments in this thread (which are the opposite of “highly critical”) are being downvoted to very light grey.</text></comment>