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by abtinf 3565 days ago
I really dislike how every point release of certain projects (Go and Gitlab being prime examples) gets onto the HN frontpage. Even as someone who loves some of the projects, I find it to be a problem.

Yet I don't want to "flag" the post, because I assume there is some kind of penalty for the submitter, beyond mere downvoting. Maybe it makes sense to have some kind of option to indicate a story fits site guidelines, but really doesn't belong on the front page.

10 comments

I totally agree that point releases like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12362147 (ones that don't solve not a big security vulnerability) don't belong on the HN frontpage. I don't think a team member of GitLab ever submitted one and I've just shared this thread with the team and the core team to ensure that we won't do so in the future. Please let me know if there is anything else we can do to prevent noise.
I appreciate your effort.

Just to avoid any misunderstanding, I didn't mean to imply that Gitlab intentionally submits point releases or promotes them to the HN front page.

But even if that was the case, I don't think there is anything wrong per se with merely submitting to HN. Software releases can, and frequently are, on topic. And a point release that fixes a major security issue may certainly warrant the front page.

This is a complicated issue and every solution I can think of has significant, unacceptable unintended consequences. I also suspect this problem has deep roots in the upvoting behavior of certain kinds of users - it completely baffles me that this submission has over 60 upvotes.

Thanks. I understood you didn't imply that. Just wanted to make sure we're being good HN citizens :)
I like it when there's a blog post with the release, explaining a new approach to garbage collection in Go, or a new abstraction to organize processes in Elixir, etc. But this particular post appears to be just some fixes with no context so I don't see the point...
You can't control what other people find interesting.
I share this sentiment. Per their own Release page [1], this one is considered a minor version with no major features, so I don't particularly find it notable, whereas a major version would probably stimulate more discussion about the new features.

I'm not sure where the line is between 'I don't find this notable' vs. 'I find this explicitly off-topic', the latter of which would warrant a flag.

[1] https://golang.org/doc/devel/release.html

Does it bother you enough to post a message here?

It's not like someone submitted it to the front page of HN? People voted it for it to come up here... and that itself should be reason enough.

Just click "hide" then.
>I find it to be a problem.

Why?

Hey, at least it wasn't a link to a merge diff on Github!
Agreed. If it had generics or something else noteworthy, it would be news. Simply having released an 1.X.X version is not.
Heck, lately one can't even dislike Google's projects here. They have so many employees in the pr team here that you'll get moded down fast.

Just watch my post tank now for stating this.

"Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or announce that you expect to get downvoted."
Also "Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading" which I also disagree with. Downvoting here is sometimes worthy, but often retaliatory/punishment for world-view non-conformism, and people should be called out on it.
If you're not going to spend your Karma Points(TM) on good controversy, why bother earning it?
The vote-brigade for the Linux distro company in North Carolina is the heaviest-handed.