To the surprise of absolutely no-one.

Congratulations, raganwald, and good call, Github. You're on a roll with hiring these days. :)

Funny, I recognized his handle over his full name. Shout out for the homoiconic. Amazing articles, like the one on lexical scopes was a great help to me.

Agreed. This a you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment. Really good match.

This is probably a really dumb question, but can you explain what a "chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment" is? I've never heard a phrase like that.

OT this is awesome. Congrats to both parties, obviously a great choice.

Don't feel dumb, you're one of the 10,000...

http://xkcd.com/1053/

Awesome one! :)

Classic 1980s tv commercial for reese's peanut butter cups: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJLDF6qZUX0

...and this is one of those times where you feel dumb. Thanks for the link. It's a good metaphor.

edit: I even really like resees. Goodness.

I know raganwald is a top HN user but I know him more through his excellent technical books, and so am looking forward to his contributions to Github's documentation:

https://leanpub.com/u/raganwald

Why on earth is this interesting enough for the greater HN community to care about?

Because many of us care about raganwald's voice. He's among the top 10 in all time karma on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

Oh wow, HN has a leader board. I didn't even know about this.

It used to be a main header link a couple of years ago but I think pg was trying to dissuade people from gaming it. I must admit I used to comment and post a lot more here when it was prominent but I'm a high score freak at the best of times :-)

Yeah, I'm glad I didn't know about it before. I'm competitive as well and I would probably go for the high score. It makes sense that pg took it down though.

See also: http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/overall

Then why did you make a new account?

Did you make your account for HN karma?

I would imagine most people did it to submit comments/links.

Are you pretending to not get the implication that it was a throwaway account just for that comment?

Maybe it's a way of self censoring, and not because of the fear of karma loss, as your comment might suggest.

I was confused for a bit as well. Reginald is raganwald, one of the more prolific hacker new users (https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders).

Somewhat tangental, it would be great to be able to sort that list by average karma. There's a lot of users in that top 100 that got there via quantity of comments alone, it'd be interesting to see who the most _valuable_ contributors are rather than just the most prolific.

Execute this in the page's scope. Works on Chrome at least.

    (function(){
      var table = document.querySelector("table tbody tr+tr+tr td table tbody");
      [].slice.call(table.querySelectorAll("tr")).map(function(r){var c=r.querySelector("td:last-child");return [c?parseFloat(c.innerHTML):0,r]}).sort(function(a,b){return b[0]-a[0]}).forEach(function(r){table.appendChild(r[1])});
    }());

Points are a pretty bad approximation of 'value' though. My shortest and most mundane comments are always the ones that get the most upvotes, meanwhile my lengthier ones that actually lead to insightful discussions hardly get any. And I've seen that same complaint around here from other users for a while now. The only real 'solution' I could think of would be to use slashdot's odd voting system, but meh...

I think it's not interesting to vast majority of the HN users. They probably don't even know who this guy is or care if gets job at X or Y company. What is happening is here is though there is small number of people who does know him (may be < 100) and they all upvote this link or write redundant comments of congratulation in quick succession driving it to the top. This is one of the scenario that downvote button could have prevented allowing rest of the users to indicate that they are not interested. Without downvote, their only recourse is to vote something else which gets pretty thinly spread at least in some small time window while those 100+ users are upvoting this.

I feel like you don't understand what a community is...

Hacker News is an online community. It has a pretty open membership policy, which is that, if you show up here over a period of time, and manage to not get hell-banned, you're a part of the community. Congrats!

Part of being in a community is that it's pretty common to have a kinship with other people in that community. This place isn't a real-life place, so naturally, that kinship might not develop as quickly, or spread as deeply as one might in person. But you'd be surprised that it can still develop.

So, "the vast majority of HN users" might not actually know who raganwald is, but I'd bet they've probably seen at least a few of his comments, at least if they've spent any amount of time here. However, "the vast majority of HN users" aren't actually the community. There's nothing stopping them from being part of it, they just aren't. Which is fine (I don't consider myself to be, for what it's worth).

But when someone who is a part of the community has something good happen to them that's of interest to the community, people share it.

The fact that this story is popular is a triumph of community, not a shitty side-effect of this place not operating the way you wish it did. I hope it continues to feel this way, lest it really turn into a shitty link aggregator that you so wish it were.

I think you have misunderstood what what I was trying to say. I was explaining why posts like this with seemingly little information density, redundant "congratulations" comments and low relevance to probably majority of HN users pops up at top. Yes, I've found raganwald's articles and comments insightful more than one occasions. However I've little interest in what color of pajama he wears in night or what flavor of ice-cream he likes. That's what Facebook is for. And there is a reason I haven't checked my Facebook "frontpage" in month. I think of HN as community of like-minded people who likes to share relevant insightful information. I do not have any judgement on what this "like-minded" means or what "relevant insightful information" should include. If some community member in leaderboard started having secret extra marital affair, should it be on frontpage of HN? I think it should be left to community to decide. What I was trying to say is that lack of downvote button disables community to make this decision. When you have only upvote button, a small group of people can collude (knowingly or unknowingly) to push anything at the top very easily whether it reflects the general sentiment in community or not. I'm still not proposing HN should starting having downvote button. As a machine learning guy, I'm endlessly fascinated with collaborative filtering and this is interesting case for me how lack of downvote/dislike/negative ratings impacts relevance.

The lack of a downvote button doesn't imply that everyone would downvote the things you don't don't care about. I don't know him except through Twitter and HN, but I care about his new job and upvoted the article. "But you're just one data point!" So are you.

Dude relax. Why write a wall of text when there is a "flag" button?

From the guidelines > Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.

Flag it then.

I agree with almost everything you are saying but would like to point out that in my observation on HN some community members (by your definition of "community") are more equal than others. And what they say, think and perhaps up vote or flag means quite a bit.

Noting last paragraph of this top 10 profile:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jacquesm

> are more equal than others.

Was there ever any claim that "we are all equal" here or something like that?

Implied by a statement like this from the faq:

"How are stories ranked?

On the front page, by points divided by a power of the time since they were submitted. Comments in comment threads are ranked the same way."

I know it's an algorithm but I just feel from observation that that statement from the faq is not entirely correct.

You've been around longer (and have quite a bit of karma) so I'd like to know your thoughts on this. Because to me I don't see ranking on the home page following this faq answer.

I think the algorithm is more complicated than that, and maybe does weigh some votes more than others, but I really don't know anything more about it than you do.

I think getting flagged pushes a submission down quite a bit, and the number of "flags" unfortunately isn't displayed.

What's interesting is that from a UI perspective the "flag" is very poorly implemented. I don't ever flag and I'm sure the flagging varies also with the length of time someone has been on the site. Newbies and older users probably flag for entirely different reasons (leading me to believe that "flag" isn't even evenly weighted or shouldn't be).

And what does it mean to flag anyway? It's possible someone thinks that it is "read later" and another person "this is wrong".

How does anyone know what flag even is for exactly?

Well put.

It's called an echo chamber.

Yes, Hacker News is an echo chamber.

People here who know of raganwald < 100, is a pretty poor guess. He's active here, he's written a number of books, he's active on r/programming and r/javascript. He has a number of things on github and on npm, his code is out there in the wild.

I know who he is and I'm hardly a member of any exclusive in-group.

Because he is way above the intelligence of 90% of HN users and noticeably so.

Why so insulting? Is there a way to flag a comment, or I need more karma on this account?

How is that insulting? It's the reason that he's high on the leaderboard and the reason that he is recognised by the community. I'm just stating the truth here - he is unusually smart.

Edit: It has to be pointed out that I was responding to a comment which said "Why on earth is this interesting enough for the greater HN community to care about?" which was in fact a rude thing to say.

There is a way indeed. Just click on the "link" link within the comment's header. On the standalone comment page there will be a "flag" option within the comment header. There may be a karma limit or something though; I'm not sure about that.

Congrats raganwald. I <3 Github, and even though I don't know raganwald personally, his comments were always intriguing and thoughtful.

I also didn't know he lived in Toronto, for some reason I assumed he lived in San Francisco.

I also didn't know about Homoiconic - and now there is a treasure trove of lots of wonderful programming (largely Ruby stuff from what I am seeing) articles that I can go through one by one...little by little.

Like this one - https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2008-10-...

For some reason, I have never used `and` instead of `&&` in Ruby. Perhaps because I have never seen it used, but now that I have seen that I can't help but try it out next time.

I am not sure if this is even valid syntax in Ruby 2.0, but I am so glad I stumbled across this.

For those that were criticizing the purpose of this post on HN - this is exactly why it deserves a place here. Raganwald is a valued member of HN, largely because of the stuff he has published over the years (and his contributions to the community) - which are still valuable today. As a relatively young Rubyist (started learning in 2009) all of these things are like gold to me.

So thank you llambda for submitting this, thank you HN for upvoting it, and thank you raganwald for not deleting this wonderful content.

Edit: Also, I think it's cool when we get a chance to 'big up' (Jamaican speak for: "send positive/congratulatory words to") someone while they are alive and can appreciate it. Don't mean to get all morbid, but with so many 'iconic' tech luminaries dying recently (or it feels like that anyway), we always see an outpouring of love after the fact - when they can't hear it. I think it's cool that even though this isn't anything "major" (like a Nobel Prize or anything like that) it's large (and meaningful) enough, for people to take time out to 'big up' raganwald.

So....cheers raganwald.

raises imaginary wine glass

Wow, it would be cool (and probably wishful thinking) if Raganwald could help make a dent in the documentation universe beyond Github.

I'm thinking Sphinx/ReadTheDocs in scope, version controlled docs with pull requests, output in Jekyl to Github (or other) Pages. Etc.

Grats raganwald! Clearly articulated supporting documentation is highly correlated with successful efforts. I am certain your efforts will be richly rewarded.

Congrats GH. raganwald is a class act.

I didn't realize that he lived in Toronto though. Awesome to see the streetcar on the GH blog!

Thanks, everyone! HN has been a very informative, interesting, and motivating place since its inception. You are the reason why.

He's currently ranked #108 on the GitHub Popularity Contest Index:

http://githubpopularitycontest.com/find?user=raganwald

Congrats, raganwald! Just don't forget to keep posting comments on HN every now and then ;).

congrats to raganwald! The link to help in the blog post is broken, btw.

Does he ride a very shaky train to work?

That's the Toronto streetcar.. one of the few symbols of this wonderful city.

That's not just a streetcar, that's the "red rocket!" ;-)

Technically, the "red rocket" was Toronto's first subway train, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-series_%28Toronto_subway_car%...

The streetcar ride is rather smooth FWIW.

Congrats Raganwald! Funny how seeing that streetcar suddenly made me nostalgic for Toronto.

Hope to see you climbing (in Dogpatch?)

Woah, congrats Reg!

Yeah, Reg!