Release milestones don't tend to make much difference in HN threads. Instead, what we get each time is a discussion of the project as a whole (as you can clearly see in the current thread.) Nothing wrong with that!—it's natural—it just means that different releases of the same product aren't really different stories from an HN thread perspective. From the perspective of the project developers, of course it's a major thing.
I don't think 1.0 releases deserve the same treatment as 1.3.2 Beta 1.
The SNI here is that Tauri has hit stable, an information that does change how a lot of people would approach it.
I might need an even longer explanation, though, because I don't get it still. There are projects like Blender which were allowed to the front page like 5+ times in the past year, exclusively with posts about new releases. The discussions always hit the same notes. Why is that any different?
> but it means that different releases of the same product aren't really different stories, from an HN discussion perspective
Sorry Dang - I would have to point to you that YC companies term their releases as 'launch day' or 'launch week' with YC W/Sxx badge in the title get preferential treatment and are allowed to be discussed multiple times over year - why is that ? I dont want to name names here.
Do you mean the official Launch HNs for YC startups? They are indeed a special case, but not in the sense you describe. They don't get to happen multiple times in a year. In fact, each YC startup only ever gets one in its entire lifetime.*
Launch HNs do get special treatment in that we place them on HN's front page. This is one of three things that HN gives back to YC in exchange for funding it—those things are all clearly listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#yc.
Btw, don't be sorry! We want everyone to know how this stuff works, and we want it to be clear what the principles are (and that there are principles). Other than the three things I just mentioned, YC startups don't get preferential treatment on HN. They have to struggle for attention just like everyone else, and with the exception of a few community darlings, they find it just as tough going as everyone else, and aren't particularly happy about it.
* although I think I'm going to make an exception next week for a startup that did the very first Launch HN 5 years ago and is still kicking.
I completely get Launch HN part - that was not I intended. I've seen companies not 'launch' but incrementally present their releases from what they've built quarter by quarter with YC badge in the title of the post or in the guise of launch week. And have always wondered why are those incremental releases allowed to be discussed so successfully ? I would say YC badge shouldn't be allowed in first place in any post other than Launch/Job. Believe me these companies have become disproportionately successful from their peers although they lack substance within. As mentioned I do not want to name names.
Ah ok - sorry for misreading you! I'd have to see specific links to be able to say what happened. In principle there shouldn't be any difference between YC and non-YC companies/projects when it comes to this.
Theoretically someone could post their new 1.0 page https://tauri.app/ and it wouldn’t be a dupe. In general a big new release usually has an announcement blog post, and those can be posted without being dupes, and they’re more timely & relevant anyway.
Honestly, I think you all should consider changing that policy. Not only because I've seen it broken before, but because major version changes imply things can be broken at upgrade time, and features are settled for a long time. Good to let people know about major releases...
You're certainly going to see that and other policies get broken, but only because we don't see everything. There's far too much content here for us to read it all.
For sure they can - in fact that was the issue with the current thread.
From an HN perspective the important thing is not the version number, nor even the significance of the release, but how recently the project last had a major discussion.
There's one workaround for this that might work sometimes: if software has undergone major recent work that is interesting in its own right, then an article devoted to the specifics of that particular project—the why and the how, with interesting technical details, and an explanation of that makes it hard and also what pain it solves / what makes it worth doing—might have a chance of generating a more specific discussion in the comments. That's what I would do if I had a big release that I hoped to get attention for on HN.
Even then, people are likely to mostly post generically about the project—just as announcements of new things from $BigCo tend to attract lots of generic discussion about $BigCo too. But if there aren't too many of those, we can downweight them and then the more specific comments can hopefully float to the top.
FWIW this post specifically links to the v1.0 release announcement in the form of "Tauri in 100 seconds" video that is now linked from the homepage; this is essentially their launch blog post.
The linked URL nor the video has not been posted before.
I'm just pointing this out as many projects seem to post their 1.3.2 Beta 1 blog posts and that seems to be ok -- or at least I see them pretty often.
I know it's annoying when we moderate HN this way and the project happens to be one that you care about, but it will make more sense if you realize that (a) we have to moderate for the general case—i.e. if we didn't have this rule of thumb, the front page would fill up with release announcements of popular projects, of which there are many every day; and (b) the issue with duplication isn't really about the article/announcements—it's about the resulting HN discussions.
That is, it's not primarily about the diff between announcement N and announcement N+1. It's about the diff between HN thread N and thread N+1. Comments in these threads are almost invariably generically about the project as a whole. You can see that with e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31764384 in the current thread - which is a fine comment in its own right. There's nothing wrong with these threads! The only problem is that we have to regulate how much repetition of them there is.
(The cutoff for dupes is a year or so: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)