Launch HN posts for YC startups are one of three formal things that HN does for YC (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). The others are job ads for YC startups, and orange usernames for YC alumni—but only when displayed to other YC alumni, which always generates "why is my username not orange" emails. But I digress.
Launch HNs are like job ads in that they get an initial front-page placement, usually somewhere between #8 and #10. (I think job ads start a little higher). Then they fall down the page. Unlike job ads, though, launch posts can be upvoted and commented on. Once they've gotten their initial placement they function like regular stories. Occasionally the community finds one particularly interesting and it gets upvoted higher. This recent one spent quite a while at #1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616857 (http://hnrankings.info/22616857/).
We started doing the Launch HNs three years ago. I was worried that the community would hate them because we were taking additional front page space for YC. (Our intention was to make it so that a launch post and a job ad wouldn't appear at the same time, but I never ended up writing that code, so sometimes they do.) But that hasn't ever come up. I think it's because launch threads are intrinsically more interesting than job ads (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767319 downthread for more on that).
All this time, the initial front-page placement of launch posts, unlike job ads, has been done manually. That is, founders have had to email us and we've manually jigged the post onto the front page. The problem with that is that you have to be awake to do it. I don't want to be awake to do it, especially because startup founders tend to be businessy, bustling types who are all bright-and-early, while my schedule drifts ever deeper into the darkness as the few moorings I had remaining to the rest of society dissolve in this time of social distancing and self-isolation, which were basically my bread and butter to begin with (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUlBWNDW72E).
Until now, I've told founders to post at Pacific 10am and email us, because that's roughly when I get going in the morning. Tomorrow, though, there are two. One is a fintech startup in Latin America who want to post at 9am. And the other is Peter Roberts, who's going to do another immigration AMA (https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=proberts). Peter is on the east coast, and wants to get going at 8am Pacific, which is late for him and (ungodly) early for me.
So tonight I got frustrated enough to write some code to deal with it. Frustration reaching a tipping point and boiling over is my gateway into the code these days. My goal is for startups to be able to post their launches, and occasionally for pre-scheduled submissions like Peter's (which are rare), to end up on the front page independently of whenever I went to sleep the night before.
This code turned out to be a lot more complicated than I anticipated. The patch ended up adding a hundred lines of Arc. A hundred lines of Arc! Do you have any idea how many lines of Arc that is? I just looked through the history and the last commit that added that many lines of code was over two years ago when we got Arc to compile to JS. Obviously this change needs to be thoroughly tested, so after testing it on my laptop I deployed it to production and decided to do a couple of sanity checks live. One was to post a test Launch HN using my old account gruseom, which is the founder account for Skysheet, the spreadsheet startup that Scott and I had 10 years ago (and which I still think about every day, but I should avoid digressing again). The code I wrote has some logic in it for cofounder accounts. One thing it's supposed to do is email all the cofounders when a Launch HN post has made it to HN's front page, so they will be ready to engage with commenters. Anyhow, this test post was the OP. The good news: it got placed on the front page in the way that I intended. The bad news: none of the emails were received. God fucking shit fucking goddamnit I knew those emails wouldn't work...I mean, dang.
(Edit: actually that's not what happened. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22772667)
My intention was for this thread to remain obscure, then get placed briefly on the front page by the new code, at which point I'd get the emails and immediately delete it. I didn't think it was very likely to get noticed in the middle of the night here, especially when posted by what ought by now to be an obscure account, but oh well.
I think that covers everything. Hopefully you all will see those two auto-placed posts on the front page tomorrow morning because I do not intend to be awake 5 hours from now. (Edit: it worked!)
"I applied to this place and they never got back to me"
"Thanks, I applied"
"Please add salary/remoteness/interview process to your job ad"
"You have a typo in your text/email address/website URL"
I think it's a little redundant making a distinction between "useful" and "interesting" because either way the comment has value. However I do agree with the points you made in your other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767319) and that the examples given of useful/interesting comments by the GP doesn't offer a high enough value to justify the inevitable negative and other low value comments. Which I think is the real crux of the matter. Much like why political discussions are generally banned on here, the signal to noise ratio just isn't worth the few valuable comments a submission might receive.