[HN Gopher] A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Be...
___________________________________________________________________
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018)
Author : billme
Score : 446 points
Date : 2020-06-06 14:32 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> If a user has 251 Karma, they can set the color of the top bar
| in their profile settings. The default is #ff6600. Here's the
| complete set of colors users have set.
|
| Happy to see that the most #bada55 colour of all is in that list.
| saagarjha wrote:
| For the curious: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%23bada55
| casefields wrote:
| That is a hideous color. I feel like the person who named it
| was trolling.
| cvs268 wrote:
| thwy didn't name it, its the color with r,g,b = 0xba, 0xda,
| 0x55.
| milankragujevic wrote:
| It's the astronaut's skin color in Kerbal Space Program.
| postsantum wrote:
| #dadb0d too
| airstrike wrote:
| Would be nice to see a sorted list and the count for each
| color. Could even bucket very similar colors so we get a sense
| for the general HN taste for colors, though I don't know the
| first thing about bucketing colors.
|
| I use #93a1a1, personally (i.e. $base1 from solarized
| https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/)
| Havoc wrote:
| Neat. Been here nearly a decade & didn't know that downvotes are
| capped to -4 for example.
| blattimwind wrote:
| Is that a recent change? I'm pretty sure some of my less
| popular remarks earned double digit negative points.
| brudgers wrote:
| It's always been -4 for me. At times it's felt like more when
| I've doubled down on my unpopular comments with more
| downvoted comments (and because usually every down vote
| hurts).
|
| I think the limit probably discourages long winded "all these
| downvotes are a badge of honor" comments. People who crave
| downvotes only get four. People hurt by downvotes only get
| four, too.
| minimaxir wrote:
| No, that's been around forever.
|
| Back when comment scores were public via the API, I retrieved
| the lowest-rating comments for each month. which was always
| -4: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IfbSDYVBXiHZCuMdH
| Xgp...
|
| Bonus histogram of comment scores calculated in 2014:
| https://minimaxir.com/img/hn-
| comments/distribution_comment_p...
| billme wrote:
| Yes, there's a lot more upside to comments as a result.
|
| Generally voting signal to noise ratio goes: upvote, no-vote,
| downvote -- allowing more downvote would most like have more
| negative than positive impact on the community.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Greying out goes with downvotes and send to go in more steps
| than just 4 ... guess I should RTFGAP.
| mhdhn wrote:
| Thanks! Pretty useful. Can anyone supply a good comparison
| between Hacker News and Reddit?
| billme wrote:
| Stating the obvious, Reddit was in the first YC batch; YC is
| HN's parent company. Further, HN was created in part because
| Reddit's intend is more general than HN; HN's intend is to
| focus on substantially new information that triggers both
| curiosity & notable dialogues.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Tip: intend is a verb. She intends to win the election. What
| did you intend? Paul intended not to lose.
|
| Intent is a noun. That is her intent.
|
| Intent is also a verb: She is intent on winning the election.
|
| You wanted "intent" as a noun in both your usages above.
| billme wrote:
| Thanks, agree that's a typo; unfortunately I am unable to
| fix it since editing is now locked, but appreciate you
| taking the time to point it out.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Also needs a section on muting. If too many of your consecutive
| comments get downvotes you start encountering "you are posting
| too fast" messages, even if it there was over an hour between
| comments and several hours since your most recent.
| billme wrote:
| For related prior discussion:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+are+posting+too+fast%...
| [deleted]
| zaroth wrote:
| I'll add one to this list, I'm sorry if it comes off as
| complaining, but at least it's topical.
|
| There is more than one karma tracking algorithm that can be
| activated for a given account. That is to say, a downvote is not
| always a downvote, and an upvote is not always an upvote, and the
| point score of a comment is not always exactly equal to the
| number of up and downvotes.
|
| Accounts that are flagged for posting flame-baiting or
| ideological comments can be switched to an alternate voting mode
| where votes are not counted the same way. This may mean that any
| manual downvotes are given greater weight, or upvotes are
| underweighted, or downvoting is automatically applied after some
| time providing a type of downward gravity which must be overcome.
|
| I don't know the precise algorithm. It's complicated by the fact
| that I've been getting auto-downvoted by bots. But due to some
| overly combative COVID related posts my account is in this
| current state. I've found that even researched technical comments
| of mine will inevitably end up at -1 karma, or struggle to stay
| above 0.
|
| After reaching out to dang about bot-downvoting Daniel was nice
| enough to look into it and confirmed my account was getting bot-
| downvoted but also explained that my account had been flagged and
| made some suggestions on posts that crossed the line. I've had a
| long and mostly enjoyable relationship with HN so hopefully I'll
| be out of purgatory soon.
|
| To be clear I have no interest in debating whether the feature
| was misapplied in my own personal case, but rather just it's
| abstract technical merits make for great meta-discussion of
| moderation techniques for social media boards.
| hilyen wrote:
| This is generally referred to as shadow banning. When the user
| is unaware their account is being restricted due to content
| rules or bot like activities.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Why would it have to be a bot? If you annoyed someone badly
| enough, there's nothing stopping them from camping your
| comments page and manually downvoting your comments as they
| appear.
| billme wrote:
| Agree, I personally feel this is a major issue, in fact
| recently posted twice about it:
|
| __Ask HN: HN user ghosted 5 years, why?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436276
|
| __Ask HN: Dark Patterns on HN
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439617
| ufmace wrote:
| I was always kind of surprised that there's a relatively high
| karma threshold for downvoting, but seemingly not for upvoting.
| Seems like it would invite voting rings. I guess there's already
| other software to detect that though.
| billme wrote:
| Downvotes per item are limited to -4 and the signal-to-noise
| ratio for negative votes beyond pushing them below the "new
| comment" boost is of little positive impact in filtering
| content, in my opinion.
|
| And yes, there a lot of filters in place for upvotes, many of
| which are intentionally kept secret.
|
| Personally, I don't use downvotes.
| brudgers wrote:
| It's easy to engage in anonymous encouraging behavior with
| upvotes. Anonymous discouraging behavior via downvotes has a
| higher threshold.
| sawyer29 wrote:
| The front page way back feature is pretty cool.
| Athas wrote:
| I think there are some "features" missing from this list. I seem
| to recall that Hacker News will transparently remove some
| characters from titles (such as emoji and exclamation points),
| which seems like a bad feature to me, and one that people should
| be aware of.
| saagarjha wrote:
| It will remove many emoji from comments as well, although not
| all of them. Not sure what the criteria is for that, either.
| masklinn wrote:
| Not just emoji either e.g. the box-drawing characters
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-drawing_character) also
| get stripped.
|
| OTOH domino or mahjong tiles (, ), playing cards () or
| musical symbols () are allowed. So are arrows (\) including
| supplementals (), number forms ([?]), superscripts and
| subscripts (42), "miscelllaneous technical" ([?], [?]) or
| geometric symbols (*), however misc symbols
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Symbols) is a
| no.
|
| So yeah, pretty arbitrary. I guess pg likes playing domino
| but hates chess.
|
| Also funny note: we have access to musical symbols but not
| notes, because the notes are in the misc. symbols block.
| Unless you want to use byzantine () or ancient greek ()
| musical notation then it's OK.
| moonchild wrote:
| Box-drawing characters are allowed. I made a comment[1] a
| while ago that used them to make a table. Unless they're
| only allowed in monospace blocks?
|
| +
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23139517
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| On FF on (older) Android I get the symbols here:
|
| >So are arrows (\) including supplementals (), number forms
| ([?]), superscripts and subscripts (42), "miscelllaneous
| technical" ([?], [?]) or geometric symbols (*), however
| misc symbols
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Symbols) is a
| no. //
|
| But not the others, they're just get boxes; except the
| boxes which are missing completely (ironic).
|
| IIRC, we had access to UTF font formats (using bold,
| outlaid, double, open, etc., letter forms) and to Zalgo,
| Za[?][?][?]lg[?]o ?
| saagarjha wrote:
| Yeah, I wanted to use U+266A once and it didn't let me, but
| random emoji gets through:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23028433
| Uehreka wrote:
| That's a shame, because I could see legit and serious reasons
| why someone would want emoji in comments. For instance, what
| if someone was trying to illustrate a point by "drawing" a
| diagram of a network, using different emoji to represent
| different types of nodes.
| BlueGh0st wrote:
| One that comes to mind is the "thrangrycat" vulnerability.
| I say "thrangrycat" but the researches insist on calling it
| . I've taken liberty of shortening the excerpt to the more
| reasonable reasons, as the answer got more nonsensical as
| it went on.
|
| >How do you describe the meaning of this vulnerability
| name?
|
| >We chose to communicate through a visual representation of
| symbols, rather than "words." Naming vulnerabilities using
| emoji sequences instead of other pronounceable natural
| languages have several advantages. First, emoji sequences
| are universally understood across nearly all natural
| languages. Choosing instead of a name rooted in any one
| language ensures that the technical contents of our
| research can be discussed democratically and without latent
| cultural or linguistic bias...
|
| from: https://thrangrycat.com/
|
| Edit: and HackerNews has indeed stripped the emojis used to
| name this vulnerability.
| criddell wrote:
| wonder how it decides which ones to remove?
| airstrike wrote:
| yrartqra ytt@rd sW@@s
| fit2rule wrote:
| C[?]ou[?]l[?][?][?][?]d
| [?][?][?]b[?][?][?][?][?][?]e[?][?][?] [?][?][?][?][?][?]
| w[?][?]or[?][?][?][?]s[?][?]e[?][?][?][?][?][?],[?][?][?]
| [?][?][?]F[?][?][?]N[?]O[?][?][?][?][?][?][?][?]R[?][?][?
| ][?][?]D [?][?]..[?][?][?][?] [?][?]
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Unicode penis?
|
| edit: yeah hieroglyphics are allowed apparently
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Get thee behind me, Zalgo!
| drannex wrote:
| As someone who despises emojis, I am more than happy that
| they are removed. There are other ways we could show the
| hypothetical example.
| fragmede wrote:
| Another thing that's undocumented is that comments can be
| "detached" from a post. The comment isn't deleted, but is
| removed from view, so the participants can continue having a
| conversation but that thread is no longer discoverable from the
| post that spawned the discussion.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Is it no longer visible, or just moved to the top level? I've
| seen plenty of top-level comment threads that start with
| something missing context, and then is followed by a reply
| from dang, of the form "We've detached this thread from $url
| because $reasons".
| detaro wrote:
| it just becomes its own top-level comment, and typically is
| pushed to the bottom.
| graeme wrote:
| I wish they had markdown's list feature
| danielecook wrote:
| Does anyone know why the top bar sometimes has a thick black line
| underneath it?
| dang wrote:
| minimaxir should add that one.
| sgillen wrote:
| The black line is a symbol of mourning, used when someone
| deemed significant to the community passes.
| yread wrote:
| Oooh I didn't know about /invited. Few stories of very high
| quality, looks like HN back in the day
| kgwxd wrote:
| I really wish they'd make RSS feeds for all the different
| views.
| l1n wrote:
| https://hnrss.org/ provides a bunch of them!
| saagarjha wrote:
| /invited is basically the second-chance queue for things that
| have been personally stamped to be interesting by the
| moderators, so it's generally pretty good.
| dang wrote:
| It's only a small part of it, the ones that were too old to
| put in the queue directly, so we emailed repost invites for
| them instead. It's on my list to publish a more complete
| page. The _types_ of stories are much the same on the larger
| list though.
| billme wrote:
| Related link:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/invited
| zaroth wrote:
| Can we make feature requests here? Hah.
|
| I would absolutely love it if the comment box was taller than 7
| lines on mobile, perhaps just at least when editing a comment.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| If you set the delay profile value to X it'll let you edit and
| save a comment for up to X minutes before other users can see
| it. I use it extensively on mobile and have mine set to 7.
| remote_phone wrote:
| It took YEARS before they added collapsible threads despite its
| obvious usefulness and easy implementation. Some people added
| extensions to do that but HN was entirely unresponsive. I
| wouldn't hold my breath for any new features.
| billme wrote:
| Here's a mod's recent comment on feature requests to give some
| context on the topic:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23199062
| buboard wrote:
| Not mentioned, but you can be "rate limited", where you can post
| up to ~ 3 comments per hour (?not sure), else you get a "posting
| too fast, please slow down" message. It's keeping us trolls at
| bay
| sparkie wrote:
| In my case it is 5 posts per 3 hours.
| ccmcarey wrote:
| Didn't know that was a thing. Is it a function of your karma?
| buboard wrote:
| No, manually flagged
| ryandrake wrote:
| Cool fact! I always assumed this applied to everyone. I've seen
| this message on and off for at least a few years. Now I'm
| wondering why/when this was applied to my account. Interesting!
| billme wrote:
| Related top level comment in this thread:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23440929
| saagarjha wrote:
| > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822
|
| Hacker News has so many strange, undocumented things that even
| such a list is incomplete. I've run into entirely new things I
| didn't know existed just by using it more, or by happening upon
| one of 'dang's comments...
| billme wrote:
| Here's an example:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643177
| 4636760295 wrote:
| People should check out https://lobste.rs/, it's like HN but with
| less censorship and less content marketing BS.
| kick wrote:
| lobste.rs is almost entirely content marketing spam, and it
| actually has heavier censorship of non-spam than HN does; you
| can see this pretty easily by checking their mod log.
| greenyoda wrote:
| I just looked at their mod log. The last article removed by a
| moderator was deleted because it was "not about computing". I
| read the same article on HN, and it gave rise to some
| interesting discussion here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23437529
|
| Some of the most interesting discussions on HN are not
| directly related to computing, and they're one of the main
| reasons why I stick around HN (and would not be interested in
| moving to lobste.rs).
| s_y_n_t_a_x wrote:
| The fact that you can check their mod log makes me like them
| even more.
|
| I have a feeling HN would never publicize that information
| themselves.
| jfim wrote:
| Lobsters requires an invite though. They have a good rationale
| for it, but it seems like a non-negligible barrier to entry,
| especially for people that are less connected.
| 4636760295 wrote:
| If you ask around I'm sure you can get an invite.
| billme wrote:
| Per the login page:
|
| "Not a user yet? Signup is by invitation only to combat
| spam and increase accountability. If you know a current
| user of the site [1], ask them for an invitation or request
| one in chat [2]."
|
| [1] https://lobste.rs/u/
|
| [2] https://lobste.rs/chat
|
| ----
|
| Related comment on the history of lobste.rs:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23441470
| dfabulich wrote:
| "Posts without URLs get penalized." That's strange. Does that
| include "Ask HN" posts? I would have thought that submissions
| with no link would be good discussion starters.
| TwelveNights wrote:
| Could this be why most Ask HN posts are desaturated? I always
| wondered why that was the case.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| "Desaturated"?
| nerdponx wrote:
| The text color is lighter, as if the post had been
| downvoted.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| That's the 'visited link' color, which indicates that
| you've visited a given post's link. Posts do not change
| color based on votes. For posts without a link, reading
| the post requires still visiting the post's link, so it
| works out as expected from there.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| No, the actual colour of the text on text-only posts is
| super light. I read somewhere a while back that it was
| supposed to discourage people from using it too much.
|
| Here's an example from the front page:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438930
| brudgers wrote:
| On my computer, the default color for visited links is
| also lighter.
| brudgers wrote:
| A blog post fills the same purpose for starting discussions
| except it requires a higher level of commitment by the author.
| Hacker News is not really a micro-blogging platform in the
| traditional sense, and because other alternatives exist, the
| higher bar appears to have some logical rationale. It creates a
| space somewhere between StackOverflow and Reddit for "I want to
| talk about X" threads. People who really want to talk about X
| can write a blog and submit it to HN if Reddit isn't good
| enough.
| billme wrote:
| My experience is the post without URLs, but say 10 upvotes are
| generally of lower quality than URL related posts with 10
| upvotes. Not sure why this is, but I was forced to speculate,
| URL post intend tend to be by an expert on a topic and while
| non-URL post tend to be seeking experts; again, just
| speculation, might be wrong.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| "Tell HN" and "Show HN" are a thing, too. I was recommended to
| use "Propose HN" once, I think. It's just text. I assume the
| ask/show links check title prefix.
| rikkipitt wrote:
| Thanks for posting this. I've been an avid reader of HN for years
| (with a few modest/minor submissions). I had no idea about a
| substantial amount of this... I wonder how much is commonly known
| in the community?
| United857 wrote:
| I've wondered why we can't comment on YC jobs postings on HN. I
| imagine commenting would be beneficial for questions/answers
| about the company or position.
| kick wrote:
| I asked this a while back. Answer was roughly that job ads
| aren't substantive and offer little in terms of actual
| conversation, and repetitive threads that lack substance
| primarily attract people with previous grievances. This would
| lead to the same thread happening every time the company posted
| an ad.
|
| It makes sense that you wouldn't want to encourage ads becoming
| actual threads.
| detaro wrote:
| I'd assume its to avoid meta discussions about the companies.
| In the "whoishiring" threads you often get people complaining
| about the companies, which the mods then remove.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Nit: generally these get detached and moved, not removed.
| billme wrote:
| Because they are officially sponsored YC related ADs.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Although it is a fact, that doesn't really answer why you
| can't comment on them.
| billme wrote:
| Generally speaking ADs don't allow comments. Have an
| example or reasoning why this would make sense?
| davedx wrote:
| Some sites do, reddit and twitter for example. Can be
| useful
| billme wrote:
| Thanks, wasn't aware either of them intentionally linked
| ADs to public comment threads.
|
| Have any notable examples?
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Comments are usually disabled on Reddit ads. YouTube
| banner ads for YouTube videos have comments, and it's
| always hilarious reading them.
| hirundo wrote:
| for users: How about "I tried it, I like it" or "this
| product gave me warts", both things it could be useful to
| know.
|
| for makers of products HN people like: Comments could
| draw more attention to the product, more clicks, more
| sales.
|
| for makers of products HN people don't like: No, can't
| think of a reason why allowing comments on ads would make
| sense.
| billme wrote:
| Nothing stopping any user from creating posts related to
| an aspect of the content on any of those ADs, but it's
| obvious allowing comments for ADs would potentially cause
| unneeded overhead for the advertiser; clearly if any YC
| advertisers want to post on HN, they're free to do so
| within the guidelines on HN.
|
| HN doesn't block negative posts about YC companies.
| kick wrote:
| The ads are job ads, not product ads. All of your
| criticisms don't really apply here. I say this as a
| person who doesn't like them and rather wishes they
| weren't here.
| d0m wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors
| billme wrote:
| Are these the only supported "custom colors" ?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7432201
| Stratoscope wrote:
| No, you can set any CSS color if you have the minimum karma
| required. The linked page is just a list of colors that users
| have actually set.
|
| I really wish any user could set a custom topcolor. I found
| the default orange hard on my eyes, and I was glad when I
| could change it.
|
| Mine is #d0c8b5, which is simply a darker version of the page
| background color. Plain and unobtrusive, and the bit of
| orange in the "Y" logo sits nicely in the corner.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| And you can always use user.css to adjust per site CSS to
| your preference. I use it for a few sites; there are addons
| that facilitate it, but I've never bothered.
| lsllc wrote:
| Comment "markdown" syntax with some examples would be a nice
| addition to this.
| ainar-g wrote:
| While we're on the topic of HN syntax, I _really_ wish they
| would add proper blockquotes. Quotes in monospace look ugly,
| especially on mobile, and quotes that simply start with a " >"
| aren't visually distinct enough, imo. Just indenting a
| paragraph when it starts with a ">" would probably be enough.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| It would also be labor saving and booboo preventing if copying
| formatted text with elided URLs like "https://bla.com/bla/bla/b
| la/bla/bla/bla/bla/bla/bla/bla/bla/... from postings would copy
| the full URLs, instead of the elided URLs shown in the text.
|
| Is there some magic way to do that with CSS, replacing the
| "..." with the rest of the URL when you copy it? (There should
| be!)
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| CSS can do that with the "text-overflow: ellipsis" property,
| but only for fixed-width elements, so it wouldn't really work
| for links.[1]
|
| Note that if you click the timestamp on the comment, links
| don't get shortened.
|
| [1] https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/truncate-string-with-
| ell...
| Deimorz wrote:
| I think this official page covers all of it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
| lsllc wrote:
| I'm don't think that covers everything! I have used that page
| when commenting, but I'm sure I've seen formatting not
| described there.
| ourmandave wrote:
| Don't forget about their API on github.
|
| It's simplistic but you can still use it to write a sh*ttier
| version of HN.
|
| https://github.com/HackerNews/API
|
| I just wish they'd open source their We're-Not-Reddit behaviors
| library.
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| One thing I've been wanting to do is write a better mobile UI
| experience for HN using their api. I visit mostly on my phone
| and I have such a hard time tapping any of the action buttons
| (upvoting, minimizing a comment thread, etc). I tried a CSS-
| only mod using Stylish (I primarily use Firefox on Android) but
| I wanted to do some stuff that the current HTML structure made
| difficult.
|
| While I appreciate that they finally added some mobile styling,
| it was very minimal and ignored accessibility best practices
| for touch target size.
| minimaxir wrote:
| The API has no authentication, which makes it useless for
| anything other than a reader.
| saagarjha wrote:
| You may find this interesting, and as a bonus it also
| includes something that you haven't documented:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788526
| minimaxir wrote:
| That is indeed interesting, but I have a feeling it'll be
| documented once it launches. :P
| saagarjha wrote:
| Was talking more about the existence of an alpha-tester
| list, which has some additional features itself :)
| willis936 wrote:
| I'd be interested in a discourse mirror for consumption.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| To me HNs biggest feature is the lack of features and the lack of
| 'innovation', or rather redesigns for the sake of redesigning.
|
| Keep up the fantastic moderation and the wonderful lack of
| innovation, HN people!
| karlakush wrote:
| For me, the biggest feature is the lack of ads. Well except for
| the job postings, which I strongly suspect are unlabeled ads.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| We have ads here, they just have to be carefully crafted
| infomercials with a high payoff for the advertisee, enough
| that it could not be an ad ...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Basically, "Mission. Fucking. Accomplished." -
| https://xkcd.com/810/.
| saagarjha wrote:
| They're job ads from YC companies, as mentioned in the FAQ:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
| LunaSea wrote:
| You're joking, right? On tech topics, every third comment is
| somebody pointing to their company. Sometimes they mention it
| and sometimes not but it's still advertisement. Not even
| talking about people spamming their site.
| [deleted]
| coronadisaster wrote:
| Often there is too much censoring going on but at least they
| appear to be a bit more transparent about it now. The one
| feature that I would like to see is to be able to collapse all
| comments by default (and read only top level comments).
|
| And often, comments critical of HN like this one first get many
| upvotes and then get sent back to a neutral 1... which is what
| just happened
| dang wrote:
| It happened because some users upvoted it and others
| downvoted it. What did you think was happening?
| coronadisaster wrote:
| I was even asked to change my nickname once, I think it was
| by you. The nickname was nothing bad, you just didn't like
| it.
| VHRanger wrote:
| Completely agreed. The site:
|
| 1) loads instantly
|
| 2) is mostly plaintext.
|
| Reddit, for what it's worth, provides about the same features
| but on an absolutely heavyweight site. Especially the new
| (redesigned) SPA reddit
| moonchild wrote:
| https://i.reddit.com/
| jimmaswell wrote:
| SPA is one of the worst things to happen to the web. There
| are a small number of instances where it makes sense but it
| just ruins sites like Reddit, especially on a mobile device.
| rckoepke wrote:
| The thing that keeps me feeling warm and fuzzy is that they
| dont redirect any links. It's amazing how special I feel when
| copy/pasting hyperlinks works like it did back in the '90s.
| brianzelip wrote:
| For sure. This helps to keep it part of the old/weird web like
| the related articles that get much attention here. I appreciate
| it.
| ummonk wrote:
| I do wish it had some styling changes on mobile though -
| hitting vote buttons, reply links, etc. is rather difficult
| because of how small everything is.
| elorant wrote:
| One thing that I'd like to know is if there is any kind of
| penalty if the stories you submit get flagged.
| dang wrote:
| No.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| I agree with most of those policies, but "downranking of
| tutorials" seems kinda dumb. I could see it making sense for "how
| to React" drivel that people use for self-promotion, but I've
| learned a lot from 1-off tutorials I saw on HN first.
| brudgers wrote:
| _I 've learned a lot from 1-off tutorials I saw on HN first._
|
| Could that reflect survivor bias (among all tutorials)?
| billme wrote:
| Reasoning is HN's goal, per dang, is to promote substantially
| new information -- unless the tutorial fits this meaning, it's
| less of a priority to feature than those posts that do meet it.
|
| Worth noting there's nothing stopping you from building custom
| HN searches like this to find tutorials posts, though this
| would not solve the likelihood of the community posting related
| comments:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Citation?
| billme wrote:
| Sure, read all the comments by dang (aka HN's main mod)
| here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23239164
| drdeadringer wrote:
| I'm glad to know about the hex-color change ability.
| benjaminsuch wrote:
| /leaders is pretty cool. First place got over 300k points, wtf.
| billme wrote:
| Related link, leader list:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
|
| Direct link to top users by rep:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek
|
| (tptacek's comments are super useful and extremely
| knowledgeable)
| [deleted]
| billme wrote:
| Good bye HN!
|
| Dang (HN's mod) just asked me to be identifiable and given that's
| not a good fit for me, this will be my last post:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23441542
| samanator wrote:
| I don't know who you are but please stay! You seem to have a
| lot to offer and in a very positive way.
|
| EDIT: When I wrote this reply your comment was at the top. 2
| minutes later it was at the bottom of the comment section.
| Looks like it was manually moved to the bottom of the comments
| by a moderator :(
| yesenadam wrote:
| Or new comments appear at the top, and after a couple of
| downvotes it went to the bottom. No conspiracy theory needed.
| amaccuish wrote:
| >Dang (HN's mod) just asked me to be identifiable
|
| But that's not what they said. Were you asked to use your real
| name? Nothing stopping you keeping to one, anonymous sounding
| username
| owaty wrote:
| I see where billme is coming from. I don't do it here
| (because I don't comment much, because I mostly use
| https://hackerweb.app for reading), but I do it on reddit.
|
| Once you've left enough comments, a motivated party has a
| good chance of identifying you based on the intersection of
| your (relatively uncommon) interests, various bits and pieces
| of the personal info that you tend to drop in comments etc.
| simonw wrote:
| This is amazingly useful. I've been on HN for nearly 13 years and
| I only knew about a fraction of this stuff.
| billme wrote:
| Agree, not sure why after X amount of rep is earned something
| like this is not featured for just for new users, users who
| haven't viewed it, etc.
| itchyjunk wrote:
| Ah, there is nothing past 501? I was hoping something else would
| unlock for user whose karma points are over 9000.
| billme wrote:
| PG's phone number used to appear if your rep got high enough,
| not sure if that's still a feature.
| lucb1e wrote:
| On his profile page (/user?id=pg) you mean? I don't see it
| there with 11k rep. It might require higher rep nowadays or
| indeed be removed.
| billme wrote:
| Yes, that's PG's username, or at least the original &
| official one, but no, that's not where it would appear.
|
| Here's example of a prior reference to this feature:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7432526
| lucb1e wrote:
| To save others a click, it would appear:
|
| > in the top right corner of the header
| nostrademons wrote:
| 65K karma (and #22 on /leaders) and I don't see it. I think
| that was a joke.
| kogir wrote:
| It happens somewhere between ten and eleven digits of
| karma :)
| billme wrote:
| Not surprising last reference I know of it is years old
| and PG is busy doing other things now.
| airstrike wrote:
| Is there a similar list to /leaders but with "active"
| accounts ranked by age?
| saagarjha wrote:
| /leaders already gets stripped of inactive users by some
| mechanism that I have not yet figured out.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Maybe it's just growth? The more active users HN has, the
| more votes a popular comment will get. So active
| commenters, even if they stay in the same relative
| ranking, accrue karma faster and faster. The corollary
| being, if you stop commenting, you lose your position in
| the ranking with speed proportional to time since your
| last comment.
| saagarjha wrote:
| No, there are people who "should" be there who aren't.
| For example, 'pg with 156k karma.
| airstrike wrote:
| I see... but in any case, those are still sorted by karma
| rather than by age. I'm just wondering who are the oldest
| users that are still active ~daily
| [deleted]
| ambicapter wrote:
| I think the values have changed, I didn't get the ability to
| downvote until very recently at >1000 karma
| dang wrote:
| No change. It's been 501 for a decade or more.
| grey-area wrote:
| After 10,000 points, there will be cake.
| krapp wrote:
| The cake was a lie.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The lie was, however, delicious.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I've always found it kind of ironic (or at least funny) that the
| code for HN isn't open source.
| ufmace wrote:
| IMO, a lot of open-source enthusiasts just don't understand the
| level of hostile/manipulative attention that get directed at
| sites with lots of high-value traffic, such as HN. There are
| quite a few users and companies actively trying to get their
| pages on the front page by any means necessary. It's dangerous
| to assume that they're not technically sophisticated.
|
| Sites of this size generally need fairly sophisticated rules to
| withstand these attempts and keep to the original purpose of
| the site. And they need to be hidden, because if they are
| known, they will be successfully gamed. There is much more
| brainpower aimed at manipulating the site than there is in
| support of keeping it dedicated to its original purpose.
| monadic2 wrote:
| "Security by obscurity"
|
| Hey no knocks, just saying there's a name for this tactic.
| billme wrote:
| Not sure that's always been true, or at least for sure PG was
| open about subsets if the code. Generally, there's reason to
| open source code, and open sourcing it would likely result in
| more overhead not less; generally HN goal is to very, very
| slowly change the code, interface, etc.
|
| Honestly, cloning HN really would not be that hard, cloning
| dang, that's another story.
|
| EDIT: Here's a recent comment from dang on open source HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22791221
| traes wrote:
| > cloning HN really would not be that hard
|
| Isn't that basically what lobste.rs did?
| billme wrote:
| Related link:
|
| https://lobste.rs/about
|
| And history:
|
| https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacke
| r...
| krapp wrote:
| There is an open source fork but it runs on Racket[0], so the
| Arc documentation isn't always correct, and of course that
| forum and this one differ in terms of features.
|
| [0]https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki
| gus_massa wrote:
| HN is written in Arc that is written in Racket.
|
| I think HN use a slightly modified version of Racket with a
| few tweaks to be more friendly with the high amount of
| memory used in HN.
| dang wrote:
| The original version of HN, or something close to it, has been
| open source for many years. It's part of the Arc distribution:
| http://arclanguage.org/.
|
| There have been many changes to both the HN code and the Arc
| implementation since then, and those are not open source. We've
| of course thought about open-sourcing them someday, but the
| problem is that it would be a lot of work to do that, and then
| a lot of ongoing work to maintain it and respond to requests.
| Our dev resources are so limited that this is not in the cards
| for the time being.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> it would be a lot of work to do that, and then a lot of
| ongoing work to maintain it and respond to requests_
|
| You could open source the code, say in a public repository
| that was read-only, without accepting pull requests or doing
| any maintenance beyond pushing to the repo whenever it seemed
| advisable.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| HN is a very lean operation and there is significant ongoing
| overhead cost to open sourcing software that often isn't fully
| appreciated, it isn't free. They may simply be directing
| limited resources to higher priorities.
|
| I know many cases of software that was not made open source
| solely because it would require a substantial resource
| investment as a practical matter.
| thrwn_frthr_awy wrote:
| There are many apps that release their source without
| supporting it. A simple link to a zip file is a fine
| distribution model. Git or any other SCM is a common
| distribution tool for open source, but it isn't a
| requirement.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| In theory you can open source software by throwing code
| over the wall with total disregard for anyone else that may
| be looking at or using that code. Zero overhead, right?
|
| In practice that doesn't actually work because some users
| will not respect the boundaries you lay out. No matter what
| you do or say, some significant subset of users will assert
| or assume the act of open sourcing code places a litany of
| obligations on the people releasing the code. Furthermore,
| some of these people will go to great lengths to try to get
| you to comply with these obligations. At which point you
| are either doing a lot of extra work you were not planning
| on doing to make these people happy or you are dealing with
| a lot of extra and unnecessary personal drama. Either way,
| it costs you time and energy that you have to account for.
|
| The only way I have ever seen anyone explicitly avoid this
| overhead was when no one was using their code.
| [deleted]
| remote_phone wrote:
| For me I find it funny that HN doesn't scale. Whenever there's
| an unusually active topic, the mods have to scramble to make
| countermeasures to keep the site up.
| dang wrote:
| That's not true. I wonder where you got that idea.
|
| It is true that the app server runs on a single core and we
| don't have a lot of performance to spare. But it handles the
| current levels of active threads reasonably well. The main
| concern is that if average load goes up significantly we'll
| be in trouble at some point.
|
| We've got an ongoing major project that will hopefully
| flatten that curve, but unfortunately it's hard to find time
| to work on it.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It usually scales well enough to demolish sites it links to
| sometimes, like Slashdot used to.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Well, it does runs off of one computer:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767439
| yesenadam wrote:
| I'd love if I could choose on my user page not to see my HN
| points total always there next to my name in the top bar. Seeing
| that often turns me into someone I don't like.
| dang wrote:
| We might implement that as a profile option. One question is
| where such a feature should fall between minimal (don't show
| karma next to usernames in top bar) vs. maximal (don't show any
| point totals or karma about anything). I feel like it might be
| better to go the whole hog and just have the maximal option.
| 'nokarma'.
| yesenadam wrote:
| Oh great. Yes, I guess not seeing the voting on one's own
| comments would be good too. (Looking at the score on my
| comments is a very small percentage of my HN time, but my HN
| total score is there every time I return to the main page.
| Have to learn to ignore it I guess.)
|
| As long as it doesn't mess with the voting system too much!
| Maybe there'd be many more bad comments if people couldn't
| see their points total/comment scores.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Set your top bar colour to black.
| yesenadam wrote:
| Haha thanks, I tried it... It 'worked', but unfortunately
| can't see anything else in the top bar - "ask" etc.
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(page generated 2020-06-06 23:00 UTC)