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Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

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Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

#71

Post by plinkplonk »

jacquesm wrote: post #68
ericd wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comment and community quality are such hard problems to solve, and are orders of magnitude more important for a site like this than features like search. Sure, it might be easy to add search. Or rankings. Or a million other things a small minority would appreciate. But that's not how you make a good site that is optimal for the larger population. An option should be very useful for a large percentage of users to make…

The argument PG brought was that it would take time away from the other work. But as it is it incrementally takes time away from all of us, and all the time. The spending of that one or two minutes at integrating searchyc.com or google.com would come back 1000 fold over the life time of the site, and probably much more than 1000 fold, and if he's that busy he maybe should pass the torch to people that can fully conce…

"Paul has kept the door solidly locked to others contributing to HN"

Does he? If you send a bug fix or feature patch to the HN arc codebase, he tosses it without looking at it? Or does he look at it and then take a decision whether to include it or not? I would imagine the latter (please correct me if I am wrong).

That he refuses to consider some suggestions, no matter how much sense it may make to the person making the suggestion (or even bystanders) is the exact same behaviour that every open source project's BDFL exhibits. I think you exaggerate with the "door solidly locked to other s contributing". If you send in a bug fix patch for example, I am sure he'd incorporate it asap.

Now the complaint reduces to "but PG refused to consider this feature though I (and many others) think it is a must have"

The traditional answer to "but the BDFL refuses to incorporate my suggestions which were liked by all the users I spoke to" is "then fork the code, and/or build something better".

My view, fwiw, is that we (users of HN) have the right to request features and present a logical case and PG (as the chief programmer/owner/BDFL etc of HN) can accept or refuse those requests for any reason whatsoever. If he explains the rationale that is a bonus, but he doesn't really need to. It is his project.

If he refuses to incorporate our fixes/suggestions, we (the hacker users of HN) can either go along with his decision xor fork the codebase (or start a new project from scratch using our preferred tools) and build something better (and I know a couple of HNers who are trying exactly that).

Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

#72

Post by tptacek »

pg wrote: post #25
jacquesm wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to believe that a programmer of your caliber would make it seem as though an off-site submission is such a big deal that it would take away significant time from working on the quality of the submissions and comments. I'm not 1% the programmer that you are and it wouldn't take me more than 15 minutes to put a search box (after all, it's just a piece of static text) in the HN footer. See, all those 'qua…

What you don't get is that attention is a zero sum game. There are an infinite number of minor things that would be pretty good to do that would "just take a minute." The only way to do good work is to ruthlessly blow them off and to focus only on the few things that matter most. Ironically, this thread, though a complete bike-shed waste of time in itself, is not entirely bad, because it's also causing me to spend ti…

Basically, points exacerbate the "someone is wrong on the Internet" trap.

This absolutely squares with my experience. I wouldn't want to lose visibility into my own comment scores, but I could do without seeing everyone else's.

Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

#73

Post by bootload »

jacquesm wrote: post #54
Aegean wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any time I see something valuable on HN I quickly bookmark it so that I can read it later on without the hassle to search it. Search is a hassle on YC. I think we need a solution especially having been used to quick and effective google search for almost anything.

That's what searchyc.com is all about. Google is a good solution, searchyc.com is even better.

"... searchyc.com is even better. ..."

I'll second that. searchyc is my HN search of choice. Works every time. Why are users complaining about finding things?

Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

#75

Post by ericd »

jacquesm wrote: post #68
ericd wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comment and community quality are such hard problems to solve, and are orders of magnitude more important for a site like this than features like search. Sure, it might be easy to add search. Or rankings. Or a million other things a small minority would appreciate. But that's not how you make a good site that is optimal for the larger population. An option should be very useful for a large percentage of users to make…

The argument PG brought was that it would take time away from the other work. But as it is it incrementally takes time away from all of us, and all the time. The spending of that one or two minutes at integrating searchyc.com or google.com would come back 1000 fold over the life time of the site, and probably much more than 1000 fold, and if he's that busy he maybe should pass the torch to people that can fully conce…

Keeping a vision intact often does require absolutism. It's helpful to experiment, but in the end, I think a maintainer has to stick to his guns to keep anything from devolving into crap. Guidance from users is often stunningly wrong when taken from a higher vantage point. I hate to keep running back to Jobs, but if he listened to popular opinion and let them guide what he wanted, his products would end up reverting to the mean. Instead he keeps his door "solidly locked".

To implement search well is not a trivial task at all, and distracts from the much, much more important task of making the community self regulate towards quality. If all you want is a link to site:news.ycombinator.com, then a bookmark should be fine for you and others who do it frequently, and typing it in should be fine for those of us who search infrequently. No additional site complexity needed. If people ask how to search it, then they'll learn a neat and generally useful trick when someone tells them about site:xyz on Google.

Edit: And in response to "he should bring on more people if he's so time-limited", bringing on more people frequently causes more of a time drain than it solves.

Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

#76

Post by zackham »

jacquesm wrote: post #68
ericd wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comment and community quality are such hard problems to solve, and are orders of magnitude more important for a site like this than features like search. Sure, it might be easy to add search. Or rankings. Or a million other things a small minority would appreciate. But that's not how you make a good site that is optimal for the larger population. An option should be very useful for a large percentage of users to make…

The argument PG brought was that it would take time away from the other work. But as it is it incrementally takes time away from all of us, and all the time. The spending of that one or two minutes at integrating searchyc.com or google.com would come back 1000 fold over the life time of the site, and probably much more than 1000 fold, and if he's that busy he maybe should pass the torch to people that can fully conce…

I read HN multiple times a day and have for a while now. I do not care about search at all. This site doesn't really have any features, and I don't care - I come here for the community. Just another data point fwiw.

Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

#77

Post by underover »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #39
pg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you don't get is that attention is a zero sum game. There are an infinite number of minor things that would be pretty good to do that would "just take a minute." The only way to do good work is to ruthlessly blow them off and to focus only on the few things that matter most. Ironically, this thread, though a complete bike-shed waste of time in itself, is not entirely bad, because it's also causing me to spend ti…

Apologies for the frankness. I keep trying diplomacy but I suck at it. A less informed person might think that since you got your clock cleaned by popular vote, you seem much more inclined to discount popular vote than you did a month ago. I have lost much of my admiration for HN. But I have an awesome appreciation of what you think is important to spend your time on. I have to admit I am mostly wrong and I am still…

"And am I to understand you monitor the voting records on HN?"

As revealed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1278680

Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

#78

Post by chengmi »

jacquesm wrote: post #50
chengmi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it stands, SearchYC doesn't get enough daily uniques to justify beefing up the system. Frankly, SearchYC was an experiment in how quickly I could learn a new technology (RoR) and build a system. I was completely expecting someone to come along a few months later to make SearchYC obsolete. It's been 2.5 years, and I don't think that's happened yet.

If you got a lot more traffic because YC would anoint you the 'official' YC search engine would you be able to handle it? Would you commit to beefing up the system to whatever it took?

Well, no. SearchYC has no revenue. I maintain SearchYC and host it out of a box in my closet as a service to the community. It doesn't make any sense for me to commit to do "whatever it takes".

That being said, with a few hundred dollars worth of hardware and some software changes, SearchYC should be able to gracefully handle a couple orders of magnitude more traffic.

Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

#80

Post by pieceofpeace »

pg wrote: post #25
jacquesm wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to believe that a programmer of your caliber would make it seem as though an off-site submission is such a big deal that it would take away significant time from working on the quality of the submissions and comments. I'm not 1% the programmer that you are and it wouldn't take me more than 15 minutes to put a search box (after all, it's just a piece of static text) in the HN footer. See, all those 'qua…

What you don't get is that attention is a zero sum game. There are an infinite number of minor things that would be pretty good to do that would "just take a minute." The only way to do good work is to ruthlessly blow them off and to focus only on the few things that matter most. Ironically, this thread, though a complete bike-shed waste of time in itself, is not entirely bad, because it's also causing me to spend ti…

> There are an infinite number of minor things that would be pretty good to do that would "just take a minute."

The search link is at least as relevant as the bookmarklet link and certainly more relevant than the webmynd and mixpanel links with images.

> Basically, points exacerbate the "someone is wrong on the Internet" trap.

While i am not sure about that, I suggest that voting for comments should be delayed like the temporarily hidden reply link, that may reduce some reflexive voting.

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