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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?

#101

Post by boredguy8 »

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…

I like the idea of getting rid of points. I dislike the idea of losing the ability to quickly scan for comments the community thinks are good. Because of the clever way new comments are briefly at/near the top of the page, something should stand in for "this is probably worth reading".

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

#102

Post by jules »

pg wrote: post #65
credo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I would be suprised if there was a single user who'd left HN because it lacked search. While I agree with you, I think you're looking at it the wrong way. No user will leave HN because of search-issues, but a lot of users will be very happy if the site had good search. imo it makes sense to do a trivial thing and make a lot of users happy. So while you're correct in saying that "quality of the submissions and comm…

I see no reason why quality of content should preclude a decent search feature. Because attention is a finite resource. I can only spend attention on minor problems by taking it away from major ones. For example, right now, instead of wasting my time replying to this comment, I should be working on a new project we're launching soon. And I think I will, so forgive me if I drop out of this thread.

Adding a google or searchyc search box is about the same amount of work as typing that comment, and several orders of magnitude more useful.

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

#103

Post by antirez »

nostrademons wrote: post #96
aneth wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the craigslist logic. Sticky sites can convince themselves they can do no wrong because really they can't. Users would need a really strong reason to leave in droves (friendster). Even spam comments would not lose users quickly unless they were overwhelming because hacker news has a critical mass of people who would have an impossible time moving en masse. Just because people still use craigslist doesn't mean…

There's an opportunity cost for every feature added, and it's not just the time lost in implementation. More features = more code, which means more things you have to consider each time you add the next feature. More features = more interface complexity, which means additional things that your users have to consider each time they use the site. More complexity also tends to scare off new users. And more features = mo…

Ok, but honestly, do you think or not that 3 lines of html code should be added, submitting to searchyc.com? I think most of the users here strongly agree.

This community is already pretty positively biased towards YC, note that there is no added value provided by HN technologically, it's just a matter of community. So it would be wise to avoid pushing hard the YC search startup if users don't like it.

Also the "I'm wasting my time" replying to this comment is the wrong attitude. Paul Graham and everybody else is supposed to just reply or not if he got something better to do, but replying this way honestly is not great.

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

#104

Post by renderful »

derefr wrote: post #59
jacquesm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> painkillers and vitamins. I can't make heads or tails of this comment. Could you please explain?

I assume it means that some features are "good for you," while others are opiates; and possibly that this is a bad thing because opiates mask pain, and graphing pain is a crucial part of iterating a design, so the more opiates a design has, the more confounding factors there will be to evolving a good core product. (That's not to say that I agree that on-site search is an opiate, but an argument could be made for it.…

I don't have a better word to describe "painkillers", as he is trying to convey the difference between want and need. I want candy, but it's also not good for me. What word conveys that, and isn't harmful in some way?

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

#105

Post by jacquesm »

trop wrote: post #81
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.

In a sense, HN is itself a bookmark site once logged in. That is, by looking at the "saved stories" link from my profile, I see what I've upvoted. Hence an incentive to upvote not just good items, but items I want to look at multiple times. (No such "saved comments" index exists, though?)

Yes, unless of course your 'saved stories' link has more than 210 entries on it.

edit: Hey, wow! This seems to have been quietly fixed, I really missed this and I'm pretty happy it's repaired.

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

#106

Post by jacquesm »

furtivefelon wrote: post #79

google: search term site:news.ycombinator.com, it's very good, and it could be better than anything pg et al. can throw together in a hurry :D

From experience, it's not as good as a tailormade search like searchyc.com, they store a lot of meta data about stuff on the site and that helps narrowing down your searches considerably.

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

#107

Post by jacquesm »

lotharbot wrote: post #87
underover wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And am I to understand you monitor the voting records on HN? " As revealed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1278680

From that post, you can't conclude that pg "monitors the voting records" as a general practice, only that he's willing to look at them when someone specifically complains about the ranking algorithm . Read the parent comment to that one -- the guy complained about what type of stories were on the front page; pg made the point that the complainer wasn't doing his part to get other stories up there.

I don't think that Mahmuds' point was about the ranking algorithm, it was about the submissions themselves. As I pointed out in that other thread the fact that he didn't vote for those stories was his whole point, to quote his voting record back in public to chew him out is imo really below the belt and was - at least to me - totally unexpected.

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

#108

Post by edw519 »

pg wrote: post #65
credo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I would be suprised if there was a single user who'd left HN because it lacked search. While I agree with you, I think you're looking at it the wrong way. No user will leave HN because of search-issues, but a lot of users will be very happy if the site had good search. imo it makes sense to do a trivial thing and make a lot of users happy. So while you're correct in saying that "quality of the submissions and comm…

I see no reason why quality of content should preclude a decent search feature. Because attention is a finite resource. I can only spend attention on minor problems by taking it away from major ones. For example, right now, instead of wasting my time replying to this comment, I should be working on a new project we're launching soon. And I think I will, so forgive me if I drop out of this thread.

Because attention is a finite resource. I can only spend attention on minor problems by taking it away from major ones.

I think you've just identified one of the best ways to "break out of the box", or dare I say, make a paradigm shift.

The issue isn't whether attention (or anything else) is finite; it's "how to make it infinite", at least for the time being.

Example: I need to add horizontal scrolling (a critical user need) to my Report Writer. I would also like to add F-Key View Toggling (a nice to have) to my Form Look-ups. As a single founder, I am constantly asking myself, "How can I have it all, even with limited resources?" I have found that the trick is not to focus on what's limited, but on how to embrace my constraints and use them to get clever out of necessity. In this case, I wrote a single program that used the same routines to do both.

This doesn't work all the time, but it's surprising how often it does. You never know until you try. You never try until you have to. You never have to until you realize how limited your resources really are.

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

#109

Post by ledger123 »

Aegean wrote: post #53
pg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I'll try it for a while. It really doesn't seem like it's worth adding a link for something so trivial though.

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.

The easiest way to bookmark HN articles is to leave a comment.

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

#110

Post by brlewis »

pg wrote: post #58
brlewis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the points helped you gain a more accurate idea of whether responding was worthwhile. The more people support an idea, the more response it calls for. Furthermore, an upvote or downvote is equivalent to a very concise comment.

The base case of concise and inarticulate are identical. The second most concise form of comment would be to say simply "yes" or "no." Do you feel such comments add to a discussion on account of their conciseness?

I feel such comments when presented like news.yc votes or FriendFeed likes add more value because of their conciseness.

  (define (value conversation-element)
    (- (benefit conversation-element)
       (cost conversation-element)))

  (define (cost conversation-element)
    (- (conciseness conversation-element)))
I'll leave the definition of (benefit conversation-element) as an exercise for the reader.
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