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To Paul Graham

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: To Paul Graham

#71

Post by jacquesm »

Ixiaus wrote: post #33
manish wrote: post #22

One thing that is different here is that this site does not need to generate (ad/any) revenue, so many of the irritating things that will be common in other forums will be absent here.

What's interesting, is that Hacker News does generate revenue in a very indirect way. By cultivating a hacker community around his early stage investment company he is ensuring there will always be top-notch thinkers and doers participating in the niche he has created. Whether this was intentional or not, I don't know, but it works well for both parties: he has a thriving community of leading edge people, and the peo…

That's an extremely good point you are making, effectively YC can afford to subsidize HN because of the fact that they make their money in a way that does not require pestering the users of the site.

I'm pretty sure that eventually many more really successful websites will find a way to adopt a model like that, it really is one of the best ways to marry a happy users to commerce, find some side-channel that you can exploit.

Most websites think that the 'data' they have on their users is the marketable good, google has often been said to see you, their user as the end-product. YC does it different, they see a subset of the users as the raw material to drive their bottom line, the rest are along for the ride.

It's a much more direct version of what FB, google and so on do, and it is much better imo because it is more honest and transparent.

Re: To Paul Graham

#72

Post by nazgulnarsil »

pg wrote: post #64

Thanks very much. I don't think it's really HN's features or lack of them is the attraction for most users though, but the quality of the submissions and comments. So thank you guys. Ironically I've been thinking of adding some variant of following as a way to deal with the increasing volume of comments. I just haven't had time to yet. I did recently (about 3 weeks ago) tweak the algorithm for ranking comments, and t…

isn't this a less transparent version of the orange users experiment?

Re: To Paul Graham

#73

Post by jacquesm »

jokermatt999 wrote: post #60
jacquesm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That nails it exactly, when slashdot and digg were small they felt just like HN does today (well, maybe digg not, but reddit certainly did). Digg always was more mainstream oriented. The biggest turn-off for me on digg is not so much the complexity of the site but the level of the discussion.

To be fair, it's possible to build a fairly good community in a smaller subreddit. The larger ones have those problems, but it seems like most small sized subreddits actually work out pretty well. Still, I find myself gradually spending more and more time here and less and less time and reddit. I think if I didn't mod a few subreddits there, I'd pretty much have solely switched to HN.

That's probably true, and in fact underscores the point even further, smaller == better.

Re: To Paul Graham

#75

Post by lionhearted »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #28
drlisp wrote: post #19

This level of ass kissing makes me want to puke.

I have to agree, actually. More to the point, this submission violates both the written and unspoken rules of submissions here: "Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something", and the unspoken rule that content-less submissions are generally frowned upon. This is something that could have been equally effective as a brief email to pg. As the current top-ranked post here, it's kind of ... masturbatory.

> This is something that could have been equally effective as a brief email to pg. As the current top-ranked post here, it's kind of ... masturbatory.

Disagree - I think this thread will be far more well-read than the site guidelines by new members and will show them why we love this place and why we want to preserve it.

Nobody wants a post like on the frong page every week, but once per six months or a year is probably good for the community.

Re: To Paul Graham

#76

Post by petercooper »

barmstrong wrote: post #68
coderdude wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Tables are still the most reliable way to display content under nearly all circumstances (maybe less so on mobiles, but definitely on the desktop). They've been stable for years and years. I went through the hardcore standards phase where I thought it would be the death of my soul if I ever went back to using tables for layout, but then I read a great article (wish I had the link) that struck a chord with…

Yeah this could quickly devolve into a flame about divs vs tables. But divs I always saw as a step backwards in one aspect: programmer ease of use. In divs you have to spend time thinking about "float drop", doing math in your head, and getting all the columns to have the same height - things which "just work" in tables. It still surprises me sometimes how quickly they were adopted.

But divs I always saw as a step backwards in one aspect: programmer ease of use.

It's always a lot easier at first to overlook structure in your app/code/whatever. It's when you or others come to work with your code or extend it in some way (with Greasemonkey, say) that all the extra work comes along.

If you have to "spend time thinking about" writing tests, it takes longer to build the prototype of your software but.. that's not a particularly good rationale for not using tests (though it is still a rationale, of course). Same goes for semantic markup in my book.

Re: To Paul Graham

#77

Post by ronnier »

petercooper wrote: post #38
edw519 wrote: post #16

I imagine hn owes a lot of success to its simplicity. I was always confused by slashdot's filters and the threads in almost every other forum, with Post #18 replying to Post #7 and Post #27 replying to Post #3, but only 10 posts visible per page. Busy people don't have the time to wade through stuff like that, so all you're left with are the trolls. hn's nested threads built with are so simple that they're brilliant.…

hn's nested threads built with are so simple that they're brilliant. No horizontal scrolling, no flipping between pages, just click "reply" and you're good to go. I don't think s should get undue praise. With s, the code would be easier to read mechanically (for manipulation with Greasemonkey, say) and even though there'd be a little more CSS, the page weight might be reduced a little (I'd have to make a mockup to be…

I actually think the best way to display these types of comments is with nested UL/LI's. It makes it really easy to call a recursive function to write out the comments then adjust the indentation with CSS. For my mobile HN site, I do just that. From there, it was trivial to add in the ability to collapse and expand comments. For example, view this page through my reader (It's meant for mobile phones):

http://toadjaw.com/hn/comments/1398250

Re: To Paul Graham

#79

Post by TheSOB88 »

gte910h wrote: post #36
lionhearted wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the permanence, because sometimes I upvote an insightful comment, then read an insightful reply and upvote it too. I think if votes were impermanent, I might be more tempted to null or downvote the original point if the second one is better - not because of evil, just because of the natural human desire to be very consistent. So I like the permanence thing... ...but I understand the misclicks. Maybe an "undo"…

" I might be more tempted to null or downvote the original point if the second one is better" Can't both comments be good?

I almost wanted to upvote this, but I might have regretted it, so I didn't.

Re: To Paul Graham

#80

Post by napierzaza »

Or the doom or Reddit. Sugary one-note posts that are just visual jokes or one persons attempt to get another's attention. cough

Anyhow, I just hope posts about "do you hate this" start rising to the top of HN.

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