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To Paul Graham

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: To Paul Graham

#91

Post by coderdude »

_pius wrote: post #81
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…

Tables are still the most reliable way to display content under nearly all circumstances (maybe less so on mobiles, but definitely on the desktop). I don't think that's been true for several years.

Internet Explorer pretty much guarantees that my statement is true.

Re: To Paul Graham

#92

Post by inerte »

jacquesm wrote: post #71
Ixiaus wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Will find? The crazyness about "social media" is exactly that, luring users around your product/brand.

Re: To Paul Graham

#93

Post by patio11 »

JesseAldridge wrote: post #86
nazgulnarsil wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The problem with orange users was that it divided the community into two camps. This doesn't have the same issue.

Closer to four -- "had orange" and "wanted orange" were independent booleans.

Re: To Paul Graham

#94

Post by joshfinnie »

nexneo wrote: post #74

I almost love HN. (will remove `almost` if they remove table layout)

How does the layout have any bearing on whether or not you enjoy the website, especially when dealing with a website like HN that is basically in tabular form?

I don't know, so if there is actually a good reason, I would love to hear it!

Re: To Paul Graham

#95

Post by riffer »

sesqu wrote: post #88
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…

How about instead of average comment score, you consider average likelihood of quality, treating the score (or its log) as odds? That is, w=avg(score/(1+score)). That way a single popular comment won't dominate.

It appears he throws out the highest rated comment when computing the average. I assume that's because of what you're getting at: the distribution of comment scores tend to look like a power law, so the arithmetic mean of all the scores isn't really the right number to use.

Re: To Paul Graham

#96

Post by jacquesm »

inerte wrote: post #92
jacquesm wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Will find? The crazyness about "social media" is exactly that, luring users around your product/brand.

Not really, in those cases the 'product' is the data about the users, not the actual engagement of the users to create value outside of the forum where the interaction normally takes place.

It's hard to put the difference any clearer than that, but YC engages a small subset of their users in activities that they are peripherally engaged in on the forum. Other 'social' sites sell their users data wholesale, that's a completely different kettle of fish.

Most of the users on HN are not engaged in the revenue stream of YC, directly or indirectly whereas almost all the users of other social sites are directly involved in the revenue stream.

Re: To Paul Graham

#97

Post by jfager »

gizmo wrote: post #89
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…

Since this is a meta-thread anyway: have you considered something like a blacklist? That would give us a way to filter out those users who like to make bad puns or witty one-liners too much, and those users who too often make wildly incorrect claims. This would still serve as a filter, but this wouldn't result in some kind of whitelist where you effectively only really notice the people you know you're going to agree…

I wrote a small greasemonkey script for blacklisting, it definitely helps keep the site useful for me.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/55745

I also second the suspicions about whitelisting being a desirable thing.

Re: To Paul Graham

#98

Post by jacquesm »

mortenjorck wrote: post #90
jacquesm wrote: post #39

If HN ever got as large as digg it would suffer from much of the problems that digg has, and you will not be able to remedy those by 'staying simple'. Digg is complex because it is that large, and I think that if HN ever got that large it would start to suffer in much the same ways. HN is not so much a reflection of the person that built it (though that definitely does help) as it is a reflection of the people that p…

As long as this document retains the respect of the majority of the users: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html HN will thrive. It's the single best set of "social news" community guidelines I've read. The triumph of HN has been in attracting an initial audience that agrees with the spirit of that document, and in their subtly but firmly encouraging its adherence in newcomers. The character of a community is a…

> the self-referential and jaded territory of Slashdot, or even the sycophantic territory of Wikipedia

In this thread that's richly ironic.

It's about as self-referential and sycophantic as I've ever seen here.

Re: To Paul Graham

#99

Post by gte910h »

tezza wrote: post #37
alanh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better & simpler solution: Bigger buttons on touchscreen devices, preventing mis-clicks in the first place

I've often thought the same. This should be easy as a greasemonkey script to save other people having to make changes to support it. --------------- EDIT: Out of curiosity I made up a javascript bookmarklet that seems to do the trick... upsize all the page's upvotes to 30x30 javascript:{im=document.images;iml=im.length;for(i=0;i Cut and paste that into your browser URL bar, or bookmark etc. It's easy to validate by e…

The issue is that it doesn't work on MOBILE devices, i.e. things without greasemonkey.

Re: To Paul Graham

#100

Post by dkersten »

jfager wrote: post #97
gizmo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since this is a meta-thread anyway: have you considered something like a blacklist? That would give us a way to filter out those users who like to make bad puns or witty one-liners too much, and those users who too often make wildly incorrect claims. This would still serve as a filter, but this wouldn't result in some kind of whitelist where you effectively only really notice the people you know you're going to agree…

I wrote a small greasemonkey script for blacklisting, it definitely helps keep the site useful for me. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/55745 I also second the suspicions about whitelisting being a desirable thing.

Though an interesting people list might be good - comments by people on the list are highlighted so you can spot them easier, this way you can choose the people whos comments you like to be highlighted. Coupled with a blacklist to hid (or make less obvious) the comments by people who you decide generally don't post interesting or useful comments could make dealing with large numbers of comments much much easier.

Thoughts?

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