Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

hackerforums.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 140 posts

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#121

Post by danmaz74 »

I really miss a way to connect with other interesting people from HN. I'm afraid that a simple forum won't work, though, because of (social) scalability: there are good reasons why HN practically bans all banter, light exchanges, or turf wars that usually come to dominate popular subreddits and similar places.

As a matter of fact, I'm thinking about a possible solution focused on allowing remote hackers to at least do professional networking. It could become a real project; anybody interested, feel free to contact me (email in my profile).

With this said, I hope I'm wrong, so I'll subscribe and wish best of luck to this new forum :)

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#122

Post by vinayms »

I see a lot of the members are appreciative of this. This venture may or may not take off, but I have to ask this: Why do we need another forum that will potentially split the community?

This is 'hacker' news after all. Can't this website release its forum software so that a bunch of interested volunteers (no me) could improve it? Wouldn't that be really meta and cool?

The main gripe I have with HN forum is lack of reply notification. Secondly, the crowd tends to overdo the hacker-nerd-geek thing by discussing unrelated minutae till the cows come home which inflates the comment count. This sort of discourages posters to post their POV fearing it will be buried amidst the 500+ comments. We have a visibility problem.

We just need a few tweaks.

Further, looking at all the passionate discussion about AI and ML that happens here, I am sure some of the regulars would like to implement a scheme that learns my 'collapse the chaff' pattern and spare me the gory boredom inside a thread.

(I think what I wrote might come across as snarky, but I assure you I am not being so.)

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#123

Post by el_cid »

vinayms wrote: post #122

I see a lot of the members are appreciative of this. This venture may or may not take off, but I have to ask this: Why do we need another forum that will potentially split the community? This is 'hacker' news after all. Can't this website release its forum software so that a bunch of interested volunteers (no me) could improve it? Wouldn't that be really meta and cool? The main gripe I have with HN forum is lack of r…

You are right... HN is starting to have a visibility issue. But I can't see how it can be fixed. All successful online communities have to deal with this aspect eventually. They all become too popular at one point and it's hard to maintain the quality.

I can't see how it can be fixed.

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#124

Post by vinayms »

el_cid wrote: post #123
vinayms wrote: post #122

I see a lot of the members are appreciative of this. This venture may or may not take off, but I have to ask this: Why do we need another forum that will potentially split the community? This is 'hacker' news after all. Can't this website release its forum software so that a bunch of interested volunteers (no me) could improve it? Wouldn't that be really meta and cool? The main gripe I have with HN forum is lack of r…

You are right... HN is starting to have a visibility issue. But I can't see how it can be fixed. All successful online communities have to deal with this aspect eventually. They all become too popular at one point and it's hard to maintain the quality. I can't see how it can be fixed.

Its actually quite simple - push the thread with the latest comments to the top. But in order to stop such threads from hogging the front page, there can be another tab for 'active' threads that people can visit to check out latest discussions. The current front page remains unchanged, with whatever algorithm that's used to order the threads.

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#125

Post by app4soft »

kchr wrote: post #116
dchuk wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll adjust! EDIT: Changed this to just have a minimum length restriction. Thanks for the feedback!

Good work! Have a cookie.

NO NEED COOKIES!

Please, disable cookies for HackerForums.co too.

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#126

Post by krapp »

code_duck wrote: post #120
dchuk wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was kinda the point of this whole thing though. This wasn't a software project for me, this was a community project. I have no interest in developing a forum, but I do have interest in participating in one. From what I can tell so far, what we setup seems to be working fine. If we hit a wall, I'll search out the next most practical option.

That makes sense as administrating a forum takes a significant investment of time, and you don’t necessarily have enough time to run a forum and also develop the software. However, if it became popular, I would expect some of us would want to hack on the software... but who would want to work on a phpbb theme? I’d pretty much rather be using a Google + group.

I've seen enough custom forums appear here only to die out to know that building the software and building a community are two completely different things and that one shouldn't expect that they will come if you build it.

I can see the temptation to want to hack around on it because it's a forum for hackers, but it's not as if HN is taking pull requests either.

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#127

Post by Can_Not »

dchuk wrote: post #21
mongol wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am thinking of starting a forum myself. How did you go about selecting phpBB of all options? I have mostly looked at nodeBB but have not taken any practical steps yet.

It's dead simple to setup, and very cheap to host. Plus I found some decent themes for it that were easy to tweak. Overall though, nodeBB looks really nice, so go for it!

Note on NodeBB's QA process: https://github.com/nodebb/nodebb/issues/4600

I would love to be corrected in this, (and in fact I'm prototyping a NodeJS+NuxtJS+VueJS forum on the weekends, but don't expect a release this year) but I think you're better off sticking with the PHP variety of forums. I think that's where maturity, stability, and extensions ecosystem shine.

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#128

Post by mygo »

0xCMP wrote: post #96
mygo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need to hash a password over the client so long as it’s sent over an encrypted network. The goal of submitting a password is that it’s not sent in open plaintext. Otherwise even if you hash it on the client, the plaintext hash can still be intercepted and used, exactly as-is, as the plaintext password.

You can if you don't want the authenticating side to actually know the plain text. e.g. password + client_salt => hash => send to server => (hash+server_salt)^hash2 => compare to db By doing this you'd protect a user when their password might be accidentally logged (e.g. Twitter recently). Then if you compromise the hash you don't immediately reveal the password itself, just the text needed to authenticate, which can…

I agree. So long as the plaintext hashes are hashed again on the sever, then it’s more secure.

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#129

Post by zrm »

angelsl wrote: post #89
zrm wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Passwords should be hashed client-side anyway, so the real issue there is how to encode the password hash in a way that satisfies the legacy system. But this is usually plausible, e.g. by base64 or hex encoding the hash to avoid disallowed characters and then appending specific characters that satisfy the set of required characters.

This just makes the password the hash of the user's passphrase.

> This just makes the password the hash of the user's passphrase.

There are some other advantages that others have already mentioned, but even if that was all it did it would still be useful in inhibiting an attacker from learning the actual passphrase which many users are likely to have reused on other services.

Re: Show HN: HackerForums.co, a forum for the crowd that hangs out on HN

#130

Post by dchuk »

vinayms wrote: post #124
el_cid wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right... HN is starting to have a visibility issue. But I can't see how it can be fixed. All successful online communities have to deal with this aspect eventually. They all become too popular at one point and it's hard to maintain the quality. I can't see how it can be fixed.

Its actually quite simple - push the thread with the latest comments to the top. But in order to stop such threads from hogging the front page, there can be another tab for 'active' threads that people can visit to check out latest discussions. The current front page remains unchanged, with whatever algorithm that's used to order the threads.

This is a good idea, and I'd be very interested to see if they ever added that, as it would essentially solve the long running conversation problem that exists on HN now.
Post reply on HN