There has been some really sensational news during the past few days: Angelgate, Facebook downtime, Zuckerberg $100mm donation, uncomfortable micro analysis of patio. Maybe it's the time of year? Or a coincidence. In terms of the normal ebb and flow this is surely a period of flow. I think that just due to regression to the mean next week should be more quiet and readers will have more time for the new page. Hopefully another "Erlang day" won't be necessary.
Tell HN: An Observation
31–40 of 93 posts
Re: Tell HN: An Observation
#32I have said this in the past (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1665746) - as long as posting doesn't "cost" anything, there will be mindless as well as countless posts, making it harder to really spot intelligent stuff. It's natural for explosive stuff to make it to the top.
Now, how we pay for the posts is probably have karma as part of it somewhere. Or may be not. But, it's a discussion worth having.
Re: Tell HN: An Observation
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
It occurred to me over the last week or two that most all of the startup and pet project work I've been doing over the past decade has all boiled down to presenting complex and thought-provoking data to the user in the most simple way possible. Every little piece of user interface, web application, or technology that sits between the brain and a simple version of the decisions it needs to make each day is a cognitive…
This is going to sound very cryptic, but I hope it comes across, you are a solution looking for a problem. I think it's only a matter of time before you find your groove, I see it happening all over HN, people that try one thing after another and suddenly it clicks, they find their thing and from there on it's upwards. Don't give up, the 'making complex stuff simple' thing you've got is absolutely a key in all this.…
Give up hell, I haven't even gotten started yet!
It might seem to the outside observer that I start a lot of things and don't finish them, but really I'm iterating around where things hurt and where the response is, just like you note. I have been very fortunate to make enough consulting that I can take several months a year to work on my pet projects. And after all, isn't wealth really the ability to use your time as you see fit? So in that sense I am truly a wealthy man.
I have some "boring" work I am doing that is bringing some residual income as well. I've found that time is truly your friend with startups -- the longer you are out there the more success you get, no matter what you are doing. So in some ways this start/stop work has been counterproductive, but you play the cards you have, not the ones you wish you had.
I am truly excited about the long-term capabilities of functional programming and the F# language in particular. It's allowing me to build blocks of little "solutions" that can then be assembled in ways to make larger products in a way that OOP simply didn't accomplish. Very cool.
Re: Tell HN: An Observation
#34Requiring 10 points to submit is really stupid?
I think it's a great idea. Even if you have to borrow points from HN. See my other comment in this thread.
Re: Tell HN: An Observation
#35I'm working on a site to fix something like that. I don't want to reveal the name yet, but stay tuned :)
Re: Tell HN: An Observation
#36Perhaps the frontpage could be filtered per account. In other words, if HN shows me the same article on the front page for the 3rd time and I don't click it, I probably don't care, so it could use that slot to show me something new.
Re: Tell HN: An Observation
#37Hide your kids, hide your wife http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlZOfHCpFFs
Re: Tell HN: An Observation
#38Yes, I've noticed that it is harder to get things on the front page.
I've recently submitted a few links that I thought were HN worthy but they barely got any notice if at all.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1714743 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1696933 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1714334
Perhaps they're not interesting or maybe with the current system more things are getting overlooked and lost. Don't know.
Usually, I tend to only look at what's on the New page when I submit something (since it automatically redirects you there). So, I'm as guilty as the rest. However, at that time, I'll check out the other posts and upvote other submissions that I consider quality material.
I probably need to spend more time looking at the New page than the front page to help with keeping the quality up.
Re: Tell HN: An Observation
#39Actually this is the biggest problem that the internet faces now. The number of quality signals that people send is much less than the amount of content that's out there -- one consequence is that it's easy to "game the system."
Hardly anybody is viewing "new" queues, making links to interesting web pages, or otherwise doing the work to discover what's new and good. They make it too easy for spammers and voting rings to do their evil work.
Also there's a general "burnout" effect that happens in social media -- if a particular forum isn't all that excited in your content, you'll find that it gradually gets less and less traffic because people see your URL or your name and decide to move on to the next thing. This can be overcome with real or imaginary 'social proof' (lots 'o votes) but then you get into the fact that the populations of people who are looking at the "new" queue and looking at the front page are entirely different.
Re: Tell HN: An Observation
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's obvious: feature a random article from the new page on the front page like Reddit does (a different one each time you load the page), so it gets some exposure.
But that would have the unintended side-effect of making the site much more attractive to spammers because they'd be almost guaranteed some homepage exposure.
Would it really?
Since the signal:noise ratio on the /new page is pretty darn good right now, I don't think that featuring one of the new submissions on the homepage would change that much.
Also: this proposal would only lead to more impressions for the spammer if the homepage received more than 30x the traffic of the new submissions page. That may be the case, but how would a spammer know that?