A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors • Hacker News Board

Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

#131

Post by kirubakaran » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 3:50 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #119

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it like a video game, which often gives people surprises by unlocking the hidden feature based on unclear conditions. I was really impressed was I discovered it for the first time. This feature is more of a Easter egg than a practical option. If you really NEED to change the color, you can simply load a custom CSS in your web browser.

Maybe we should add another. Any ideas?

It would be awesome to be able to see the up and down vote counts on comments. If you think showing that might adversely affect HN, you could make that super exclusive, like requiring over 10k in karma ;)

Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

#132

Post by ndesaulniers » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 3:51 AM UTC

cpeterso wrote: post #2

How can we report bugs in the Hacker News site? My particular bug/request: the story submission form will trim page title suffixes for some popular sites, but the form's "too long" JavaScript check measures the original title length, not the auto-trimmed title length. So I often submit a story and have to manually trim the title suffix that would have been trimmed anyways for a story from the same site with a shorter…

Mine would be hitting back in Firefox for Android sometimes returns to a stale front page (when returning to the front page of HN).

Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

#133

Post by forgotmypw3 » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 3:51 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #114

shaunpersad wrote: post #7

I don't believe this is an actual feature, but I've noticed a trend that I've been calling "twos", where, at any given moment, a particular subject (present as a word or phrase in the article's title) will show up twice on the front page. Funnily enough, currently the "twos" subject is "Hacker News", with this article and "What I've Learned from Hacker News" both being present in the front page at the same time.

We call those copycat or follow-up posts and mostly downweight them, on the grounds that predictability makes HN less interesting.

If it's just the same theme, and not just another page on the same thing, why not encourage it instead?

Example: reddit.com/r/redditDayOf

Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

#134

Post by robgibbons » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 3:52 AM UTC

Noumenon72 wrote: post #79

UweSchmidt wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got any examples for well-written grey posts? Most downvoted posts are not that amazing.

I have almost a conditioned reflex for upvoting grey posts at this point. The people who downvote are a weird crew that don't seem to judge by Reddit's "contributes to the discussion" standard.

Funny. I wrote a userscript solely to upvote greyed-out comments, half in jest and half in honest frustration with this.

I'd link to it, but won't out of respect for dang. Look for it on my GitHub.

Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

#135

Post by krapp » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 4:00 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #130

krapp wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit's standard seems to contribute more directly to quality discussion than the haphazard result of pg's opinion, authoritative though it may be. When voting is applied with no real guidelines or standards, it ceases to be an effective filter for anything but the immediate emotional zeitgeist, and this goes against HN's stated purpose of bias towards quality.

Pretty much all of HN is the "haphazard result of pg's opinion", no? That is an interesting way to describe creating something. I see no reason to mess with how HN has always worked, at least not where there's no obvious problem. I know people have strong feelings about downvotes, but those feelings are rooted in something other than discussion quality. Everything I think I know about how to keep HN from deterioratin…

>I know people have strong feelings about downvoting, but those feelings are rooted in something other than discussion quality.

How do you know? People have different opinions about what constitutes and contributes to quality. From what I've seen, a lot of people assume Reddit's standard should apply here, and they seem surprised to learn that it doesn't. Those people do seem to be concerned about discussion quality.

>Everything I think I know about how to keep HN from deteriorating too badly tells me that the downvotes here serve a critical purpose—even though they're a crude and imprecise weapon, with a lot of downside.

Fine... but why is it wrong to have a standard for downvotes?

The argument being made here is that arbitrary and excessive downvotes are a symptom of deterioration.

Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

#136

Post by Deimorz » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 4:03 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #115

_ps6d wrote: post #104

Lots of people posting random feature requests in here, but is HN even developed any more? The last significant changes I remember were two and a half years ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675 ) and I think even those were the first ones in a long time.

It's interesting to see that question show up, because we work so hard on the code. It makes sense that you'd ask it, though, because most of the changes are either not visible (like anti-spam or anti-voting-ring features), or are subtle. For example, you may have noticed more capitalized titles on the front page in the last couple days—but this is an experiment we're going to roll back. One reason we don't do a lot…

Would it be possible to add a public changelog?

I wasn't trying to diminish the work being done, but I couldn't find a more recent official update announcement than the one I linked from 2016.

Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

#137

Post by sambroner » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 4:05 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #115

_ps6d wrote: post #104

Lots of people posting random feature requests in here, but is HN even developed any more? The last significant changes I remember were two and a half years ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675 ) and I think even those were the first ones in a long time.

It's interesting to see that question show up, because we work so hard on the code. It makes sense that you'd ask it, though, because most of the changes are either not visible (like anti-spam or anti-voting-ring features), or are subtle. For example, you may have noticed more capitalized titles on the front page in the last couple days—but this is an experiment we're going to roll back. One reason we don't do a lot…

What kind of changes to the internals do you all do? And would you do a post on the architecture?

I assume there's been lots of work to make the site more efficient/reduce cost. "No [few] internal pressures" sounds like a great recipe for an interesting design.

Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

#138

Post by wpasc » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 4:16 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #82

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call birthday paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem Number of all possible topics is N, number of news on FP is 30. For example if N is 365, you would expect 70% chance that two separate items on FP mention the same topic. Although, HN recurrence probably a bigger contributor. When a person gets reminded of some previous highly upvoted link and re-submits it. The highly upvoted link gets upvoted a…

This only works if your sample space is small, whereas I'd argue the range of topics that can show up on Hacker News is nothing but ;)

I agree, but the range of topics which may be popular at any given time is narrower and two stories about a single topic are likely to trend at similar times shrinking the sample space somewhat.

Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

#139

Post by _ps6d » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 4:20 AM UTC

NicoJuicy wrote: post #110

_ps6d wrote: post #104

Lots of people posting random feature requests in here, but is HN even developed any more? The last significant changes I remember were two and a half years ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675 ) and I think even those were the first ones in a long time.

Web changed from Google to DuckDuckGo. But which features are missing?

There's quite a bit that could be added, without even touching the site's overall mechanics at all.

The markdown support is extremely minimal and doesn't support a lot of basics like quotes (which causes many people to "quote" by using a code block, which has issues).

A basic private messaging system would be really helpful in a lot of cases. Right now people always have to post email addresses publicly.

It would be nice to have some built-in visibility into things like title changes, link changes, etc. that mods do, instead of needing them to comment manually about everything they do.

They could implement some scraping to automatically add the year to older stories, instead of users needing to flag it and get the mods to do it manually all the time.

And so on.

Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

#140

Post by themodelplumber » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 4:32 AM UTC

Deimorz wrote: post #136

dang wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to see that question show up, because we work so hard on the code. It makes sense that you'd ask it, though, because most of the changes are either not visible (like anti-spam or anti-voting-ring features), or are subtle. For example, you may have noticed more capitalized titles on the front page in the last couple days—but this is an experiment we're going to roll back. One reason we don't do a lot…

Would it be possible to add a public changelog? I wasn't trying to diminish the work being done, but I couldn't find a more recent official update announcement than the one I linked from 2016.

Public changelogs can create their own form of community feedback pressure which easily stretches the sustainability of development resources. Not that I would complain about it if it existed, but I can see how it would be counterproductive when the development goal as expressed seems to prioritize stabilization.