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Solving The Hacker News Problem

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Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#141

Post by mkr-hn »

derefr wrote: post #52
jacques_chester wrote: post #18

Ah yes, the cycle of website life. * Hot new community forms at Site X. * Site X residents refer to themselves as the New Wave of whatever. Much better than older Site W because of features/members/dynamic/demographics 1, 2 and 3! * Site X's reputation spreads to former hot new sites T, U, V and W. Site X begins to attract more and more new users. * Site X denizens begin linking articles at T, U, V, W and vice versa.…

How about, instead of a single community, the site runs as a set of "cohort" communities that each only allow direct sign-ups for their first year in existence, but then run a bit like leagues thereafter? If people like you on HN/2011, you might be invited into HN/2010, then HN/2009, etc. It could also be automatic/karma-based: if you earn enough karma on HN/2011, you start again on HN/2010 with 1 karma point (though…

A recursive treehouse sounds like an idea worth trying.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#142

Post by jacques_chester »

mkr-hn wrote: post #128
steveklabnik wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dribbble, then.

It'll be interesting to see how that model holds up to another 2-3 years. The few invite-based communities I've been a part of started to degrade as the social graph grew out and started to pick up the occasional undesirable. It was harder to get rid of them because they knew someone who knew someone, and trying to push them out had a network effect. It might be obvious to someone removed by 3+ levels that a bad elem…

Advogato investigated the problem of transitive trust networks pretty thoroughly as I recall. Anyone here able to comment on how they turned out?

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#143

Post by erikpukinskis »

malandrew wrote: post #46

Forking of sites has the same problems as forking open-source projects. It exacerbates conflict, forces people to choose sides, and ultimately both forks typically end up poorer because of members lost. Instead, the best solution is to evolve Hacker News as a product. My personal opinion is that we should put Hacker news in the hands of the YCombinator alumni. Founders and first employees (CEO, CTO, lead designer, fi…

both forks typically end up poorer because of members lost.

I strongly disagree. Off the top of my head: XFree86/Xorg, Mozilla/Firefox, Debian/Ubuntu, Rails/Merb... these were all cases where the existing community had calcified in some key area and a fork was necessary to create a space where important work could get done.

And in most of those cases, not only was the fork stronger than the trunk in (some) specific areas, the fork actually led to the trunk getting stronger. Not only were patches merged, but entire projects, community values, development practices, etc were.

XFree86 is an exception, but organizational paralysis was what necessitated the fork, so it's not surprising they were also unable to respond to the fork.

But I just don't buy your notion that forking is somehow unhealthy and destructive. It's one of the most valuable ways we have to keep open source code, ideas, organizations and practices fresh, healthy, and vibrant.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#144

Post by kajecounterhack »

barrkel wrote: post #135
xentronium wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://news.ycombinator.com//item?id=512145

I don't know what you tried to do there, but it didn't work. Link is broken.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145 He had an extra slash in his URL

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#145

Post by tomrod »

Wait... he complains on his post about not submitting his blog posts to the community.. which then gets submitted to the community and upvoted (albeit probably not by him). Does that sum it up?

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#146

Post by jacques_chester »

malandrew wrote: post #137
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that many of those tools are affected negatively by the regression to the mean as well. An average comment, that would never be upvoted during the early elite, will be upvoted by average people during the mean. Reputation follows.

The question to be answered then is "what mechanisms of reputation and combinatorial game mechanics can prevent regression towards the mean?" I don't have an answer to this off the top of my head, but succinctly describing the problem as you just did oftentimes can be half the battle.

Another formulation:

"What system can allow a site to absorb N new users without causing regression to the mean, with the constraint the membership is open?"

I'm pretty sure the answer is: no such system exists.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#147

Post by kedi_xed »

It's simple really. Digg was good, then it got popular, Reddit was good, then it got popular. I've increasingly visited HN more than Reddit to get my old Reddit fix, as I assume others have, and so popularity has increased and now the quality is degrading as people want their karma fix or 2 cents.

There should be a brainstorm on this. I'm starting to realise I want comment submissions from well known or quality submitters. Not just your average kid or someone who is trying to troll.

The other issue is one-off opinion pieces on some guys blog. HN feels like every programmers chance at 15 mins of fame. Why Ruby On Rails is X times better than this (adudecodingblog.com), My way of speeding up Python (pythonlover.com), etc. having someone like pg, of Joel, or big wigs viewing items or articles like these, offering actual real world advice, and providing comments.

Maybe a subscription based hackernews, where the kudos goes to the legends of the industry, interns are made, and I get my intelli-fix and boredom disguiser because I'm stuck in a cube-farm polishing PL/SQL wondering how the hell I got here and when can I play that stupid COD:Black Ops with its really crappy hit detection. Why do I keep playing it?! Why haven't I asked for a bigger paycheck? Why am I not contracting? How is it that the kid I use to teach programmer is now earning more than me? Oh well, keep surfing...

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#148

Post by mkr-hn »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #98
dschobel wrote: post #66

How to solve the signal/noise problem? Amplify the signal. Call it undemocratic, but insight and perspicacity is not uniformly distributed so it's absurd that pg/$whoever_you_respect's upvote on an article counts as much as anyone else. As a simple experiment, it would be interesting to see a view of the frontpage based only on the upvotes of people who are above a certain avg-comment karma threshold (since the site…

The problem with using karma is that it is affected by the regression to the mean. As more "average" people come in, more "average" people will give them karma. Solve that problem, and you might have a solution to the whole problem (I, for one, am not smart enough for that ;).

Maybe some mix of karma, account age, and the number of upvotes received from first-year members to give a person's votes weight.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#149

Post by robryan »

johnrob wrote: post #92

Another reason HN may be boring: we've beaten a lot of the common topics to death. It only takes a handful of articles about "how to pitch a VC" to soak up most of the relevant advice on the subject. While posts often present a unique combination of previously mentioned ideas, it's becoming increasingly rare to actually find something new if you are a regular here.

This may also explain why even older members are posting things further away from the core hacker news topics. Something about health care or law or economics might seem more interesting than a pitch a VC article because we have all read many many opinions on the latter.

I think good technical stuff though is evergreen because there are always new languages, libraries and techniques.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#150

Post by metachris »

petercooper wrote: post #76
pg wrote: post #24

I think if we could see random frontpages from days a few years ago, we'd find that the top stories weren't that different, and that there was the same "jack of all trades, master of none" aspect to the site that Alex complains about. It may be that a site whose design spec is to satisfy hackers' intellectual curiosity would necessarily feel that way. Maybe I'll write something to regenerate past front pages, so we c…

You (pg) will not need this since you have the data.. ;-).. but for anyone else interested in doing analysis over time, HackerSlide stores JSON representations of the HN front page every hour (starting Oct 15 2010). http://hackerslide.com/data/YYYY-MM-DD-HH.json gets you what you want. For example: http://hackerslide.com/data/2010-10-15-23.json

Wow great! http://hackerslide.com/data/2010-10-15-05.json appears to be the earliest.

Do you provide this as an "api" and allow people to build apps on top of it? If so, are there any limits?

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