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Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

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Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#71

Post by sbierwagen »

lucisferre wrote: post #35
tokenadult wrote: post #25

In the submitted article from February 2009, Paul Graham wrote, "Probably the most important thing I've learned about dilution is that it's measured more in behavior than users. It's bad behavior you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out to be surprisingly malleable. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to; and vice versa. "Though of course forbidding bad behavior does tend to kee…

Perhaps subjectively this change did improve the comment quality a bit, I still see plenty of ongoing examples of the problem though. What I'd like to see is the actual removal of karma (at least comment karma) from the user profiles as well. I see no good reason to incentivize intelligent thoughtful conversation, no one actually does it for karma. I do realize there is a bit of a feedback system in place (upvotes te…

(commenting from my high-karma account, to avoid the green-user stigma)

  I see no good reason to incentivize intelligent thoughtful 
  conversation, no one actually does it for karma.
I comment to grind karma points. There's a fairly linear relationship between comment length and score, my best comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3705599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3218642) are essentially small blog posts, requiring research, links, several drafts and extensive revision. If it wasn't for karma, I wouldn't go to the effort.

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#72

Post by EwanG »

sbierwagen wrote: post #71
lucisferre wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps subjectively this change did improve the comment quality a bit, I still see plenty of ongoing examples of the problem though. What I'd like to see is the actual removal of karma (at least comment karma) from the user profiles as well. I see no good reason to incentivize intelligent thoughtful conversation, no one actually does it for karma. I do realize there is a bit of a feedback system in place (upvotes te…

(commenting from my high-karma account, to avoid the green-user stigma) I see no good reason to incentivize intelligent thoughtful conversation, no one actually does it for karma. I comment to grind karma points. There's a fairly linear relationship between comment length and score, my best comments ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3705599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3218642 ) are essentially small blo…

So what do you fell that karma "earns you" that makes it worth the effort? Is it something intrinsic to karma, or something about what you think karma says about you to others? If the latter, then do you think karma is the best way to deliver that value?

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#73

Post by sbierwagen »

EwanG wrote: post #72
sbierwagen wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(commenting from my high-karma account, to avoid the green-user stigma) I see no good reason to incentivize intelligent thoughtful conversation, no one actually does it for karma. I comment to grind karma points. There's a fairly linear relationship between comment length and score, my best comments ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3705599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3218642 ) are essentially small blo…

So what do you fell that karma "earns you" that makes it worth the effort? Is it something intrinsic to karma, or something about what you think karma says about you to others? If the latter, then do you think karma is the best way to deliver that value?

Brand new accounts can't flag posts (~200 karma) or downvote comments. (~2000 karma) Once I hit those thresholds, the urge to grind goes away.

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#74

Post by lukejduncan »

sbierwagen wrote: post #73
EwanG wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what do you fell that karma "earns you" that makes it worth the effort? Is it something intrinsic to karma, or something about what you think karma says about you to others? If the latter, then do you think karma is the best way to deliver that value?

Brand new accounts can't flag posts (~200 karma) or downvote comments. (~2000 karma) Once I hit those thresholds, the urge to grind goes away.

Downvoting seems to be enabled around the 500 mark. At least for me.

Also, I just noticed the flag option for the first time. Thanks for pointing that out.

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#75

Post by roryokane »

lukejduncan wrote: post #74
sbierwagen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brand new accounts can't flag posts (~200 karma) or downvote comments. (~2000 karma) Once I hit those thresholds, the urge to grind goes away.

Downvoting seems to be enabled around the 500 mark. At least for me. Also, I just noticed the flag option for the first time. Thanks for pointing that out.

Yes, downvoting was enabled for me, too, after I passed 500 karma points (reached 501 points) on 2012-06-09, a month and a half ago.

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#76

Post by robryan »

danwiding wrote: post #68
pg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robert has made a bunch of tweaks that improved performance. To be honest I don't remember what they were. We're still running on one core.

Point of comparison, as of March 2011 Stack Overflow, which got about 2x the traffic for page hits/month, used 12 cores for the web tier and 12-24 cores for their SQL Server 2008 database(s?). Source - http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/3/3/stack-overflow-arch... Does anyone know what db engine serves as backend for HN?

A Stack Overflow page I'd imagine would be so much more complex than a Hacker News page to render. Would likely require lots of complex queries for everything going on around the primary question and answer mechanism. By contrast Hacker News seems fairly simple.

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#77

Post by brandnewlow »

mixmax wrote: post #2

on a somewhat related note; any chance of getting points on comments back? My personal opinion is that it degrades the site tremendously not to be able to skim through a thread and see which comments others have deemed interesting/noteworthy/insightful by upvoting them.

IPhone app I use to read HN has been busted and not showing usernames on comments for over a year now. It's annoying at often tell when some of the more active HN users comment because because their voices come through so strongly. A Patio11 comment (uber-detailed) is immediately recognizable. So is a Tptacek comment (aggressively but gracefully contrarian) or a PG comment (short declarative sentences followed by many many many responses).

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#78

Post by pg »

danwiding wrote: post #68
pg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robert has made a bunch of tweaks that improved performance. To be honest I don't remember what they were. We're still running on one core.

Point of comparison, as of March 2011 Stack Overflow, which got about 2x the traffic for page hits/month, used 12 cores for the web tier and 12-24 cores for their SQL Server 2008 database(s?). Source - http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/3/3/stack-overflow-arch... Does anyone know what db engine serves as backend for HN?

The file system.

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#79

Post by politician »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #54
dclowd9901 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a good idea. I think that when someone sees a comment that would otherwise not be agreeable on a personal level, when it has votes from many other members, it has a tendency to sway your personal convictions a bit, just enough to make you second guess your own opinions . Let a comment stand for its merit. I honestly wish they'd take names off the comments too. I feel like there are way too many…

> I honestly wish they'd take names off the comments too I have seen familiar (absolutely not famous) handles from IRC on HN on two occasions. Made me happy. I can't turn this into a more rational point, though.

Names are helpful iff high-karma users help reinforce pg's goals for the site. In my experience that is the case, and the site provides a higher-than-average quality of discussion.

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#80

Post by politician »

icebraining wrote: post #31
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Separation of concerns. You might want to be able to tag a post or comment as noteworthy but not want to upvote it. For example, to remind you to come back to it and add a comment explaining why its wrong or that you disagree with it. Basically: Upvote != Save for Later

Isn't that what bookmarks are for? Why do we need HN to recreate basic browser functionality?

Perhaps to address a limitation in browsers wherein it is not currently possible to scope bookmarks to a given site during a search for said bookmarks?
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