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A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

sridattalabs.com

71–80 of 193 posts

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#71
post #31

Add to the list: Keep HACKER NEWS FOR AND BY HACKERS..stop posting other useless content. I want this place to learn and read about new coding practices, api's, only technically relavent stuff.

If your definition of hacking is limited to technical details then you are misunderstanding the historical ethos of hacking.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#72
post #53
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> spam, pandering, submission strategies, power users and all the other bullshit that comes with that territory. that's actually what bothers me more about current HN state than the 'harsh comments' everybody complains about. and one another thing: I remember when the frontpage was full of business and tech advice from experienced people who shared valuable knowledge hard to obtain on my own. now I wonder how many mo…

Dude, I'm happy when I see a git / fabric tutorials. I'm always looking for new tips. Looking at the current front page, the lonely VIM tutorial is literally the only thing a programmer is going to find useful right now. Oh, there's also a PCA overview using mostly Excel (two lines of actual code - from matplotlib.mlab import PCA; pca = PCA(x)), something about a new editor called "Lighttable" and a few sciency thing…

when it comes to technical knowledge on HN, I'm happy when I see a talk f.ex. how huge companies solve tech problems, or conference talks around specific technologies, because it's knowledge very hard or sometimes even impossible to acquire on my own - no matter how hard I would try, I won't have a clue how facebook handles massive deployments or how twitter scales unless somebody from the company publishes it and the community shares it. there is a vast ammount of technical advice/news to share, but toolset tutorials are one google search away, you don't need hn support for that, rtfm.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#73

Please boycott ycmmbinator and hackernews for their misogynistic policy of shadow banning all female participants.

I don't think this can possibly be true. Can you give us some proof of this assertion?

We could even start with some reasoned speculation instead of a blatant unqualified assertion.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#74

This, and many of the suggestions in the original thread, and pg's default response, are all falling into the same trap: they are attempting to fix a people problem using technical solutions. Technology can make community management easier. Better algorithms and visual design and so on can improve the way that a community polices itself. But, I think eventually you'll run into vanishing returns from that kind of stuf…

Sure, some of the suggestions are technological in nature (purple for distinguished veterans). The author seemed very aware that tweaking the algorithms wasn't the solution.

Well, he did say, "here is what I think would benefit the community the most." But, I wasn't really responding to him directly anyway.

I just picked this particular thread because it was new. The other one was too busy and already halfway down the front page; the same comment there would have worse chances of actually being read.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#75
post #39
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that someone who consistently provides high-quality (or at least frequently-upvoted) comments / submissions will likely have less of a contribution than someone with significantly lower karma. For instance: you would have (slightly) more influence than someone with 3000 karma and an average of 5.

You're right but because it's logarithmic, the difference is nominal and evaporates as a new member makes more posts. Plus, what is the downside to encouraging new members to post?

Because newer members not familiar with the guidelines typically post the more inflammatory comments that we have seen as of late.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#76
post #65

What do people think of the idea of removing down votes and allowing only up votes? Has this been shown on other discussion boards to work?

My immediate reaction is to say that the downvotes serve a useful purpose. They can indicate social disapproval without adding noise or fanning flamewars.

The downside, of course, is that you see so many "WTF? Downvotes? Why" Comments.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#77
post #50
post #14

I'm an algorithm designer, so I don't know about all of these changes but I do have a mathematical solution to PG's vote value problem: before edit: Value of vote = Log[base:TotalUserKarma](UserAvgKarmaPerComment) after edit: Vote Value = (Log[base:TotalUserKarma](AvgUserKarma)) * (Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50Rank)) another edit: Vote Value = (Log[base:Median(AvgUserKarma)](AvgUserKarma)) * (Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50R…

The other problem with this idea is that it creates too much of an echo chamber or filter bubble.

Actually, karma is very good market indicator for any board and filter bubbles tend to be specific to filtering out certain types of content. This won't be filtering anything by content.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#78
post #55
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> spam, pandering, submission strategies, power users and all the other bullshit that comes with that territory. that's actually what bothers me more about current HN state than the 'harsh comments' everybody complains about. and one another thing: I remember when the frontpage was full of business and tech advice from experienced people who shared valuable knowledge hard to obtain on my own. now I wonder how many mo…

And that every blog post must be followed by 'Why blog post A is wrong' and then 'why blog post A and B are both wrong'.

yeah, blogger ping-pong.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#79
post #14

I'm an algorithm designer, so I don't know about all of these changes but I do have a mathematical solution to PG's vote value problem: before edit: Value of vote = Log[base:TotalUserKarma](UserAvgKarmaPerComment) after edit: Vote Value = (Log[base:TotalUserKarma](AvgUserKarma)) * (Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50Rank)) another edit: Vote Value = (Log[base:Median(AvgUserKarma)](AvgUserKarma)) * (Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50R…

This proposal would give a relative penalty to people like me who get into lengthy discussions, and who reply in older threads.

Whether or not this is a good thing is a matter of preference. (My preference should be obvious.)

Though, truth be told, I've never worried much about karma.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#80

This, and many of the suggestions in the original thread, and pg's default response, are all falling into the same trap: they are attempting to fix a people problem using technical solutions. Technology can make community management easier. Better algorithms and visual design and so on can improve the way that a community polices itself. But, I think eventually you'll run into vanishing returns from that kind of stuf…

The other thing is that his proposal was a proposal to "improve" Hacker News, not a promise to "fix" hacker news. Trying to do a grand massive "fix every problem" is more likely to introduce new problems than just making relatively safe improvements.
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