Nobody made some Advent of HN with the 24 best links of the year?
Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
11–20 of 56 posts
Re: Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
#12> Here are some of our favorite Hacker News comments a) Who is 'our'? And why is HN typically opaque like this? [1] b) Why are they some of your favorite comments? Reasons? [1] As I have noted in the past in comments I have made the mods don't even say they are mods. It's like a secret society where you have to figure it out over time or be clued in. Example dang's profile [2] doesn't say he is a mod. Even PG's profi…
a) For this one, it's just an opaque Y Combinator. A highlights post is about the highlights.
b) 'Cause we thought they were interesting. Don't you think some of these are interesting?
> Why have people infer the relationship.
'Cause It's like a secret society where you have to figure it out over time or be clued in.
> What's preventing anyone from coming up with a handle and the acting like a mod?
Nothing! It's a community site, and communities can function surprisingly well without too much ceremony.
Re: Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
#13re The Shipping Forecast: people actually have to leave London because of Brexit? O_o
Re: Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
#14I did not intend to read this from beginning to the end. Talk about a sticky article. Consider quoting the text directly though. Making images of text is probably the most inaccessible thing imaginable. Should take less than a hundred lines of CSS to create a believable HN container in a div.
> Making images of text is probably the most inaccessible thing imaginable.
Agreed. I love the concept of this site, but it would load significantly faster and provide better user experience if it utilized text instead. Loading this website took me 9.41 seconds.
Images don't scale, and people using screenreaders would be out of luck, for starters.
Re: Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
#15I did not intend to read this from beginning to the end. Talk about a sticky article. Consider quoting the text directly though. Making images of text is probably the most inaccessible thing imaginable. Should take less than a hundred lines of CSS to create a believable HN container in a div.
Or just copy paste the text to the image alt="" and voilà.
Re: Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can subscribe to receive the emails. I do and often there's pretty interesting stuff in there.
Is the subscribe link at the bottom of that page specifically for this type of stuff? There is nothing visually connecting that to the article and it only uses the vague phrase "updates from Y Combinator". I am one of those HN users who comes here for the tech topics much more than the startup topics. I therefore don't have much interest in Y Combinator outside of being thankful that they host this site. I don't real…
It's all the blog entries, but usually formatted fairly well. There aren't too many blog entries (five or so), and typically ones that make HN are highlighted more.
All that being said, I see your point.
Re: Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
#17I probably get downvoted to hell for this, but: although the picks were interesting I didn't think they were as good for making it worth putting a list together. Looking at hn front page and checking through the comments I find something on similar excitement levels perhaps every third day.
Don't mean to discourage the authors, simply saying how I felt.
Re: Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
#18This is great. I have never seen this posted before on HN so I did a search and saw these have been put together sporadically for at least the last three years with seemingly little engagement. I wonder why that is. These posts highlight some of the best things about this website/community. I would love to see them more often or have them receive more promotion.
If engagement is the priority, my suggestion would be to build this curation into HN itself instead of using a post on a separate blog. Give the admins a way to tag a comment as highlighted, then present those comments in some visually distinct way and add a link to the nav that jumps you to a list of all highlighted comments.
Not a good idea. Some of the admins don't have very good taste, for starters. They also play favoratism, and whether your comments do well on HN is highly dependent on whether they (dis)like you.
PG also tried something like that by highlighting users with high average karma. It fractured the community.
Re: Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
#19> Here are some of our favorite Hacker News comments a) Who is 'our'? And why is HN typically opaque like this? [1] b) Why are they some of your favorite comments? Reasons? [1] As I have noted in the past in comments I have made the mods don't even say they are mods. It's like a secret society where you have to figure it out over time or be clued in. Example dang's profile [2] doesn't say he is a mod. Even PG's profi…
a) For this one, it's just an opaque Y Combinator. A highlights post is about the highlights. b) 'Cause we thought they were interesting. Don't you think some of these are interesting? > Why have people infer the relationship. 'Cause It's like a secret society where you have to figure it out over time or be clued in. > What's preventing anyone from coming up with a handle and the acting like a mod? Nothing! It's a co…
> Don't you think some of these are interesting?
Because there is so much that someone can read it is usually helpful to have additional information so you can decide if it's worth reading.
Now I am not a Bill Gates fan in any way, and I am not saying you should go into the depth that he does, but as an example look at what he does when he recommends a book. He doesn't just say 'this is something I find interesting'.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Educated
> 'Cause It's like a secret society where you have to figure it out over time or be clued in.
Hah well this thinking is similar to, say, Twitter which on purpose makes things difficult for the ordinary man and the beginner. Will note that Apple took a different attitude with the iphone in 2007 and we know how that ended up.
So sure why not be more welcoming to newcomers?
Re: Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
#20I probably get downvoted to hell for this, but: although the picks were interesting I didn't think they were as good for making it worth putting a list together. Looking at hn front page and checking through the comments I find something on similar excitement levels perhaps every third day. Don't mean to discourage the authors, simply saying how I felt.
A lot of these comments were from people with incredible first hand experience of the topic at hand. The crash bandicoot dev for instance. These kind of comments do crop up from time to time, but I really enjoyed having them in a single condensed place, as I ended up missing the majority of them in the wild.