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“12 years ago today, I finished writing Hacker News”

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Re: “12 years ago today, I finished writing Hacker News”

#121

Post by tannhaeuser »

japhyr wrote: post #55
jermaink wrote: post #13

HN is a perfect example of an classic, evergreen product. Or call it a crocodile product, as crocodiles are somewhat location-loyal. Are there more examples of products that did (on purpose) not change significantly? If you consider the sentiment on the recent GMail redesign, Facebook, .. it often appears that product managers are the only ones that want to change the product and its appeal. I think Reddit also had t…

> Are there more examples of products that did (on purpose) not change significantly? I think Craigslist would be the classic example of a simple design that hasn't changed significantly over its lifetime.

Google Search?

Re: “12 years ago today, I finished writing Hacker News”

#122

Post by Bartweiss »

Insanity wrote: post #57
sbinthree wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would dislike all of this except markdown support.

cache links sounds like an okay idea. OTOH, the avatars sounds like a horrible idea to me. I'm neutral on the markdown one, it wouldn't be too bad but it might end up making comments look like mini-articles rather than just comments.

I'm opposed to markdown for that reason. It's a bit of a shame that the existing formatting isn't aligned to markdown syntax, and I think lots of people don't know the

  code trick.
But otherwise, I'm grateful to not have posts using headers, multipart essays with horizontal rules, or that "every word a hyperlink" style that people use when they want to intensify a statement by implying it's densely sourced or describing a common issue. The informal standards HN has worked out seem sufficient for the conversations I value most here:

- this is sufficient for bullets

- since people don't bullet whole paragraphs

1. this works for numbers

2. for the same reason

> And this is just fine for pseudo-blockquotes, which can be much longer.

And the lack of embedded links encourages human-readable URLs that are either sources[1], or inline links to a page people might want to visit after reading the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown

It's a bit arbitrary what's supported, but HN has always felt to me like a display of how working within constraints can improve quality.

Re: “12 years ago today, I finished writing Hacker News”

#123

Post by microcolonel »

nerflad wrote: post #112
vinceguidry wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Quora for this. The threat of a BNBR ding is eternal and the panopticon unwavering. As a result every interaction becomes an opportunity for reflection.

My version of being Nice and Respectful tends to skew toward "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all". Which topics still have a good experience on Quora? I find the quality of the discussion, especially the quality of many of the questions themselves, to be quite low. They need more aggressive community moderation to filter out duplicates, miscategorizations and nonsense before potential a…

> "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all"

I think this is the wrong model for productive discussions, since being afraid that somebody will be upset about merely being contradicted can tend to chill people from refuting things at all (which, to me at least, seems like the purpose of having conversations in the first place).

I'd say it's more "If what you're saying is hostile to your interlocutor rather than the argument, then it does not belong in the thread.", however it seems some moderators do not feel that this is sufficient, hence I am hellbanned.

Re: “12 years ago today, I finished writing Hacker News”

#124

Post by kaitai »

woofcat wrote: post #19
leemailll wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never get the idea for avatars. And in fact I more than often use Adblock to block any of those on the websites I visit frequently. Can any one shed the light on why they like it?

The only real selling point is it allows you to distinguish users apart from one another really quickly in a threaded conversation. Sometimes someone other than the original commentator replies and unless you're paying attention to the user names you may make a presumption based on assuming they're the same person.

I kind of like that on HN I read through without necessarily paying attention to who is who. I focus on the comment or discussion rather than the personalities, and if I want to argue with a person rather than a point I have to go back & look at which comments are theirs.

Re: “12 years ago today, I finished writing Hacker News”

#125

Post by 0xmohit »

dang wrote: post #65
wenc wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does HN still run on a single server? [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522

Yes.

Too bad that you guys don't write software that makes current hardware appear inadequate :)

Re: “12 years ago today, I finished writing Hacker News”

#126

Post by sbr464 »

One bug, which I think can be fixed in css, is losing scroll position on device rotation (iPhone). I think iOS should fix it for sites, but until then.

One feature that would be nice is seeing new comments in popular posts without having to look for them. (Not threads, just unrelated new ones)

Re: “12 years ago today, I finished writing Hacker News”

#127

Post by sebazzz »

wild_preference wrote: post #117
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my top feature request, I mean you have to be able to post inline links, bullet points, code segments, etc on a site like this. IMO.

You can already do all of your examples. URLs are autolinked, bullet points just require \n\n, and there's a 4-space prefix for preformatted text. I think extraneous formatting would just create more incentives to write long, pretentious, streams of consciousness comments where someone just screams from their soap box instead of actually engaging anyone.

That is:

https://example.com

- Bullet list - Item 2

    And preformatting which you DON'T want for quotes because they are very annoying to read on mobile

Re: “12 years ago today, I finished writing Hacker News”

#128

Post by erikpukinskis »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #92
asaph wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one would like to see some improvements. Here is my wishlist: 1. Markdown support 2. More profile capabilities. e.g. avatars, vanity URLs, link to your GitHub, Twitter, Stack Overflow, blog, etc. 3. Automatically create cache link for articles in case their hosts go down after being linked from HN. 4. Revision history for comments.

5. Comment reply notifications 6. Responsive design so the site doesn't suck on mobile What else? Honestly there's probably a _ton_ of stuff that could be improved, but given how change-averse the typical HN user seems to be perhaps just leaving it as it is _is_ the best idea.

http://hn.premii.com is a nice way to read HN responsively on mobile web.

You have to pop out to comment though.

Re: “12 years ago today, I finished writing Hacker News”

#129

Post by mnw21cam »

dang wrote: post #65
wenc wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does HN still run on a single server? [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522

Yes.

I'm not sure that describing Cloudflare's massive worldwide network as a single server is completely accurate.

Re: “12 years ago today, I finished writing Hacker News”

#130

Post by bhandziuk »

mbrock wrote: post #120
bhandziuk wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how you can use reddit while not logged in. The all the default subreddits, I find, are garbage. It's just page after page of memes.

You can visit specific subreddits.

This is true. If you have those bookmarked it's a good strategy.

The front page is to be avoided at all costs.

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