It'd be nice if Hacker News had automated pages that showed the most upvoted and the most voted (up or down) comments for {time period}.
Hacker News does have a dynamically updated page for the “best comments”:
Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
31–40 of 56 posts
Re: Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
#32These are great. I also try to collect interesting discussions and comments at https://www.reddit.com/r/HNDepthHub I would appreciate other contributors.
This is great. Thank you.
Re: Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
#33> 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…
FYI for those who don’t know, you’re an official HN mod, per this official HN post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675
(“dang” being the only other active mod that I am aware of)
Re: Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
#34I 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.
Sharing the image retains attribution and source. Sharing the text alone opens channels of abuse and lack of context... I like this option more, personally.
Re: Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
#35re The Shipping Forecast: people actually have to leave London because of Brexit? O_o
The Conservative government's "hostile environment" host of policies and rhetoric can be quite distasteful to immigrants just trying to live and work in the UK.
Re: Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
#36This 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.
After reading the post, I feel like maybe not everything needs to be optimized for well-defined priorities. :)
Re: Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
#37I 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.
If you click on the images, it'll open to the actual comment in text form. While load times for images are worse, this format provides some handy advantages, namely the ability to look through that thread and see more context, read the related article, etc.
No advantages that a css/html rendered version of the same thing doesn't have, with the loss of accessibility that you'd get using the alternative approach.
This is just "the easy way out". Justifying it otherwise is wrong, in my opinion...
Re: Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
#38I 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.
Not that I'm for screen shot, I imagine they wrote a quick script that went through a list of links to the comment and produced the screenshot (which also resized the height of the window to fit the full comment).
The script probably utilized an integration with a screen capture library. I'd imagine someone can write a script to parse html and dig out the comment, but the screen capture script was probably faster to write.
A slower method would be to copy and paste the text by hand...
Re: Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
#39[deleted]
Re: Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you click on the images, it'll open to the actual comment in text form. While load times for images are worse, this format provides some handy advantages, namely the ability to look through that thread and see more context, read the related article, etc.
No advantages that a css/html rendered version of the same thing doesn't have, with the loss of accessibility that you'd get using the alternative approach. This is just "the easy way out". Justifying it otherwise is wrong, in my opinion...
That's fair, and true from an engineering perspective. I imagine for YC it comes down to, as with nearly every other company, a prioritization problem.
With the exception of companies like FB with millions of users, the priority of creating a css/html rendered version of text to prevent people from having to click through to copy is quite low.
I suppose I'm defending the image as being the more useful of the two "easy way outs" that are likely to be implemented. :)