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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"?

#41

Post by scott_s »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #19
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like seeing comment points but I'm not sure that it's a good thing to display them. Threads are already sorted by comment score so that the best comments are close to the top - I'm not sure what additional benefit comes from seeing the actual snapshot numbers aside from sheer curiosity.

Threads are sorted by comment score and by age, with newer threads floating to the top. I think this is a great heuristic. My only beef is that this also naturally floats poor replies to great comments. It would be nice to have a good heuristic to know when to read the replies and when to move on to the next thread. I think one does exist: expandos. Give us the ability to expand and compact threads, and then automati…

Just as bad as uplifting poor replies to great comments, it pushes down great replies to poor comments. I've seen some threads were the most informative and insightful comment was halfway down the page because it was a reply correcting misconceptions.

The only solution I can think of are collapsable threads, similar to reddit.

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

#42

Post by russell »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #19
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like seeing comment points but I'm not sure that it's a good thing to display them. Threads are already sorted by comment score so that the best comments are close to the top - I'm not sure what additional benefit comes from seeing the actual snapshot numbers aside from sheer curiosity.

Threads are sorted by comment score and by age, with newer threads floating to the top. I think this is a great heuristic. My only beef is that this also naturally floats poor replies to great comments. It would be nice to have a good heuristic to know when to read the replies and when to move on to the next thread. I think one does exist: expandos. Give us the ability to expand and compact threads, and then automati…

+/- expansion/contraction seems like a good idea to me too. It would be a good way for me to hide the occasional off topic argument between a couple of individuals and to find the grand.. parent of a comment.

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

#43

Post by joshlegs »

I must say, I enjoyed reading this. It seems I have noticed a lot of changes in the last few weeks.

And I suppose it's time to fess up ;) I had another account that got hellbanned recently. Because the comment guidelines were what I felt a bit ambiguous, and because I had seen other comments that I thought seemed reflective in nature that had been downvoted (perhaps because they expressed a view that is contrary to what most on the site hold?), I wanted to experiment with comments to see what the clear lines were. I found out very quickly :P

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

#44

Post by temphn »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #34
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.

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…

He was definitely downvoted during the AirBnB hysteria last summer.

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

#46

Post by 3pt14159 »

pg wrote: post #45

It's remarkably close to what I'd write today. The biggest difference now is the numbers. Now on a typical weekday we get about 150k unique IPs and 1.5m pageviews.

Anecdote: My brother is a construction engineer with Ellis Don and he goes to HN even though he has no interest in startups because he likes the "quality of thought and discourse for current events" and is working his way through learning python the hard way in order to script some of his more mundane tasks.

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

#47

Post by mixmax »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #34
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.

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…

It's a signal to noise problem.

In a perfect world I would research each comment, do basic background checkes against stated facts, think through the implications of the comment, etc. and then form an unbiased opinion. I would do this with every comment thread. After I had done this I would be uniquely qualified to form an opinion on every comment, and I would be wise because I'd read and understood all the comments. I'd also have spent most of my day doing so.

The reason comment scores, and usernames as a proxy for scores, are interesting is that it's a good way of cutting through the noise. Most people just don't have the time to read through all comments on a thread and form an opinion on each one seperately.

That's what I'm really missing about the points - I don't care how many points a certain poster or a certain comment has, but I do care greatly to have an indicator of quality so that I can skim through a thread and pick out the best comments. Particularly on long comment threads where I don't know much about the subject, or on busy days.

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

#48

Post by NathanKP »

pg wrote: post #45

It's remarkably close to what I'd write today. The biggest difference now is the numbers. Now on a typical weekday we get about 150k unique IPs and 1.5m pageviews.

How has the scaling effort gone? In the first post you mentioned that you were just rewriting code to remove bottlenecks. Have you had to make any more exotic and interesting changes to the code base since then to support the growth?

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

#49

Post by pg »

NathanKP wrote: post #48
pg wrote: post #45

It's remarkably close to what I'd write today. The biggest difference now is the numbers. Now on a typical weekday we get about 150k unique IPs and 1.5m pageviews.

How has the scaling effort gone? In the first post you mentioned that you were just rewriting code to remove bottlenecks. Have you had to make any more exotic and interesting changes to the code base since then to support the growth?

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.

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

#50

Post by mynegation »

3pt14159 wrote: post #46
pg wrote: post #45

It's remarkably close to what I'd write today. The biggest difference now is the numbers. Now on a typical weekday we get about 150k unique IPs and 1.5m pageviews.

Anecdote: My brother is a construction engineer with Ellis Don and he goes to HN even though he has no interest in startups because he likes the "quality of thought and discourse for current events" and is working his way through learning python the hard way in order to script some of his more mundane tasks.

Excellent story! Discussion on HN is indeed second to none.

Would you brother mind sharing what kind of tasks he would like to script? I am a big fan of Python and it is always interesting to see how people use it in various industries.

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