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Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News

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Re: Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News

#61

Post by rahimnathwani »

jstrieb wrote: post #54

This post recommends the Newsit extension to view Hacker News discussion associated with a page. In the same vein, a few years ago, I made a Firefox extension for users who want a privacy-preserving way to see if pages have associated HN discussion: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-d... Most other extensions probably hit an external API (such as Algolia) to check submission status, which mea…

I use Chrome as my main browser and was going to ask if there was a Chrome version. I was sad to see there's a technical reason you couldn't make it work :(

https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button/issues/1

Re: Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News

#62

Post by Karrot_Kream »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #12
lapcat wrote: post #5

> There were many large forums that hit a tipping point where low-effort posting and polarization drag everything down. How does HN resist the slide? It doesn't. Admittedly, HN discussion is generally of higher "quality" than Reddit, at least for large subreddits, but that's a very low bar to hurdle. > The HN welcome page lays out two cardinal rules: don’t post or upvote crap links, and don’t be rude or dumb in comme…

Discussion here is generally of higher quality because of the people who come here. Lots of developers of all kinds, tech company employees, insiders, people who invented the algorithms you read about in the books, people who invented the programming languages we use. I for one ignore the articles and go straight for the comments. I care a lot more about what smart people think than the articles themselves. The news…

Only occasionally. I think this was more true 10 years ago when the pool of commenters and topics on the site was smaller.

At this point I'd agree with GP that HN conversations are only better than large subreddits, a bit worse than most focused medium-sized subreddits, and a lot worse than more focused subreddits. The level of in-depth conversation you'll get about Go on r/golang or Emacs on r/emacs is much, much higher than this site. In fact you can get a decent amount of arbitrage karma bringing links from those subs onto here :)

I think the sweetspot of this site is a technical topic that's a bit out of the mainstream. These threads usually take a couple hours to really develop but because of that they usually avoid the kneejerk negative/contrarian toplevel posts that the community posts on more accessible topics which usually derail conversation quality. As such you usually get thoughtful, well-developed, good-faith takes on these threads. A good example is a Lisp or Forth related thread.

Re: Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News

#63

Post by rdmuser »

jstrieb wrote: post #54

This post recommends the Newsit extension to view Hacker News discussion associated with a page. In the same vein, a few years ago, I made a Firefox extension for users who want a privacy-preserving way to see if pages have associated HN discussion: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-d... Most other extensions probably hit an external API (such as Algolia) to check submission status, which mea…

Personally I use this bookmarklet to check if sites have been submitted since I like to minimize extensions:

    javascript:void(location.href="https://hn.algolia.com/?query="+location.href)

Re: Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News

#64

Post by jstrieb »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #61
jstrieb wrote: post #54

This post recommends the Newsit extension to view Hacker News discussion associated with a page. In the same vein, a few years ago, I made a Firefox extension for users who want a privacy-preserving way to see if pages have associated HN discussion: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-d... Most other extensions probably hit an external API (such as Algolia) to check submission status, which mea…

I use Chrome as my main browser and was going to ask if there was a Chrome version. I was sad to see there's a technical reason you couldn't make it work :( https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button/issues/1

Probably worth me revisiting! Web tech has changed a bit since I last investigated this in 2021, and I'm also not sure if I considered options like IndexedDB at the time.

Re: Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News

#65

Post by matheusmoreira »

qwertytyyuu wrote: post #37
matheusmoreira wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is particularly evident on medical and health related submissions. HN users, tech people in general, are biased against doctors and medicine. I don't think that can be generalized to technology discussion. I've seen a few doctors posting here on HN. I'm among them. Medical discussion is useful to me since I can gain perspective on how medical practice works in other countries.

He users and tech people are biased against doctors? Wha? That doesn’t sound right

Here's an example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32534550

Re: Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News

#66

Post by dpifke »

j1elo wrote: post #44

This is my personal and minimal guide to HN (for whoever might be interested): ! Hacker News ! =========== ! Remove AI-related entries (Top: title / url) news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission span.titleline > a:has-text(/\b(AI|GPT|MCP|LLMs?|Chatbot|Copilot|Gemini)\b/):upward(tr) ! Remove AI-related entries (Bottom: stats / comments) news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission span.titleline > a:has-text(/\b(AI|GPT|MCP|LLMs?|Ch…

My uBlock Origin rules use almost identical syntax (but there are a lot more of them, since I hide stories from TV news and clickbait sites):

https://pifke.org/hn.txt

(I also would love to know if there's a way to consolidate rules.)

dang has previously indicated receptiveness to built-in killlist functionality for sites/users/titles, similar to what this list accomplishes. My offer to build this (for free) stands, if anyone at YC was willing to provide access the HN codebase.

Re: Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News

#67

Post by foresto »

rdmuser wrote: post #63
jstrieb wrote: post #54

This post recommends the Newsit extension to view Hacker News discussion associated with a page. In the same vein, a few years ago, I made a Firefox extension for users who want a privacy-preserving way to see if pages have associated HN discussion: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-d... Most other extensions probably hit an external API (such as Algolia) to check submission status, which mea…

Personally I use this bookmarklet to check if sites have been submitted since I like to minimize extensions: javascript:void(location.href="https://hn.algolia.com/?query="+location.href)

That sends every page you check to Algolia's API, which is what jstrieb's extension is designed to avoid.

Re: Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News

#68

Post by NaOH »

dang wrote: post #49
reaperducer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is attracting more and more new users who enjoy making low quality posts on hot button topics, which also triggers other previously well-behaved users to make low quality posts in response. Posting a "hot take" on HN was unheard of for a very long time. Now people do it regularly with no shame. I've never really understood why people write those, and even less why people read them. It's admitting from the outset t…

I think you guys are succumbing to a nostalgia-filtered view of HN's past.

An unspoken inference from when you've made posts like this is that HN has largely only changed in terms of scale, that the overall community culture has been relatively static. What are the indicators that would catch your attention to indicate a cultural shift, whether they are improving the site or diminishing it?

Re: Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News

#69

Post by stronglikedan »

_fat_santa wrote: post #9

IMO one of the things that makes HN so special is the "culture" here. Having been on here since 2018, most folks here are acutely aware of the issues that other sites like Reddit have and we all collectively work to preserve this space so it doesn't become like the other places. If I see a meme on Reddit I would probably upvote it, but if I see that exact same meme on here I would downvote and probably report it too.…

You just made me look at how long I've been coming here. I'm still internally struggling with whether that is something I needed to know!

Re: Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News

#70

Post by pembrook »

_fat_santa wrote: post #9

IMO one of the things that makes HN so special is the "culture" here. Having been on here since 2018, most folks here are acutely aware of the issues that other sites like Reddit have and we all collectively work to preserve this space so it doesn't become like the other places. If I see a meme on Reddit I would probably upvote it, but if I see that exact same meme on here I would downvote and probably report it too.…

I would say that was true until recently (have basically been lurking for a decade), but this year in particular it feels like HN has gone full Reddit.

More and more topics somehow devolve into emotional political fights instead of intellectual debates.

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