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
#2The best comments are at the bottom. I’ve been twaddling here long enough to know what the most upvoted take will be, so unless it’s a personal anecdote it’s not worth reading. The real juicers are usually buried near the bottom of the page, a few comments above where the apathy and sarcasm start bleeding into grey.
Re: Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News
#3>the servers that run HN are surprisingly modest: just two machines with quad-core Intel Xeon E5-2637 v4 CPUs, running FreeBSD
Very nice. I used FreeBSD on my server until Version 9, I think I left for 2 reasons. The server experience heat death (my fault) and its Laptop support.
I heard v15 became alpha + its Laptop support has improved a lot. I will keep an eye on v15 and give it a try when released.
FWIW, I had to replace the power supply on the server and I forgot to plug in the CPU fan, doh. The machine was over 10 years old at the time.
Re: Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News
#4I've always been curious what the front page of hn would look like if you filtered out all the tech posts. I'd love a rss feed for that. Maybe make it top weekly or monthly instead since that would cull a large % of posts?
One site I've been really enjoying for filtering through feeds including all hn submissions is https://scour.ing/about. You input interests and it filters rss based on that. You can even follow your profile using an external rss reader. It's inspired by sites like bear blog and seems to be trying to do everything right re treating users well. I'm a long time rss user and rarely find new rss projects interesting enough to use but scour instantly hooked me because it works and is trying to do everything right by its users.
Re: Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News
#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 comment threads.
These cardinal rules are routinely violated.
A rational person would just read the linked articles and ignore the comment section. HN is still the best link aggregator, I think. Unfortunately, I'm irrational and prone to pointless argumentation, which is why I sometimes show up in the comments. (Duty calls.) I usually regret it, though.
Re: Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News
#6I've always been curious what the front page of hn would look like if you filtered out all the tech posts. I'd love a rss feed for that. Maybe make it top weekly or monthly instead since that would cull a large % of posts? One site I've been really enjoying for filtering through feeds including all hn submissions is https://scour.ing/about . You input interests and it filters rss based on that. You can even follow yo…
Developer of Scour here. Really glad to hear you're enjoying it!
Comments like these are very motivating, so thank you!
Re: Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News
#7> 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…
I find myself going to the comments before the article. There's so many times where one of the first comments are something like "I work in the industry, and the base assumptions of this article are incorrect", and I feel that that's a valuable thing to keep in mind before digging into the meat.
Re: Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News
#8I've always been curious what the front page of hn would look like if you filtered out all the tech posts. I'd love a rss feed for that. Maybe make it top weekly or monthly instead since that would cull a large % of posts? One site I've been really enjoying for filtering through feeds including all hn submissions is https://scour.ing/about . You input interests and it filters rss based on that. You can even follow yo…
Developer of Scour here. Really glad to hear you're enjoying it! Comments like these are very motivating, so thank you!
Tbh I've been working on a big feedback list since early this year after finding scour through /r/rss. This year got busy etc so I haven't sent it in yet but I'd like to soon once I polish it up.
Being able to apply custom interests to all feeds globally has been a wonderful way to run into new stuff online. I was genuinely surprised how great of addition scour was to my rss setup since I'm already a longterm experienced user with a well curated follow list of a several hundred feeds.
Re: Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News
#9IMO 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. That decision comes from a place of wanting to preserve this space and I'm sure many other folks on here would very much agree.
Re: Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News
#10> 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…
I find myself going to the comments before the article. There's so many times where one of the first comments are something like "I work in the industry, and the base assumptions of this article are incorrect", and I feel that that's a valuable thing to keep in mind before digging into the meat.
> There's so many times where one of the first comments are something like "I work in the industry, and the base assumptions of this article are incorrect"
There are so many times where the top comments are totally full of crap, including and especially from people who work in the industry. It's a large industry with countless subspecialties. What reason do you have to trust a comment over an article? If you're going to be skeptical, be skeptical of both, but be especially skeptical of some cursory dismissal of a work that obviously took significant time, effort, and expertise.
I'd love for these commenters to write their own articles and see what's it like to be commented on.