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Hacker News Highlights[0] is something I didn't even know I needed. There's some great content to be found here (including some insightful comments), but the sh

Hacker News Highlights[0] is something I didn't even know I needed. There's some great content to be found here (including some insightful comments), but the sheer volume of content means I'm probably missing out on most of it. [0] http://macro.ycombinator.com/articles/2015/11/hacker-news-highlights/ http://macro.ycombinator.com/articles/2015/11/hacker-news-hi...

jt2190 11y ago
> the sheer volume of content means I'm probably missing > out on most of it. I guess I'm one of those old-timers who misses the days when the submissions were more focused on startups and less about government policy, macro economics, and whatever else. (I'm quite biased toward consuming information that is useful and actionable rather than merely interesting, so I realize that puts me at odds with the site's stated policy.) (edit: phrasing)
- davidw 11y ago
  I don't think most of the policy stuff is even all that 'interesting'. 'Interesting' is learning something new for the sake of learning about the world. Most of the policy stuff is more like "look at this outrageous thing!". In many cases, it's true that the thing in question is important - probably more important than startups/hacking - but there are plenty of other places for those kinds of links/discussions.
  - ethbro 11y ago
    Everyone has their own conscious and unconscious biases for news preferences. At least as far as my conscious, I like to use "Does this better help me relate to the world?" as a yardstick. I don't think anyone would argue that it's best practice to make decisions with substantial amounts of missing knowledge, yet I feel like there are a huge number of startups founded via the "I am a white, middle-class, college-attending male, and this is one of my problems that I want to solve" selector. That's all well and good, I don't expect every freshman to be an expert on {insert problem outside that subclass} for {insert region outside US/EUR}, but... if we're serious about solving important world problems, then the people who are going to solve them need to at least be aware that it's a problem. Aka the malaria argument
    - davidw 11y ago
      > Everyone has their own conscious and unconscious biases for news preferences. I simply don't view HN as a place for 'news' in the general sense of the term, but rather a much more focused community.
      - mbrock 11y ago
        That's probably why the submission guidelines say if you'd see it on the TV news, it's probably off-topic here.
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - deleted 11y ago
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- mindcrime 11y ago
  I guess I'm one of those old-timers who misses the days when the submissions were more focused on startups and less about government policy, macro economics, and whatever else Put me in the same category, FWIW. I've adjusted to the new way of things, and just accept it for what it is. But I would prefer less politics, world affairs, economics, etc., and more focus on tech and startups.
- tptacek 11y ago
  1000000000% agree. I think the site is pretty bad at hosting political discussions, and, worse, that the resulting discussions are tedious. There are very few long-time readers of HN who can honestly say they'd have a hard time predicting what HN will say about any given political issue.
  - pvg 11y ago
    That's exactly the sort of thing a plant of the technonormative Big Karma oppressor would say.
    - krapp 11y ago
      karma is the opiate of the masses
      - earleybird 11y ago
        the medium is the oppressor
  - Alex3917 11y ago
    > There are very few long-time readers of HN who can honestly say they'd have a hard time predicting what HN will say about any given political issue. While the political discussions on HN are predictable, I do think the overall politics of the site have shifted significantly over time. Six or seven years ago I was pretty much the token crazy liberal or whatever. Whereas now my politics generally aren't even noticeably out of the mainstream, without my views having shifted significantly on most issues.
  - mbrock 11y ago
    The guidelines say "avoid bringing up flame bait unless you've something new to say." I think a better guideline might be "avoid just expressing your opinion unless you can make it both polite and interesting."
    - tptacek 11y ago
- thenomad 11y ago
  Definitely. I read HN to get content I can't get anywhere else, specifically useful, actionable content. If I want to read articles from Vice, The Atlantic or the NYT, there are plenty of other places for those to bubble up.
  - dang 11y ago
    What are some examples of 'actionable' content?
    - bjwbell 11y ago
      Brian Kernighan's recent lecture on language design, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg4U4r_AgJU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg4U4r_AgJU, is an example (not sure if it was on hacker news). I'm working on SIMD in Go and don't want to make avoidable mistakes.
      - dang 11y ago
        That got significant attention here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10595195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10595195. I'd particularly like to see examples of the kind of content people think used to appear on HN and doesn't anymore. My guess is that this is more nostalgia bias than reality, but if that's wrong, we need to know.
        thenomad 11y ago
        I've been meaning to test to see if I'm subject to nostalgia bias on this. Any suggestions for how to do so? FWIW, I have a VERY strong feeling that the content on HN has shifted since about five years ago, to the point that I've been trying to find a site that has more of the entrepreneurship / practical advice that I used to see on HN a lot. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10190783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10190783 ) However, I don't have data to back it up (yet). I can't swear that these things don't appear on HN any more, but in terms of what I'm looking for, and used to find on HN, I'd say stuff like Brennan Dunn or Jason Cohen's writing on practical entrepreneurship: http://blog.asmartbear.com/unprofitable-saas-business-model.html http://blog.asmartbear.com/unprofitable-saas-business-model.... http://blog.asmartbear.com/consulting-company-accounting.html http://blog.asmartbear.com/consulting-company-accounting.htm... http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/the-freelancers-guide-to-recurring-revenue/ http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/the-freelancers-guide-to-re... I very, very rarely see posts like that upvoted on HN any more. And if it does briefly appear, it tends to get significantly downvoted and criticised - I recall an Empire Flippers article recently that took a lot of flak in the comments section (despite defence from Patio11 amongst others) and disappeared. More tech / programming-focused stuff bubbles up with some regularity, but the micro-ISV / lifestyle business and even startup advice hardly ever appears from what I see. Hope that feedback is useful!
- elif 11y ago
  I definitely see your perspective and agree with you in principle.. but on the other hand, for a lot of these topics it is really difficult to find a forum for intelligent and at least superficially science/fact-based discussion from more-informed-than-average people. I also think that macro economics are pretty important if you're trying to divine a profit from the startup world. If you believe we're in a bubble, you can't really afford to not be aware of what's happening in both the financial markets and consumer markets..
  - jdminhbg 11y ago
    The problem is that once you allow that crack in the wall, articles that generate outrage and comments and clicks all flood through. For example, on the front page right now is this article about pharma pricing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10595041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10595041. Is it likely to draw measured, informative comments about how your business should approach pricing and PR, or is it likely to draw yet another tedious flamewar about health care policy? I think it's reasonable that knowing macroeconomics news is important to running a business, but it's not the case that everything that's important to running a business has to be on HN. It's hard to run a business if you are constantly fighting with your spouse/partner/whatever, but that shouldn't mean flooding the front page with relationship advice.
- david_mitchell 11y ago
  Someone should start a petition to change the name back to startup news. edit: I should have written a more than a single sentence. Obviously I'm joking; hn is what it is now and it's not going to go back to the good old days. There is a point that is worth making though: when the site was focused on startups it was a much nicer place and people posting new things got help in the comments section rather than just commentary and opinions. That has been lost mostly because of the growth in users but I can't help think that the increase in scope had a negative impact too.
- mbesto 11y ago
  From HN guidelines: > If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. I insta-flag anything that fits in this category. As much as I might want to discuss ISIS, HN isn't the place for it.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    Me too. More people should be doing this.
- tedmiston 11y ago
  Do you think breaking HN into (algorithmically determined) categories or "subHNs" would help?
- brudgers 11y ago
  I think the change in proportion of news devoted to startups is at least partially driven by changes to business journalism and business in general. Covering startups as startups is much more common in mainstream business journalism. Culturally, "startup" has become associated with a larger cluster of concepts than it was five years ago and it is not surprising when I see a new small business referred to as a startup. A few years ago, 10 Strategies for Marketing my Startup would be more likely to fall in the intersection of useful and actionable and interesting. These days the level of general knowledge about startups is higher (e.g. Altman's Stanford class and recent handbook). There was a time when "growth hacking" was an HN "trending topic". Today, we live in a time where it's been dissected and found to be a poor fit for a startup's core business strategy. The third factor is that I think the standards of HN have become higher. Many of the VC blogs that used to make the front page look a bit flat compared to today's median...it used to be that the the 200-500 word daily thoughts and opinions of "important" people made the front page despite lacking supporting evidence. These days that seems less common.
- noonespecial 11y ago
  I'm with you. But I've made my peace with it and found a way to make it useful. Most of the news these days is click/flame bait. I just check HN first. The top rated comments on most of these stories is a pretty good barometer of if I need to care or not. Usually not. HN is a meta-filter for mainstream news if you use it right. But yes. Very yes. The "how I did this cool thing" story is sorely missed. A front page full of hope and awesome was a welcome sight each morning.
  - dang 11y ago
    > The "how I did this cool thing" story is sorely missed. Are you sure there are less of those? I'm not. Certainly they're as on topic as ever, and continue to make the front page. I'm not aware of a lot of such stories that get submitted but not upvoted.
- dang 11y ago
  > misses the days when the submissions were more focused on startups What kind of stories about startups do you think aren't being represented here? Links would be super helpful. There certainly hasn't been any policy change about what's on topic.
ihnorton 11y ago
Hacker Newsletter and HN Daily have filled this role for a while now for me. I read the highlights over lunch or on the train, and otherwise try to avoid HN during the day (heh, mostly). http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/
- jt2190 11y ago
  Thanks! I just signed up for hackernewsletter.
- jagtesh 11y ago
  Thanks for the links! I'm one of those people too who likes to read 'actionable' news. HN used to be great for that.
- dluan 11y ago
  There's also http://hackermonthly.com/ http://hackermonthly.com/
  - npongratz 11y ago
    But not after March 2016: http://blog.hackermonthly.com/final-issue.html http://blog.hackermonthly.com/final-issue.html Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9223955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9223955
- duck 11y ago
  Thanks for the Hacker Newsletter mention, Isaiah! In case anyone is interested, here is the issue that went out today: http://eepurl.com/bGNPCf http://eepurl.com/bGNPCf
  - username223 11y ago
    Screw your redirect nonsense... $ curl -I http://eepurl.com/bGNPCf HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily Server: nginx/1.2.0 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 X-UA-Compatible: IE=edge,chrome=1 Location: http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=faa8eb4ef3a111cef92c4f3d4&id=ba47a59781 Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2015 02:51:43 GMT Connection: keep-alive Set-Cookie: _AVESTA_ENVIRONMENT=prod; path=/ $ curl -i 'http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=faa8eb4ef3a111cef92c4f3d4&id=ba47a59781' # a bunch of Urchin Tracker stuff EDIT: eepurl.com and campaign-archive1.com are both Mailchimp garbage.
minimaxir 11y ago
Granted, the browser-snapshot-of-comment may not be the best presentation technique, especially as HN layout causes the comment to clip at small browser widths. A fix for this (without having to redesign HN) would be to create an embedable widget that takes in a HN comment ID and retrieves it from the HN API, then style the response so it matches the theme.
staunch 11y ago
It's Upvoted for Hacker News. Heh.
nicklovescode 11y ago
Would be great for someone to connect a browser plugin that somehow highlights exceptional comments that might be hidden. Maybe people > X,000 karma get to highlight one a day. Ideally it would also highlight ones that were featured on The Macro

jt2190 11y ago

> the sheer volume of content means I'm probably missing > out on most of it. I guess I'm one of those old-timers who misses the days when the submissions were more focused on startups and less about government policy, macro economics, and whatever else. (I'm quite biased toward consuming information that is useful and actionable rather than merely interesting, so I realize that puts me at odds with the site's stated policy.) (edit: phrasing)

davidw 11y ago
I don't think most of the policy stuff is even all that 'interesting'. 'Interesting' is learning something new for the sake of learning about the world. Most of the policy stuff is more like "look at this outrageous thing!". In many cases, it's true that the thing in question is important - probably more important than startups/hacking - but there are plenty of other places for those kinds of links/discussions.
- ethbro 11y ago
  Everyone has their own conscious and unconscious biases for news preferences. At least as far as my conscious, I like to use "Does this better help me relate to the world?" as a yardstick. I don't think anyone would argue that it's best practice to make decisions with substantial amounts of missing knowledge, yet I feel like there are a huge number of startups founded via the "I am a white, middle-class, college-attending male, and this is one of my problems that I want to solve" selector. That's all well and good, I don't expect every freshman to be an expert on {insert problem outside that subclass} for {insert region outside US/EUR}, but... if we're serious about solving important world problems, then the people who are going to solve them need to at least be aware that it's a problem. Aka the malaria argument
  - davidw 11y ago
    > Everyone has their own conscious and unconscious biases for news preferences. I simply don't view HN as a place for 'news' in the general sense of the term, but rather a much more focused community.
    - mbrock 11y ago
      That's probably why the submission guidelines say if you'd see it on the TV news, it's probably off-topic here.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
mindcrime 11y ago
I guess I'm one of those old-timers who misses the days when the submissions were more focused on startups and less about government policy, macro economics, and whatever else Put me in the same category, FWIW. I've adjusted to the new way of things, and just accept it for what it is. But I would prefer less politics, world affairs, economics, etc., and more focus on tech and startups.
tptacek 11y ago
1000000000% agree. I think the site is pretty bad at hosting political discussions, and, worse, that the resulting discussions are tedious. There are very few long-time readers of HN who can honestly say they'd have a hard time predicting what HN will say about any given political issue.
- pvg 11y ago
  That's exactly the sort of thing a plant of the technonormative Big Karma oppressor would say.
  - krapp 11y ago
    karma is the opiate of the masses
    - earleybird 11y ago
      the medium is the oppressor
- Alex3917 11y ago
  > There are very few long-time readers of HN who can honestly say they'd have a hard time predicting what HN will say about any given political issue. While the political discussions on HN are predictable, I do think the overall politics of the site have shifted significantly over time. Six or seven years ago I was pretty much the token crazy liberal or whatever. Whereas now my politics generally aren't even noticeably out of the mainstream, without my views having shifted significantly on most issues.
- mbrock 11y ago
  The guidelines say "avoid bringing up flame bait unless you've something new to say." I think a better guideline might be "avoid just expressing your opinion unless you can make it both polite and interesting."
  - tptacek 11y ago
thenomad 11y ago
Definitely. I read HN to get content I can't get anywhere else, specifically useful, actionable content. If I want to read articles from Vice, The Atlantic or the NYT, there are plenty of other places for those to bubble up.
- dang 11y ago
  What are some examples of 'actionable' content?
  - bjwbell 11y ago
    Brian Kernighan's recent lecture on language design, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg4U4r_AgJU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg4U4r_AgJU, is an example (not sure if it was on hacker news). I'm working on SIMD in Go and don't want to make avoidable mistakes.
    - dang 11y ago
      That got significant attention here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10595195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10595195. I'd particularly like to see examples of the kind of content people think used to appear on HN and doesn't anymore. My guess is that this is more nostalgia bias than reality, but if that's wrong, we need to know.
      - thenomad 11y ago
        I've been meaning to test to see if I'm subject to nostalgia bias on this. Any suggestions for how to do so? FWIW, I have a VERY strong feeling that the content on HN has shifted since about five years ago, to the point that I've been trying to find a site that has more of the entrepreneurship / practical advice that I used to see on HN a lot. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10190783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10190783 ) However, I don't have data to back it up (yet). I can't swear that these things don't appear on HN any more, but in terms of what I'm looking for, and used to find on HN, I'd say stuff like Brennan Dunn or Jason Cohen's writing on practical entrepreneurship: http://blog.asmartbear.com/unprofitable-saas-business-model.html http://blog.asmartbear.com/unprofitable-saas-business-model.... http://blog.asmartbear.com/consulting-company-accounting.html http://blog.asmartbear.com/consulting-company-accounting.htm... http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/the-freelancers-guide-to-recurring-revenue/ http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/the-freelancers-guide-to-re... I very, very rarely see posts like that upvoted on HN any more. And if it does briefly appear, it tends to get significantly downvoted and criticised - I recall an Empire Flippers article recently that took a lot of flak in the comments section (despite defence from Patio11 amongst others) and disappeared. More tech / programming-focused stuff bubbles up with some regularity, but the micro-ISV / lifestyle business and even startup advice hardly ever appears from what I see. Hope that feedback is useful!
elif 11y ago
I definitely see your perspective and agree with you in principle.. but on the other hand, for a lot of these topics it is really difficult to find a forum for intelligent and at least superficially science/fact-based discussion from more-informed-than-average people. I also think that macro economics are pretty important if you're trying to divine a profit from the startup world. If you believe we're in a bubble, you can't really afford to not be aware of what's happening in both the financial markets and consumer markets..
- jdminhbg 11y ago
  The problem is that once you allow that crack in the wall, articles that generate outrage and comments and clicks all flood through. For example, on the front page right now is this article about pharma pricing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10595041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10595041. Is it likely to draw measured, informative comments about how your business should approach pricing and PR, or is it likely to draw yet another tedious flamewar about health care policy? I think it's reasonable that knowing macroeconomics news is important to running a business, but it's not the case that everything that's important to running a business has to be on HN. It's hard to run a business if you are constantly fighting with your spouse/partner/whatever, but that shouldn't mean flooding the front page with relationship advice.
david_mitchell 11y ago
Someone should start a petition to change the name back to startup news. edit: I should have written a more than a single sentence. Obviously I'm joking; hn is what it is now and it's not going to go back to the good old days. There is a point that is worth making though: when the site was focused on startups it was a much nicer place and people posting new things got help in the comments section rather than just commentary and opinions. That has been lost mostly because of the growth in users but I can't help think that the increase in scope had a negative impact too.
mbesto 11y ago
From HN guidelines: > If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. I insta-flag anything that fits in this category. As much as I might want to discuss ISIS, HN isn't the place for it.
- tptacek 11y ago
  Me too. More people should be doing this.
tedmiston 11y ago
Do you think breaking HN into (algorithmically determined) categories or "subHNs" would help?
brudgers 11y ago
I think the change in proportion of news devoted to startups is at least partially driven by changes to business journalism and business in general. Covering startups as startups is much more common in mainstream business journalism. Culturally, "startup" has become associated with a larger cluster of concepts than it was five years ago and it is not surprising when I see a new small business referred to as a startup. A few years ago, 10 Strategies for Marketing my Startup would be more likely to fall in the intersection of useful and actionable and interesting. These days the level of general knowledge about startups is higher (e.g. Altman's Stanford class and recent handbook). There was a time when "growth hacking" was an HN "trending topic". Today, we live in a time where it's been dissected and found to be a poor fit for a startup's core business strategy. The third factor is that I think the standards of HN have become higher. Many of the VC blogs that used to make the front page look a bit flat compared to today's median...it used to be that the the 200-500 word daily thoughts and opinions of "important" people made the front page despite lacking supporting evidence. These days that seems less common.
noonespecial 11y ago
I'm with you. But I've made my peace with it and found a way to make it useful. Most of the news these days is click/flame bait. I just check HN first. The top rated comments on most of these stories is a pretty good barometer of if I need to care or not. Usually not. HN is a meta-filter for mainstream news if you use it right. But yes. Very yes. The "how I did this cool thing" story is sorely missed. A front page full of hope and awesome was a welcome sight each morning.
- dang 11y ago
  > The "how I did this cool thing" story is sorely missed. Are you sure there are less of those? I'm not. Certainly they're as on topic as ever, and continue to make the front page. I'm not aware of a lot of such stories that get submitted but not upvoted.
dang 11y ago
> misses the days when the submissions were more focused on startups What kind of stories about startups do you think aren't being represented here? Links would be super helpful. There certainly hasn't been any policy change about what's on topic.

ihnorton 11y ago

Hacker Newsletter and HN Daily have filled this role for a while now for me. I read the highlights over lunch or on the train, and otherwise try to avoid HN during the day (heh, mostly). http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

jt2190 11y ago
Thanks! I just signed up for hackernewsletter.
jagtesh 11y ago
Thanks for the links! I'm one of those people too who likes to read 'actionable' news. HN used to be great for that.
dluan 11y ago
There's also http://hackermonthly.com/ http://hackermonthly.com/
- npongratz 11y ago
  But not after March 2016: http://blog.hackermonthly.com/final-issue.html http://blog.hackermonthly.com/final-issue.html Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9223955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9223955
duck 11y ago
Thanks for the Hacker Newsletter mention, Isaiah! In case anyone is interested, here is the issue that went out today: http://eepurl.com/bGNPCf http://eepurl.com/bGNPCf
- username223 11y ago
  Screw your redirect nonsense... $ curl -I http://eepurl.com/bGNPCf HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily Server: nginx/1.2.0 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 X-UA-Compatible: IE=edge,chrome=1 Location: http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=faa8eb4ef3a111cef92c4f3d4&id=ba47a59781 Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2015 02:51:43 GMT Connection: keep-alive Set-Cookie: _AVESTA_ENVIRONMENT=prod; path=/ $ curl -i 'http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=faa8eb4ef3a111cef92c4f3d4&id=ba47a59781' # a bunch of Urchin Tracker stuff EDIT: eepurl.com and campaign-archive1.com are both Mailchimp garbage.

minimaxir 11y ago

Granted, the browser-snapshot-of-comment may not be the best presentation technique, especially as HN layout causes the comment to clip at small browser widths. A fix for this (without having to redesign HN) would be to create an embedable widget that takes in a HN comment ID and retrieves it from the HN API, then style the response so it matches the theme.

staunch 11y ago

It's Upvoted for Hacker News. Heh.

nicklovescode 11y ago

Would be great for someone to connect a browser plugin that somehow highlights exceptional comments that might be hidden. Maybe people > X,000 karma get to highlight one a day. Ideally it would also highlight ones that were featured on The Macro