4 ms·

Even if people said they'd prefer I focused on adding features like search rather than the quality of submissions and comments, which is unlikely, I still would

by pg 17y ago

Even if people said they'd prefer I focused on adding features like search rather than the quality of submissions and comments, which is unlikely, I still wouldn't.

jacquesm 17y ago
I find it hard to believe that a programmer of your caliber would make it seem as though an off-site submission is such a big deal that it would take away significant time from working on the quality of the submissions and comments. I'm not 1% the programmer that you are and it wouldn't take me more than 15 minutes to put a search box (after all, it's just a piece of static text) in the HN footer. See, all those 'quality submissions and comments' are pretty much useless if you can't find them, what's the use of having this amazing body of content if there is no easy way to peruse it? The content goes by so quick now that if you look the other way for three days that you'll have missed tons of good stuff, an easy way to search would make all of HN accessible, not just what is current right now.
- pg 17y ago
  What you don't get is that attention is a zero sum game. There are an infinite number of minor things that would be pretty good to do that would "just take a minute." The only way to do good work is to ruthlessly blow them off and to focus only on the few things that matter most. Ironically, this thread, though a complete bike-shed waste of time in itself, is not entirely bad, because it's also causing me to spend time thinking about the kind of problem I should be thinking about. One of the big questions I've been mulling over is what to do about points on comments. I'm increasingly inclined not to display them, because an upvote or downvote is equivalent to a very inarticulate comment. And this subthread is an argument for doing so, because the only reason I felt obliged to respond to you is the number of points your comment got. If points weren't displayed I wouldn't have felt I had to respond. Basically, points exacerbate the "someone is wrong on the Internet" trap.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Found using searchyc.com: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740983 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740983 (google doesn't work well when you search for words in the UI of HN)
  - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
    Apologies for the frankness. I keep trying diplomacy but I suck at it. A less informed person might think that since you got your clock cleaned by popular vote, you seem much more inclined to discount popular vote than you did a month ago. I have lost much of my admiration for HN. But I have an awesome appreciation of what you think is important to spend your time on. I have to admit I am mostly wrong and I am still trying to learn as much as I can from you, but why the hell do you think here that Jacques is giving you a bad requirement for your site? You sound pompous and disconnected. EDIT: And am I to understand you monitor the voting records on HN? That sounded crazy, but I just heard it via email. The internet is crazy. Can't be true.
    - ericd 17y ago
      Comment and community quality are such hard problems to solve, and are orders of magnitude more important for a site like this than features like search. Sure, it might be easy to add search. Or rankings. Or a million other things a small minority would appreciate. But that's not how you make a good site that is optimal for the larger population. An option should be very useful for a large percentage of users to make it worth adding to the complexity of something. Users say they want every feature under the sun, but after a lot of that, when they see something well designed like the iPad, and they're generally struck by how nice it is to be free of that grabbag design philosophy. Speaking anecdotally, I've tried to dig up a past item maybe 5 times in the past year via search, and none of them were very important. Compare that to the maybe 300 times I've been back to the site, solely for the content quality. I could do without HN searchability altogether very easily, I very rarely reread things. I would venture that this is a common usage pattern of a news site with ephemeral content. You sound like an entitled and disconnected user, asking why he's not adding something so simple that you personally want, rather than thinking about what would make this site better for everyone. Search is not going to make the site better for most, and people that respond to a vote about the subject are not going to be the apathetic majority.
matt1 17y ago
Make something people want, right? If the majority of folks here want search, and given that it wouldn't take much time to add a link to SearchYC, why not do it?
- pg 17y ago
  The reason I wouldn't add a link to SearchYC is the same that I don't add a link to one of the HN iPhone apps: I don't know the authors or the app well enough to anoint it as official. I don't mind if people want to build stuff on top of HN, but I have a much higher threshold for making something part of HN.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Searchyc is at least as reliable if not more reliable than HN, I think you'd be in pretty good hands there. In all the time that I've been using it I think I've seen it down only twice, HN over the same period numerous times.
    - chengmi 17y ago
      HN handles considerably more traffic than SearchYC.
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        Well, that's a difficult one: Either PG is right and nobody needs search, then we'll find it doesn't matter, or I'm right and we do need search and then the searchyc guys will need to beef up their system. But then at least we do know for sure we need that search.
        chengmi 17y ago
        As it stands, SearchYC doesn't get enough daily uniques to justify beefing up the system. Frankly, SearchYC was an experiment in how quickly I could learn a new technology (RoR) and build a system. I was completely expecting someone to come along a few months later to make SearchYC obsolete. It's been 2.5 years, and I don't think that's happened yet.

by pg 17y ago

Even if people said they'd prefer I focused on adding features like search rather than the quality of submissions and comments, which is unlikely, I still wouldn't.

jacquesm 17y ago

I find it hard to believe that a programmer of your caliber would make it seem as though an off-site submission is such a big deal that it would take away significant time from working on the quality of the submissions and comments. I'm not 1% the programmer that you are and it wouldn't take me more than 15 minutes to put a search box (after all, it's just a piece of static text) in the HN footer. See, all those 'quality submissions and comments' are pretty much useless if you can't find them, what's the use of having this amazing body of content if there is no easy way to peruse it? The content goes by so quick now that if you look the other way for three days that you'll have missed tons of good stuff, an easy way to search would make all of HN accessible, not just what is current right now.

pg 17y ago
What you don't get is that attention is a zero sum game. There are an infinite number of minor things that would be pretty good to do that would "just take a minute." The only way to do good work is to ruthlessly blow them off and to focus only on the few things that matter most. Ironically, this thread, though a complete bike-shed waste of time in itself, is not entirely bad, because it's also causing me to spend time thinking about the kind of problem I should be thinking about. One of the big questions I've been mulling over is what to do about points on comments. I'm increasingly inclined not to display them, because an upvote or downvote is equivalent to a very inarticulate comment. And this subthread is an argument for doing so, because the only reason I felt obliged to respond to you is the number of points your comment got. If points weren't displayed I wouldn't have felt I had to respond. Basically, points exacerbate the "someone is wrong on the Internet" trap.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Found using searchyc.com: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740983 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740983 (google doesn't work well when you search for words in the UI of HN)
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  Apologies for the frankness. I keep trying diplomacy but I suck at it. A less informed person might think that since you got your clock cleaned by popular vote, you seem much more inclined to discount popular vote than you did a month ago. I have lost much of my admiration for HN. But I have an awesome appreciation of what you think is important to spend your time on. I have to admit I am mostly wrong and I am still trying to learn as much as I can from you, but why the hell do you think here that Jacques is giving you a bad requirement for your site? You sound pompous and disconnected. EDIT: And am I to understand you monitor the voting records on HN? That sounded crazy, but I just heard it via email. The internet is crazy. Can't be true.
  - ericd 17y ago
    Comment and community quality are such hard problems to solve, and are orders of magnitude more important for a site like this than features like search. Sure, it might be easy to add search. Or rankings. Or a million other things a small minority would appreciate. But that's not how you make a good site that is optimal for the larger population. An option should be very useful for a large percentage of users to make it worth adding to the complexity of something. Users say they want every feature under the sun, but after a lot of that, when they see something well designed like the iPad, and they're generally struck by how nice it is to be free of that grabbag design philosophy. Speaking anecdotally, I've tried to dig up a past item maybe 5 times in the past year via search, and none of them were very important. Compare that to the maybe 300 times I've been back to the site, solely for the content quality. I could do without HN searchability altogether very easily, I very rarely reread things. I would venture that this is a common usage pattern of a news site with ephemeral content. You sound like an entitled and disconnected user, asking why he's not adding something so simple that you personally want, rather than thinking about what would make this site better for everyone. Search is not going to make the site better for most, and people that respond to a vote about the subject are not going to be the apathetic majority.

matt1 17y ago

Make something people want, right? If the majority of folks here want search, and given that it wouldn't take much time to add a link to SearchYC, why not do it?

pg 17y ago
The reason I wouldn't add a link to SearchYC is the same that I don't add a link to one of the HN iPhone apps: I don't know the authors or the app well enough to anoint it as official. I don't mind if people want to build stuff on top of HN, but I have a much higher threshold for making something part of HN.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Searchyc is at least as reliable if not more reliable than HN, I think you'd be in pretty good hands there. In all the time that I've been using it I think I've seen it down only twice, HN over the same period numerous times.
  - chengmi 17y ago
    HN handles considerably more traffic than SearchYC.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      Well, that's a difficult one: Either PG is right and nobody needs search, then we'll find it doesn't matter, or I'm right and we do need search and then the searchyc guys will need to beef up their system. But then at least we do know for sure we need that search.
      - chengmi 17y ago
        As it stands, SearchYC doesn't get enough daily uniques to justify beefing up the system. Frankly, SearchYC was an experiment in how quickly I could learn a new technology (RoR) and build a system. I was completely expecting someone to come along a few months later to make SearchYC obsolete. It's been 2.5 years, and I don't think that's happened yet.