11 ms·
Kind reminder: please (re)read the HN guidelines
- dkennedy 16y agoI just can't believe the volume of new posts. I posted a link to my own python blog 23 hours ago and since then there have been 470 other postings. Perhaps an idea is that people should only post their own work or even it HN was limited to programming related posts only. I come here for insights into different languages and the programming profession. I'm not that interested in the politics of another country or parenting tips for New Yorkers.
- j_baker 16y agoDone. What do I win?
- ljf 16y agothanks hopefully this can stay near the top for a while. been getting a lot of off topic posts again recently; adverts, thinly veiled spam, repeat posts etc. one thing i do wish hn had is a link/title checker to stop people all linking to same story hours or days apart.
- spooneybarger 16y ago"one thing i do wish hn had is a link/title checker to stop people all linking to same story hours or days apart." I don't. I think it is sometimes a symptom of a different problem. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1634847 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1634847
- duke_sam 16y agoI'm pretty sure if you try to submit the same link multiple times HN will show you the originally submitted story.
- sp332 16y agoIt doesn't always work though. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632572 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632572 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1630579 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1630579 were posted one day apart, with identical URLs.
- ptomato 16y agoActually the link checker only checks vs. links that are currently loaded into memory.
- vijaydev 16y agolinks loaded into memory - how does that work? Can you please explain?
- ptomato 16y agoAnything that has been accessed within the past x amount of time and hasn't fallen out of cache yet. For more info, check http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc around lines 1485, 1550, 233.
- blasdel 16y agoThat would probably work terrifically if there was an eviction algorithm other than crashing at least once per day. (If you try to comment and get "Unknown or expired link", it's because news.arc crashed between the page load and the POST)
- Vivtek 16y agoI can confirm that this works if the URL is exactly identical - it happened to me and I was quite pleased.
- mawhidby 16y agoNot only that, but if it does find a story to the same link, it will upvote it.
- swombat 16y agoYes, yes, HN is going to the dogs, it's not as good as it used to be, it's all because of the new users, and so on and so on. It's been like that since I joined two and a half years ago.
- boredguy8 16y agoI agree, it's a fairly constant theme. But... 1) It's been a while, so worth the reminder; and 2) It's actually a submission from someone whose been here a while. The last several were from people with < 200 day memberships. So: worth a little bit of +1 action, but I certainly hope it doesn't 'stay at the top for a while' as someone else said. Hoarding one of the 'above the fold' slots would be a bummer.
- RossM 16y agoWe're supposed to ignore the fold now aren't we? :)
- j_baker 16y agoYes, but I don't see this as being helpful. Be honest. Did you reread the guidelines? And more importantly, do you think the people that didn't read the guidelines the first time around will reread it because of a thread like this? All in all, I think this is less about helping newbies integrate into the site and more about giving "old-timers" a chance to vent.
- DavidSJ 16y agoI think the reality is more that it goes in cycles, and it does seem to be at one of its low points currently. A reminder of the guidelines seems in order.
- pg 16y agoWhat I find is that randomness produces the appearance of cycles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion The last couple days were particularly bad, with lots of articles about controversial but fundamentally boring topics. But I think it was a coincidence, as usual.
- Vivtek 16y agoI'm pleased to see that I am officially allowed to complain that HNN is getting to be just like Reddit.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoI still have about 3 weeks left before I can make that complaint. Luckily though, HN seems to be holding steady, and it has a long way to go before it becomes Reddit. HN is like having a conversation in your living room at a cocktail party with a lot of smart people in attendance. Reddit is like having a conversation at a sports bar with a bunch of random drunk assholes.
- gcheong 16y agoI think if we can get it to the point where it's like going out for beers with a bunch of smart people at a reasonably nice bar that will be perfect.
- davidw 16y agoYeah, but that's going to attract "hangers-on", isn't it? I think that's why that sort of community can either be stable or open but not both.
- cryptoz 16y agoYou should check out some of the smaller subreddit communities. For example, r/coding is extremely nerdy and has virtually 0 drunk assholes.
- terinjokes 16y agoI came over to the comments just to see who would make this remark. ;)
- Sukotto 16y agoI wish I had signed up when I started reading and not when I decided to stop lurking. Then again, I'm pretty happy with the overall quality of the site and comments so I guess it doesn't really matter :)
- moron4hire 16y ago>> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation. What if I make snide comments in face-to-face conversation?
- lotharbot 16y agoThe title should say "please (re)read and follow the HN guidelines".
- gabrielroth 16y agoThe title should say: "Reminder: Kindly (re)read and follow the HN guidelines." Describing one's own reminder as "kind" is presumptuous.
- didip 16y agoRemember, it will be September soon. That's probably the point of this post.
- grandalf 16y agoMy take is that hackers are sometimes gasp interested in discussing political issues. Thus, the best approach is not to have people constantly chastising topics/comments as off topic, but to keep the quality of each comment high enough that an intellectually curious person would enjoy reading it, even if it's about something not typically associated with hacking.
- sabat 16y agoI don't see HN going downhill in terms of submissions or in discourse. Things are mostly the same as they were 2-3 years ago. I do worry -- perhaps unnecessarily -- about the killing of submissions for no obvious reason. Apparently using a URL shortener is verboten, although the HN guidelines don't mention this. But using one will get your story autokilled. Yesterday, I tried to submit what I thought was an interesting story about Scoble's Building43 and older founders, but the submission page kept calling me a spammer. I am by no means a spammer. I really want to understand what causes stories to be killed, mainly so that I can participate in good faith. But even asking about this seems to make one persona non grata. I sense a chilling effect here. I hope I'm mis-reading all this, and that I'll be proven absolutely wrong. :-)
- mapleoin 16y agoWhat do you need the URL shortener for? I find it very annoying to have to click in order to see who the author of the content is when I can just look at the domain name at the end of the HN submission.
- sabat 16y agoWhat do you need the URL shortener for? Actually I don't use them here; never have. I just noticed a post having been killed, and saw a followup from HN staff explaining that using a URL shortener will cause a post to be autokilled. I don't care about URL shorteners. I am concerned about what the rules are, and particularly the rules that are not explictly stated in the HN Guidelines.
- jacquesm 16y agoThat's fairly logical though, a url shortener would allow re-submission of the same link over and over again and drops the hint of where the link goes to from the 'new' and 'news' pages as well as the ability to hover on the link for the full url. All of which are useful. Url shorteners are ok for twitter or IRC elsewhere they're just unnecessary complications.
- revorad 16y agoOne question I ask myself now before commenting is: Will this comment significantly improve this conversation? I try not to comment if the comment is merely: 1. clever and amusing 2. expressing anger/disagreement 3. disproving a wrong but unimportant claim made by another commenter. Besides these, submitting, upvoting, downvoting, not voting and flagging are enough to make HN more interesting for myself.
- uxp 16y agoI find myself writing comments fairly often, but end up pausing before I hit the reply button to re-read what I'm replying to and to think if my comment is actually contributing to the discussion. A good percentage of the time, I just end up closing the window. I may have good intentions to begin with, but if what I say reads as being one of the three points you wrote, there's no point in having other people argue against my invalid or ignorant claim. It just leads to semantical flame wars.
- billswift 16y agoMe too. But the worst thing about commenting here is how all the context that you are replying to goes away and you can't re-read your comment within the context of the discussion, because all you can see is the immediate comment you are directly responding to. Interestingly, this is the only site I comment on that has that behavior.
- kevinskii 16y agoI also try to stop myself from saying the same things that others have already said--i.e. "piling on."
- kabuks 16y agoIsn't that a pile on comment itself?
- bpyne 16y agoAs long as someone has opened up a guideline discussion.... "Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." Agreed in full. However, downmodding without constructive criticism leaves the downmodded with no sense of what to improve in the next comment. A downmod could easily be due to underdeveloped point, style, or disagreement about an opinion. At least 2 of the 3 reasons can lead to better future comments.
- swolchok 16y agoSo assume it's that your comment fell into the "noise" category and work harder on producing "signal" next time. We don't need to have a discussion every time someone felt that some post did not contribute sufficiently to the discussion.
- binspace 16y agoHow about this for a HN feature. If your post is < 1, add a link to a page about downvoted comments. That way, the person who was downvoted has an opportunity to read about some common reasons why a post was downvoted, read tips on making better comments, and has more time to emotionally process being downvoted.
- binspace 16y agoIronically, the comment above is an accidental implementation of this feature. It is currently at 0 points, and has a link to the HN policy as a link.
- bpyne 16y agoThe noise category assumption is a fair one. "Work harder" is a vague recommendation. Are there more specific recommendations you could make? No, a discussion would create noise, which would not be valuable for the HN community. A voluntary, anonymous, tip about what made the downvoted comment noise would be more than sufficient. To avoid it becoming a discussion, no reply would be allowed. (Just to throw a half-baked idea out.) Downvotes could easily become learning exercises that boost the comment quality over time.
- robertg 16y agoStill better than reddit.com/r/programming
- kamechan 16y agoaside from this one, i never read the comments. i'm just here for the links not the community editorialization of them. but my faith in "communities" has dwindled over the years through my continued participation over the years in this thing called "the interwebs". as the japanese would say, ganbatte kudasai. keep up the good work/do your best. in other words, please do not ruin this nice little community with your own baggage.
- mcantor 16y agoAt its worst, Hacker News has continued to impress and inspire me as vastly superior in quality and consistency compared to other online communities.
- magamiako 16y agoI think this is just a reminder to those that can't push their agendas on the new Digg to not come here and try to push it. Take it somewhere else. Good riddance.
- todayiamme 16y agoOne of the biggest reasons I can think of for the eventual decline of HN are the result of these words; >>>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.<<< The problem over here is that people's version of what gratifies their intellectual curiosity varies. What I find interesting is deeply subjective and I need to acknowledge that to contribute anything, anywhere. The same thing goes for HN in general. HN is starting to attract people outside of its core audience and in doing so it inevitably leads to the point where people come in whose mean of what's interesting is different from the mean of what's interesting for the core audience. It isn't their fault, but this process feeds into itself. So, if I see a post here on HN on death. I have this tendency to post up stuff related to death. Regardless of the fact whether or not they adhere to the spirit of the guidelines. People see that and they are more inclined to upvote it, since there is already content like that on the front page. So, it accelerates. You might have noticed that the front page of HN always follows a pattern there are a series of similar posts which come up and stay there over the course of time. This is a good thing and a bad thing as well. The trick is in stopping it at the right time. That's where the community and the moderators come in, but if the majority of the community don't know any better than that. This means that the community can't self adjust. The moderators then have to play a stricter role, which is inherently negative in the longer run. At the same time, if you define those words too strictly then HN won't be HN, anymore. This is the underlying paradox that needs to be solved to avoid that decline.
- krschultz 16y agoIt is August. A lot of people are on vacation - including writers of blogs and articles. Get used to it. We have X numbers of stories on the front page, we won't always have X amount of interesting stories. Some days we will have 0. The world doesn't fit into nice even patterns.
- bcrawl 16y agoI blame digg
- petercooper 16y agoEveryone seems to be focusing on the voting of comments, but I think the tips on what to submit (and vote up) are the most violated, as seen by the now almost daily post about men vs women.
- jacquesm 16y agoNot to mention a morbid fascination with death.
- sz 16y agoMaybe there should be a link to this on the post and reply forms, at least for newer accounts.
- bobbywilson0 16y agoThis is a nice public service announcement. It does make me think that these guidelines should be linked to more prominently somewhere, maybe on submit page?
- lsc 16y agohey, I have a question that is related to the hacker news guidelines. So, I'm considering taking my blog static. You know, it goes with the whole early 90s feel of my website. Also, I'm lazy and maintaining a good comment system is work. So, I was thinking, I'd submit every blog post here, and basically say "go to [link to hn story] to comment" (I could also do a ssi include of the hn story comments, but I would be less in the clear from a copyright perspective there, and it'd open me to worrying about things like cross site scripting, which is one of the things I wanted to avoid by going static anyhow, and users would still need to click the link to comment.) Anyhow, a friend of mine who isn't a hn user thought that spamming up hn with every blog post I wrote would be, well, spammish. My thought is that hn seems to be mostly okay with that sort of thing. I'd like to get some feedback from others on this idea.
- mquander 16y agoI consider it spammish too (there's my feedback.) But my observation is that there are a ton of people who link their own blog posts all the time, and if the blog posts are of an OK quality, everyone here seems to be fine with it.
- lsc 16y agohm. What do you think of the other suggestion, a "submit this to hn/talk about it on hn" link that asked a user to do the submission for me? does that make it any more or less spammish, in your opinion?
- ismarc 16y agoWhile it may be a bit spammy, with the frequency you updat your blog, I personally wouldn't see it as such. However, you're tying yourself to HN for discussion (typically a good discussion), but I see it as "setting precedent" for others. You remember the web rings? It reminds me of that. Perhaps a single platform for managing discussions of articles/posts/blogs similar to news list sites, but specifically for discussion of the posts, not specifically for news. I mean, we could all find a majority of these articles on our own if we wanted (eventually), but the community discussion about the topic/story is what really adds to it. In short, I personally don't see an issue with YOU submitting each post, but I wouldn't post just to comment and would be disheartened if it became a standard way of providing discussion about your posts.
- JacobAldridge 16y agoSo, where's nickb? Oh, and Erlang, Erlang, Erlang. That is all.
- JshWright 16y agoThe only trend I've seen lately that's bugged me is people creating "throwaway" accounts with names intended to be a joke specific to the comment they've posted.
- blahblahblah 16y agoMy main annoyance with HN posts lately is the use of profanity in post titles and occasional posts that are, in general, NSFW. For those of you in startup land this probably isn't an issue, but on behalf of those of us who are still "workin' for the man" please take a moment before hitting the submit button to imagine that you still have a boss and consider whether your imaginary boss who just walked into your office and saw this post title on your screen would be A) pleased that you are taking a moment to keep up with industry trends while you're waiting for your code to compile or B) wondering why you would waste your time reading such trash. If it's the latter, consider whether this is because the topic of your post is really inappropriate for a professional forum (if so, please don't bother posting it) or if it is an appropriate topic but you're using profanity as a crutch because you're too damn lazy to write an articulate, descriptive title (if so, stop being lazy and rewrite your title).
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- mkr-hn 16y agoI try to be a good new person who follows the rules. :) The rating system is probably the only one I've seen work this well. When I see myself getting downvoted, it tells me pretty clearly that I need to go and reconsider what I posted. The apparent degradation in quality is probably because the average quality of discussion on the internet has declined as more people entered the melee. It'll probably go back up as new combatants start to get better at expressing their ideas. That, or it'll become so hopelessly unproductive that everyone will collectively decide the internet was a bad idea.
- techiferous 16y agoA reminder from the guidelines: Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. And some recent examples of comments here on HN: "All you have is a pink blouse and a pathological case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder" -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644724 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644724 "I'm sorry, but even on HN I feel it is appropriate to reply to this jackass with only two characters: FU" -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644606 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644606 So sometimes HN can feel like a pretty rough place and a reminder is in good order. To HN's credit, though, these comments tend to be few and tend to be downvoted. You can also find comments like this floating around: "Email me, and we'll figure out a good time for you to come buy and visit; I'll buy you coffee." -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1641763 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1641763
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- sasare 16y ago...I love this , So does My boyfriend .he is almost 11year older than me .i met him via agegap love ``.c`o`m` a nice place for seeking age le ss love.which gives you a chance to make your life better and open opportunities for you to meet the attractive young girls and treat you like a king. Maybe you wanna check it out or tell your friends.. Just love it
- 10ren 16y agoI must have noticed this too, because I switched my hackernews bookmark to go directly to the newest submissions a few days ago, since I didn't like what was on top. Reading and upvoting from newest is the most effective way to change what is on the frontpage. http://news.ycombinator.com/newest http://news.ycombinator.com/newest Lamenting the bad is less effective than embracing the good. As in life.