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A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors
- cpeterso 8y agoHow can we report bugs in the Hacker News site? My particular bug/request: the story submission form will trim page title suffixes for some popular sites, but the form's "too long" JavaScript check measures the original title length, not the auto-trimmed title length. So I often submit a story and have to manually trim the title suffix that would have been trimmed anyways for a story from the same site with a shorter title.
- peterwwillis 8y agoE-mail the mods, hn@ycombinator.com
- ndesaulniers 8y agoMine would be hitting back in Firefox for Android sometimes returns to a stale front page (when returning to the front page of HN).
- minikites 8y ago>Likewise, topics around diversity and inclusion in tech have gained lots of visibility over the past few years. However, despite these discussions not being off-topic, they tend to be flagged to death by users regardless. Time to see see if mentioning this very clear behavior gets this link flagged/killed. Privileged people usually don't like having their privilege challenged.
- jdc 8y agoNah. I think it's just aversion to culture war. I know I get more than enough of my fill on Twitter.
- minikites 8y agoYour ability to ignore "the culture war" is the very definition of privilege.
- stcredzero 8y ago"Privilege" in Intersectionality seems to have all of the same semantics as "original sin" in traditional religions. However, it's most particularly similar to certain toxic fundamentalist religious formulations of inherited guilt, in that the concept is explicitly tied to race and ethnicity. (The "Children of Ham" in the Handmaid's Tale.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_bQTxNT-K8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_bQTxNT-K8 (EDIT: An anthropologist friend of mine told me about this story of a Jewish mystic and preacher who was also a travelling trader. As he was returning to a particular town, the residents recognized him and started throwing rocks at him. To this, he says, "Ah, good!" His companion asks why in the world would you say this is good? His answer: "Because it means they were listening!")
- hombre_fatal 8y agoIt's less about privilege being challenged, more about "inclusion" being used to justify just about anything and often going too far. Here's a comment in an official nodejs repository that got edited by a contributor to correct a pronoun on somebody else's post: https://github.com/nodejs/package-maintenance/issues/77#issuecomment-463868273 https://github.com/nodejs/package-maintenance/issues/77#issu... (click the "edited" dropdown) That you yourself come right out the gate guns blazing about "privilege" shows exactly why people prefer to just not have the discussion at all anymore on this forum. It seems more like flamebait and it never ends well.
- minikites 8y agoI don't understand what you mean, why is correcting a pronoun "going too far"? Do you not think respecting people's gender is worthy of the tiny amount of effort it takes?
- lxmcneill 8y agoI think this has less to do with respect and more to do with detracting from the original discussion e.g. source code integrity having nothing to do with human genitalia.
- xnxn 8y agoGender is also not about genitalia, fwiw. I see that the author of the edited comment got defensive about it and went on an irrelevant rant about singular they. Wish people like that would grow up a bit.
- icebraining 8y agoEh, having others edit comments attributed to us is weird, regardless of the context, I can see why people would get defensive. At least SO shows the editing user pretty clearly, on Github it's almost invisible.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- greglindahl 8y agoOne of the best ways to get downvoted is to predict in advance why you'll be downvoted! In this case you appear to be setting up a narrative to claim downvoters are evidence of a particular ideological point, when instead they might be downvoting you because you're being a jerk.
- NoodleIncident 8y agoYou seem to have misread his comment. He predicted downvotes on the original submission, not his own comment. He was wrong, but only because you have to click the link and read the full list to see the excerpt he quoted, when most people only read titles and comments.
- mises 8y agoThis really does bug me. The whole "if-you-downvote-me-you're-a-jerk" sorta makes me want to, even if the comment itself has some kind of decent reasoning. With that said, i can also be frustrating when people downvote to invisibility things that are not wrong but with which they disagree.
- minikites 8y agoI meant the overall post/link (where I quoted from), not my own comment.
- tom_ 8y agoOops, you missed out the best bit from your quote: "(Unfortunately)" ;) - I was going to post a comment about how precious this is, but looks like you got here first on this subject, so I'm going to add a reply instead. The fact that people here will generally flag this shit to death is good. This is a sign of maturity. The community has realised that discussions here on these topics are reliably unproductive, and will therefore kill them on sight. "But what if this means killing the productive discussions here on this topic?" - well, it's a calculated risk...
- computerphage 8y agoThis is a great list. It took me years to learn most of this stuff and I still learned a few things.
- jonbaer 8y agoMy only wish is that dupes weren't marked as dupes. It's not like you are submitting with the intention of creating a duplicate link (normally), it should just take you there instead of a [dupe] mark on your submission.
- minimaxir 8y agoI should add a section on dupes to the list, as the policy is a bit inconsistent (for example, a post on a subject that gets a lot of upvotes but is not the original source, might have the original source submission duped to that later submission.)
- krapp 8y agoI'd like to see a "rolling thread" feature where dupe threads (and links) are automatically merged into an existing thread, with older comments and subthreads being deleted over time. Hacker News doesn't do a good job of avoiding duplicates anyway, might as well make that a feature.
- saagarjha 8y ago> with older comments and subthreads being deleted over time No, don't delete comments! Hide them if you must, but I always like being able to enjoy and send people link to comments from years ago.
- jplayer01 8y agoAgreed, even comments from 5 years ago are often just as relevant now, and are often more substantive than more recent ones in the same article (in my experience).
- Nomentatus 8y agoI'd like it to be easier to get to the search box, so fewer people would post dupes.
- dang 8y agoThe software already does that when it can. The [dupe] marks are added by moderators, or in some cases by user flagging. I'm sorry if it feels like a stigma—that's not the intention!—it's rather that otherwise a lot of complaints arise about why the story is buried.
- shaunpersad 8y agoI don't believe this is an actual feature, but I've noticed a trend that I've been calling "twos", where, at any given moment, a particular subject (present as a word or phrase in the article's title) will show up twice on the front page. Funnily enough, currently the "twos" subject is "Hacker News", with this article and "What I've Learned from Hacker News" both being present in the front page at the same time.
- jacques_chester 8y agoVery often this is readers following some link, seeing other links from that page and submitting them.
- Deimorz 8y agoAlso often links that get mentioned in the comments of the original one.
- spectre256 8y agoThat's how I interpret it as well. I also think interesting articles on a topic jog people's memory and cause them to re-submit interesting articles from the past on that topic.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- TrainedMonkey 8y agoI call birthday paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem Number of all possible topics is N, number of news on FP is 30. For example if N is 365, you would expect 70% chance that two separate items on FP mention the same topic. Although, HN recurrence probably a bigger contributor. When a person gets reminded of some previous highly upvoted link and re-submits it. The highly upvoted link gets upvoted again and now you have two items on FP with similar keywords.
- saagarjha 8y ago
- Zecar 8y agoHow do I turn off echo chamber mode where well-written posts that go against the mob thinking turn grey?
- UweSchmidt 8y agoGot any examples for well-written grey posts? Most downvoted posts are not that amazing.
- Noumenon72 8y agoI have almost a conditioned reflex for upvoting grey posts at this point. The people who downvote are a weird crew that don't seem to judge by Reddit's "contributes to the discussion" standard.
- dang 8y agoHN doesn't have that standard. Not being Reddit doesn't make you weird. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
- Noumenon72 8y agoWeird is better than Reddit, which tends to downvote for political and groupthink reasons, but it's still weird. I usually can't tell why the downvoters are downvoting. Their downvoting doesn't match the comments, so I just see them as weird and apart from the general users.
- krapp 8y agoReddit's standard seems to contribute more directly to quality discussion than the haphazard result of pg's opinion, authoritative though it may be. When voting is applied with no real guidelines or standards, it ceases to be an effective filter for anything but the immediate emotional zeitgeist, and this goes against HN's stated purpose of bias towards quality.
- Aardwolf 8y ago> If the comment desaturation makes Hacker News difficult to read, you can click on the comment's timestamp to go to its page where the comment will no longer be faded, or you can install the CSS extension discussed here. Or, you can select its text to see it in (typically) black on blue.
- jolmg 8y agoI get white on blue, but yeah, I also do this and it's very readable.
- lanius 8y agoHN should update its color scheme. I use a quality IPS monitor with color calibration, and those comments are still hard to read.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoThis doesn't work for me in Safari on a Mac. The text remains gray and is still quite hard to read against the blue background.
- dooglius 8y ago>If a user has 251 Karma, they can set the color of the top bar in their profile settings Why on earth is there a karma requirement for this, let alone such a high one?
- segfaultbuserr 8y agoThink of it like a video game, which often gives people surprises by unlocking the hidden feature based on unclear conditions. I was really impressed was I discovered it for the first time. This feature is more of a Easter egg than a practical option. If you really NEED to change the color, you can simply load a custom CSS in your web browser.
- dang 8y agoMaybe we should add another. Any ideas?
- segfaultbuserr 8y agoWe really should have more Easter eggs. I was disappointed that nothing unusual happened to my "past-life account" with 1000+ karma.
- kirubakaran 8y agoIt would be awesome to be able to see the up and down vote counts on comments. If you think showing that might adversely affect HN, you could make that super exclusive, like requiring over 10k in karma ;)
- jedieaston 8y agoMaybe top 5 users (by karma count) get to change their username color? Would be another meaningless change on theme.
- tptacek 8y agoPlease no. Didn't pg try something like this once?
- snazz 8y agoSmall correction: the “web” link under a story now takes you to DuckDuckGo instead of Google.
- minimaxir 8y agoWait, what? When did this change? Added it to the doc!
- jedberg 8y agoA new account posting a very old and famous post... almost looks like karma farming...
- recursive 8y agoI've never seen it before, and I've been reading HN for years. A new user might naturally be interested in undocumented features and stumble upon. I can't help but notice that it's still missing `noprocrast` and related settings.
- minimaxir 8y agonoprocrast is documented in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- keithnz 8y agoI maintain a list of resources here https://github.com/keithn/HackerNewsCommunity https://github.com/keithn/HackerNewsCommunity I'd actually added this list a year ago, but forgot about it, then just added it again, and had to remove it again as I realized it was dupe :)
- adamrezich 8y agoLooks like /topcolors is getting hugged to death
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hannasanarion 8y agoI was hoping to learn about why sometimes comments can't be replied to, especially if they're deep in a thread. Can somebody fill me in?
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoTry clicking the time stamp link of the comment, you should be able to reply from there. I don’t know if there’s a limit to thread depth?
- mamon 8y agoSome kind of anti-flamewar feature. if there are multiple responses added in a very short time HN will temporarily hide "Reply" link.
- ehsankia 8y agoOne issue I've noticed which I'm surprised still exists is, on really large threads with 1000+ comments, collapsing threads becomes noticeably slow (multiple seconds long). I was looking at the source code, and it seemed like collapsing recursively collapses all comments below it too?
- 0xbadcafebee 8y agoHere's some features I wish we had: - Overhauled voting system. Comment votes are effectively "like/dislike" buttons, and some people use them to help promote/discourage comments central to the discussion. If you get downvoted or upvoted you do not know why, and that helps no one. Slashdot implemented a useful feature for this over 20 years ago. - Tags on submissions, which would enable very simple filtering by topics. - New hidden sections to let us dig into dead or controversial stories (maybe /dead and /deadnew?). If you watch /newest, you'll sometimes notice information that is interesting or meaningful, but it's auto-killed. There's no way to only show dead info except to page back through /newest. It would also be neat if we could actually vote on these, even if they remain dead. I don't even need comments to work on them, I'd just like to occasionally look at content that either a bot or overzealous human deems 'inappropriate'. On the last one, here's an example: I just found this dead article in /newest (https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/The-Worlds-Largest-Battery-To-Power-The-Permian.html https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/The...) talking about the world's largest battery being built in Texas. It was submitted by protomyth, number 55 on the HN leaderboard. Of their past 30 submissions, 5 are dead, 1 has >100 votes, and 1 has >200 votes. You can't easily find articles like this, because you have to keep paging back and paging back to find 30 or more dead articles. And you can't see the highest voted dead articles, so ones that might be interesting but were killed for some reason are also hard to find.
- cm2187 8y agoOne feature I’d like to see is the split between upvotes and downvotes on a comment. It’s a measure of controversiality which I would find more interesting than the net score.
- theli0nheart 8y agoYes. I’d much rather read comments with a high number of votes and net zero score than the two other extremes.
- cm2187 8y agoWell you don't get to see other people's comment scores anyway. What I meant is for your own comments, seeing a score of +1 doesn't carry the same information than +15/-14.
- theli0nheart 8y agoYep, I know. I was just riffing on your idea; I think the ranking algorithm should be tweaked a bit. Popularity contests don't lend to great debate or conversation. They tend to shut down one side at the expense of the other.
- ghayes 8y agoStackOverflow does this well. They allow you to click the sum total of votes to see the breakdown of upvotes versus downvotes.
- iscrewyou 8y agoBut I think that would lead to people preferring vote manipulation. If I agree with a title but I see it close to 50% upvotes/downvoted, I’m more prone to upvote it. Whereas I’m reality I might not upvote it anyways.
- cm2187 8y agoNot submissions which you can't downvote anyway. I meant comments, for which you can only see the score of your own anyway.
- ptruesdell 8y agoIt's interesting that you need at least 501 karma to be able to downvote comments and posts, but only 31 to flag submissions. Kind of surprising considering that they say a flag is essentially a "super" downvote.
- cm2187 8y agoOut of curiosity, how do comments get flagged?
- saagarjha 8y agoUsers with enough karma (I think it's 30?) flag them. You need to click on the actual link to the comment, which is where you can flag (or vouch!) for comments that you think break the guidelines (or were wrongly flagged).
- DanBC 8y agoYou click the timestamp of the comment, which takes you to a page with more menu options. One of those is [flag]. I don't know how many flags it takes to convert a comment from normal to [flagged], or to dead.
- FPGAhacker 8y agoI always thought newbie names were red. Color deficiency sucks.
- davidw 8y agoThat's pretty well done and thorough. The wayback feature was one I hadn't noticed before, and it caused me to look at the account creation date - 12 years and 1 day ago! Wow...
- sotojuan 8y agoPretty cool report. Personally all I want is to be able to change my username, even if it means emailing and waiting a few days.
- mises 8y agoAgreed, this would be nice to add. However, it would have been easier if everyone's primary identifier was a number, and a name was just an associated field. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that it was set up this way. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. Anybody known if emailing the mods will let this happen?
- saagarjha 8y agoEmailing the mods seems like a great way to know the answer to your question :)
- PavlovsCat 8y agoMaybe add a displayname "on top" that gets displayed in discussions, while still showing the username in the profile so people don't impersonate each other, add a button to "flag displayname" on the profile so that can be reset if abused or even the privilege to set it revoked -- done?
- dang 8y agoWe do that! Email hn@ycombinator.com and ask.
- slg 8y agoThe ranking algorithm also isn't some simple votes/time metric. The flame war detector for posts is an example that is mentioned, but there are also some undocumented complexities on the comment side too. An obvious one is brand new comments get a huge boost in the rankings compared to older comments. It is pretty common to see a few minute old comment at the top of a lot of comment threads. It also seems user reputation is a factor in this. A user with a good average karma score (a metric that used to be displayed publicly but is now hidden) seems to have their comments stay near the top longer than other users.
- inopinatus 8y agoRe. comments lingering high based on account karma, I've suggested the same but dang says not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16441687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16441687 Perhaps such remarks are retaining position by their own merit. An experienced or high quality commentator may simply produce remarks that are better received.
- slg 8y agoI don't know what to say other than there is something going on behinds the scenes that can be seen in play in this thread. My comment is 1 minute newer than another comment in this thread. My comment currently hasn't been upvoted yet is several spots higher in the thread. I tried upvoting the other comment and mine was still higher. My account has almost twice the karma and is older than the author of the other comment. It might not be 100% or even 1% karma related, but there seems to be some sort of user reputation effect.
- inopinatus 8y agoI upvoted your remark and it immediately dropped down the page. Evidently I am typhoid mary for unfavourable comment ranking... Joking aside, dang specifically denies there is a comment ranking adjustment due to account karma, but not other factors (such as account age, an unseen reputation field, your IP address/choice of web browser/#{1/user.name.size}). We are the blind to Hacker News's elephant in this.
- inopinatus 8y agoRemark ordering also appears to incorporate freshness (new remarks get a moment at/near the top), and I may possibly have also observed a penalty box: hidden downweighting, or reduction in effective comment score, imposed by moderators upon troublesome users that weren't egregious enough to ban/shadowban.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoJust one comment about vouch, which seems to have have changed behaviour fairly recently. Used to be that if a shadowbanned user posted a clearly substantive comment a vouch would always (nearly always?) restore it. Now it never does - I guess vouch is now just a vote that needs x votes. Suspect that's going to unintentionally have even more people talking to themselves, because they've not yet noticed the shadowban.
- krapp 8y agoIt is possible to lose vouching privileges if the mods feel the comments you're vouching for are uncivil or do more harm than good.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoThat's also possible. Don't think I have vouched for something that shouldn't, but I would say that, wouldn't I? :) So have others noticed a change, or did I accidentally flag my own account somehow?
- krapp 8y ago>or did I accidentally flag my own account somehow? If you did, the mods won't necessarily tell you, you'll just have to email them and find out.
- gjs278 8y agothey notify you when you get banned. i’m currently one of them. I didn’t notice for a few days though because the site doesn’t have an obvious way of notifying you when you get a reply.
- saagarjha 8y agoI've found https://www.hnreplies.com https://www.hnreplies.com to be pretty useful.
- arnonejoe 8y agoNot sure if this applies but new functionality will show up in your profile if you make it far enough in the YC application process. Our team landed an interview for the S2014 batch. There is a whole part of the site that you would only see during this process. I had questions in my profile during the application process (which normally does not appear) and when we were invited to interview there was scheduling tool where you could see the open slots over the four days of interviews. In our batch, they interviewed four teams at a time in 15-minute intervals and you could pick your time in this scheduling grid. https://github.com/joseph-adam/YCombinator-Application-S14 https://github.com/joseph-adam/YCombinator-Application-S14
- gjs278 8y agogo into your profile and mark the ability to see [dead] comments. a lot of them are useful.
- ggm 8y agoThis isn't the best place to do feature requests and I also strongly believe the more features HN gets the worserer it will become. But. anyway, my current top fave is this: implement some kind of keystroke scheme to to basic page steerage in emacs/vi mode respecting ways, and ? to show what the keystrokes are
- nyx_ 8y agoI really like cVim[0] for this. Think there's a couple of extensions for Firefox that accomplish the same thing. [0] https://github.com/1995eaton/chromium-vim https://github.com/1995eaton/chromium-vim
- ggm 8y agoThank you. TIL. Given about 5-10 web pages I badly miss the google default steerage choices for gmail/photos &c, this may well fill a hole in my life. So .. thank you kind HN reader.
- dang 8y agoThat may actually happen someday, because I wrote an HN client to help with moderation and it has all kinds of keyboard shortcuts for navigation. It's on my list to publish the navigation parts.
- ggm 8y agoThis would make me very happy.
- dang 8y agoYou'd be welcome to bug us about it periodically at hn@ycombinator.com. The reason it's not done yet is that we have limited resources for working on software and there are always much higher-priority things to get done. But I really would like to get it out someday. Also, it's written in Arc using an Arc-to-JS implementation, which is fun.
- rob 8y agoI think I was one of the first to join HN when I was only a teenager. I think 18. I miss the simple days! Went by so fast.
- russellbeattie 8y agoInteresting... this post caused me to finally look up what "delay" in the user settings does. As you might assume, it delays visibility of your comment for that number of minutes. I wrote this 2 minutes ago, see you in the future!
- pelario 8y agoFlame-war detector remind me of the following short story by Scott Alexander https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
- _ps6d 8y agoLots of people posting random feature requests in here, but is HN even developed any more? The last significant changes I remember were two and a half years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675) and I think even those were the first ones in a long time.
- NicoJuicy 8y agoWeb changed from Google to DuckDuckGo. But which features are missing?
- _ps6d 8y agoThere's quite a bit that could be added, without even touching the site's overall mechanics at all. The markdown support is extremely minimal and doesn't support a lot of basics like quotes (which causes many people to "quote" by using a code block, which has issues). A basic private messaging system would be really helpful in a lot of cases. Right now people always have to post email addresses publicly. It would be nice to have some built-in visibility into things like title changes, link changes, etc. that mods do, instead of needing them to comment manually about everything they do. They could implement some scraping to automatically add the year to older stories, instead of users needing to flag it and get the mods to do it manually all the time. And so on.
- NicoJuicy 8y agoSome people don't want to be contacted. If they want too, they add their email in their profile. > The markdown support is extremely minimal and doesn't support a lot of basics like quotes (which causes many people to "quote" by using a code block, which has issues). Obvious enough. An extra button: moderated, is with a comment. Scraping is different for each website.
- dang 8y agoIt's interesting to see that question show up, because we work so hard on the code. It makes sense that you'd ask it, though, because most of the changes are either not visible (like anti-spam or anti-voting-ring features), or are subtle. For example, you may have noticed more capitalized titles on the front page in the last couple days—but this is an experiment we're going to roll back. One reason we don't do a lot of visible changes is that HN's minimalism is one of its biggest assets. Another is that users don't like things to change, and the internal pressures that cause companies to do arbitrary redesigns are thankfully not in play here.
- kyleblarson 8y agoYou left out orange usernames
- Someone1234 8y agoUnfortunately the site still has no way of doing bullet lists. If you try this is the result: - One - Two - Three - Four You can do this but it isn't clear that it is even a bulleted list (particularly with real content): - One - Two - Three - Four It does support code blocks but that has strange boxing behavior making them hard to read even for actual code. For example: - Super long line that will box strangely for some reason... ! Long Line Long Line. - One - Two - Three - Four As you move further down a reply thread the box around code blocks shrinks and scrolling increases. If you access the comments with increased font size, a mobile device, or a smaller browser window it also gets worse/happens sooner. There's also now anti-hammering protection on the site (posting/replying/voting too fast) but it is far too easy to trigger. Just voting for a comment and hitting reply to that same comment can easily trigger it.
- 2038AD 8y agoI think this should work • one • two • three • four
- mariojv 8y agoInteresting post, I didn't know about some things like "/noobstories" or the karma needed for downvoting. One feature I've been wanting lately is the ability to see only new comments since my last visit to the thread. I've thought about writing some sort of reader application for this or perhaps a browser plugin. Even nicer would be something that takes into account comments I've actually read by using what my viewport has had open, but that may be less useful.
- greglindahl 8y agoThe inability to see new comments since your last visit is a feature. :-)
- bharrison 8y agoI'm as surprised to see this posted by a green username as I am glad to know what a green username means after having read your submission.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Tomte 8y ago> but the minimum score is -4 points. Is that true? I may misremember, but I thought I had comments in the minus a dozen or so.
- Beskz 8y agoI just turned 24, I’ve been a software developer since I was 18-19,and it’s so interesting to go back in time and see what was going on in the HN universe on specific days in the past, way before I even got interested in tech (I was in 6th or 7th grade when HN started). I really wish I would’ve discovered my passion for tech earlier.