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A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors
- mikequinlan 4y agoIf you've documented them, then they are no longer undocumented.
- dragonmost 4y agoThe same way you can't know something that is unknown
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago“We also know there are known unknowns — that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.”
- minimaxir 4y agoThe motivation for making this list was due to the deliberate sparseness of the HN Guidelines and FAQs.
- achow 4y agoMy biggest feature wishlist: Ability to search only within my favorites.
- masklinn 4y agoMine is to either improve the markup sufficiently that it’s worth using, or remove it entirely. Currently it sits at an awkward position where it’s not complete enough that it’s any good, but it’s too obtrusive to use “raw” text formatting à la plain text emails.
- zeristor 4y agoShared Tagging of posts, perhaps like delicio.us had. Using HNews as a database of knowledge, fallable as it is. If it is overwhelmed a lot of the time, this wouldn’t make it any easier.
- airstrike 4y agoThis 1,000,000x
- comboy 4y agoTo me it feels like the feature is not necessary at all, everybody can manage, organize and search their bookmarks on their own, the way they prefer.
- Semaphor 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973 2018 391 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292361 2019 25 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24548010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24548010 2020 3 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482 2021 255 comments
- mkl 4y agoAlso: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 2019 188 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 2020 267 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30459276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30459276 2022 67 comments It's posted pretty often!
- ars 4y agoIt's too bad the maintainer appears to have abandoned this, judging by the pull requests.
- minimaxir 4y agoI haven't abandoned it, I just haven't gone though the PRs deeply. The commit history is a better metric for repo activity.
- modeless 4y agoCool, I like https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool. Possibly more interesting than the front page. https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments is interesting as well. I have a recent comment with 74 points and it's only on the fifth page. I guess people are getting a lot of upvotes on their comments!
- LoveMortuus 4y agoI think 'bestcomments' is for a certain timeframe because most that are at the top are about Google and Google Stadia, which was relevant not long ago.
- Semaphor 4y agoFrom the 2018 thread [0] > What I like about HN is that the comments VERY RARELY descend into the inevitable political sniping that seems to happen almost everywhere else on the internet, even when discussing controversial topics like Trump, and even the percentage of snarky and dismissive comments is kept pretty low. This is something, I thought, has gotten way worse since covid. I always explained it (mostly to myself) from the sudden influx of people that arrived faster than cultural assimilation could happen. Back then, it was only cryptocurrency topics where I preferred not reading the comments. Nowadays, it’s so many topics where I quickly nope out of the comments again. It’s still better than most places, but that’s because it started from a far superior position. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16441306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16441306
- closedloop129 4y agoWould it be an option to embrace that development? Instead of assimilating everybody the Borg way, it would also be possible to tag snarky people and allow each user to choose if their comments should be included. The front page could be an example of good behavior, but people don't have to adapt instantly. They can be snarky, are flagged, and get the signal that the expectations are higher. With some resources for personal development, depending on the flagged transgressions, there could be a form of assimilation that scales.
- Semaphor 4y agoI mean, what you are describing is still assimilation [0]. The way to get there can be multifold, but concepts like not being toxic (which seems harder to accept) and providing value instead of making joke-comments (which seems to be accepted somewhat readily) still need to be adopted by new people. This is exactly how it should be, but it’s also a way that, at least IMO, does not scale and stopped working properly. [0]: the process of assimilating new ideas into an existing cognitive structure
- jimbob45 4y agoWell two of three years since COVID hit have been hotly contentious election years. I would expect things to rapidly cool down come this December.
- unknownaccount 4y agoWhat about the one where you get shadowbanned from posting any new submissions but not comments?
- alister 4y agoThe source code for the software that runs Hacker News was available at one time. Are the undocumented features, voting ring detectors, and spam detectors not in the released source code? It would make sense that they weren't.
- krapp 4y ago>The source code for the software that runs Hacker News was available at one time. still is: http://arclanguage.org http://arclanguage.org >Are the undocumented features, voting ring detectors, and spam detectors not in the released source code? Some are, but things like voting ring detection and spam detection aren't. YCombinator doesn't often share the code of changes they make to HN, unfortunately.
- skilled 4y agoA new one I recently learned about: you can favorite comments! You have to click on the actual comment context to do so. It actually got me thinking if I ever would have favorited comments even if I knew about the feature. Caught me by surprise.
- DaedPsyker 4y agoThat's a handy feature. I have in the past favourite a thread more so for a the comments (book recommendations are a common one) than the actual article.
- c23gooey 4y agoThanks for this. I've been on this site for longer than my kids have been alive and I didn't know half this stuff. The filter by points seems quite useful[0], especially as the amount of submissions has wildly increased in the last couple of years 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100 https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100
- robga 4y agoPost numbers may be ornamented with alternating red and green colour on Christmas Day. As in 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20071225140214/http://news.ycombinator.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20071225140214/http://news.ycomb...
- saagarjha 4y agoThis is one of those things I have probably never noticed out of colorblindness :P
- mdaniel 4y agoWhat a cruelty of fate that society has picked the two^1 action colors from the pallet that affect colorblind people 1: I actually only recently learned there were multiple forms of colorblindness from the Chrome emulation drop-down
- randomNumber7 4y agoI find it strange that there is no link in the navigation bar to open the "best" category. Only "new" and "past" is shown, but when you open https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best you get a different ordering of articles.
- mkl 4y agoThere are a whole bunch of pages like that. Click "Lists" (https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/lists) at the bottom of the page and you get: https://news.ycombinator.com/front https://news.ycombinator.com/front Front page submissions for a given day (e.g. 2016-06-20) https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool Links selected for a second chance at the front page https://news.ycombinator.com/invited https://news.ycombinator.com/invited Overlooked links, invited to repost https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best Highest-voted recent links https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active Most active current discussions https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments Highest-voted recent comments https://news.ycombinator.com/asknew https://news.ycombinator.com/asknew The latest Ask HN (i.e. text) posts https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew The latest Show HN posts https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories Submissions from new accounts https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments Comments from new accounts leaders Users with most karma https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring Monthly "Who Is Hiring" threads https://news.ycombinator.com/launches https://news.ycombinator.com/launches Launches of YC startups
- kleiba 4y ago...by which they become documented features and behaviors.
- thrwyoilarticle 4y agoI've wondered about creating an extension for HN and Reddit to get around what I see as a problem in the voting system. Nominally, downvotes aren't for disagreeing, they're for posts that don't add to the discussion. Upvotes aren't a perfect reflection: a comment with a high score or prominence implies consensus. Sometimes I'll see comments where I think it has been unfairly downvoted - maybe greyed out for posting an unpopular opinion - but I don't think the comment deserves my co-signing or approval. I can upvote it, but then the negative votes may later turn out to be an anomaly and be cancelled-out by upvotes or by having the negative votes de-fuzzed. Then the comment is visible again but has my +1 and might be obscuring a reply that I thought did deserve an upvote. My extension would be a third button on greyed-out comments. Maybe 'resurrect'. It will work as an upvote until the comment is allowed to be part of the discussion again, then it removes it. With Reddit I'd just add it to the firehose but HN's lower traffic and greater risk of astroturfing means I'd seek dang approval first.
- saagarjha 4y agoThis is kind of what the "vouch" button is for?
- Kbelicius 4y ago> Nominally, downvotes aren't for disagreeing, they're for posts that don't add to the discussion. On HN one should downvote for disagreeing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
- jrootabega 4y agoThat is incompatible with the practice of making it hard, or even impossible, to see comments which have been downvoted too much. I am guessing it also was not taking into account the type and volume of use/abuse that it sees today.
- jrootabega 4y agoThis problem will never be solved if it hasn't by now. Downvoting as disagreement, or to punish unpopular ideas, is rampant. And downvoting is not just a way of EXPRESSING disagreement, it's a way to suppress those you disagree with by hiding their comments. And, as pointed out here and elsewhere in this submission, the vouching mechanism that WAS meant to solve it will be silently disabled for your account if you use it to offset too many posts which are TOO unpopular or disagreed-with.
- formerly_proven 4y agoAn undocumented behavior not on the list of undocumented behaviors is that vouching and presumably flagging as well can be shadowbanned. If you vouch for things which then get flagged again, the vouch link won't disappear, it just won't do anything anymore. So you should be careful if vouching or flagging something is "worth it".
- thg 4y agoSame goes for Up-/Downvoting on comments. I know because I've lost mine a couple years ago. ;)
- 4cao 4y ago> If a user has 251 Karma, they can set the color of the top bar in their profile settings. The default is #ff6600. Here's the complete set of colors users have set: https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors Seems this is sorted by popularity? I'd have never expected the color I set (#ffcc00) to make it so high on the list. But then most people probably don't bother changing the default setting, so it can just be due to the low base effect. Would be great to know what it's like in absolute terms.
- tmoravec 4y agoI set #0099FF, the opposite of the default, in order to quickly see if I'm logged in. I'd expect that being related to the default, it's a common choice. But it doesn't seem to be.
- airstrike 4y agoI've had #93A1A1 on for so long I forget it isn't the official color... I really wish that link would show the tally for each color
- eth0up 4y agoFor the greater portion of a year, I can no longer upvote comments. I can upvote submissions though. I suspect this was mitigation against my upvoting comments which seemed unfairly grayed. It's very kind of them to leave me the arrow icon, which at least pretends to accept my input.
- ryandrake 4y agoHow do you know or test this? You can’t see the numeric scores of other people’s comments. Use a second account?
- jrootabega 4y agoYou can see the person's total points
- eth0up 4y agoThe other reply to your question is correct. Simply note the user's total sum.
- philipkglass 4y agoI had this limitation on my account for a while too. It was because I was upvoting flame-bait comments that had been grayed out. My personal reasoning at the time was "but the other poster started it" (these were deeply nested angry comment chains). After a couple of months I emailed dang to request if I could get real voting back and he took the penalty off my account, after explaining why it had been put there in the first place. If you see an ugly exchange of comments, DO downvote (or ignore) provocations. DON'T upvote provocative retorts, even if you think that the reaction was justified. And if you get your account penalized, you can have the penalties lifted with an email to hn@ycombinator.com.
- WithinReason 4y agoHow does karma from submissions work? What percentage do you get? For example this guy has a submission with 196 karma but only has 104 karma: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mikaelaustin https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mikaelaustin
- airstrike 4y agoYou get 100%, as far as I know. He may have a ton of downvotes from comments that net out some of that karma
- nkurz 4y agoApparently this isn't the case in actuality. Here are a couple threads about it where Dan confirms that not all upvotes count toward karma: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16438849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16438849
- WithinReason 4y agoHe has 0 comments and no other submissions, the account is less than a day old
- NickRandom 4y agoAbsolutely not the case, as others have mentioned
- LoveMortuus 4y agoOhh... I thought 'flag' was like a bookmark, for something that I wanted to read but isn't my 'favorite', but because I couldn't find the flagged articles I stopped using it...
- NickRandom 4y agoO.D.G! Well at least you held your hand up to not reading the FAQ
- LoveMortuus 4y agoTo be honest I've probably read it multiple times, but they're usually not interesting enough to remember. :/
- NickRandom 4y agoI think the fact that posts like these turn up often and that a lot of users comment 'omg, I didn't know that' points to the need for Dan and the other mods to either update the sites FAQ or provide a new one. All joking aside, it should only take a day or two to do it and is obviously much needed as their userbase expands.
- 2devnull 4y ago▲ ▲ ▲
- thom_ 4y agoTheir censorship function is broken because you can just make a new account in 30 seconds from a new ip which is automatic now with safari relay. This is like my 50th account. And there’s no real benefit to amassing points except for the mods and users to threaten taking them away to keep you singing the woke village tune and not criticize YC startups. But you know that’s a loss to HN, because there’s a great deal of value in dissenting opinion. Don’t you want to know if you have a delusional bad idea? Of course that’s valuable feedback. The self censorship flagging is also a nasty feature allowing crypto zealots to control the narrative. Take for example that ridiculous eyeball scanning crypto scam. Any criticism was censored, and then twitter found out and shot it down in glorious style. Well and Edward Snowden. Would’ve benefited the creators to actually listen to the criticism, which was super valid, over censoring it on a backwater forum to give the false impression of endorsement by the bay.
- thom_ 4y ago