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1. None of the HN knockoffs can really clone Hacker News because, for one thing, it's missing everything in the original HN's code. pg mentions that there's a m
by dylangs1030 13y ago
1. None of the HN knockoffs can really clone Hacker News because, for one thing, it's missing everything in the original HN's code. pg mentions that there's a missing "secret sauce" that ties it all together. That, and you really need to have some sort of heavy involvement in the community before you try to start it, so you'll need someone of pg-level importance to start it. Specializations could be started by very knowledgable HN users in their field but very general implementations would need an all around "ideologue." EDIT: I don't know if you're already aware of this, I'm just explaining because the way you wrote it appears as though you may think the Arc code is packaged with a full implementation of HN.
2. I don't think this would be allowed via the HN Search API...that's a lot of content.
3. This is a cool idea, but how would you get people to participate and add content to what is essentially a ghost, rather than just come back here, where there's news? I also don't think it solves the problem HN is currently facing. It merely puts a bandaid on it until we get back up to 2013 level volume.
- sillysaurus 13y agoI just ran across an old dump of HN from April 24, 2008. It contains the first 172,000 items (stories+comments) and the profiles of the first 6,500 users. http://rapidshare.com/files/3129266675/ycombinator-news-2008-04-24.zip http://rapidshare.com/files/3129266675/ycombinator-news-2008... I would guess the secret sauce is spam filtering code. It seems conspicuously absent from Arc releases. The Arc code does come bundled with the HN source code, though, and all of the core features seem to work fine. There's nothing missing except some way of filtering spam.
- vidarh 13y agoThe point for someone doing this would presumably be to hope the visitors in question would not notice that they're adding content to the ghost/doppelganger comments.
- OGC 13y agoThe secret sauce is that HN is the news aggregator of a successful start up combinator. The secret sauce is popularity.
- krapp 13y agoThe secret sauce is green.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- krapp 13y agoI think a HN clone might get better traction not necessarily focusing on hackers/programmers, who likely are already perfectly happy being here. Maybe make one for all the stories and things that HN users don't want to see, or for different communities altogether.