Tell HN: List of HN Subdivisions | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: List of HN Subdivisions

86 pointsjmonegro22 comments

Hey,

Every once in a while, I see a comment or something that brings up a subdivision I hadn't known. The last one I discovered was /noobstories. The obvious ones are /newest, /threads, /comments and /leaders. Here's a list of the least obvious ones that I have found. Add any missing ones in the comments. Happy new year!

  /noobstories - news submitted by new members (intended for moderation
  /noobcomments - comments submitted by new members
  /active - actively commented stories
  /best - best recent stories submitted 
  /classic - submissions by established members
  /bestcomments - best recent comments submitted
  /newpoll - submit a new poll
  did I miss any?

added:

  /saved?id=yourusername shows stories you've upvoted

View on HN

I got these from looking through the Arc 3.1 source.

http://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors shows the most popular colors of the top bar.

http://news.ycombinator.com/welcome prints "Welcome to Hacker News, <username>".

/vote is the page that votes go to

http://news.ycombinator.com/submit is, trivially, where you can submit pages

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink is /submit where you can only submit links; no text. However, the page still says you can put text in.

/item is the permalink to a comment or submission (or internal message, in case of comments/questions to YC applicants).

/edit lets you edit a comment

/reply submits a comment as a reply to a submission or prior comment

/submitted?id=<name> lets you see the submissions by user name.

/rss is the rss feed

http://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments is the latest comments on HN.

Those are, as far as I can tell, the publically accessible pages that haven't been mentioned elsewhere on this submission. There are some admin-only ones, like /badsites and /editors.

/edit also works on submissions. useful for grabbing the url from a dead'd submission.

As to docs /lists tells you what some of these do.

/noobstories - submissions from new users

/noobcomments - comments from new users

If I remember right, new users are 'registered less than a year ago'

/classic is the complement of /noobstories, submissions by users with accounts older than a year [edit: mbrubeck below says this is actually all submissions but the ranking only takes into account non-noob votes. reply to correct any other inaccuracies]

/active is recently active submissions

/best is recent submissions with the most points

/bestcomments is same as above but for comments

neither /newpoll nor /saved are subdivisions really, the former is an interface to post a poll, the latter only works when parametrized by a username and shows 'submissions upvoted'.

It really wouldn't hurt to have a help link in the top nav bar describing most of this stuff along with the formatting rules, the relevant etiquette links, etc. It would cut down on their frequent reposting and indignant reminders to startled users ('You're not supposed to do X! Have you not read [obscure link unreachable from anywhere obvious]!')

I've never been able to figure out the reason for not having this information easily available - in more cynical and less charitable moments, when yet another 'L2post, n00b' article graces the top slot, I imagine it's some sort of infantile secret treehouse thing under the guise of 'well, a real hacker would figure these out'.

Here are some clickable links:

http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments

http://news.ycombinator.com/active

http://news.ycombinator.com/best

http://news.ycombinator.com/classic

http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

The FAQ (http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) listed in the footer also has a few more:

http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc - Formatting rules

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - Guidelines

Thanks for posting these. I'd forgotten about /best

Found a story I had missed "Is college worth it?" and a fascinating insight by lionhearted about how you might get into an airline lounge:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011748

Note that "Lists" is the first link at the bottom of the page.

I'll admin I'm being lazy, but does anyone have a greesemonkey script to add these to the top?

Why not just memorize them like terminal commands?

    /saved

Documentation on what they all mean would be helpful.

I hate to say this, but if you actually have to ask the developer for some simple docs on something basic like this, that's a big red flag to me.

Well, the basic parts of the site are self-evident, certainly to anyone interested in the hacker community. And the other, more esoteric aspects of the site are 1) in the source and 2) occasionally mentioned in articles.

Not sure I would say that it is a red flag about the site.

I would say it's a red flag about the site. It's certainly not a red flag about the person (why should you have to read through the source to work out how the software works? There isn't even a link to the source from the software beyond using a Google search).

I'd say its fun and a challenge to find things by exploration. In some cases, such as poll posting, they are deliberately left unpublicized to prevent over abuse.

why is it a red flag?

Because they're not very useful if nobody knows what they are or what they do.

I suppose they're kind of cute, in an easter-egg sort of sense. But I really don't see why HN just couldn't have a regular landing page or maybe a sidebar with these links on them, along with maybe a caption or tooltip describing what they're for.

Why all the mystery? It really makes the site much less useful for huge numbers of people to keep this stuff semi-hidden.

It's posts you've upvoted.