The Macro | Hacker News Reader

The Macro

macro.ycombinator.com

454 pointsBIackSwan133 comments

Hacker News Highlights[0] is something I didn't even know I needed. There's some great content to be found here (including some insightful comments), but the sheer volume of content means I'm probably missing out on most of it.

[0] http://macro.ycombinator.com/articles/2015/11/hacker-news-hi...

  > the sheer volume of content means I'm probably missing 
  > out on most of it.

I guess I'm one of those old-timers who misses the days when the submissions were more focused on startups and less about government policy, macro economics, and whatever else. (I'm quite biased toward consuming information that is useful and actionable rather than merely interesting, so I realize that puts me at odds with the site's stated policy.)

(edit: phrasing)

I don't think most of the policy stuff is even all that 'interesting'. 'Interesting' is learning something new for the sake of learning about the world. Most of the policy stuff is more like "look at this outrageous thing!". In many cases, it's true that the thing in question is important - probably more important than startups/hacking - but there are plenty of other places for those kinds of links/discussions.

Everyone has their own conscious and unconscious biases for news preferences.

At least as far as my conscious, I like to use "Does this better help me relate to the world?" as a yardstick.

I don't think anyone would argue that it's best practice to make decisions with substantial amounts of missing knowledge, yet I feel like there are a huge number of startups founded via the "I am a white, middle-class, college-attending male, and this is one of my problems that I want to solve" selector.

That's all well and good, I don't expect every freshman to be an expert on {insert problem outside that subclass} for {insert region outside US/EUR}, but... if we're serious about solving important world problems, then the people who are going to solve them need to at least be aware that it's a problem.

Aka the malaria argument

> Everyone has their own conscious and unconscious biases for news preferences.

I simply don't view HN as a place for 'news' in the general sense of the term, but rather a much more focused community.

That's probably why the submission guidelines say if you'd see it on the TV news, it's probably off-topic here.

I guess I'm one of those old-timers who misses the days when the submissions were more focused on startups and less about government policy, macro economics, and whatever else

Put me in the same category, FWIW. I've adjusted to the new way of things, and just accept it for what it is. But I would prefer less politics, world affairs, economics, etc., and more focus on tech and startups.

1000000000% agree. I think the site is pretty bad at hosting political discussions, and, worse, that the resulting discussions are tedious. There are very few long-time readers of HN who can honestly say they'd have a hard time predicting what HN will say about any given political issue.

That's exactly the sort of thing a plant of the technonormative Big Karma oppressor would say.

karma is the opiate of the masses

the medium is the oppressor

> There are very few long-time readers of HN who can honestly say they'd have a hard time predicting what HN will say about any given political issue.

While the political discussions on HN are predictable, I do think the overall politics of the site have shifted significantly over time. Six or seven years ago I was pretty much the token crazy liberal or whatever. Whereas now my politics generally aren't even noticeably out of the mainstream, without my views having shifted significantly on most issues.

The guidelines say "avoid bringing up flame bait unless you've something new to say."

I think a better guideline might be "avoid just expressing your opinion unless you can make it both polite and interesting."

That's a much better guideline. The reason I think it won't be adopted is that HN's moderators feel like "make it polite" is already a guideline.

For example - any thread even tangentially related to the Paris attacks recently. There are probably still subthreads simmering over whether Islam is really a death cult or no more evil than Christianity or whether the West really had it coming, or whether maybe we should just nuke all of Asia and be done with it. Except really it was all a false flag operation by the New World Order because Snowden. For a while, the comments page was practically toxic - and every bit of it entirely predictable.

I'm starting to see now why some people say engineers can be prone to rigid and extremist political views. When your day job requires you to prove things to a certain degree of correctness, maybe it makes sense to believe the world and people should work the same way. There seems to be far too much cynicism, vitriol and condescension here around some subjects, and too many people who seem to think those are the qualities of a keen intellect. Maybe politics is one of those fields everyone just thinks they're an expert at.

I'm starting to see now why some people say engineers can be prone to rigid and extremist political views.

I really don't see engineers being in any way unique in that regard.

There are very few long-time readers of HN who can honestly say they'd have a hard time predicting what HN will say about any given political issue.

The only issue I have predicting that stuff here is related to the surprise I sometimes feel at how much the bias of this site has drifted over the past couple of years. There's definitely been a pronounced uptick in the prevalence of left'ish wing /socialist'ist thinking here. At one time opinions focusing on individual rights, free markets, etc. were mainstream here. Now they routinely get heavily downvoted.

Personally, I believe there is more diversity of opinion on political topics than behavior exhibited in the comment threads on political topics.

Definitely. I read HN to get content I can't get anywhere else, specifically useful, actionable content.

If I want to read articles from Vice, The Atlantic or the NYT, there are plenty of other places for those to bubble up.

What are some examples of 'actionable' content?

Brian Kernighan's recent lecture on language design, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg4U4r_AgJU, is an example (not sure if it was on hacker news). I'm working on SIMD in Go and don't want to make avoidable mistakes.

That got significant attention here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10595195.

I'd particularly like to see examples of the kind of content people think used to appear on HN and doesn't anymore. My guess is that this is more nostalgia bias than reality, but if that's wrong, we need to know.

I've been meaning to test to see if I'm subject to nostalgia bias on this. Any suggestions for how to do so?

FWIW, I have a VERY strong feeling that the content on HN has shifted since about five years ago, to the point that I've been trying to find a site that has more of the entrepreneurship / practical advice that I used to see on HN a lot. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10190783 )

However, I don't have data to back it up (yet).

I can't swear that these things don't appear on HN any more, but in terms of what I'm looking for, and used to find on HN, I'd say stuff like Brennan Dunn or Jason Cohen's writing on practical entrepreneurship:

http://blog.asmartbear.com/unprofitable-saas-business-model.... http://blog.asmartbear.com/consulting-company-accounting.htm... http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/the-freelancers-guide-to-re...

I very, very rarely see posts like that upvoted on HN any more. And if it does briefly appear, it tends to get significantly downvoted and criticised - I recall an Empire Flippers article recently that took a lot of flak in the comments section (despite defence from Patio11 amongst others) and disappeared.

More tech / programming-focused stuff bubbles up with some regularity, but the micro-ISV / lifestyle business and even startup advice hardly ever appears from what I see.

Hope that feedback is useful!

Here are a couple of examples of the kind of content that I think would have been upvoted 5-6 years ago, but nowadays seems to die in the /new queue or not even make it that far.

They're not truly stellar, outstanding examples because I don't have enough time to dig through 100 to find 5 that would fit, but I found them pretty interesting and think that 6 years ago they would have gotten at least some upvotes and discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10606780 - actionable suggestions backed up by practical experience. Slightly shilling his new startup, but also interesting and worth a read. I added it to my bookmarks. 1 upvote in the /new queue, from me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10606876 - Found on Medium, wasn't even submitted to HN. Interesting discussion, actionable advice, focused on very HN-centric topic (Lean Startup). No upvotes so far.

Overall, I find that I have better luck discovering this kind of content on HN these days from reading /new than reading the front page. However, that still involves kissing a LOT of frogs because of the /new signal-to-noise ratio. I almost never see this sort of content make it to the front page in 2015.

Again, hope this feedback's useful!

Very helpful. Thank you!

Edit: it might be beneficial to discuss this further. If you'd like to do that, email us at hn@ycombinator.com.

I definitely see your perspective and agree with you in principle.. but on the other hand, for a lot of these topics it is really difficult to find a forum for intelligent and at least superficially science/fact-based discussion from more-informed-than-average people.

I also think that macro economics are pretty important if you're trying to divine a profit from the startup world. If you believe we're in a bubble, you can't really afford to not be aware of what's happening in both the financial markets and consumer markets..

The problem is that once you allow that crack in the wall, articles that generate outrage and comments and clicks all flood through. For example, on the front page right now is this article about pharma pricing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10595041. Is it likely to draw measured, informative comments about how your business should approach pricing and PR, or is it likely to draw yet another tedious flamewar about health care policy?

I think it's reasonable that knowing macroeconomics news is important to running a business, but it's not the case that everything that's important to running a business has to be on HN. It's hard to run a business if you are constantly fighting with your spouse/partner/whatever, but that shouldn't mean flooding the front page with relationship advice.

Someone should start a petition to change the name back to startup news.

edit: I should have written a more than a single sentence. Obviously I'm joking; hn is what it is now and it's not going to go back to the good old days.

There is a point that is worth making though: when the site was focused on startups it was a much nicer place and people posting new things got help in the comments section rather than just commentary and opinions. That has been lost mostly because of the growth in users but I can't help think that the increase in scope had a negative impact too.

From HN guidelines:

> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I insta-flag anything that fits in this category. As much as I might want to discuss ISIS, HN isn't the place for it.

Me too. More people should be doing this.

Do you think breaking HN into (algorithmically determined) categories or "subHNs" would help?

I think the change in proportion of news devoted to startups is at least partially driven by changes to business journalism and business in general. Covering startups as startups is much more common in mainstream business journalism. Culturally, "startup" has become associated with a larger cluster of concepts than it was five years ago and it is not surprising when I see a new small business referred to as a startup. A few years ago, 10 Strategies for Marketing my Startup would be more likely to fall in the intersection of useful and actionable and interesting. These days the level of general knowledge about startups is higher (e.g. Altman's Stanford class and recent handbook). There was a time when "growth hacking" was an HN "trending topic". Today, we live in a time where it's been dissected and found to be a poor fit for a startup's core business strategy.

The third factor is that I think the standards of HN have become higher. Many of the VC blogs that used to make the front page look a bit flat compared to today's median...it used to be that the the 200-500 word daily thoughts and opinions of "important" people made the front page despite lacking supporting evidence. These days that seems less common.

I'm with you. But I've made my peace with it and found a way to make it useful. Most of the news these days is click/flame bait. I just check HN first. The top rated comments on most of these stories is a pretty good barometer of if I need to care or not. Usually not.

HN is a meta-filter for mainstream news if you use it right.

But yes. Very yes. The "how I did this cool thing" story is sorely missed. A front page full of hope and awesome was a welcome sight each morning.

> The "how I did this cool thing" story is sorely missed.

Are you sure there are less of those? I'm not. Certainly they're as on topic as ever, and continue to make the front page. I'm not aware of a lot of such stories that get submitted but not upvoted.

> misses the days when the submissions were more focused on startups

What kind of stories about startups do you think aren't being represented here? Links would be super helpful.

There certainly hasn't been any policy change about what's on topic.

Hacker Newsletter and HN Daily have filled this role for a while now for me. I read the highlights over lunch or on the train, and otherwise try to avoid HN during the day (heh, mostly).

http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

Thanks! I just signed up for hackernewsletter.

Thanks for the links! I'm one of those people too who likes to read 'actionable' news. HN used to be great for that.

There's also http://hackermonthly.com/

But not after March 2016:

http://blog.hackermonthly.com/final-issue.html

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9223955

Thanks for the Hacker Newsletter mention, Isaiah! In case anyone is interested, here is the issue that went out today: http://eepurl.com/bGNPCf

Screw your redirect nonsense...

  $ curl -I http://eepurl.com/bGNPCf
     HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
     Server: nginx/1.2.0
     Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
     X-UA-Compatible: IE=edge,chrome=1
     Location: http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=faa8eb4ef3a111cef92c4f3d4&id=ba47a59781
     Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2015 02:51:43 GMT
     Connection: keep-alive
     Set-Cookie: _AVESTA_ENVIRONMENT=prod; path=/
  $ curl -i 'http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=faa8eb4ef3a111cef92c4f3d4&id=ba47a59781'
    # a bunch of Urchin Tracker stuff

EDIT: eepurl.com and campaign-archive1.com are both Mailchimp garbage.

Not the most optimal (or cordial) way to convince people that they've made a less optimal decision. It also doesn't explain why you're mad, or what alternative you're suggesting.

I don't care that much about "optimal (or cordial)," and I'm not all that mad. Distrusting "duck"/"Kale Davis" is probably a good idea, but you're of course free to do what you want.

33k people trust me with their email address, but you can do whatever you like username223.

Is using Mailchimp (or related services) the issue or link tracking in general?

Granted, the browser-snapshot-of-comment may not be the best presentation technique, especially as HN layout causes the comment to clip at small browser widths.

A fix for this (without having to redesign HN) would be to create an embedable widget that takes in a HN comment ID and retrieves it from the HN API, then style the response so it matches the theme.

It's Upvoted for Hacker News. Heh.

Would be great for someone to connect a browser plugin that somehow highlights exceptional comments that might be hidden. Maybe people > X,000 karma get to highlight one a day.

Ideally it would also highlight ones that were featured on The Macro

I'm Colleen, the editor of The Macro. Happy to answer any questions and hear feedback!

No questions. Although as UI Designer/Developer with 10 years experience under my belt, I have to say I'm in love with site's design. If the content matches in caliber, we're in for a treat.

Best of luck!

Thank you! Kevin Hale (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kevin) is the designer/developer. I love it too.

Fantastic job by Kevin. His talks are fantastic and you can clearly see his work here. He should take a stab at updating the frontpage!

Went to check out Kevin's own website (roundedbygravity) and the css seems to be 404ing.

It's a nice design. But they should probably disable the article header mouse effects (color change, pointer cursor) once an article is selected.

Looking forward to read great stories/articles from all partners.

That's something I wished I had the time for when I was in YC.. i.e. individually talking to each partners and learning about the previous startups and great stories they'd be willing to share. Hopefully we could read some of them on the Macro : )

What's the best way to send you "best of HN"-type material?

Can you retroactively include 'tzs missile command comment? :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6228350

I think this should be a separate feature: highlighted historical comments.

For now, the best place to send them is macro@ycombinator.com. I think it will make sense to set up a dedicated HN Highlights submission address eventually!

Really impressed by the fast page loads and readability. This matters more than anything and they nailed it. I wish other publications thought like this.

5.8 KB transferred

A+

It's amazing when websites that display text documents just use text and a bit of CSS :-)

I'm getting a Chrome ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED on all of the "macro.ycombinator.com" links here. "ycombinator.com" works, however.

Same

It was working a few minutes ago. I'm sure it'll be up soon.

yes, macro sub domain seems to be down.

Looks like an issue with a redirect. Everything is at:

http://themacro.com

http://yc-macro-redirect.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/index.ht...

This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below. <Error> <Code>AccessDenied</Code> <Message>Access Denied</Message> <RequestId>...</RequestId> <HostId> ... </HostId> </Error>

Looks like someone forgot to add view permission for everyone.

getting this error on other articles too (e.g., http://yc-macro-redirect.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/articles...)

use "cache:" in front of url in chrome. it will get the cache copy.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...

Great pro tip. Thanks!

Why isn't there a comments section in the articles? :P

I'm surprised here isn't a link to the analogous HN thread, at the least. (Akin to the implementation in Reddit's Upvoted)

Relatedly, there should be an official bot (like whoishiring) to auto-submit themacro.com links to HN anyways to avoid race conditions for Karma.

HN is the comments section, I guess.

It was difficult to decide how to handle comments and whether to have them at all, so we opted to just leave them out for now. I like both of those ideas -- adding in a link to an article's analogous HN thread, and the official submit bot.

Comment threads are infinite, sprawling, and often infuriating. It's nice to have a peaceful place aside from that. Us commenters will find a way to comment anyway.

Very much this, I use Ublock Origin to hide comments on all the news stuff I consume since they are generally just noise that detracts from good content (outside of specific sub-reddits and this place anyway).

that's a great use! I'm gonna do that. I've been blocking headers and footers of webpages because I have a 16:9 screen and need all the vertical space can get. as "web 1.0" as it sounds, I love that I get to decide how webpages appear on my computer.

If only there were a YC startup for that :) http://genius.it/themacro.com

    ;; QUESTION SECTION:
    ;macro.ycombinator.com.		IN	A

    ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
    ycombinator.com.	831	IN	SOA	ns-225.awsdns-28.com. awsdns-hostmaster.amazon.com. 1 7200 900 1209600 86400

    ;; Query time: 60 msec

no A record here.

Y Combinator expands its media conglomerate:

1. Starts from books "Founders at works".

2. Startup School.

3. Hacker News.

4. Paul Graham essays.

5. Startup class.

6. Macro.

7. ???, but already excited

N+1. An image sharing serivce that is to HN what imgur is to Reddit. For posting screenshots of your startup's growth metrics.

For a moment I thought you were suggesting they produce something like N+1 Magazine (https://nplusonemag.com/), which is a pretty awesome publication.

Never heard of it before, thanks!

They might really tie together the fixpoint loop if they turn HN into some kind of post-StackOverflow type reputation forum for hackers and businesspeople.

Investors need reputable hunches, companies need insights and clever people, and commenters love to gain social karma status especially if it might land them better jobs or chances to talk with interesting/rich/powerful people.

Discussion is fundamental to the whole ecosystem. HN is a primitive weekend hack yet still pretty valuable.

Blogging platform to rival the other startup-y blog platforms out there.

Thank your for including RSS feed!

Cool idea. Little niggle though - the body font for articles etc. is a bit illegible. I think removing "webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased" and letting it default to "subpixel-antialiased" on the paragraph text makes it a lot better: http://imgur.com/sVPPPwK (before/after comparison).

Ooshma here. Loving the new website. Was a crazy experience to open up with Colleen on the inaugural Q&A. Thanks Colleen for an incredible interview, and congrats Colleen, Kevin, and YC on a successful launch!

I'm getting ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED error. Is it just me?

Great name! I'm wondering if this will be like Reddit's Upvoted trying to surface interesting content from Hacker News, or if this will be focused on allowing submissions and collecting ideas to distribute as a publication? Looking forward to seeing what comes out of it.

I'm Colleen, the editor of The Macro. Thank you!

It's more focused on the latter, but there is a "Hacker News Highlights" section that we'll probably update semi-regularly.

This is wonderful. Looking forward to reading this in the future.

One suggestion to improve readability: use text-align: left instead of text-align: justify on the body text.

Bug report: URLs are broken in the articles - they append to the article's address. See e.g. [0].

EDIT: I've been seeing a steady increase of this particular bug on the Internet, usually in blog and news articles. I wonder if this isn't a direct consequence of browser vendors removing protocol from the address bar? I.e. people just copy-paste a part of an address and don't notice that the browser didn't append the protocol part.

[0] - http://macro.ycombinator.com/articles/2015/11/science-startu...

Oops. Fixing now. thanks for letting us know!

You're welcome :). The site is beautiful.

I also want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for providing an Atom feed and a visible link to it!

Hello Kevin,

In your article, I think there are 4 errors, which I surround with brackets:

1 This is a visual essay, which is [every] different.

2 [Everyone one] of those items is a piece of information.

3 Normally, it’s not ideal to show a slide with every potential [comeptitor] out on the market.

4 However, these logos represent how annoying it would be for users to get what they want [themsevles] using each of these companies.

Thanks for the article and design. (:

Great eyes. Thanks!

Mmmm so fast. The most important feature of a good site, outside of good content, IMO. Nice work.

Strange use of a 'colofon', normally it lists information about the publisher rather than just the fonts used to make the publication.

Historically, the term colophon was also used to indicate the brief statement at the end of a book with details about how it was printed.

Ah, I see. Ok, normally the 'colofon' pages I'm familiar with - especially with publications like periodicals - will include that info but only as an afterthought or a footnote, the 'meat' is the details behind the publisher, addresses, people involved (editor) and so on.

Historically, you're right, but it strikes me that I haven't read a book in the last ten years whose labeled colophon didn't focus on typesetting. Of course, all the publication information is in the front matter, just not labeled in the same way.

Had to read like 3x to realize it wasn't Marco's new project

I read it as "The Marco" at first too

Could you please get https support?

macro.ycombinator.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is only valid for *.cloudfront.net

Thanks :-)

Yeah, we can do that.

You should be able to hit that without warnings now :)

I had no idea there's a Startup School Podcast.

http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:150759713...

Would it be possible to have the macro available using the HN ui and accessible from a link in the orange nav bar? (Don't read this as a criticism of your design; I just think it would be more convenient).

That's lovely. The Hacker News highlights is really nice. I was a bit confused at first because I have images turned off.

But mostly I really love this. Thank you.

Ah. I'll add alt tags to those images and that should help you and other fellow text browsers.

Looks like the actual domain is going to be http://themacro.com/

Did pg have any influence on the name? I know that guy likes his macros.

Edit: Nvm, it says in a footnote that that is indeed an influence. I'm glad it is.

Yep! It was a really fun moment when I first told PG the name.

I'm so excited by this. The name, the simplicity, the overall vibes. Looking forward to some quality content as the weeks go by.

Love the idea. I'm glad to hear they are using Middleman for the site, it has been a joy to develop with. I highly recommend checking it out if you're looking to build a static site [0].

[0] https://middlemanapp.com/basics/install/

Very cool!

Quick note on Kevin's article, I'm getting a 404 on the link titled "bottom of the slide." w/link to:

http://macro.ycombinator.com/images/ddaytips/ddaytips.034.jp...

Dang. Should be png.

http://themacro.com/images/ddaytips/ddaytips.034-e3a53b28.pn...

Also, there is a bug I see.

Haven't had a chance to read the articles yet, but I'm a fan of how well designed the site feels while still feeling like I'm on hacker news. That slight motion on the tab hover states feels very nice and the large orange block of text is great. I can't help but read the headline.

Excellent aesthetic.

HN looks charmingly terrible. TM pays homage to it, but is significantly better looking.

Well done, designer.

Excellent web design. Love it!

Question for the Macro peeps: Does one still need to subscribe for the publication if already on YC mailing list? My inbox is currently chaos land and I want to avoid duplicate missives.

My email from YC had a button that let me subscribe, so I assume they're seperate

We'll be treating them as separate.

I noticed a typo in one of the articles. Any thought to open-sourcing the Middleman repo so individuals can submit pull requests for fixes such as this?

Does the logo have anything to do with Lisp macros? : )

Yep

http://themacro.com/about/#r1

See Note1 at the bottom

Showethough: Since supporting Nonprofits and Research @ycombinator is becoming the real life Plus Ultra society (#Tomorrowland).

New Caledonia? Obviously Kevin is involved :)

Looks sup. Note to FE chef: reader view seems broken on FF (article 'header' missing).

The link is down on my browser (DNS lookup failed).

and... it's down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com