Just Ask HN (or more precisely, url-less) posts | Hacker News Reader

Just Ask HN (or more precisely, url-less) posts

news.ycombinator.com

209 pointspg46 comments

Great feature, thanks.

A parallel feature for "rate my startup" posts would be useful; those self-posts also tend to get lost.

I would second this. My last post about Cadmus got buried almost instantly. Thanks.

It doesn't seem to happen as much any more, but historically people used to post "rate my startup" posts without a url and just link to the start-up in the body of the text.

If people did that now it'd show up in the Ask section, so maybe we should return to that practice.

That's a good point, the existing functionality is good enough as long as you make it an "Ask HN."

Sometimes I may not the have time to review something, and just want a quick click to see if it catches my interest. I think having a clickable link helps with click through.

Yup, it'd be nice to give more front-page time to the project announcements and to the posts asking for a feedback.

+1. This is what I miss the most as HN becomes more popular and slants toward a karma-game of news submission.

I would also like to be able to submit a URL and description for readers who click on comments as a way to provide context and clarification around why I submitted a URL without having to post another comment. Adding a comment later doesn't guarantee it will be at the top unless everyone collectively votes it up which is hit or miss.

I would like to note that I and 44 people that voted me up initially missed that the feature and code as written were for all self posts, not just for ask posts.

So far it looks like the feature is working perfectly; the vibrant discussions on self posts were one of the best things about the earlier days of Hacker News and Startup News.

A worthy feature for sure, but moving something that's been commonly used for years to squeeze something else in is a negative UI experience. The "threads" link is no longer where it used to be. I'd guess the earliest it should go would be before "jobs" as I doubt the average HN user clicks "jobs" or "submit" more than once a day (if that often), whereas "threads" is the way to a common activity.

Twitter did something like this when they added the new "retweet" feature. They pushed the "reply" link aside and put the "retweet" in its place. I had to write a Greasemonkey script to resolve this due to years of muscle memory built up on how it was.

Better now?

Much better (at least in my opinion).

The old positioning threw me off.

Totally :-)

I think the top bar is a little screwed up on the jobs page - the word jobs appears twice. Here's how it looks to me:

Thanks, fixed.

Is it possible to have it as a link at the top of the page too? Because people are sure to forget - or new users won't find out about it for ages :)

I'm just testing this. (I literally just pasted it into the repl.) If it's super popular I'd consider adding it to the top bar. But it will be on http://news.ycombinator.com/lists at least.

Didn't even know lists exist. That right there is killer (best comments, etc.) Most of the time I read HN for the comments.

If anything, lists should be added to the topbar.

I agree, but to prevent it from cluttering it could be implemented as a drop-down menu.

There is a Greasemoneky script which exactly does that: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/58915

That's two awesome Greasemonkey scripts in one day for me! That's enough to get me to install this awesome add-on. Thanks!

(P.S. The other is for searching your YouTube favorites: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/62580)

There is a link to lists at the bottom of the main page.

It would seem to be vastly more useful then the "leaders" link that's currently at the top of the page. How many people (other than people actually on it and trying to climb the ranks) actually use that page ?

Ok, let's try switching them. See above.

Perfect. The karma game is old and tired. This puts the focus on the discussion, not the popularity contests. Thanks, pg!

test

Wow, I literally just posted a comment in a separate thread about how much I value ASK HN posts. And half hour later I see this - assuming it's a coincidence, but either way, thank you, thank you, thank you.

EDIT: Just saw the other post and saw that this is not a coincidence. As I wrote there, your responsiveness to this community is truly impressive.

Does anyone have the link for the page where the guy categorized all the Ask HN posts?

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

Thanks a ton PG for this new feature.

How are these ASK posts are ordered? by the Points, Comments or Time Based?

I have been using http://ask.searchyc.com/ for checking ASK related posts. They also have the feature of highlighting the post in BOLD font if the post is commented heavily.

Going to bookmark this new ASK url.

For now the same algorithm as the frontpage (points divided by time to a power).

Thanks PG for the reply.

I can only see 31 posts under ASK. Is it just me or any other user also see only 31 posts?

For speed it skims the url-less posts out of the sorted list I keep for the frontpage, which needs to be made longer to be used for this as well. I just cranked up the length a bit; should be ok now.

This is a really nice addition to HN. Hopefully this will enable more peer-to-peer engagement around issues that are of interest to the HN community. I know I will be checking this page out on a regular basis to see what I might be able to add to the discussion, and what I might learn from the rest of the HN community.

Great, now just move all of these off the front page entirely, and we'll be good to go.

I know self-posts are algorithmically docked already, but I think I would prefer that HN was set up like StackOverflow where all meta-posts were cordoned off from the real stories.

Ask HN posts are not meta posts, they can be but only a relatively small part of them are.

Meta posts are posts discussing HN itself, Ask HN posts range from startup-reviews to job advice and all kinds of other stuff.

Ok, sure... but I still say please still rope them off in the same fashion.

They are already discouraged from making the front page, and we might as well banish them completely.

I disagree. The ones that make the front page are often interesting and I use the front page as a filter to keep me from spending too much time on HN while at work (as I would bet a lot of other people do something similar as well).

I know you can treat the front page of the ask section the same way, but now its a filter of a much smaller set which means that "top 30" is not as good a filter (in addition to doubling the number of pages that are on a "front page").

I would think that its best to create disjoint sections only if people usually want to target one section or the other, which I don't think people do here (though if I'm wrong, I would agree with your idea).

It would be great to be able to search this... in case you want to ask a question and quickly check whether it's been asked before.

I know there are third-party search tools for HN, but it's less convenient to use them.

I get "Unknown." when I click on this - is it down now?

Edit: working now. Cool.

Awesome feature. Just in checking it out, I found several excellent questions that it would never have occurred to me to ask.

Thanks for implementing this!

Is there an RSS feed for just the ask questions? I can't find one there...

This is awesome, thank you for this

Great. Thank You.

I like the idea!

Great

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