Hacker News Reader

Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

I know it's "hip" these days to use a vote up/vote down news/reddit type system, but sometimes I just wish a site was laid out more like a flat forum or directory.

This is definitely one of those times.

I'd much rather see things organized - by language, by type, by author. But never by (upvotes/date submitted)

Great idea though.

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I disagree. There are already many, many places to search for code and sites where code fragments are organized in that fashion. Here, each code submitter is making a claim that their submission is an example of beautiful code. User voting is an efficient way to vet those claims a bit.

UseTheSource strikes me as filling what is currently a void: How to be introduced to cool code and listen to people discuss it.

Perhaps it would be good to have a page on UseTheSource that explicitly links to those directories.

I disagree with that: there are, indeed, many places that claim to house great code; indeed, these do not all house great code; indeed, user voting may (may!) help; but that does not mean that rating by (votes/time since submission) is useful - it's not a news site, after all, and showcasing some classics is at least as useful as showcasing the newest Rails trick or somesuch.

Actually, it is useful, because everyone is going to the same page, so the community's attention is focused on a few items at a time. This is what enables conversations to happen. If instead you just have a catalog of code, the community's attention is dispersed throughout the site. That's fine if the site has the popularity of, say, YouTube, but that's not the case here. There's extremely limited attentional resources, and they need to be focused.

Just as with reddit or hacker news, if I haven't seen some piece of code, it's new to me, so it's news. There's no reason to apply some traditional standard of news and then say code submissions don't fit it. I read reddit or hacker news because like-minded people canvas the web and collect awesome links. Often it's "news" but often it's not. This is a case where most items may not be news, but the hacker news UI is still useful.

I dig it. More signal, less noise.

I read hacker news, techstartu.ps, and proggit for the unknown unknowns, the things that may be useful that I wouldn't think to search for. Add UseTheSource to that list.

For the known unknowns (language, type, author, etc), I'll Google/DDG/SO it.

That's not to say that tagging wouldn't be useful on UseTheSource, though.

I'm capturing language deliberately. If this takes off a bit I'll add viewing by language.

I agree. Particularly the timelines of news makes a system where older stories slowly fade away useful. I guess it depends on whether useTheSource is supposed to be a "coding news" where you find great stuff accidentally (like hacker news), or whether it's a place to search for an elegant solution to a problem that bugs you (i.e. StackOverflow for pros).

Either one would be great.

Indeed, I was expecting something very different, not a one-man version of programming reddit '07.

(But then I thought the book Beautiful Code was over-rated, so what do I know).

http://refactormycode.com

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