Hacker News Highlights: April and May 2018 | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News Highlights: April and May 2018

blog.ycombinator.com

217 pointscraigcannon42 comments

I was recently reminded just how unusual this place (HN) is - I think there was a common thread between HN and Reddit, and so I followed the link from HN and read a fairly tame comment that drew quite shocking personal vitriol, and there was no community correction, no obvious moderator action. I closed the tab.

The weather "out there" is pretty horrible. It's much nicer here by the warm fire.

And we should thank pg, dang and the many other moderators and commenters for keeping that fire going. communities at scale is hard.

Love it. IMHO comments are the best part of HN. I always read the top few comments before clicking the linked URL.

Many times I'll just read the comments and not bother reading the linked article at all.

I think most people do this. It's often striking how many people ask questions that are answered in the linked article.

The Tesla story currently on the front page is a great example of this.

Sometimes I do read the comments without reading the op, but then I won't comment, unless it's something unrelated (like this very comment, for example, even thought in this case I did read the OP).

But yes, there's plenty of "Didn't read the article, but...".

I always feel somewhat bad when I do this, but it really is much easier to read the first few comments. For really long articles, I often only read the beginning, catch something I want to comment on, and hope I didn't need the rest for my comment to be valuable.

It's not great, and honestly feels a little like in high school when you didn't actually do the full reading assignment for english class, but it can be hard to keep yourself to high standards.

The articles are almost never as short and to the point as they could have been. The article authors are at fault.

I like to think of it as delegating :)

I do the same! An TL;DR at the beginning of the thread would be super useful though. Especially when it's a WSJ article behind a paywall.

Agreed. I'm sure someone is working on this and can be easily applied to HN (maybe https://www.agolo.com/)

It's something we do on Lobste.rs. Its guidelines allow a short, purely-factual description just to save people time. On CompSci papers, I always put the abstract in there either whole or trimmed. Some people TL;DR the articles in their comments which happens here, too.

Allowing a super-short summary might be a good practice here, too. Especially for long articles or videos. On videos, maybe link to transcript or slides, too, so people don't have to dig them up. It's another thing I try to do over there.

This is great and I would love you to keep doing this, however couldn’t HN software be made better so I could follow people and provide many different ways to surface fascinating commentary? Even being able to see what people had favourited over the last month would give another great list of incredible commentary from all the clever people here.

Some of this I expect could be built with the HN API, though I don't think favourites are part of it.

They can't find ARC developers :D

Is this a regular thing? I've never seen a highlight post by YC before.

Almost regular: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hacker-news-highlights&sort=by...

Thanks, Daniel!

I switched to White Mountain (from Fage) based on that thread. So delicious. Especially with homemade granola and a dollop of honey. Thank you HN.

This is cool, I hope you guys keep posting these

Hacker Daily appears to have gone weekly, but that's another good roundup source: https://hackerdaily.simplecast.fm/ ; https://hackerdaily.co/

I try to collect interesting comments on /r/HNDepthHub. I would appreciate any help

This is a neat way to highlight interesting things going on here, but as others are pointing out, it surfaces the challenges of a temporal ranking system creates...this was a very manually curated post that could probably be easily automated.

A few of us have been chatting at https://hackerforums.co because of this after a thread here made me realize many others pined for the bulletin board systems of old. It’s much quieter than day 1/2 but it’s still healthy.

I have a draft thread in the works that highlights how it’s all running and how it’s done growth-wise since launch, hoping to get it posted next week.

Hi, man! I saw your forum had experienced spam-bots attack. I have a suggestion...

Do you know any messenger app based on replicating database in which users' messages are acknowledged by their transfer history through a social graph? So, a new user must ask several registered ones to broadcast the creation of a new node in that social graph, and then he will be able to post his messages by relaying them to the rest of the system through those users who registered him. Spam-bots could be then filtered out by black-lists...

Simple idea, I'm sure someone had to make it already. Do you know any? Thanks for the effort!

I implied just sharded database of messages, no need to replicate it. With customizable filters along data transfer path, of course.

Love the focus on positivity and encouragement here. Such a great counterbalance against the cynism that's so easy to popup.

As a counterpoint, I love the conflict on HN. I usually go to reddit for my warm-fuzzies, but when it comes to making sense of the world HN is my favorite spot on the internet.

That said, I'm slightly conflating intellectual rigor with standoffishness. I'm not sure that they have to go together (but it seems they often do), but I'd rather have both than neither.

I'm digging these Highlights. Very handy.

I prefer the n-gate highlights. http://n-gate.com/

Somebody's violating the prime directive...

"please complete the captcha to continue" and the spinner spins forever.

No errors in the console.

It's doing that based on the referer being hacker news

Working as intended :) . Try the right-hand side menu...

From the source:

  <img src="loading.gif">

Reminds me of the Macalope.

I'm always surprised at how in 2018, screenshots are often the fastest and most aesthetic way to share a few paragraphs of text. Considering the amount of text shared like this, I would have thought that there would be more search-friendly alternatives

I know it's easy to snipe, as we often do here on HN, but a series of screenshots with no alt text is an accessibility disaster.

To be fair, in this case the original comment is linked to, so one just needs to click the link to have a text version of the screenshot.

I'm surprised that it's used in the ycombinator blogposts, considering that it must be easier just to copy-paste the excerpted text into a stylized div. However, screenshotting text is the best way to share excerpts on Twitter, because of the lack of styling options and the character limit.

jwz uses CSS to reproduce the look of the iPhone Messages app when he is posting a text conversation. It's better than a screenshot since it's still text.

(I would like to an example but jwz doesn't allow links to his blog from HN.)

Why they gotta be using Safari

Safari is a fine choice of browser, especially if you still want to browse and read some documents instead of interacting with a web app.

It looks nice in screenshots.

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