The Unofficial HN FAQ
jacquesmattheij.com
jacquesmattheij.com
Q: Why don't people ever email me when I invite them to in a comment?
A: The Email field in your profile is for site administrators only. If you want other users to be able to see it, you need to include it in your About box.
I've wondered about that… I spend a fair amount of time reading through the "newest" and "ask" lists and often comment on articles that don't end up making the front page. This can really drag your average down. The best way to have a high average score is to comment only on top stories where everyone else is reading, which I think is a bit unfortunate.
Which means that even the person who asked the question didn't upvote the commenter who was taking the time to respond to them. I've seen this even in cases where the OP followed up on the comment and said "thanks that's very useful". So click the up-arrow, dude.
(unless upvotes by the OP are filtered out? but I can't imagine why that would be)
AFAIK they are. For instance, if I were to upvote your comment it would have no effect.
This definitely happens if you comment and then upvote. Not sure about the reverse order.
This isn't always true. I've bitched about submissions and gotten upvoted for it. :-)
Usually, it's something along the lines of "I'm tired of seeing this crap on the front page" though. Usually if it's "this is hacker news" or "N00b, this is a violation of the rules" it will get downvoted.
One other point to make, it's ok to point out that someone is breaking the rules if you're not bitching about it. I think comments saying "You might not realize this, but this will likely get downvoted/flagged because it breaks rule X" comments should be encouraged.
I think feedback helps at least some submitters tremendously.
Another noob FAQ is: "Is HN becoming like Reddit and Digg?". pg has given lots of good answers to that (mainly that people who haven't been around long enough see patterns in randomness).
Edited to add: You might also want to point out that Reddit and Digg are also good communities with a different feel, and there is no need to take a moral high ground.
I don't see how I could have missed the reddit/digg one, I've added it.
Comment from PG: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721105
The rule about having to be here for a year before you can even talk about if we're turning into Reddit. It's in the guidelines, but I think it's worth mentioning under "Is HN becoming like Reddit and Digg?".
It's also pretty courteous around here to note any edits you made to your comment with a brief footnote, or by adding the additional content as a footnote itself. The footnote should mention what was edited, not just that the edit occurred. That bit of etiquette might fit under "Someone edited a comment I replied to and now I look like an idiot!"
PG has said quite a few times that if your HN contributions are 'thoughtful' (which is a fairly arbitrary criterion) that that helps. Of course there is no linear relationship, and anybody that believes that is not likely to make it in to YC anyway.
edit: I've added a bit of text there in case someone might interpret it this way, but I think the risk of that happening was fairly low.
I'd imagine Patrick would have no problems, but that may be in spite of the karma score, not because of it.
Personally I don't care one bit about getting in to YC, and I highly doubt you would either, it seems you are pretty well established, most likely that's 'mutual'.
As for Patrick, only Patrick could answer that question, but his route so far suggests he's a bootstrapper far more than someone that would go looking for funding.
Though I doubt it would be hard for him to find funding through YC or elsewhere he at least seems to have chosen for the moment to forgo that option.
I don't know what the 'something else' is that you're referring to, but to make a stab at it for myself, HN is the replacement of something that I used to have, which is people to work with, remotely or in person.
As a result of that I spend an inordinate amount of time on HN, but the result - as far as I can see - has been an absolute net positive, I've gotten to know quite a few people 'in real life' that have enriched my life in many ways and I've been able to learn from quite a few people as well.
If HN karma translates in to 'work' then my own score would probably represent upwards of 4 months full-time since I became a member, I'm fortunate enough that I actually can spend that time, and when expressed in money, at a very conservative 75 euros per hour would be the equivalent of about 50K euros, so approximately 1 euro per 'karma point' invested.
I'm in the wrong place (Europe), in the wrong age group (45+), in the wrong 'mindset' (more like grizzled and scarred tomcat than a fresh and young kid) that is pretty opinionated and so on. Too much impedance mismatch between me and YC to make me even think of applying, besides that I wouldn't live in the US if you paid me for it.
Don't worry, I have even more karma than you; this is what I do instead of IRC and Usenet.
I've had my 10 year long stretch of 16 to 18 hour days and it served me well enough, I'm not going to feel at all bad about 'not being focused' and 'allowing myself too much free time', though I can see why for YC that would be a red flag.
You spend a lot of time on HN commenting? ;)
As num_comments->oo, karma->oo.
If you have high karma, but most of your comments are noise, that can't help. Or if you have low karma and rarely post, but your posts are mostly "thoughtful", that probably helps.
I suspect it varies like that.
Most high-karma people on HN (like, 5k+) get there by being thoughtful. I'd imagine pretty much everyone in the top 100 would be helped rather than hurt by their HN presence. I suppose it's theoretically possible to amass a lot of karma without making any useful contributions, but I haven't see anybody do it yet.
I may be reading this wrong, but I think what you're saying is that once you reach a karma of 50, you can downvote comments. I'm pretty sure that's incorrect - I have a karma of 89 as of this writing, and (unless I haven't yet figured out how to) am unable to downvote comments. Maybe someone who recently became able to could give a more accurate number.
Now of course the next question is if anybody knows that the threshold is for flagging comments?
edit: proof: http://pics.ww.com/d/425306-1/downvote-cutoff.png
That's the 'comments' list.
But that doesn't happen for every "Ask HN" I've posted. A good number move there, but not all, and not immediately.
edit: re: the not immediately part, that's logical, the ask page is also ranked, try looking at the second or third page if you don't see your question listed.
Is there a minimum karma level for Ask HN posts? Or is this a bug in the system?
By the way, it'd be nice to have a QA for polls. The http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll is not easy to find when one needs it.
Conversely if PG wants to crib any part of the unofficial one for inclusion in the official one I'll be happy and I'll remove that entry from the unofficial one.
Somebody should put together a list of meta-HN posts. These guides written by the users have as much or more value than that the stuff pg and the rest put together. I think part of the reason why is that fellow users are more likely to see things from a user's point of view.
Current answer is wrong. Commenting is disabled for old threads. For new, overly active threads only in-thread commenting is disabled, but clicking on the 'link' link still gives an access to the response form.
In summary:
+ "reply" on comments in old threads are disabled.
+ "reply" on comments in new threads have a timeout
+ the timeout is very short if the comment is shallow
+ the timeout gets longer as the thread gets deeper
+ the timeout can be circumvented by clicking "link" - then you are offered a "reply" link immediately.
+ PG might put the timeout out the shortcut method, but hasn't yet done so.
The old thread item duly noted and added. What do you think about the 'link' bit, should that be added or best left as it is?
How about on-topic but trivial, repetitive, frivolous, flimsily-argued, outside-the-mainstream, etc.? Best to ignore, rather than flag these -- a flag is not a downvote saying 'less attention', it's a judgment 'no attention; against-the-rules'. (It stings far more when your earnestly-offered submission is killed than when it simply never musters many votes.)
I've noticed more people using flags as simple downvotes, and some good submissions have been killed as a result.
If you want to re-word a specific entry in it's entirety I'd be grateful, this is a hard one to get right.
+ Why can't I downvote comment?
with the answer
+ You can only downvote comments once you have sufficient karma. The required level rises over time to account for the karma inflation caused by an increasing userbase.
This would enhance the answer about what one can do with one's karma.
thanks!
Typos:
For one HN has it's own 'flavor' => its
HN gets it's (more than) fair share of spam => its
Weird HTML:
It seems line-breaks are hard-coded with BRs inside of P elements? In this phrase the BRs are missing and therefore it crosses over to the invisible right side:
The thresholds at which this happens changes over time, the downvote threshold is at 200 right now and the flag cap is at 100. There
http://jmillerinc.com/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-over...
And thanks for mentioning Resourcey. I've added your FAQ to HN's Resourcey.com page (gotta love circular recursion!)
The FAQ actually covers that.
"At what karma level can I downvote articles ?
There is no karma level that I know of that will allow you to downvote articles."
and
"What [karma] does give you is that at some point you can downvote other comments and it gives you the ability to flag posts."
In other words, you can't downvote articles, ever, and you can downvote comments after a certain karma threshold has been reached.
A Google search for "link:http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc site:news.ycombinator.com" shows that others have requested more links to the formatting help.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1759548
How to make the homepage.
Where did you get the (one boat cruise|two boat race) saying?
> Where did you get the (one boat cruise|two boat race) saying?
Long ago I designed a CAD/CAM system for a sailmaker in the Netherlands, the effect of this is that I spent a ton of time in and around the sailmakery itself (I even spent some time living in the attic above it because I had no house) and the sailing related proverbs flew fast and thick there.
It's really true though, if you're on a boat and having a good time sailing and someone overtakes you the urge to give chase is almost too strong to resist, it's like having a hound spot a deer that is running away.