How to make the Hacker News homepage | Hacker News Reader

How to make the Hacker News homepage

jacquesmattheij.com

21 pointsjacquesm14 comments

Great.

Now we'll have a whole bunch of 10-character titled 400 words essays full of links to wikipedia hitting the new page every day at 8:30.

Then we'll have a whole bunch of utilities that write 10-character titled 400 word essays full of links to wikipedia, posting them to the new page every day at 8:30.

</sarcasm>

jacquesm, your contributions here are second to none, but lately I'm beginning to wonder if you might have a little too much time on your hands. As many teachers have told me, "If only we could channel that energy."

:-)

I'd seriously regret writing this if that was the outcome.

As for me having too much time on my hands, my days are pretty long and I still get all the work done that I should so as far as I can see the damage is limited. In the last three weeks I've changed out the gearbox on a car (which is something I'd never done before on a car that new), had about 30K lines of changes committed, made a couple of online friends, helped some fellow HN'ers to improve and/or launch their startup, met some interesting people and I found enough time to write an article or two and be active here.

If you have any productivity tips other than 48 hour workdays I'm game :)

And I enjoy this.

Good to see you have a diverse range of activities. I firmly believe that overspecialisation (even though it is sometimes economically advantageous) can be crippling for the mind.

Thanks for the interesting post Jacques. Keep it up.

Hmm, not sure if we really need this kind of posts (even if it contains only "white hat" recommendations). If you are going to write something oriented to "new" HN users, something that tries to define what a productive member should do (posts should be good "discussion material", don't ignore the new page, karma is not that important, etc...) or give some insight into the community could be more useful. Just my $.02.

Also, include Hacker News in the title. This site is getting entirely too self-referential.

I think there's a large issue of luck. Your advice certainly improves the odds, but it's no guarantee. There's just so much getting submitted nowadays, of front-page-worthy quality, that you need to get lucky with the first 4 or 5 upvotes. If you don't get them, you're toast. If you do, you make it to the front page where the real crowd sourcing magic kicks in.

Yep, there is no magic bullet here, and I've written as much in the article. But it certainly won't hurt and it will help to improve the overall quality of the stuff that does get submitted.

Of course it would be really funny if this post didn't make it!

I've noticed lately that having a very discussable, opinionated, or judgmental topic will also propel your post. For example, meta-topics, like this, seem to do pretty well. So do articles or local posts like "Why you should[n't] X" or "[Why it's | Is it] OK to X". So, I think you'll do alright. It's an interesting topic and everybody will want to chime in about their own experience posting to HN.

My "rate my start-up" post, however, is probably going to die.

It looks like it worked :)

Yeah. I noticed there's also a human touch somewhere in the mix. I think the editors choose a "boost" on certain posts. It looks like mine was selected (thankfully) to benefit more per upvote/comment than yours.

Your post has more comments and upvotes than mine, but is ranked lower. It was ranked higher for a period of time, then suddenly dropped down to the bottom. Mine, on the other hand, jumps up 5 spots anytime somebody upvotes it.

Or, maybe it matters who upvotes/comments on posts. I don't know, but it's made me have more faith in HN.

Edit: I've been on here for this long and have not once ever noticed the "flag" button.

No, this post was flagged a couple of times so that's what penalized it. Flags are an input to the ranking algorithm once a post gets more than 10 upvotes.

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