Show HN: Enlyte – A Computer Science and Tech Only Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Enlyte – A Computer Science and Tech Only Hacker News

enlyte.com

52 pointsmeeseeks54 comments

Some honest feedback: I personally wouldn't switch to this from HN. The reason being that the main problems you're trying to solve (encouraging constructive discussions, influence farming, etc.) are simply not things that have been an issue for me on HN. If anything, I come to HN specifically because the majority of discussions are pretty constructive, and the karma points are hidden so no one really cares about (or can tell) a user's influence.

The rest of the benefits like markdown support are cool, but it's also kind of nice that the focus on HN is on the content versus formatting.

My two cents. Congrats on shipping!

Appreciate the honest feedback, one of the reasons why fighting karma/influence farming may be useful is it mitigates automated posting.

Either way, again, really appreciate the feedback!

In my experience, HN definitely has a problem with actively discouraging dissent, so some effort towards mitigating that is appreciated.

As far as online forums go, HN seems significantly better than any other platform, considering we're also trying to self-moderate (i.e. excluding old-school forums with no voting / self-moderation features)

HN tends to keep non-Tech dissent to a minimum, or at least, if you have a differing opinion, you are held to a higher standard to defend it. I think that is a necessity for semi-anonymous online forums in this age - if you allow throwaway comments that seem anywhere from eccentric to absurd in order to troll the base, you lose the community. (reddit, 4chan, etc.)

I like that there are some standards here.

> In my experience, HN definitely has a problem with actively discouraging dissent

Do you think so? The "punishment" for extremely unpopular opinions seems to be a few downvotes, which are bounded below by -4. Thus the net effect is that your message appears below others. I cannot see how this can be construed as "severely discouraging dissent", it seems rather mild to me. In any case, I am not afraid to express my strong dissent on any topic here, and if anything I find the downvotes that I get rather amusing.

User karma is public, did you mean comment score?

I meant more that it's not visible in threads/posts.

As if hn wasn't comp sci and tech focused enough. I really don't see the point if this bar some formatting features and a different karma system (who cares about karma on hn anyway?)

Occasionally there are comments in threads about tangent-but-complicated topics in tech (e.g. tech-politics, tech-gender) that tend to ask "why is this on HN?", despite tangent topics still being on-topic.

ah so this is a tech forum where we avoid talking about any inconvenient issues like inequity in tech

That has been, and still is, talked about a great deal here. If it feels like it's not enough, that's because nobody ever feels like their favorite topics are discussed enough on HN. Even Rust hackers probably feel that way. This is because frontpage space is the scarcest resource on the site. More here if anyone wants it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19720659.

HN's pretty much a perfect website as far as design and community goes for me, but if anything I'd like more non-tech content. Some of the best articles I've ever read have been ones on urban planning or behavioral economics that I wouldn't have found posted and talked about elsewhere. Paul Graham's "Life is Short" essay is incredible and I revisit it several times a year. There's much more to life than SAAS.

Hey HN, Josh here

Enlyte is a new cs/tech community. Right now tech-only content is pulled from HN.

Some small differences from HN include:

- Downvoting comments either requires user to spend 1 of their own karma OR an explanatory reply, this is to encourage constructive discussions and combat toxic-induced downvotes.

- Posts and Comment Influence Points are capped per Post/Comment to combat influence farming

- Markdown support

- Notifications

- HN comment replies can be fully collapsed, so you can dig into the comment that interest you most

This is a work in progress, so if you find any bugs (I’m sure they will show up) or have any suggestions/questions, you can comment on HN or email me at contact@enlyte.com

It's an SPA and I do think it's a refreshing take on HN. Much faster loading feel. Don't know if I would use it as my HN front end - why not just make it a separate system altogether?

Faster loading? HN pages are so fast I sometimes wonder if my click missed the "refresh" button. This one has time to display two loading states, and the HN main page loads long before this thing's first loading state's done. This takes at least a full second before content shows up.

> Enlyte is a new cs/tech community. Right now tech-only content is pulled from HN.

We've let people do mashups, alternative UIs, and other cool experiments with HN data, but "pulling" (i.e. copying) HN's content wholesale in an attempt to start a separate community seems very different and, frankly, dodgy. Not to mention branding it as "a" Hacker News, like you have in the title above.

If you think you can make a better community than HN with different features, you're free to try, but not by mirroring and forking HN's discussions.

First impact: compared to HN it's needlessly colorful (not bad but a little distracting), it's much less compact, and on my slow and filtered network connection there is one apparently permanent spinner overlay per story (stories don't open).

Say no to useless Javascript! Why risk bad user experience?

I'm afraid I have to agree with this. The simplicity of HN is something I really appreciate.

additionally, HN works exactly the same with no javascript. I'm just getting a white page here.

It looks like they were heavily inspired by the new Reddit design, which is terrible and slow.

I agree - it looks almost identical. I quite dislike the new Reddit design and always have it disabled.

Had the same impression, and the website was terribly rendered on Firefox focus which is my main browser on mobile. I have a smoother UX with hn.

I disabled umatrix and ublock entirely and it still just loads a white page in firefox. I assume because I'm blocking cookies? Not sure why they're necessary

Unfortunately I have to agree. I went straight to the JavaScript-less browser I do most of my text browsing on (and which HN works fine on), and just got a blank page.

I love HN's minimalism.

Either lots of people are crossposting their comments to your site, or you're doing it for them. If it's the latter, that's a pretty wholesale copyright infringement job, isn't it? As I understand it, YCombinator is granted a license for the comments by the EULA on the site, but that doesn't extend to scrapers..?

[I should add, it's probably also a GDPR violation. The GDPR has some excitingly large fines for data misuse! :-)]

It’s pulling from the HN API

Interesting legal question about the API then, I guess.

The site imports a lot of stuff from other URLs.

HN: ycombinator.com news.ycombinator.com

This website: bootstrapcdn.com maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com cloudflare.com cdnjs.cloudflare.com embedly.com cdn.embedly.com firebaseio.com hacker-news.firebaseio.com fonts.googleapis.com google-analytics.com www.google-analytics.com google.com www.google.com jquery.com code.jquery.com jsdelivr.net cdn.jsdelivr.net maps.googleapis.com mxpnl.com cdn4.mxpnl.com unpkg.com

One of the positive things about HN is that the implementation of the software itself is unusually clueful.

those are the libraries the app uses

Just curious, what are you using google maps for?

I have a unreleased feature that uses the places api

If it is an unreleased feature, it should be in an unreleased separate non-production branch and/or removed automatically by build scripts.

The existence of a Google maps URL in the page makes your feature not working yet, but released and contributing cruft to an already troubled page.

Slightly tangentially, someone mentioned recently that he'd like a feed of only non-science/tech related HN articles. I put together some code[0] to get the feed from the API, and parse them with either a word blacklist or a classifier trained on a text corpus, but my results weren't really good. If anyone has any insights, I'd be happy to hear them.

[0] https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/lordgrenville/browser_sc...

It's a little sluggish and some of the async data flows have been unresponsive (editing profile, etc)... May even out with time, but not sure if it's on a cloud host or if enlarging the system is an option.

seems to be a huge spike in the ec2 instances, looking into it now

Looks like it may have been a cloudflare issue.

As an alternative: There is also computer science and technology focused community Lobsters [1], which has been around for a couple of years and offers a different experience.

[1] http://lobste.rs

I thought this was HN content with all the non-CS stuff filtered out with some sort of ML-based tool.

Turns out it has its own content.

Blank page without javascript.

Unreadable with an ad blocker.

Would be great if it didn't have sticky headers.

I would switch if this had an RSS feed...

+1 really!!!

Really not to keen on SPAs - JS is fine for analytics but not an entire website. Still, the design is nice - especially like image previews under links.

my fortune 100 firewall is blocking it due to content. that greatly surprises me.

The site seems down

Like the idea. There is lobste.rs. But last time I checked it was "invite only". Keep up the good work!

I have to admit, I think the interface is prettier than HN.

That is not the point of HN.

Not something I think is really needed, but I'd love to be proved wrong, good luck!

Also, opening popcorn, I feel the word "Enlyte" will be PROBLEMATIC to some religious fanatics.

Why, if I may ask?

Enlyte might be connoted with Elyte -> Elite -> elitarism -> Exclusion

> I feel the word "Enlyte" will be PROBLEMATIC to some religious fanatics.

I don't get the context here, do you mind dropping a link.

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