Poll: Hacker News Functionality | Hacker News Reader

Poll: Hacker News Functionality

21 pointsAndrewDucker13 comments

Did you even know Hacker News allowed you to make polls

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The functionality to create a new poll can be found on the HN FAQ. The direct link is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

Just says, "Sorry, you need over 200 karma to create a poll." :/

Works for me ...

Added in edit ...

Since I've had some downvotes for this I'm guessing people aren't really reading the intended content of my comment. On reflection I'm not all that surprised, but let me expand on it.

The comment I was replying to was:

> Just says, "Sorry, you need over 200 karma to create a poll." :/

My comment was intended to pick up on the work "just". The implication from this comment, to me, is that this is the only thing the page does. It's akin to someone showing you something and the reply being, "So, it just does that?"

But clearly the page does more than that, so the word "just" in this comment is very much out-of-place.

But HN is full of people with different linguistic backgrounds, and sometimes English will be their second, third, or even fourth language. Even then, there are different variants of English even when it is someone's first language, so I shouldn't have made my comment the way I did and expected the meaning to come through. /Mea Culpa/.

So let me say what I perhaps should have said in the first place:

Not sure the word "just" is justified here. It's true that it says that for you, but it's giving you information that when you have more than 200 karma there will be a form to create a poll.

Not sure anyone will read this, but I wanted to explain.

As you were ...

I have 184 karma, so it's probably conditionally checking if you meet the requirements before showing the instructions

Their personal experience is that it just gives a message and not means to create a poll. HN is better when people delete or forego throw away comments. Explaining the comment as overt criticism of the way a particular person speaks was not an improvement.

Seeing as you've edited your comment to clarify that you're objecting to my use of the English language, I feel obligated to comment again to justify my use of just.

This screenshot is the page as it appears to me:

https://i.imgur.com/yihy6R7.png

Saying exactly what I quoted and nothing more:

https://i.imgur.com/SIqxaso.png

OK, so I guess I'm just not getting my point across, so I'll give up. If you're interested in knowing more then feel free to email me and I'll try to make it clearer, but I'd guess we're talking past each other, so I'm not sure there's any value in it.

Feel free to ignore me - no reply is necessary.

Hard to answer, need a 'yes I'd seen reference to it in the guidelines, but no I've never seen one before, and actually I'm pretty sure it doesn't allow me to create them, because one needs somewhere between our karma levels' option.

It seems that asking people if they knew HN did polls is the biggest use of polls.

And cleverly, it puts the options in a random order each time to remove some of the bias that might exist.

Less cleverly, you can vote both yes and no

That's a feature, not a bug. If, for some poll, you feel that it's appropriate to tick more than one box, then you can.

Yes, they're mentioned in the API.

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

Reply on news.ycombinator.com