New HN users: do not overlook the "Lists" feature | Hacker News Reader

New HN users: do not overlook the "Lists" feature

news.ycombinator.com

89 pointsgsivil35 comments

Special HN pages like this one have to be made more well known. They are referenced throughout the site, but there is no central place to find all of them. Most of the new users will have never seen them before. Even the older users will have trouble finding them when the need to use them.

Here are some of these "special" pages for anyone who is curious:

New Polls (http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll)

Top Colors (http://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors)

Formatting Options (http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)

Front Page with Threshold (http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100)

Classic Front Page [1] (http://news.ycombinator.com/classic)

[1] - The classic front page only counts votes from accounts that signed up in the first year that HN was released.

How does top colors work? Where can you set the colors?

You need to reach a certain threshold before you can use Top Colors. I think it maybe 500 karma points, but don't take my word for that.

When you do get the feature, you can go to settings and enter a hexadecimal entry for topcolor. The banner on every page of HN (except in Add Comment) will then change from the default orange to the color you specified.

The threshold is indeed a bit lower than that; I have topcolor with 296 karma.

Ok, thanks for pointing this out. It may be a 250 karma threshold, although we can't know for sure as it is always changing (due to inflation from new users): http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ#cantdow...

Am I right in thinking that the page of topcolors is a list of the topcolors that some account is currently using?

(I just set my topcolor to b000b5 because I am incredibly easily amused.)

The classic front page only counts submissions (not votes), I believe.

PG:

   To measure any possible decline I created an alternative
   version of the frontpage that only counted the votes of
   users who signed up in the first year.

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073513)

Unfortunately, first-year users will only vote on what they see, and if they don't consistently use the classic view - which I expect very few would - then they will most likely only vote on what everyone else has voted on. Thus, classic wouldn't be expected to be significantly different from the regular home page, and thus it cannot measure the decline.

As a newer user, what are the differences between the standard view and the classic view?

Classic view (news.ycombinator.com/classic) looks the same, however the stories are ranked using only votes from older users.

The cutoff is either (1)accounts that have been around for more than a year or (2)accounts that were made in the first year the site was running. I believe that it's (1), but I've heard it both ways.

I think the current Hacker News UI balance with regards to karma points is about right. Exposing top ten lists etc too prominently on the site will inevitably encourage people to game the system, which will damage the quality of discussion.

Here's another page that many may not know about:

Change Password (http://news.ycombinator.com/changepw)

Thanks for this - my account was linked with Clickpass before and it was a bit of a pain to log in - going through three or four different pages on a mobile isn't fun. I didn't know I could just use this and change it to a normal username/password account.

I have been on HN for almost 3 years and never knew about that page.

User jacquesm has an unofficial HN FAQ: http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ

It was submitted and discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1755533

The official FAQ can be found here: http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Ok, two things that I've never found answers to:

1. How do people do the really small font size? It's not in the formatting document. 2. Assuming you've been upvoted some, how can you tell you've been downvoted? Do people keep such close tabs on their karma that they just...know? I haven't seen a UI element for "you've been downvoted".

1. I'm not sure what you mean by "the really small font size." Can you link to an example?

2. You can't.

Re: the font size, in this sub-thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2163862

All the comments are normal sized except for keiferski's, which appears smaller. I don't see any obvious reason in the stylesheet, and it seems to only happen on the iPhone (and not in Safari 5 on the Mac), so perhaps it's a Mobile Safari rendering oddity--maybe something to do with tables. It does only seem to happen on rather short comments.

Title needs a colon or a comma after "New HN users." It looks like a story about how new HN users do not overlook the "Lists" feature.

I am constantly surprised by people who call themselves "hackers" not exploring the entire site. I always had the idea that being a hacker was that one didn't ask "What does this do?", but instead asks: "What can I make this do?"

Exploration is at the heart of hacking. It's odd that people don't know about, for example, the "lists" page. The link is there.

ADDED IN EDIT: I see that at least one person has down-voted this comment. Do you disagree? Do you think hacking is something else? Or are you simply stung by the apparent criticism, and feel the need to lash out?

Do you not have the instinct to explore? Is that not a critical part of being a hacker?

(And in a further edit - clearly someone agrees and has up-voted again. Interesting.)

You're right that "hackers" should be able to explore and navigate by themselves, but why should they have to? Do you think pg intends to scatter all the links to these special pages in order to ensure that we're true "hackers"? No, he simply hasn't gotten around to putting them all in a central location.

You are basically saying that we need to make life hard for all the "hackers" just because they should be able to deal with the unnecessary challenge that we give them.

ADDED IN EDIT:

> Do you not have the instinct to explore? Is that not a critical part of being a hacker?

It's the nature of a hacker to explore, but this nature exists for a reason. We use our talents when we have to, but that does not mean we like it or need the practice. Most people come to HN for quick information. Telling them to spend unnecessary time looking around the site in their spare time is asking too much for some users. While it may not seem big to you and me, it probably does to others. What's funny about this debate is that is trivial to fix it. Add a page with all the links and you're done. Saves everyone time.

It seems as if a lot of people are divided on this topic. I've seen you been downvoted and upvoted a few times in past 10 or 15 minutes already. Let's see what others have to say.

I am a user of the lists functionality, but in all fairness, novice HN users can come in many forms. There are some industry experts that simply read the front page briefly and go back to their work. There is an opportunity cost to exploring something hard-to-find, and some people may be better off spending the time exploring or hacking something else outside of HN. I agree with your point, but not the generalizations that accompany it.

I don't really hack my car either. I have a couple of times, but it is not something that I feel driven to do.

Same is true for my washing machine. I don't think I even understand all of the settings. Yet I use it regularly.

Does that mean I am not a hacker?

How many hacks must a hacker hack for a hacker to hack hacks?

Whoa. Calm down on the condescension, dude.

Am I a hacker? Dunno. I don't self-identify as one. Doing so is not that important to me.

Neither are lists and score-keeping on this particular site.

I do consider myself a hacker, but don't feel any urge to explore the nooks and crannies of this site. I've downloaded and skimmed the Arc code for it, but don't feel any urge to check out all the links. I do fix my car (and my washing machine) but don't have an urge to modify them.

Partly it's a "time in the day" problem, and partly a lack of generalization. I'm more interested in learning the structure of things than the specifics of any particular implementation. I guess some people, including you, put equal emphasis on both.

ps. It's odd that you ask if those who down-vote are "lashing out" but presume that those who up-vote agree with you. I voted for this, not out of agreement, but because it's a valid viewpoint, well-expressed, a starting point for discussion, and the sort of post I want to encourage.

I think that's it odd that RiderOfGiraffes is even referring to particular people upvoting/downvoting him in his comment. But maybe that's just me...

"Is that not a critical part of being a hacker?"

Possibly, but I guess most of us don't have the time to explore everything in our environment to that level. Note that this may be an age thing - 20 years ago I would obsessively explore and customize things like X window managers, editors and my Lisp environment. Now I find myself increasingly going with the defaults unless something really annoys me as, to be frank, life is too short and I have better things to be doing.

Search YC may not be a Hacker News page, it is still an important tool for me : http://searchyc.com/

I wish I had bookmarked along the way all those little tools built around HN... Which ones do you use?

There are a bunch of links at the bottom of every page, 'Lists' is one of them.

That's so funny... I noticed something was wrong when I received more karma than expected for my first couple of posts, but I didn't know why. Some people are probably using noobcomments to reward new posters with karma (I thought HN used a secret internal multiplier for the first couple of posts, but this is a much better explanation).

Why not put links to these on the top nav bar? It's not like there's no room up there.

Or a link to a complete sitemap.

Not just new users - I had no idea the page existed and I've been here for a while.

Maybe the reason these lists are not easily discovered is because they are taxing the server pretty heavily. It took quite a while to return the "leaders" list the first time I ran it, but it wasn't as bad the second time.

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