Hacker News Reader

Comment by solipsist | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com