A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018)
github.com
github.com
Keep up the fantastic moderation and the wonderful lack of innovation, HN people!
And often, comments critical of HN like this one first get many upvotes and then get sent back to a neutral 1... which is what just happened
If you're going to make a claim like this, you should provide a link so that readers can make up their own minds. When such complaints show up linklessly, it's usually because there's more to the story that the complaint is omitting (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
fair enough: https://i.imgur.com/Iu7CLxN.png or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16834895
I would like to think that the same type of decision would have been made had your username been from the opposing political party.
I find that hard to believe, but it is possible.
You should state the reason if you have one. Otherwise, you are just slinging a baseless insult.
Additionally: you have a feeling he might allow democratic troll nicks. the strength of that feeling ranges from not surprised if to hard to believe not depending on the day.
Your evidence: claim that the forum is very democratic
The description ("The nickname was nothing bad, you just didn't like it") was false though. 'lovetrump' was a trollish username, and we don't allow those on HN because they effectively troll every thread they post to, which is bad.
This is standard practice: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... By the way, we can change usernames now, so the problem is easier to solve.
1) loads instantly
2) is mostly plaintext.
Reddit, for what it's worth, provides about the same features but on an absolutely heavyweight site. Especially the new (redesigned) SPA reddit
There are those who believe strongly in the web as interactive documents. I fall largely into this camp. I want small pages with a minuscule amount of JS.
On the other hand, there are those now using the web as a distribution platform. My favorite example is Figma. Figma is my favorite vector graphics program of all time. Compare it to something like Illustrator, but with file syncing, collaboration and updates abstracted. I don't have to expose myself to the horror of Adobe bloat.
So I must disagree. SPA and the rise of JS frameworks is not one of the worst things to happen to the web. Look at what Facebook has become. It's an application, not a website of interactive documents. Or see what GitHub is doing. They are soon to integrate a whole IDE into the browser with Codespaces. I'm bullish on WASM as well. I envision a future where all software could be distributed via the browser.
The problem I think is that too many companies have become overly ambitious and bought into a lot of unnecessary tech. Reddit is a great example, and they are also guilty of pushing their native app incessantly.
The problem isn't the technology. It's the misuse of the technology.
The Apollo app solves every technical problem with Reddit, so I just recommend that people use that instead of dealing with the official web app. Luckily, they haven't gotten rid of old.reddit.com.
On the flip side, SPAs are terrible for hypertext content, because existing web technology was literally built for that. Why should a blog be an application? The content creation side, sure, maybe, but viewing a blog? That's literally what HTML was made for. A table of contents full of links like the HN or Reddit homepage? That's pretty much hypertext 101.
Maybe greasemonkey style plugin on mobile could fix it up ?
Their motto is "move slow and preserve things." They do change, but not stupidly and they do so with a great deal of respect for what is currently working, which is something many, many, many people in the world utterly fail at it. It is the norm to take for granted the things that are going right, then act all surprised when changes result in throwing the baby out with the bath water.
It's enormously hard to make thoughtful tweaks of the sort the happen here, that get researched and thought through over very long periods of time and go largely unnoticed by the collective subconscious of the site. It's the sort of the thing the world needs more of, but also the world needs more commentary on "Well, we did make this, that and the other tweaks, while leaving most stuff intact." because it does tend to go unnoticed and it does tend to get characterized as "never changing."
An excellent design motto. Respect what works!
> To me HNs biggest feature is the lack of features and the lack of 'innovation', or rather redesigns for the sake of redesigning.
But so many people abuse the code formatting for these
To me HNs biggest feature is the lack of features and the lack of 'innovation', or rather redesigns for the sake of redesigning.
At the very least, an instant preview or enforced separate preview-before-posting page would help a lot, especially if either it was narrow enough to represent mobile, or had a warning below not to abuse code snippets that way if there's a detected code snippet. (A preview would help anyway because the reply edit box is monospace, which is really hard to read. I often end up posting an initial draft immediately and using the edit page to fix it up.)
There is more than one karma tracking algorithm that can be activated for a given account. That is to say, a downvote is not always a downvote, and an upvote is not always an upvote, and the point score of a comment is not always exactly equal to the number of up and downvotes.
Accounts that are flagged for posting flame-baiting or ideological comments can be switched to an alternate voting mode where votes are not counted the same way. This may mean that any manual downvotes are given greater weight, or upvotes are underweighted, or downvoting is automatically applied after some time providing a type of downward gravity which must be overcome.
I don’t know the precise algorithm. It’s complicated by the fact that I’ve been getting auto-downvoted by bots. But due to some overly combative COVID related posts my account is in this current state. I’ve found that even researched technical comments of mine will inevitably end up at -1 karma, or struggle to stay above 0.
After reaching out to dang about bot-downvoting Daniel was nice enough to look into it and confirmed my account was getting bot-downvoted but also explained that my account had been flagged and made some suggestions on posts that crossed the line. I’ve had a long and mostly enjoyable relationship with HN so hopefully I’ll be out of purgatory soon.
To be clear I have no interest in debating whether the feature was misapplied in my own personal case, but rather just it’s abstract technical merits make for great meta-discussion of moderation techniques for social media boards.
Ask HN: HN user ghosted 5 years, why?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436276
Ask HN: Dark Patterns on HN
If your posts are unpopular for any reason you're automatically penalized. Doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, you're penalized for posting anything that people disagree with or don't want to hear.
That's why sites like Reddit and HN will always be echo chambers. Dissenting voices are automatically silenced. Not 100% of the time, but often enough that most will probably never waste their time posting.
> Researchers from Hebrew University, NYU, and MIT explored herd mentality in online spaces, specifically in the context of "digitized, aggregated opinions".[4] Online comments were given an initial positive or negative vote (up or down) on an undisclosed website over five months.[5] The control group comments were left alone. The researchers found that "the first person reading the comment was 32 percent more likely to give it an up vote if it had been already given a fake positive score".[5] Over the five months, comments artificially rated positively showed a 25% higher average score than the control group, with the initial negative vote ending up with no statistical significance in comparison to the control group.[4] The researchers found that "prior ratings created significant bias in individual rating behavior, and positive and negative social influences created asymmetric herding effects".[4]
> “That is a significant change”, Dr. Aral, one of the researchers involved in the experiment, stated. “We saw how these very small signals of social influence snowballed into behaviors like herding.”[5]
Imagine someone was following you around IRL delegitimizing your experience. Telling people not to believe you. That your opinions are worth less than others. Only the other people can't see that person, they absolutely believe that person, and people think you're crazy for thinking that it's happening.
𓀐𓂸 edit: yeah hieroglyphics are allowed apparently
>How do you describe the meaning of this vulnerability name?
>We chose to communicate through a visual representation of symbols, rather than “words.” Naming vulnerabilities using emoji sequences instead of other pronounceable natural languages have several advantages. First, emoji sequences are universally understood across nearly all natural languages. Choosing instead of a name rooted in any one language ensures that the technical contents of our research can be discussed democratically and without latent cultural or linguistic bias...
from: https://thrangrycat.com/
Edit: and HackerNews has indeed stripped the emojis used to name this vulnerability.
OTOH domino or mahjong tiles (🁓, 🀕), playing cards (🃅) or musical symbols (𝅗𝅥) are allowed. So are arrows (↸) including supplementals (⤪), number forms (ↈ), superscripts and subscripts (⁴₂), "miscelllaneous technical" (⎋, ⏱) or geometric symbols (◉), however misc symbols (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Symbols) is a no.
So yeah, pretty arbitrary. I guess pg likes playing domino but hates chess.
Also funny note: we have access to musical symbols but not notes, because the notes are in the misc. symbols block. Unless you want to use byzantine (𝀶) or ancient greek (𝈙) musical notation then it's OK.
>So are arrows (↸) including supplementals (⤪), number forms (ↈ), superscripts and subscripts (⁴₂), "miscelllaneous technical" (⎋, ⏱) or geometric symbols (◉), however misc symbols (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Symbols) is a no. //
But not the others, they're just get boxes; except the boxes which are missing completely (ironic).
IIRC, we had access to UTF font formats (using bold, outlaid, double, open, etc., letter forms) and to Zalgo, Z̸̠̽a̷͍̟̱͔͛͘̚ĺ̸͎̌̄̌g̷͓͈̗̓͌̏̉o̴̢̺̹̕ ?
That's a different issue, the glyphs are missing from your machine's fonts rather than HN stripping them.
┐
Sorry for having been misleading.
- like
- this?
* But yes, this is how I
* Make a list workaround
* It is not ideal
There
Ain’t
No
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As
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ListHacker News has so many strange, undocumented things that even such a list is incomplete. I’ve run into entirely new things I didn’t know existed just by using it more, or by happening upon one of ‘dang’s comments…
It's simplistic but you can still use it to write a sh*ttier version of HN.
https://github.com/HackerNews/API
I just wish they'd open source their We're-Not-Reddit behaviors library.
While I appreciate that they finally added some mobile styling, it was very minimal and ignored accessibility best practices for touch target size.
Their Github docs say to use the Firebase SDK, but the mobile SDKs require that you actually have your own Firebase account and you own the Firebase db, you can't enter an arbitrary Firebase URL and have it "just work."
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+are+posting+too+fast%...
Honestly, cloning HN really would not be that hard, cloning dang, that’s another story.
EDIT: Here’s a recent comment from dang on open source HN:
I think HN use a slightly modified version of Racket with a few tweaks to be more friendly with the high amount of memory used in HN.
Isn't that basically what lobste.rs did?
And history:
https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...
It is true that the app server runs on a single core and we don't have a lot of performance to spare. But it handles the current levels of active threads reasonably well. The main concern is that if average load goes up significantly we'll be in trouble at some point.
We've got an ongoing major project that will hopefully flatten that curve, but unfortunately it's hard to find time to work on it.
Sites of this size generally need fairly sophisticated rules to withstand these attempts and keep to the original purpose of the site. And they need to be hidden, because if they are known, they will be successfully gamed. There is much more brainpower aimed at manipulating the site than there is in support of keeping it dedicated to its original purpose.
Hey no knocks, just saying there’s a name for this tactic.
I must disagree emphatically with open-source enthusiasts who believe that "security by obscurity is bad" advice applies to everything. In my opinion, it only applies to a small subset of certain types of software - packages that are meant to be used on extremely large scale, such as web servers, encryption algorithms, and the like. Attempts to apply it to other areas are foolish.
Obscurity is the only possible mechanism for keeping a highly popular link-aggregating site's story ranking reflective of what the community of genuine readers wants to see when under attack by "content promoter" types.
Frankly I just don’t think they give a damn about the value of open source, at least relative to immediate things, and I respect that.
There have been many changes to both the HN code and the Arc implementation since then, and those are not open source. We've of course thought about open-sourcing them someday, but the problem is that it would be a lot of work to do that, and then a lot of ongoing work to maintain it and respond to requests. Our dev resources are so limited that this is not in the cards for the time being.
You could open source the code, say in a public repository that was read-only, without accepting pull requests or doing any maintenance beyond pushing to the repo whenever it seemed advisable.
I know many cases of software that was not made open source solely because it would require a substantial resource investment as a practical matter.
In practice that doesn't actually work because some users will not respect the boundaries you lay out. No matter what you do or say, some significant subset of users will assert or assume the act of open sourcing code places a litany of obligations on the people releasing the code. Furthermore, some of these people will go to great lengths to try to get you to comply with these obligations. At which point you are either doing a lot of extra work you were not planning on doing to make these people happy or you are dealing with a lot of extra and unnecessary personal drama. Either way, it costs you time and energy that you have to account for.
The only way I have ever seen anyone explicitly avoid this overhead was when no one was using their code.
Here’s example of a prior reference to this feature:
> in the top right corner of the header
Worth noting there’s nothing stopping you from building custom HN searches like this to find tutorials posts, though this would not solve the likelihood of the community posting related comments:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Could that reflect survivor bias (among all tutorials)?
As long as it doesn't mess with the voting system too much! Maybe there'd be many more bad comments if people couldn't see their points total/comment scores.
Happy to see that the most #bada55 colour of all is in that list.
I use #93a1a1, personally (i.e. $base1 from solarized https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/)
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/darkreader/
Generally voting signal to noise ratio goes: upvote, no-vote, downvote — allowing more downvote would most like have more negative than positive impact on the community.
Back when comment scores were public via the API, I retrieved the lowest-rating comments for each month. which was always -4: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IfbSDYVBXiHZCuMdHXgp...
Bonus histogram of comment scores calculated in 2014: https://minimaxir.com/img/hn-comments/distribution_comment_p...
I think the limit probably discourages long winded "all these downvotes are a badge of honor" comments. People who crave downvotes only get four. People hurt by downvotes only get four, too.
for makers of products HN people like: Comments could draw more attention to the product, more clicks, more sales.
for makers of products HN people don't like: No, can't think of a reason why allowing comments on ads would make sense.
HN doesn’t block negative posts about YC companies.
Have any notable examples?
It makes sense that you wouldn't want to encourage ads becoming actual threads.
I think that italics,
code blocks,
Like this? It's just italics and a > symbol.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...
Is there some magic way to do that with CSS, replacing the "..." with the rest of the URL when you copy it? (There should be!)
Note that if you click the timestamp on the comment, links don't get shortened.
[1] https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/truncate-string-with-ell...
I really wish any user could set a custom topcolor. I found the default orange hard on my eyes, and I was glad when I could change it.
Mine is #d0c8b5, which is simply a darker version of the page background color. Plain and unobtrusive, and the bit of orange in the "Y" logo sits nicely in the corner.
Here's an example from the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438930
…with a couple caveats regarding accessibility: the default font is way, way too small, and some colours don't have enough contrast (eg, the “visited link”). Also, a tiny bit more of formatting would make comments more readable while keeping them sober and focused (eg, blockquotes, monospaced inlines, true hyperlinks).
And yes, there a lot of filters in place for upvotes, many of which are intentionally kept secret.
Personally, I don’t use downvotes.
I would absolutely love it if the comment box was taller than 7 lines on mobile, perhaps just at least when editing a comment.
Making it a separate category bin bypasses all of the hemming and hawing over particulars.
Intent is a noun. That is her intent.
Intent is also a verb: She is intent on winning the election.
You wanted "intent" as a noun in both your usages above.
Compare:
His program focused on dinosaurs. (verb) His program is focused on dinosaurs. (adjective describing his program).
You would never say "his program intented on dinosuars" because it's not a verb.
This sounds more like manipulation of content based upon moderator viewpoints or interests. HN has a wide enough audience to hit a good post the first time around.
Unfortunately, it is widely agreed that a lot of good quality content goes unnoticed. Which might be due to the sheer number of submissions.
That could be seen in yesterday's post about quality content that goes under.
https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
Direct link to top users by rep:
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek
(tptacek’s comments are super useful and extremely knowledgeable)
Dang (HN’s mod) just asked me to be identifiable and given that’s not a good fit for me, this will be my last post:
EDIT: When I wrote this reply your comment was at the top. 2 minutes later it was at the bottom of the comment section. Looks like it was manually moved to the bottom of the comments by a moderator :(
But that's not what they said. Were you asked to use your real name? Nothing stopping you keeping to one, anonymous sounding username
Once you've left enough comments, a motivated party has a good chance of identifying you based on the intersection of your (relatively uncommon) interests, various bits and pieces of the personal info that you tend to drop in comments etc.
I have a feeling you'll be back soon anyway.
“Not a user yet? Signup is by invitation only to combat spam and increase accountability. If you know a current user of the site [1], ask them for an invitation or request one in chat [2].”
——
Related comment on the history of lobste.rs:
I have a feeling HN would never publicize that information themselves.
Some of the most interesting discussions on HN are not directly related to computing, and they're one of the main reasons why I stick around HN (and would not be interested in moving to lobste.rs).