Ask HN: How Can I Make Better Submissions to HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How Can I Make Better Submissions to HN?

56 pointstokenadult42 comments

I just saw a comment by pg reminding another commenter of the HN guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This seems like an opportune time to ask how I might implement the guidelines quoted below:

"What to Submit

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

I've read most of pg's essays

http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

over the years, so I have some sense of his intellectual interests, and I remember the very early phase of Reddit (which I think was seeded with participants by a bunch of personal friends of pg and the Reddit founders). But please inform me so I do better. I can see empirically which links and which "Ask HN" posts get upvoted the most, but which links and which Ask HN posts are the ones you would most like to see? What posts that gratify intellectual curiosity should there be more of?

Still learning at age fifty,

Boy, I wish someone had asked this before.

The best posts are ones that say something surprising (e.g. not just a reporter writing a routine story about a familiar topic), and say it in a convincing way, with depth of argument, and numbers, if applicable.

Posts about how to do things oneself, and how things work, tend to be particularly appreciated. This is an audience that likes to know the details.

Posts don't have to be about hacking, so long as they talk in detail about something novel or surprising. Though arguably anything that talks about the internal details of how something works is about hacking, in the broader sense.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411994

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406885

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418776

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414330

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418329

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414226

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414502

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418098

Three of those links were a different color because they were not in my browser history. I immediately middle-clicked each of them.

Holy cow -- middle clicking opens in a new tab?! I love you.

yea.. that just transformed my browsing ability, though probably not for the better :)

My first thought on reading that was, "some people don't know that?!"

My immediate next thought was, "I wonder what obvious things I don't know that might save me countless hours."

Is there a wiki for this sort of thing? There needs to be one.

apple-shift-t reopens closed tabs in firefox

Ctrl-Shift-T on Windows: works in Firefox, Opera and Chrome.

Also middle click closes tab.

It's the same for Linux, too.

You are my hero.

I presume that's built in? I've been using TMP to get the same functionality, but it uses F12 which gets swallowed by firebug if you have that enabled.

Yeah I used to use F12 with Tab Mix Plus until it was swallowed by Firebug, and that's when I discovered Ctrl-Shift-T, which is arguably easier to hit than F12 as well.

heh. Funny thing is that I post or tweet this about once a week. It's my pet project to tell more people about this.

how do you get firebug to work with F12 on Mac!?

It's hard to look for things that solve problems you don't know you have.

Now there's an opportunity for a startup search engine.

Ctrl-CMD-D over any word in OS X gives you a definition. Keep holding Ctrl-CMD and move around...

The problem with an obvious things you don't know wiki is that everyone doesn't know something different that's obvious. Putting all those things in one easy to find place makes them hard to find. And if you didn't know what you were looking for in the first place...

A wiki with "middle click opens in new tabs" would be noise for me. Nice thought though.

"I wonder what obvious things I don't know that might save me countless hours."

I recently learned about open in OS X:

  $ open filename

This opens filename using whatever the default application is for the file's type.

CTRL-click does the same.

This just saved me countless minutes. Great.

I think this is default behavior (thought I vaguely remember configuring it) -- on a computer without a mouse you can simultaneous left and right to open a new tab.

On Linux, left+right click emulate a middle click, at least if you only have two buttons.

Thanks for the specific examples of threads you have liked. I find that I like to learn inductively. And you also described some characteristics of likeable posts, for those who like to learn deductively.

"President of Minnesota Council for the Gifted and Talented (volunteer), founding director and math coach for Edina Center for Academic Excellence (career), homeschooling father of four children." - extracted from the profile of tokenadult.

He is a grown up man with four children. Not longer a boy.

As a point of linguistic information: boy used as the poster did is an exclamation, pretty much equivalent to Wow.

Thanks for your advice. This shows that I did learned something from leaving comment.

I find most of the content on HN great - have a look at the front page now, it's largely balanced and good. The list pg posted is also spot on.

My only qualm is with articles like 90% of those on http://www.reddit.com/r/politics and http://www.reddit.com/r/business . I believe that if we don't keep a watchful eye on things, HN will turn into something similarly intelligence-free and I'd hate to see that happen.

I think the fundamental difference is that there's no real effort here to appeal to a wider audience. In fact there seem to be some things done (lack of a "fancy" design for starters) to discourage that.

IMO HN sees hackers with a wide range of interests. I personally like to read anything that tickles my intellectual curiosity, from programming topics, to articles covering the current financial crisis (of which I know very little, BTW :D) [Needless to say every now and then I come across an article that introduced me to a topic that I knew nothing of, and it has subsequently found itself on my "like" list]

Right now as I write this the top 3 articles on HN cover how to load a plan, an article on the current financial debacle, and the highly optimized square root calculation used by the makers of Quake. I read all three, and upvoted all three (did not comment on any).

IMO I would not worry about what articles other hackers find interesting, post those that _you_ do. The voting process will separate the wheat from the chaff.

After that long response, personally, I tend to like to read about the new language/technology that I have currently immersed myself in, but I tend not to post all the articles that I read to avoid making HN a www.reddit.com/r/<insert language here> clone.

I think for the most part, submit what you feel is interesting, and every now and then a comment will tell you that you messed up (I know I have had a few, and have apologized for the same).

Happy Posting...

Anything that's intellectually stimulating to entrepreneurs and hackers. 99.9% of the people who visit Hacker News are in one or both categories.

Problem solving? Ground-breaking tech news? News about YCombinator start-ups? Better development methods? Ways to raise funds? Ideas that grate against the system?

Bring them on.

Submit stuff that interests you with a title. If the community agrees it'll also get upvoted, if not no harm. Unless you're flooding the new page, which can happen accidentally sometimes.

Assume that you are a hacker, then submit stuff that interests you?

I think it would be fair to say that I am not a hacker, although my oldest son aspires to be a hacker. So some of my bias in what I find interesting to post here is

a) what is good groundwork-laying information for a YOUNG hacker?

or

b) what contributes to a broad, complete education for hackers of any age?

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Depending on how advanced he is I would recommend he go through Hackety Hack. http://www.hacketyhack.net/

Thanks. Right-clicked for context menu in Firefox to open new tabs with each link. I see "21-days.html" from the Peter Norvig site is the "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" article that I was rereading just yesterday. (I've referred my son to it before, and heartily agree it's good for young people who like programming to read.)

Hackety Hack is new to me. Your comment is an example of a good comment with links to further information.

He might like David Macaulay's _The Way Things Work_ ( http://www.amazon.com/New-Way-Things-Work/dp/0395938473/ ).

Also, libraries in general, including university libraries. Some books on homeschooling (such as Grace Llewellyn's _Teenage Liberation Handbook_) are full of pointers for self-study.

Yes, Macaulay's _The Way Things Work_ is a wonderful book. He's a little bit older than I think you may have guessed he is. His younger siblings like that book too.

Libraries in general are where I spend much of my life. I definitely like to bring all my children to libraries at every opportunity. Thanks for mentioning The Teenage Liberation Handbook in your reply. Some older hackers may find that very interesting as a way to hack getting an education.

Sure thing. Focus on nurturing the desire to keep learning, rather than whatever specific, short term interests their variety of "hacking" implies.

Subversiveness.

Ever read The Diamond Age? You should. It's not only a fantastic novel on its own merits, and a great spec fic, but it's got a lot of pure human truth to it -- specifically regarding what goes into helping a child grow into a great hacker.

That's an interesting book recommendation.

http://www.amazon.com/Diamond-Age-Illustrated-Primer-Spectra...

That looks like a good genre fit for my son's tastes, and the title is not at all familiar to me. Thanks.

Well, what "is" considered a hacker will vary from person to person, and getting caught up in arguments about identity / group politics detracts from doing/learning cool stuff.

I didn't look at who submitted the E-prime link; after reading this comment, I knew it was you ;)

Yep. It occurred to me that the HN community might find E-Prime interesting as I wrote the comment.

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