Ask PG: Why don’t you open source HN?

I don't have time to manage such a project. I don't think it's necessary anyway. The reason HN lacks x cool feature is not that I expend no energy on the site, but that I expend all my energy on what users actually care about, which is not features but the content.

It's simple but effective. The pages load quickly and look pretty decent in many different browsers.

I'm really happy that HN isn't your typical constantly-mutating, constantly growing news site, adding a new social share button and 2KB of new Javascript every week. Please, pg, don't start taking pull requests or anything like that, it's great the way it is.

Edit: look at the current top story. A pretty but not especially functional Facebook redesign, proposed as the latest in a long line of changes that the users pretty much always disliked. There's my point.

It's fine. It does what it's supposed to that's true. There are a few items however, that should really have been tackled in the many years this site has now been running imo.

- You can't take away an upvote. Misclick is just bad luck

- user settings have some really obscure settings that aren't explained like showdead / noprocrast / maxvisit / minaway

- The "Unknown or expired link" is just a bad solution, either redirect me to the front page when that happens, or find an alternative way to deal with it.

That last one always gets me... Cant believe its been that way for so long, considering the type of people who visit this site....

There's "not having time to work on it" and then theres "complete abandonment."

I do sort of agree with OP that at least adding a few more people onto a team would be good, if not full on opensourcing it.

But hey, Reddit is always open source. And someone could always open their own site out of its source code and try to one-up HackerNews. Competition breads innovation.

I was hoping someone would mention it: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki

thanks!

Except it's impossible to set up without AWS and IndexTank. We tried that in our local Hackerspace and failed miserably.

By the way, our Hackerspace is looking for a sane, reddit-line threaded discussion engine. I'd use HN engine, but it doesn't support "subreddits". Anyone knows something that could work? We had hard time finding anything.

I use http://hckrnews.com/ to avoid the expired-link error

I just recently stumbled on it and boy oh boy, that's much better than HN itself. Not complaining about HN but I'm from the time of the web when things got a little better than the table-like structure of HN. I do feel comfortable when there's a better interface/design.

On a slightly off-topic talk, I think the whole thing basically boils down to the crux. People aren't too bothered to change the looks of HN because it just works good as it is and that's most important. Now, ages from now Apple's design philosophy might look pretty old but may be people will be okay with that because it's a brand. I tend to think of HN like that.

I also use hckrnews.com, its a much better interface for HN.

Particularly its useful, if I have not used HN for some days, and come back to see 'what great items have I missed?'.

edit: minor rephrase

Excellent! Just what I was after having been on holidays and wanting to see what I missed. Also, is there a list of HN interfaces and related sites somewhere? HNSearch etc?

Also: After voting on a comment, you cannot see whether it was an upvote or downvote. While on a touchscreen, I always hesitate while clicking the small arrows.

That being said, I'd prefer no change to the HN system.

I always liked the obscure settings. I like that HN doesn't try to pamper me.

You feel special because you're in an 'elite' club of people that know what the noprocrast setting does?

It's easy to find out by searching hn.

Still, an explanation would be nice, for example on the guideline page.

Are you also browsing the web by issuing HTTP commands directly in a telnet session?

showdead / noprocrast / maxvisit / minaway are explained in FAQs and are must use features of HN.

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

using hn with a small touchscreen (phone or tablet) makes you really appreciate the magnitude of the irrevocable misclick problem.

the UX on tablets is sometimes just absurd, isn't it? I thought it is a practical joke. Thousands of tech savy folks driving the internet use an interface from the nineties.

how often I missed this upvote button or saw expired session..

Just because of this "Unknown or expired link" thing, i fill up my browser with lots of tabs.

When i open HN, i open the links that interests me in new tabs. And immediately click on "More" to see the next page.

Wow. The "Unknown or expired link" is a horrible solution. How bad is it? So bad that even though I've been browsing hacker news for over a year, only just now after reading this did I realize that the "More" link was inaccessible only because of a timeout. It occurs to me that every single time I clicked More in the past, it was after reading comments on the first page for a while, and so it always timed out for me. But the error page made me just assumed it was a bug and that the next page of results would not be possible to retrieve. Was always surprised when I periodically checked the second page and found that this "bug" was never fixed. Why not just show page two of the results, as they are at the time the more link is clicked? Seems pointless to have an expiration for this. So what if the pagination gets a little off-sync and I either miss a post or re-read something? That's much better than getting an error page.

That's a red herring, and a silly reason to choose not to free code.

pg could open source HN and then never ever accept a pull request, and he would still have made a positive change in the world.

i agree the site is simple and effective as it is. but it's not perfect. there is always something that can be improved. this probably doesn't include adding social share buttons and 2KB of new JavaScript every week. Like you said. And I agree, so would many people, so would pg, and this would also be the conclusion of an open feature discussion and wouldn't result in a successful pull request.

but think about it from a different perspective: there is a feature that many people agree would make the site better. e.g. a new job board for non-YC-companies, like discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4993571. lets assume that after openly discussing the problem, pg and the majority of the community agrees upon a solution. now lets assume that there are more features like this, and that pg hasn't the time to implement them all. wouldn't it be nice if the community could help out?

Job posts on HN are a perk for YC companies. Adding job posts for non-YC companies essentially kills that perk.

Could be a revenue source, like a daily auction for a non-YC job post slot. YC companies would still get it for free.

A big problem is: Comments are too deep for mobile devices.

Agreed, the site isn't all that usable from mobile devices. I use the Hacker News Reader app [0] for Android, it has a very nice interface and it's open source. [1]

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.manuelmaly...

[1] https://github.com/manmal/hn-android

works well enough with opera mobile. it reflows them so they fit the screen.

People probably said the same about the horse and buggy when the car was invented. Not that I'd personally like a shit ton of social media buttons, just sayin'

Two big reasons people miss:

(a) HN is the front-end and back-end of a bunch of YC business processes.

(b) The voting ring and antispam features rely on obscurity; they are game-able.

The code for older versions of HN is available, but you'd be better off with the code for lobste.rs.

The voting-ring/anti-spam features don't have to be included in the repository. It might be a big hassle to detangle them from the rest of the codebase, though.

This is what reddit does

Not only that, there's a variety of mechanisms built in to boost/identify YC users to other YCers to provide mechanisms of boosting their submitted stories. HN in itself is like a giant voter ring in that way.

Do you have specific evidence of that?

It's pretty well known. Don't know that I'd use the term voter ring though.

It's just that if you're in a YC batch or an alum you get posts, especially job posts, boosted.

I wouldn't pay much mind to this talk of mechanisms and gaming systems, sounds like post-hoc reasoning by outsiders.

There is more than that going on.

Not that I'm surprised, but I have to imagine it would take the form of the quasi-benign backslapping I saw on Reddit.

Think about this: YC is a business. YC likes hackers -- hell, YC are hackers. Gaming systems is what hacking is about. Hacker News provides a platform to let their companies get attention. Being front page on HN brings you traffic and tech attention. The HN that you read is the same one potential hires, investors and journalists read.

Pre-chasm traffic.

It's true, or was recently.

No there aren't. YC founders' userids show up in orange to one another, and there is a page where they can see one anothers' submissions. There are no mechanisms to "boost" stories submitted by YC founders, nor does the voting ring detector discriminate.

To me that sounds like a mechanism to help boost. Not automatically, but definitely an advantage.

The third big reason:

(c) The standard complaints don't matter because they don't impact growth.

There's a message in that.

It is, "Ship."

I would say the look and name of HN do impact growth in certain "demographics". That might even be the idea.

In that vein, discouraging memes, insider jokes, meanness, snark, and flamewars, also impact growth.

Of course, but it can also be engaging. It all depends on what kind of growth you want. For the size of the reader base, it's not very common to see people "on the team" comment something here on HN once the discussion turns opinionated.

It can be engaging when it is engaging. However, the median meme, etc. of the set of all internet discussions is not.

The source is called news.arc and you can find old versions on the Web, e.g. https://github.com/nex3/arc/ https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/lib/how-to-run-news

thanks, but to clarify: I'm not proposing to open source it for the purpose of looking at the code or forking my own HN-version.

instead i'm proposing that building _this_ site becomes an community effort, with open feature discussions and people committing code to the HN code base.

there is an army of people who deeply care about HN, and are very skilled to help out. i think it would be smart to use that asset.

As far as features go, diminishing returns at this point.

Really? A mobile friendlier theme? Better markup? Arrows that are pressable? Being able to correct an incorrect comment vote? Those don't change the character of the site but would enhance its usability greatly.

There are mobile clients for hn, arent't there?

Mobile friendly is low hanging fruit. How many improper up/down votes have resulted because of an insanely difficult up/down arrow touch-point? I know that I am responsible for a few.

For whatever reason pg just doesn't want to do that. Perhaps he doesn't want building HN itself to become a distraction (for other people) from building more useful stuff like startups. There may be a sort of contradiction where ninja rockstar programmers are too valuable to waste on improving HN, but HN is simultaneously too important to be put in the hands of mediocre programmers.

HN is kind of a double-edged sword because while it is educational it's also distracting and addictive. If making HN better also makes it more of a time-suck, the exercise could be a net negative for the community.

Reddit aint what it used to be.

Tech oriented users are exiling to other places, including here.

People are disappointed with the current featureset.

I smell opportunity for someone.

I think any improvements would make this site worse.

It is so very common for projects to inflate with new features until they become useless piles of filth. The fact that HN is a bit clunky is a feature not a bug. It will only attract and retain a certain type.

You probably meant it slightly differently, but improvements that make things worse are per definition not improvements.

I get that people don't want HN to get worse than it is. But i don't get why people think open sourcing it would result in that.

I trust PG would be the kind of project lead who only accepts pull requests that would actually improve the site.

And I trust the community has a lot of smart people who would come up with solutions that would actually improve this site.

Eh, _this_ site is a funnel of valuable applicants (and proprietary candidate evaluation tool) for YCombinator. Not to mention the needs-to-be-secret voting-ring detection algos that surely exist by now, this site will likely never be a community project.

>instead i'm proposing that building _this_ site becomes an community effort, with open feature discussions and people committing code to the HN code base.

Lamer News is similar to HN and community driven, so if you have energy to spare that's as good a place as any to put it. If pg wanted HN to evolve, it would evolve. Most people are happy with it as-is, tech-wise.

It is open sourced.

https://github.com/wting/hackernews

It's written in an experimental language, as an experimental side project[0], on a single machine in...I like to think it's PG's basement.

Considering this, it's probably not a service that can be "open sourced" as the number of people who can actually work on it appears to be PG. And PG is probably too busy to even act as the project lead.

[0]: It's not so experimental anymore...

YCombinator is listed as in the Rackspace Startup Program [0] - I'm on my phone so I haven't had a chance to do due diligence, but is HN hosted on a Rackspace server?

[0]http://www.rackspacestartups.com/

HN is hosted at SoftLayer in Houston, TX. The IP block and reverse DNS indicate hosting by ThePlanet; ThePlanet merged into SoftLayer.

Might I mention that I'm building an open-source HN clone with Meteor? It's a great starting point if you want to build your own HN-style community, and it's also the only real-time HN clone as far as I know:

http://telesc.pe

I started to reply last night when there were only two comments, but then decided to stfu and leave the discussion to real hackers. After skimming what real hackers have said, I think my observation is still relevant:

A) There are plenty of people already tweaking hn in the form of "add ons" like hnnotify.com. That piece already exists and without being the kind of problem that this approach would become.

B) People seem to routinely miss that hn is part of the yc business process. (I honestly don't get how anyone can miss that but posts like this one clearly do. I was a homemaker for eons and I get it.) You know, that is just slightly relevant to how and why things get done the way they are (aka central to the decision making process). This doesn't make good business sense, for reasons other more informed members have already covered.

The biggest annoyance for me is that this design isn't responsive. It's incredibly hard to read on my iPhone. At the very least let someone commit a dozen or so lines of CSS which includes a media query to make the design look better on mobile!

I use news:yc on my iPhone. It works great and has an Instapaper "Read later" option which is exactly what I was looking for!

I'd hazard that opening the source makes it easier to game the algorithm; so with that in mind, keeping it closed means one less vector for people to play.

I'm certainly not against open source - just trying to provide a possible answer.

Call me wrong on this one, but if you really are interested in the code for HN why not create your own? From what I've seen so far, HN is great n' all but the logic behind it seems pretty trivial (excluding the whole anti-spam module & related stuff).

The HTML for HN is ultra simple so, there you already have a front-send pretty much done.

This reply box is pretty simple as well: a input box and a submit button.

Add some filters/sorts and other misc features and you have your own version of HN.

Not saying it's 'easy', but it's not that difficult.

I didn't come into this with an opinion, but I have to admit it looks like the pro-open source argument is making a much stronger case and has countered almost every objection.

as the OP I'm obviously biased, but I feel so too. At the same time it looks like more people seemed to be against it though. I would still like to hear pg thoughts on this...

Open source gives away value (in effect, destroying it for the previous owner), sometimes for very little benefit. Why would pg open source the site and open HN up to a myriad of competitors? HN needs a large user base so that YC companies can promote themselves here. HN is not like the Linux kernel. The code is not complex. It doesn't need thousands of contributors nor would the benefits of extra features be worth the business cost.

When I first saw this, I was excited thinking this will be something about making the code base of HN available so we can use it to deploy similar sites on other topics with relative ease.

But to have the hacker news itself the product of an open source project, HELL NO. I can't even think of one way that would be a good thing.

Hacker news is perfect the way it is.

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, HN is already open source in that sense. See http://arclanguage.org/ - it's the example app (news.arc). A git mirror is here: https://github.com/wting/hackernews

> I bet you have a long wishlist of features yourself.

I think that's the main reason why it's not. It's fine as it is. The minimal features list and quirky HTML is part of HN identity.

Non coder speaking. I have tried the plug in "answers" from wpmu. Org running on wordpress. Ok, nothing sexy. Themesforest also has plug in for sale. My 2 cents

I'm not sure why anyone couldn't reasonably build their own pretty quickly. reddit publishes their source code.

Isn't HN just racket + arc + news.arc?

It will be more interesting if the years' data on HN can be made available to public.

Please have mercy on iPhone users' eyes and specify font-sizes in em

Use a different front end for IOS: http://hackerwebapp.com/

I made a mobile version sometime ago. http://ihackernews.com

And a great one that is, I use it on my mobile devices.

just use a different browser that let's you set your own font size.

http://newsyc.me/ is the best iPhone app I've found for Hacker News, highly recommend it over just using Safari.

There are plenty on iOS Apps for that, like: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hackernode/id473882597?mt=8

I've always wondered how one goes about building a voting ring.