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Comment by jere | Hacker News Reader

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jere

How about an About page or FAQ so I know why the site exists? Here are a few questions to get you started:

1. Was this created by pg?

2. If not, why does everyone have an obsession with cloning Hacker News?

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This is a great idea and one that will happen in the near future. To answer your questions:

1. No it wasn't created by pg and it's not associated with him or ycombinator. Of course Arc is definitely associated with pg, Libre News is not.

2. Personally, I created this site because I am interested in Arc and wanted to experiment with it. I also wanted to provide a service for others (one that I was also interested in) and a non-censored news source that encouraged discussion seemed like a good idea.

Would you be interested in blogging about any changes you made, or particularly interesting/tricky things you found in the sources, while creating this?

I haven't looked closely at ARC, so perhaps this is a foolish question, but was this as turn-key as unpacking the distribution, changing some names and colors, and running it on some server, or did you need to make substantial changes in order to make it your own, or even to get it to run?

OK. Fair enough. I wasn't trying to be negative, but was genuinely wondering why so many HN clones are made. As a learning experience, it makes sense. Anyway, definitely do the About page because otherwise it won't be obvious that it's meant to be a "non-censored news source."

It can be powered by Arc but did you have to use the same crappy table-based layout? I'd have to think these kinds of sites would save some bandwidth by simply trimming all that fat.

Can we please not start this flamewar again? It's been done to death and there's nothing new to be said.

I've just posted my onw HN-inspired forum:

https://github.com/skx/gathering/

This is written in Perl, and has some interesting features. But I was inspired by HN because it works well, in its minimal fashion.

No, this wasn't created by pg. This is a clone of hacker news because that's what ships with Arc.

3. What is the value-add of this site compared to existing subreddits on this topic and/or a potentially creatable subreddit on this topic?

I suspect the value add is "Isn't reddit". Reddit is the new myspace. There are a few (mostly musty) corners that are still decent, due to herculean moderation efforts such as /r/AskScience, but the bulk of it becomes less worthwhile every day.

The comments alone make /r/politics nearly unusable for me. And I honestly tried! /r/WorldNews Isn't much better in that regard and I'd much rather see a forum with limited or no comments than either of those. I still get access to the news and get to avoid the trite in the comments.

You need to use smaller subreddits if that's what you want. Subscribe to /r/RepublicOfNews, /r/NeutralNews, and /r/DiggRSS and you will find something completely different.

I don't think cloning HN is bad. But has PG open sourced his code, or will the voting algorithm not going to be as good?

From what I understand based on HN comments over the years, HN proper has lots of special secret sauce to prevent spam, voting fraud, etc.

It's shipped with Arc, a programming language pg made. So yes, it is open source.

Out of curiosity, what voting algorithm are you using at the moment? You'll have to tweak it if the site takes off. Especially since people get very particular about politics, even more so than money, and will try to game it in whatever way possible. It could make HN voting rings look benign.

I'm not the site creator so you'd have to ask him.

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