

News.YC faster (plus new traffic stats) - pg
http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#9jan09

======
robg
_But we're hoping that, as in past influxes, the new arrivals will with some
prodding from the existing inhabitants learn the local customs._

I'm absolutely smitten with this form of social hacking. To me, this seems to
be the most revolutionary part of the site. That controlling "free" speech is
not an impediment to open speech and that community members can be taught,
through participation, to behave according to some simple constraints.

My apologies if this is an inane realization. It just doesn't seem to be said
often enough in on-line communities. Lassez faire doesn't work and it's
possible to also encourage the worst, trollish, impulses. This is the first
clearly positive example I've seen. If there are others please let me know!

~~~
bd
MetaFilter also works this way. Self-policing is a big part of the community
[1][2].

There is a even a whole section of the site devoted to discussing internal
stuff (called appropriately MetaTalk [3]).

Sometimes I miss something like this on HN - a separate space for meta stuff.

BTW MetaFilter is the only other online community I'm aware of that has
quality on the level of HN (despite being even larger - over 56,000 registered
people).

[1] <http://mssv.net/wiki.cgi?SelfPolicing>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaFilter#Moderation>

[3] <http://metatalk.metafilter.com>

~~~
jballanc
Actually, I kind of like that HN is self-meta (i.e. the ability to ask
questions as well as post links). There were a few good discussions about how
to make a good post a while back: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419539>

~~~
DTrejo
I think his point was that meta does not have its own section, and that
because of this some meta comments are voted down (despite validity, good
points, etc).

------
mdasen
_prove that with sufficient caching you can serve arbitrarily large numbers of
requests with arbitrarily slow languages_

I love the way that's worded, but I do have a serious question: how do you do
the caching in a way that keeps content fresh? For example, you couldn't just
cache this page with the comments because then I'd think mine didn't show up.
Or do you add it to a comments cache in memcached or some similar mechanism as
well as saving it to the database? Or simply expire the cache on save assuming
that there will be more reads than writes?

It's always seemed hard to do good caching for a site whose content is
constantly changing as people comment and vote on items and it'd be nice to
see how complex the model used here was. The latest source I know of is at
<http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc2.tar>. Will there be an update with new
source?

Oh, and congratulations on an awesome site!

------
aristus
"...with sufficient caching you can serve arbitrarily large numbers of
requests with arbitrarily slow languages."

Only if the dataset is small relative to the traffic rate, and if the data
mutation rate is relatively small to the size of the dataset. There are plenty
of systems that do not have these properties.

I agree the speed of the language does not matter as much as people used to
think... but the _shape of the data_ matters a lot more than people think.

~~~
pmjordan
The shape of the data matters particularly when you want to scale beyond that
initial single server, which is especially relevant if performance is weak.

------
Alex3917
Maybe it would be helpful if there were a way to see a user's 100 highest
rated comments. I'm thinking it would help both in socializing the influx of
new users, and also in getting an idea of what a given person like.

~~~
davi
Currently, just clicking on a username and then clicking on the comments link
in the user profile gives me a pretty good sense of what that user is like.

My highest rated comment so far occurred yesterday, when I got 30 points for
saying something reasonably good early on in a popular post. I think other
people agreed with what I said, and so (appropriately) just upvoted the
comment rather than repeating it.

If your proposed feature just ended up displaying lots of comments like these,
it might not be that great.

A somewhat related idea might be to let longstanding/high karma users add a
'top N favorite comments' list to their profile. When you looked at a user's
profile, you could click through to see their favorites, and the comments by
them favorited by others. (Users could add their own comments to their
favorites list, if they wanted to.)

I can think of several users right now whose favorites would be interesting to
me.

~~~
wensing
_My highest rated comment so far occurred yesterday, when I got 30 points for
saying something reasonably good early on in a popular post. I think other
people agreed with what I said, and so (appropriately) just upvoted the
comment rather than repeating it._

This is why some indication of a user's median karma per comment would be at
least as insightful as his or her total.

------
jskopek
Long time reader, first time poster. Just wanted to say that the quality of
submissions and comments is what always keeps me coming back to HN, and it's
great to see active interest in maintaining the quality.

You'd never hear something like "Growth can't keep going at this rate forever
without ruining the site, though. Between those two alternatives, we prefer
growth to slow down. We hope it will happen naturally—that we'll simply run
out of new people the site appeals to." coming from a profit-driven site

------
vaksel
would be interesting to see what kind of hardware HN is hosted on

~~~
tedroden
Also, somewhat related to this, does anyone know if newmogul.com runs on the
same code or does it just look identical?

~~~
pclark
probably the same code - it's open source.

~~~
bdotdub
where? i can't seem to find it

~~~
cchooper
<http://www.arclanguage.org/install>

~~~
Fuca
Now that I am learning PHP to do it you tell me...

~~~
ashishk
umm why are all mentions of PHP being downvoted? i might not understand
completely, but that seems like a puerile thing to do.

~~~
cstejerean
It's not the mention of PHP, it's the tone of the comment.

~~~
yters
Tone is hard to interpret without a tone.

------
trickjarrett
Does anyone else feel like HN is actually ahead of the zeitgeist than other
sites like Reddit and Digg? Obviously the focus is closer with
technology/entrepreneur articles but I keep finding stories I've already seen
on HN hitting Reddit and Digg up to a day later.

~~~
tokenadult
HN is beating some of the specialty discussion sites I like best in timeliness
for certain specialized topics, so it appears that people who find cool links
are defaulting to posting to HN first (which is also becoming my default
behavior).

------
ionfish
> "[W]ith sufficient caching you can write popular apps in arbitrarily slow
> languages."

Somehow I doubt this pronouncement will stem the tide of statements along the
lines of "x is written in a slow language and therefore won't scale", although
they have been mercifully less frequent around here of late.

------
staunch
1) Any idea how many page views per month?

2) Is all the HN data (comments, submissions, users) backed up and stored off
the machine it's running on?

~~~
asmosoinio
1) Looking at the graph from the article:

<http://ycombinator.com/images/traffic-8dec08.png>

For December the average page views per day averages about 200K => 6M page
views.

------
robg
On a slow satellite connection I definitely noticed the new zippiness. No
other site I visit loads as quickly - not even a google search.

~~~
pclark
I'm curious about a satellite connection. I spend a lot of time in southern
Spain where we don't have landlines. We do have GSM so we get _slow_ internet.

Can you shed some light on satellite internet? Who are you hosted with? Hows
the speed & reliability?

~~~
robg
We're with HughesNet. It's bad (200 kbps) at peak times, better at moderate
volume (500 kbps), and pretty good at off-hours - 5am (1.5 mbps). We pay about
$80 month but it's our only choice besides dial-up. It seems they now have
faster connections if you're willing to pay more
(<http://go.gethughesnet.com/plans.cfm>)

Reliability is really good. It's hardly ever down, even during major
snowstorms (just have to clean off the dish). I'd say we lose connectivity
maybe a few hours a month.

The worst part is the low daily bandwidth limits (425 MB in 24 hour periods)
and then they throttle the service (<20 kbps) until you're into the next 24
hour period. They don't tell you when you're getting close. Since we started
using a bandwidth tracker to monitor ourselves we haven't had any problems but
the first few months were painful and frustrating. They do have three non-
monitored hours (4am to 7am local time) so you can schedule downloads
accordingly.

Not sure if they're international though. Be careful of on-line reviews.
They're almost all negative because I don't think folks realize the technology
is always going to seem more limited than DSL or cable. Coming from either of
those (or a T1 etc.), you just have to reset your expectations.

~~~
pclark
thanks a lot - really handy information. I'll look for some global providers.
Doesn't seem unreasonably priced, either.

Good luck with your venture/startup by the way - sounds fascinating.

~~~
gdee
Telefonica does satellite inet access in Spain. I remember prices to be quite
high some years ago. You could check their site and see how they fare now.

~~~
pclark
great lead, will check it out now - thanks!

------
pclark
awesome.

News.YC is still my primary source for most news, it's an amazing community.

~~~
unalone
Two months ago I was worried that with the Obama surge things would break
apart and collapse and become generic as a site like Reddit's become. To my
surprise, it's managed to hold together incredibly well. And I love it: this
is absolutely the best community I know of on the Internet.

~~~
allenbrunson
"it" didn't magically hold together. that was the work of the editors! if you
read the site with showdead turned on in your profile, you'll see that a
record number of users and submissions are getting killed.

just to be clear, that's not me screaming censorship. it's rare for me to see
a dead comment or submission that i wouldn't have killed myself, if i had the
power to do it.

~~~
unalone
Yep! I flag a lot of stuff in the new section. I'm just always surprised to
see how effective that is at pruning the site.

------
yan
This is great.

Are the events that brought in the largest spikes in traffic known? Do page
views correlate to new accounts?

~~~
pclark
I belive the huge spike was techcrunch

~~~
pclark
hmm, that spike was before techcrunch covered YC (they covered it in December)
... no idea, then :)

------
prakash
_So we just finished a new round of optimizations as part of our ongoing quest
to prove that with sufficient caching you can ....._

PG, can you please list the various optimizations? Thanks!

------
fallentimes
_...and there has been a slight uptick in comments that are insulting or
inane._

Is there a way to measure this? I know someone mentioned a filter for Youtube
comments before...

------
tokenadult
Oddly, just now my access failed to HN using either of two different browsers,
several times, even though other sites that occasionally have traffic hiccups
responded just fine.

------
JoelSutherland
I'd like to see increased moderation to balance the new users.

~~~
Xichekolas
If you watch the site with showdead turned on, you'll notice that moderation
has increased as the userbase has increased. There are more dead items than
ever, but such is life when trying to maintain quality.

So in short, you are seeing it.

------
gommm
One feature I would love news.yc is a page to list only the Ask HN
submissions... I like reading articles and seeing the reactions to articles
but the Ask HN submission usually end up having higher quality content on
average IMHO.

~~~
bd
<http://ask.searchyc.com>

<http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive>

Courtesy of chengmi, alaskamiller and epi0Bauqu

------
ced
I realized today that caching breaks one of Lisp's cardinal rules (as quoted
from OnLisp):

 _The convention in Lisp seems to be that an invocation owns objects it
receives as return values, but not objects passed to it as arguments._

How do experienced Lispers deal with this? Just being careful?

------
unalone
I don't know if this is because of the new fix, but for me submission pages
won't load. Any user's submission page just freezes. Safari 4, OS X 10.5.6.

Edit: never mind, working now. Possibly an Internet malfunction.

------
medianama
Why is the alexa rank so low for the kind of traffic this site gets?

