
Just Ask HN (or more precisely, url-less) posts - pg
http://news.ycombinator.com/ask
======
rms
Great feature, thanks.

A parallel feature for "rate my startup" posts would be useful; those self-
posts also tend to get lost.

~~~
ig1
It doesn't seem to happen as much any more, but historically people used to
post "rate my startup" posts without a url and just link to the start-up in
the body of the text.

If people did that now it'd show up in the Ask section, so maybe we should
return to that practice.

~~~
jeromec
Sometimes I may not the have time to review something, and just want a quick
click to see if it catches my interest. I think having a clickable link helps
with click through.

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petercooper
A worthy feature for sure, but moving something that's been commonly used for
years to squeeze something else in is a negative UI experience. The "threads"
link is no longer where it used to be. I'd guess the earliest it should go
would be before "jobs" as I doubt the average HN user clicks "jobs" or
"submit" more than once a day (if that often), whereas "threads" is the way to
a common activity.

Twitter did something like this when they added the new "retweet" feature.
They pushed the "reply" link aside and put the "retweet" in its place. I had
to write a Greasemonkey script to resolve this due to years of muscle memory
built up on how it was.

~~~
pg
Better now?

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psawaya
I think the top bar is a little screwed up on the jobs page - the word jobs
appears twice. Here's how it looks to me:

new | threads | comments | ask | jobs | submit | jobs

~~~
pg
Thanks, fixed.

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ErrantX
Is it possible to have it as a link at the top of the page too? Because people
are sure to forget - or new users won't find out about it for ages :)

~~~
pg
I'm just testing this. (I literally just pasted it into the repl.) If it's
super popular I'd consider adding it to the top bar. But it will be on
<http://news.ycombinator.com/lists> at least.

~~~
ig1
It would seem to be vastly more useful then the "leaders" link that's
currently at the top of the page. How many people (other than people actually
on it and trying to climb the ranks) actually use that page ?

~~~
pg
Ok, let's try switching them. See above.

~~~
ax0n
Perfect. The karma game is old and tired. This puts the focus on the
discussion, not the popularity contests. Thanks, pg!

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shafqat
Wow, I literally just posted a comment in a separate thread about how much I
value ASK HN posts. And half hour later I see this - assuming it's a
coincidence, but either way, thank you, thank you, thank you.

EDIT: Just saw the other post and saw that this is not a coincidence. As I
wrote there, your responsiveness to this community is truly impressive.

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Scriptor
Does anyone have the link for the page where the guy categorized all the Ask
HN posts?

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

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rasikjain
Thanks a ton PG for this new feature.

How are these ASK posts are ordered? by the Points, Comments or Time Based?

I have been using <http://ask.searchyc.com/> for checking ASK related posts.
They also have the feature of highlighting the post in BOLD font if the post
is commented heavily.

Going to bookmark this new ASK url.

~~~
pg
For now the same algorithm as the frontpage (points divided by time to a
power).

~~~
rasikjain
Thanks PG for the reply.

I can only see 31 posts under ASK. Is it just me or any other user also see
only 31 posts?

~~~
pg
For speed it skims the url-less posts out of the sorted list I keep for the
frontpage, which needs to be made longer to be used for this as well. I just
cranked up the length a bit; should be ok now.

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mattew
This is a really nice addition to HN. Hopefully this will enable more peer-to-
peer engagement around issues that are of interest to the HN community. I know
I will be checking this page out on a regular basis to see what I might be
able to add to the discussion, and what I might learn from the rest of the HN
community.

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andrewljohnson
Great, now just move all of these off the front page entirely, and we'll be
good to go.

I know self-posts are algorithmically docked already, but I think I would
prefer that HN was set up like StackOverflow where all meta-posts were
cordoned off from the real stories.

~~~
jacquesm
Ask HN posts are not meta posts, they can be but only a relatively small part
of them are.

Meta posts are posts discussing HN itself, Ask HN posts range from startup-
reviews to job advice and all kinds of other stuff.

~~~
andrewljohnson
Ok, sure... but I still say please still rope them off in the same fashion.

They are already discouraged from making the front page, and we might as well
banish them completely.

~~~
roundsquare
I disagree. The ones that make the front page are often interesting and I use
the front page as a filter to keep me from spending too much time on HN while
at work (as I would bet a lot of other people do something similar as well).

I know you can treat the front page of the ask section the same way, but now
its a filter of a much smaller set which means that "top 30" is not as good a
filter (in addition to doubling the number of pages that are on a "front
page").

I would think that its best to create disjoint sections only if people usually
want to target one section or the other, which I don't think people do here
(though if I'm wrong, I would agree with your idea).

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zavulon
It would be great to be able to search this... in case you want to ask a
question and quickly check whether it's been asked before.

I know there are third-party search tools for HN, but it's less convenient to
use them.

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nostrademons
I get "Unknown." when I click on this - is it down now?

Edit: working now. Cool.

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TheTarquin
Awesome feature. Just in checking it out, I found several excellent questions
that it would never have occurred to me to ask.

Thanks for implementing this!

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fseek
Is there an RSS feed for just the ask questions? I can't find one there...

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icey
This is awesome, thank you for this

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medianama
Great. Thank You.

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d_c
I like the idea!

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bliss
Great

