

What's ailing Hacker News? - cmonsen
http://blog.symcat.com/post/17997724097/whats-ailing-hacker-news

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AndrewDucker
I was expecting this to be another post along the lines of "Woe, woe, hacker
news isn't as good as it was when I joined last week. Here is how it should
instantly change in order to be more/less like this other site."

It was nice to see it was just telling us that we all have headaches
(particularly as I had a headache when I used the site, to go with my cold).

~~~
mansolo
I call linkbait on the title.

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DanBC
Gently disturbed that you're releasing medical data, albeit anonymised medical
data.

What ethics panel did you run it through? What internal policies do you have
governing release of such data?

~~~
latch
The site has no privacy policy, as far as I'm concerned, that means buyer-
beware.

HOWEVER... A comment by cmonsen (founder??) on the original-OP states "User
privacy will be critical and we are making that a priority." (1)

So..ya, a bit of #fail here.

(1) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3603466>

~~~
cmonsen
Privacy policy posted. It's in the footer of symcat.com. Thanks for your
patience and let us know if you have any feedback!

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m_for_monkey
Not a surprising result. These are the symptoms that are listed as examples
right below the search box on the frontpage, just a click away.

~~~
cmonsen
True, but if that alone were the explanation then "shortness of breath,
vomiting, and chest pain" would also be higher.

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RyanMcGreal
I was pleasantly surprised to discover this is not yet another post
complaining that HN is in decline.

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nhebb
I'm not sure this data is meaningful. I recall searching for several real
symptoms that I had, and the step 2 options were so far off that I decided to
just try the suggested searches to see the sample results.

~~~
cmonsen
We observed that we had exact concept matches for over 2/3rds of the symptoms
searched on the first try.

To get the rest we are doing two things: 1\. adding common queries without
matches into our symptom vocab 2\. improving the suggested searches algorithm

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easymode
Thats really great news. Just checked out the site and it's a good
implementation. I'll provide more feedback.

We launched <http://www.kaanzi.com/> and I shared in HN in hopes of getting
some feedback. But it lasted about 10 minutes in the front page of "new"
thread of HN and we only got about 30 visits total from HN.

I wonder how it works with HN :P

Anyways, it's great to see some success. Keep up the good work!

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waterside81
1) I, as well, was glad that this wasn't another "HN is turning into Reddit"

2) I was one of the people who chose headache just to play around with the
site. Incidentally, I never got to finish because the site hung on the last
part so I never found out what happens at the end.

Out of curiosity, are there any legal implications of running a service like
this? Would the FDA or AMA disapprove of this?

~~~
cmonsen
We were getting a lot of traffic in a short amount of time that day, so the
site performance was lacking. You might have better luck trying again (maybe
wait a few hours until this new HN traffic dies down).

I welcome the opinion of a legal expertise on your later point, but we're
taking the appropriate measures based on the advice we've received.

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prawn
I wouldn't have clicked through if I hadn't read the HN comments first. A
different article title might be more effective?

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shalmanese
Please consider working with a product designer (note: not visual designer) as
soon as possible. The entire site gives off the vibe of being built by geeks
for geeks. I understand that this is a MVP but still, there are massive
product level decisions that could make this dramatically more user friendly.

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JonnieCache
I'm shocked lower back pain isn't higher up the list.

I guess everyone here has those $5000 chairs, or they stand up or whatever.

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junto
I actually did have a cold.

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SpiderX
The problem is that in the first page, there are three links to Ubuntu on
Android, and two for the latest Apache release. Really? WTF is up with all the
duplicates here?

~~~
epenn
Downvoted for being off topic. Please read the post before you comment. It
talks about statistics from a symptom checking website created by a handful of
medical students, using searches from Hacker News users as a sample. It has
nothing to do with the Hacker News website itself.

~~~
SpiderX
I read the article, I didn't think you could gather any meaningful statistics
from their results, because chances are, people here were just clicking things
and seeing how it works. Hence the off topic comment.

