

HN is getting too big - eli_s

Sorry for the link bait title ;) HN is maintaining its quality very nicely for a site that's growing so quickly.<p>Just wondering if it might be time for HN to get sub HNs (like sub reddits).<p>Stories are getting buried v.quickly. I was trying to find a link I saw at work yesterday and ended up having to dig through 6 or 7 pages worth of posts.
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blasdel
<http://searchyc.com> is the solution to your particular problem, not sharded
communities.

It's unfortunate that pg petulantly refuses to acknowledge its existence. Even
talking about in person, he'd only engage with me on the subject when I
referred to the useless HNSearch Firefox extension that's linked in the footer
because it's from WebMynd (YC W08).

Confounding things is the fact that HNSearch actually redirects to searchyc
SERPs on some user actions!

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jacquesm
I wonder what the deal is there.

He has to be aware of the fact that we all understand that he's rooting for
the companies that YC has funded, but clearly webmynd is dysfunctional when it
comes to effectively searching HN, and the HN audience deserves the best it
can get.

If he would just so much as place a link to searchyc or a form that submits
there that would make life a bit easier and save endless newcomer questions.

In any other community such a feature would have been implemented long ago,
the searchyc guys seem to do it for free so why not recognize their efforts
and make it official? Or is there bad blood between searchyc and PG?

~~~
amirnathoo
I'm a founder of WebMynd, and I feel a need to clarify what we do since
comments like this have been raised several times. For the record, I think
searchyc is great and we've never tried to pretend that we have created an HN-
specific search engine as they have.

We have created a custom version of our product for HN which, like several
other YC-funded companies who's products PG thought relevant, are linked to in
the HN footer. Perhaps the fact our icon says 'HNSearch' is a problem - maybe
we need to change this to 'HNSidebar'?

To clarify - we make browser addons that allow you to personalize the right-
hand side of the Google search results page with sources that you value. When
you search on Google (and others) we open up a sidebar on the right of the
page where you can see more results from sources that you can select, some of
which Google cannot, or does not, show you - e.g. searches across your
Facebook or LinkedIn profiles, or Gmail, or your own Delicious bookmarks.

Hacker News is one of the sources that you can select in our sidebar and we've
created a specific version of our addon that shows results from HN, by
default, in a larger widget than normal. That's powered by Bing site search
and if you click on the title of the widget, it'll take you to searchyc to try
your search there. Some other sources are also powered by Bing site search
where we think that's the best way of showing the results. For many other
sources we use their own search APIs, like Digg or OneRiot which put a big
emphasis on recency and explicit user inputs.

Our product lets you tell Google: "A lot of the time I want to see New York
Times and Hacker News search results when I search, so show me what they've
got on the right-hand side."

I hope that helps and we'd love comments on our actual product and how we can
make it work for you.

~~~
jacquesm
> Perhaps the fact our icon says 'HNSearch' is a problem - maybe we need to
> change this to 'HNSidebar'?

It would at least be more descriptive, and it would also reduce 'bounce' from
people that install it and then are totally confused and remove it again.

Thanks for the explanation, I've actually installed webmynd in the past and we
had some email exchange long ago (September last year or so), it's neat to see
you're sticking around and explaining so clearly what webmynd is and what it
is not.

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10ren
eli_s, not an answer, but if you upvote that article, it's in your _saved
stories_ : <http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=eli_s>

(from your homepage, 3rd link from the bottom)

~~~
eli_s
nice - thanks for the heads up :)

now why is news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=eli_s a magic link that can't be
found on the main nav?

oops... just found it in my profile page. not the best spot to put it :S

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jacquesm
That's already happening, since a few weeks HN now has an 'ask' section, which
is effectively a first split.

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sesqu
I too have noticed a large increase in volume recently, but I'm not sure
that's the problem. Rather, I'd say the site needs less churn - top articles
should stay on the front page for at least a day. That just means a different
ranking, maybe something like log(votes)*weight, where weight decays over time
but gets bumped at each upvote.

If that's not enough churn for some people, I'd prefer a filter that lets them
temporarily hide some stories. And ten there's /newest

I know there's also the /best section, but it's not linked to and I don't know
how it's ranked.

A reddit-like url filter would help a little in catching reposts, but I'm not
sure this is a big problem yet.

~~~
jacquesm
it's linked:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/lists>

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pedalpete
I don't use the 'ask' section link, but regularly click on them from the 'new'
or main view.

What categories would you suggest? Business, technology, environment,
programming, apple, facebook? Ok, probably not apple and facebook though those
do get an inordinate amount of links.

Personally I wouldn't use them, and my concern would be that people who come
only to read articles tagged in that column wouldn't cross-polinate their
expertise into cross-over areas.

Just a thought.

~~~
eli_s
My personal favourite would be to have 10 or so official sub HNs and not to
allow people to create their own.

My list would include Entrepreneurship, Tech Web, Tech Other

~~~
_delirium
I'd be happy with a minimalist two-way split: one category for mainly
technical articles (new languages, language tutorials, code releases, review-
my-app requests, in-depth articles on the state of some technology, etc.), and
a second category for mainly business, startup, political, or meta-type news
(X got bought, tips on productivity, VC term sheets, management styles, etc.).

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younata
The problem with sub HNs is for those of us who use feed readers to read HN
and other news sites. I REALLY don't want to have to add ten extra feeds to my
feed list, as the idea of sub-HNs implies. I, for one, am fond of the way this
is currently set up, it works well with how I have my feed reader set up, and
my desire for knowledge at all hours.

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jessor
Noticed this, too.

The way I keep up with it is using google reader to star (mark) stories over
the day and reading them when i get the chance.

I'm not sure sub HNs are the answer just now since I'd need to subscribe to
pretty much all of them to not miss good content.

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mehulkar
I agree. My RSS feed has 100s of articles every day. And I can't keep up :(

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rms
I miss Nick B.

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jasonlbaptiste
That's what she said.

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ellyagg
I wonder how many people laugh at inappropriate comments here and then vote
them down.

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savant
How does one downvote something? Is there a karma level a user should be at to
be able to downvote?

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kgermino
Yes, the minimum is at 200pts currently

