

Little Known Hacker News Is My First Read Every Morning - hwork
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-is-my-first-read-every-morning/

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jl
New to Hacker News? <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

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TheTarquin
Fantastic and concise. Out of curiosity, is there a link to that anywhere on
the News.YC website? Perhaps I'm blind, but I don't see one anywhere. I looked
for a page like that when I joined and, after not finding one, just jumped
into the fray.

It's a great resource for newbies like myself. Perhaps it deserves more
prominent billing?

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iamwil
It's in the footer on the list pages under "guidelines". footers don't appear
for comment pages, for some reason. It's even more important that they're
there in comment pages, I imagine.

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TheTarquin
Ah, so it is. Thanks! (I'm fairly option-blind. If what I'm looking for isn't
pretty obvious on a webpage, I usually never find it.)

And adding the Guidelines link to the comments page in some way might well be
a helpful addition. At least there IS a link to it, though.

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run4yourlives
We're screwed now... techcrunch isn't exactly known for its overly insightful
comments.

Welcome digg-like users!

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ivankirigin
The arrival of less insightful people is inevitable. The goal should be
presenting the site such that they matter less or don't bother coming.

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run4yourlives
Well put. It'll be interesting to see how pg and team handle something that
every other site has failed miserably with.

I've got high hopes.

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gcv
Not every site. The Ars Technica forums have maintained a surprisingly high
level of quality discussion over the years. Ars uses human moderators who read
every post and enforce the rules.

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Flemlord
I concur. I'm a top-10 reddit poster and Hacker News is my first site of the
day now. Keep up the good work and don't be afraid to ban the idiots. Now if
only somebody would set up a "Political News" site using the same code base...

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comatose_kid
Anyone can. pg included the sourcecode to news.ycombinator in his latest
release of Arc.

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kingnothing
With as much as we complain about how much noobs will change the site, why did
he go off and do a stupid thing like put this on the front page of TC?

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garbowza
Who is "he?" Arrington runs TC. PG doesn't put anything on the frontpage of
TC.

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kingnothing
"He" would be Michael Arrington, the person who put it on the front page of
TC. If he's an actual community member here, then he should have realized that
was a stupid thing to do, for the sake of the news and comment quality on
Hacker News, and not to have done it.

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ntoshev
Do you think Arrington values the community here more than the community
reading TC, his own community? Adding value for his readers should be his
first priority.

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kingnothing
What value is he adding for his users?

First off, he's referring them to a site that competes with his own, which
very well may cause some users to switch over. That isn't too far of a stretch
for my imagination, seeing as N.YC has much higher comment quality and
community cohesion.

Second, if the TC users came here and destroyed the signal to noise ratio we
currently enjoy, he would have done them a disservice by recommending a web
site that was so quickly destroyed after they all discovered it. Of course,
few of them would likely realize that they, themselves, were the cause of the
downturn.

Clearly neither of those seem like they're going to happen, based on the
referral numbers that Paul posted so far, but it was a more feasible option
when I made my earlier post.

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ntoshev
Even if the community here is "diluted" with TC members, it is a net positive
effect for techcrunchers to get smarter people to talk with.

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kingnothing
Of course, that's only up to the point that the "smarter people" stop
tolerating the dilution and leave, thus leaving the TC members in the exact
same position as before.

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allenbrunson
you guys, relax. pg has been thinking long and hard about the newbie influx
problem for many months now. he saw what happened to reddit, and he's applying
his usual sensible approach to preventing that from happening here.

if anybody can do this, pg can.

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curi
why do you figure pg is amazingly good at this? he already banned me and rms
from voting. that doesn't seem to suggest great leadership skills.

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Hexstream
That doesn't seem to suggest anything at all, period.

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curi
Why do you say that? I think failing to get along peacefully with leaderboard
users is a bad sign.

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pg
All users are held to the same standards, whether they're on the leaderboard
or not.

Eventually the other users will get tired of you filling up the comment
threads with your private beefs, and you'll stop.

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curi
It's not a matter of different standards, it's a matter of: if you can't lead
active yc users, why would you be able to lead an influx of new reddit (or
techcrunch or whatever) users?

rms for example is apologetic and offered to do what you wanted. a new user
from reddit probably wouldn't do that. but despite this, you still lead in a
way that alienates rms.

in my case, i haven't apologized or offered to change my behavior because you
never notified me of doing something wrong or asked me to change any behavior.
that's bad leadership too. if you want me to follow some rules you have to
tell me.

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iamelgringo
Dude. The place for this discussion is not here. If you have a beef with PG,
use email. Nothing personal, but it doesn't make for great reading.

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curi
I don't think he'd enjoy that email, so I haven't sent it. He chose not to
contact me about this, presumably for a reason.

This, on the other hand, is a public thread where it's relevant to the topic
in the parent comments. I haven't asked pg to read this thread, so it's not my
problem if he chooses to.

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ghiotion
I'm not ready to pull a chicken little. I came over here from reddit after
seeing pg's post on trolls on the reddit front page. Some of the earliest
comments and/or posts I saw were of the "oh man, we're screwed now" type.
Obviously I can't speak from experience, but I have a hard time believing the
reddit crowd did HN a disservice. HN is just too darn... smart for the
majority of people. On the rare occasion when some stupid POS makes it to the
front page, the comment section more than makes up for it.

The community is too good to suffer fools gladly. And fools get bored easily.

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ojbyrne
So the obvious question is... how many sock puppet accounts does Arrington
already have here? He admitted to 5 at digg, I think. Sometimes I come here
first thing in the morning and it's 75% techcrunch.

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fortes
> Why? Because it’s focused mostly on startup and hacking news, which is what
> we cover. It’s one of the best places to find information on startups we
> haven’t heard about yet. And, better, the community is jerk-free. Comments
> are mostly helpful, thoughtful and interesting.

Hopefully the TC coverage doesn't change this ...

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Prrometheus
Hacker News is the Schrodinger blog. Techcrunch can’t observe it without
changing its state.

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jgamman
_ahem_ i think you mean Heisenberg's blog - Shcrodinger's blog would be all
blogs at the same time until you actually tried to read it - then the blog
wave function (a blavtion if you will) would collapse thus revealing the true
observed blog. which will almost certainly be a LOL cat. it may be alive or
dead - it's mileage has varied.

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hbien
Oh crap, here comes eternal sept.

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dhimes
HN is one of the very best sites on the web. In fact, it's probably one of the
best sites the web has ever had, at least for the tech/startup group. I have
confidence that the right people will find it and the others will be bored and
go away. It's actually kind of boring for flame wars. But great for news and
ideas.

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socratees
Hacker News is one of my favorite sites - i love it for the quality of the
content. Hope it doesn't go down because of the attention that it's getting
now.

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hooande
On one hand, I'm glad that arrington validated something I've believed for a
long time: news.yc is the best social news/network/app for people who are into
startups.

On the other hand, I do not want to see this place get overrun by ron paul
supporters and facebook fanboys. Where will all the cool people post news to
then? Maybe swen.yc?

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mrtron
Does HN have an issue with scalability? The site is tremendously slow from the
new influx.

How would you go about scaling an Arc app?

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kajecounterhack
"Little known?" Or is he getting confused and _really_ mean, "Different target
audience?"

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staunch
Hopefully we'll get to see the traffic spike chart from all this Techcrunch
traffic (PG? :D)

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eaken
hey man TC isn't that bad. You have to muddle through a lot of comments from
what seem to be the same trolls, but once in a while you find a gem of a
comment.

too bad there isn't a browser that can filter out comments from select people
... TC would then be much more insightful

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njetx
Gee, I registered only yesterday. I'm glad I made it before it became
mainstream!

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joeguilmette
ok, the word is out.

SHHHHHHH...

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DarrenStuart
oh well at least scoble didn't get a whiteboard out to explain how it works :p

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DarrenStuart
lol, no sense of humour I guess

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johnrob
Get ready for some LOL cats.

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moog
Let's ban everyone with < 10k karma!

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nikolaj
and news.yc jumps the shark....

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electric
So does this mean that Hacker News will soon be acquired by Google?

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Readmore
Hacker News gets Techcrunch'd and Arc falls to it's knees. Start your "Arc
can't scale as well as X" rants here
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133489>

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Caligula
I find it amusing people are 'upset' that HN got techcrunch'd with the story
being posted on TechCrunch. You should be ecstatic the TechCrunch editor
frequents this site so often as you would most likely sell your first born to
get featured on TechCrunch.

