

Why Y Combinator’s Hacker News Is Flawed - jhuckestein
http://thezukunft.com/2010/02/24/4-fixable-reasons-ycombinators-vc-hacker-news-flawed/

======
cjoh
None of these "flaws" are actually flaws.

That's not to say HN doesn't have flaws. But these aren't the droids you're
looking for.

The droids you're looking for have to do with solving the problem of growing a
community and keeping it intelligent. Inevitably, the tyranny of the majority
will prevail, people will leave HN and go to some place smaller and newer, as
did those who came here from reddit who came here from digg who came here from
slashdot who came here from John Carmack's .plan file.

~~~
Sukotto
I disagree. I found him pretty much dead on with regards to the things I find
annoying about this site.

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moe
I'm ambivalent about his points. What annoys _me_ are two different, purely
technical flaws:

1\. Comment formatting is too limited. I want multi-level quoting and lists.

2\. Unknown or expired link.

------
IsaacL
1\. It takes only 1 hour for a post to disappear from the “New” page.

Inevitable for a news site.

2\. The Point system sets the wrong incentives Most people seem to be in it
for the points.

This could happen, but I haven't seen many signs of it. Personally, I try to
avoid making comments that might get a negative karma score, but I don't much
care how high a positive score I get. IMO The points system works well; I
especially like the way that negative karma posts are 'named and shamed'.

3\. There is no way to search

This is a reasonable point.

4\. Using HN as a discussion forum doesn’t work.

Ask and Tell HN threads appear frequently, so this doesn't seem to be a
problem. And I find the discussions on HN to be excellent.

5\. There is no way to revive old discussions

IMO, this is a good thing for HN. It prevents it turning into a traditional
web forum - not that web forums are a bad thing, they just tend to be more
insular, and there's more of a split between regulars and newcomers.

~~~
viraptor
5 is also a very nice feature that allows never-ending fights known from
forums to die. There's no way to bring back some old rant by replying "You're
wrong!". Unfortunately that happens on mailing lists and forums quite a lot.

Otherwise I can imagine the front page would consist of "git vs hg", "dvorak
vs qwerty", "python vs ruby", "nosql vs rdbms", "lisp vs everything", ...

------
JayNeely
Voting on features on the HN Feature Requests page is the best way to get
action taken: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363>

For searching HN, <http://searchyc.com> is a fantastic service, much better
than the HN Search linked at the very bottom of HN.

If you're interested in more discussion with startup folks / if you find that
Ask HN posts are usually your favorite, you may also enjoy:
<http://answers.onstartups.com>

~~~
eru
About searching: Interestingly Google loves HN. At least I when I search for
stuff that is mentioned in the comments, I often get the very comment as a
search result.

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tptacek
I think the fact that conversations go stale quickly is a feature. It keeps
things from becoming too unproductive, and makes "the last word" in a debate
arbitrary.

If you want to continue a discussion that has gone stale, you write a new blog
post about it and post it. Discussion continues.

~~~
jhuckestein
Point taken. But still, as a data-mining person (yes, shame on me), it feels
like a lot of information and opinions that have ben created by some of the
smartest guys around the internet are discarded of.

Maybe a best-of page would help collecting really thoughtful, long and well-
crafted comments on a subject?

~~~
scott_s
<http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments>

Old comments don't go anywhere. They're still here, and are searchable via
Google or searchyc.

------
synnik
Maybe I just have a different perspective -- I think of HN as online "hallway
discussions". None of his points are flaws under this perspective...

~~~
jhuckestein
That's true, but if you keep meeting smart people in the hall, maybe you would
like to start a more substantial discussion with them. This is currently not
directly achievable (except for writing blog posts back and forth)

------
wakeupthedawn
This site times out more than any other site I visit regularly. I wish they
would fix that first.

~~~
seiji
HN is written in the 100-year programming language Arc using the first
Unlimited Scalability tactic of keeping everything stored as serialized hash
tables. Any performance problems you may experience are due to your lack of
ability to perceive perfection.

~~~
jhuckestein
I think most distributed "unlimited scalability" databases (S3, Google
bigTable) are (essentially) serialized hash tables.

------
mdg
Is this his <http://twittershouldhireme.com> attempt at YC ?

