
Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018 - craigcannon
https://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-highlights-august-to-november-2018/
======
citilife
My personal favorite (which I was involved in), was people willing to openly
test one my applications:

[https://twitter.com/AustinGWalters/status/104189476543920128...](https://twitter.com/AustinGWalters/status/1041894765439201281)

It was fun / exciting to see it work, plus from all the emails I got there was
a lot of interest. I personally enjoy the collaborative nature of Hacker News,
although these posts are also interesting and highlight the breadth of
knowledge here.

From the list in the post, my personal favorite was meeting Rick Jay:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18555353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18555353)

~~~
gkoberger
For anyone else who couldn't figure out what's going on, the context is that
the app he built ([https://hnprofile.com/](https://hnprofile.com/)) has a
disabled (for privacy reasons) feature that can figure out alternate HN
accounts based on speech patterns.

Here's the link to the comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981)

------
slg
This is great. I have never seen this posted before on HN so I did a search
and saw these have been put together sporadically for at least the last three
years with seemingly little engagement. I wonder why that is. These posts
highlight some of the best things about this website/community. I would love
to see them more often or have them receive more promotion.

~~~
smacktoward
If engagement is the priority, my suggestion would be to build this curation
into HN itself instead of using a post on a separate blog. Give the admins a
way to tag a comment as highlighted, then present those comments in some
visually distinct way and add a link to the nav that jumps you to a list of
all highlighted comments.

~~~
brianpan
After reading the post, I feel like maybe not everything needs to be optimized
for well-defined priorities. :)

------
rolleiflex
I did not intend to read this from beginning to the end. Talk about a sticky
article.

Consider quoting the text directly though. Making images of text is probably
the most inaccessible thing imaginable. Should take less than a hundred lines
of CSS to create a believable HN container in a div.

~~~
alehul
If you click on the images, it'll open to the actual comment in text form.

While load times for images are worse, this format provides some handy
advantages, namely the ability to look through that thread and see more
context, read the related article, etc.

~~~
bigiain
No advantages that a css/html rendered version of the same thing doesn't have,
with the loss of accessibility that you'd get using the alternative approach.

This is just "the easy way out". Justifying it otherwise is wrong, in my
opinion...

~~~
zerealshadowban
This would be an easy thing to do and everyday occurrence if we had proper,
first-class-citizen transclusion [1] mechanisms as part of the Web standards
and their implementations.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion#History_and_imple...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion#History_and_implementation_by_Project_Xanadu)

------
temp71863295
Hacker News generates a list of “best comments” that updates based on the rank
and age of the comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments](https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments)

------
yread
These are great. I also try to collect interesting discussions and comments at
[https://www.reddit.com/r/HNDepthHub](https://www.reddit.com/r/HNDepthHub)

I would appreciate other contributors.

~~~
exist
This is great. Thank you.

------
morley
I really like the concept of this article and would love to see this
quarterly, bi-monthly, or monthly!

I also would prefer if the comment text were rendered in actual text instead
of screenshots, as the low resolution is really obvious. Hope true text makes
it into the next one of these.

~~~
l33tbro
Tap/click the rendered text and it will link to the original text post.

------
rmason
Thank you so much for doing this for the community. I recognized a few
comments that I'd read previously but a lot of them were new. I can't read
everything simply because I've got lines of code to write in between multiple
visits to HN daily!

~~~
csunbird
I'm surprised that I could recall reading some of the comments :)

------
raihansaputra
I kinda did the same with all of my favorite comments (not including
screenshots on my desktop/my phone) and compiled what should be a pretty good
guide for me. But if I have to put another quote in: It's hard to act
according to my knowledge/thinking. [https://raihansaputra.com/hn-
wisdom/](https://raihansaputra.com/hn-wisdom/)

------
kreetx
I probably get downvoted to hell for this, but: although the picks were
interesting I didn't think they were as good for making it worth putting a
list together. Looking at hn front page and checking through the comments I
find something on similar excitement levels perhaps every third day.

Don't mean to discourage the authors, simply saying how I felt.

~~~
fhood
A lot of these comments were from people with incredible first hand experience
of the topic at hand. The crash bandicoot dev for instance. These kind of
comments do crop up from time to time, but I really enjoyed having them in a
single condensed place, as I ended up missing the majority of them in the
wild.

------
veddox
The computer-crashing portfolio comment was hilarious! (Hadn't seen that one
myself.)

They didn't pick the best comment from the thread on bad codebases, but that
whole discussion was ... enlightening.

------
Beltiras
Instead of screenshotting, I'd love it if HN comments were embeddable like
social media posts. Wouldn't it be a minimal project to extend the HN codebase
for it?

------
hirundo
It'd be nice if Hacker News had automated pages that showed the most upvoted
and the most voted (up or down) comments for {time period}.

~~~
temp71863295
Hacker News does have a dynamically updated page for the “best comments”:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18603578](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18603578)

------
aresant
Format of the screenshots reminded me a lot of embedded Twitter posts - would
love to see embeddable HN comments :)

------
Dowwie
I appreciate a curated list such as this. Only a few were items were familiar
to me.

------
qznc
Nobody made some Advent of HN with the 24 best links of the year?

------
new_here
This self gratification is a bit distasteful.

------
TACIXAT
These would be cool if the comments were embedded to make the page more
accessible, rather than just screenshots (granted, there are links).

------
gist
> Here are some of our favorite Hacker News comments

a) Who is 'our'? And why is HN typically opaque like this? [1]

b) Why are they some of your favorite comments? Reasons?

[1] As I have noted in the past in comments I have made the mods don't even
say they are mods. It's like a secret society where you have to figure it out
over time or be clued in. Example dang's profile [2] doesn't say he is a mod.
Even PG's profile said 'bug fixer'. [3]

Why have people infer the relationship. What's preventing anyone from coming
up with a handle and the acting like a mod?

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg)

~~~
sctb
a) For this one, it's just an opaque Y Combinator. A highlights post is about
the highlights.

b) 'Cause we thought they were interesting. Don't you think some of these are
interesting?

> _Why have people infer the relationship._

'Cause _It 's like a secret society where you have to figure it out over time
or be clued in._

> _What 's preventing anyone from coming up with a handle and the acting like
> a mod?_

Nothing! It's a community site, and communities can function surprisingly well
without too much ceremony.

~~~
gist
> Don't you think some of these are interesting?

Because there is so much that someone can read it is usually helpful to have
additional information so you can decide if it's worth reading.

Now I am not a Bill Gates fan in any way, and I am not saying you should go
into the depth that he does, but as an example look at what he does when he
recommends a book. He doesn't just say 'this is something I find interesting'.

[https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Educated](https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Educated)

> 'Cause It's like a secret society where you have to figure it out over time
> or be clued in.

Hah well this thinking is similar to, say, Twitter which on purpose makes
things difficult for the ordinary man and the beginner. Will note that Apple
took a different attitude with the iphone in 2007 and we know how that ended
up.

So sure why not be more welcoming to newcomers?

~~~
sctb
> _Because there is so much that someone can read it is usually helpful to
> have additional information so you can decide if it 's worth reading._

I think the intention is for the one-line description to let the reader know
what they're getting into. At some point you just have to take the plunge and
read the one-or-two-paragraph comment and let the chips fall where they may.

> _So sure why not be more welcoming to newcomers?_

We definitely want to be welcoming! That's one reason we don't wave a big mod
flag around and instead use our own language to communicate what needs to be
communicated. Hacker News isn't a product like Twitter or an iPhone. It's not
a fancy thing like that—we're just trying to have interesting discussions.

------
vtesucks
Also needs mention: N-gate.com

------
ratsimihah
re The Shipping Forecast: people actually have to leave London because of
Brexit? O_o

~~~
shrikant
The Conservative government's "hostile environment" host of policies and
rhetoric can be quite distasteful to immigrants just trying to live and work
in the UK.

~~~
ratsimihah
I wasn't aware. I came to work in London a year ago and at our company it's
like nothing ever happened, which might change I guess.

