
Ask HN: How Can I Make Better Submissions to HN? - tokenadult
I just saw a comment by pg reminding another commenter of the HN guidelines.<p>http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html<p>This seems like an opportune time to ask how I might implement the guidelines quoted below:<p>"What to Submit<p>"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.<p>"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."<p>I've read most of pg's essays<p>http://paulgraham.com/articles.html<p>over the years, so I have some sense of his intellectual interests, and I remember the very early phase of Reddit (which I think was seeded with participants by a bunch of personal friends of pg and the Reddit founders). But please inform me so I do better. I can see empirically which links and which "Ask HN" posts get upvoted the most, but which links and which Ask HN posts are the ones you would most like to see? What posts that gratify intellectual curiosity should there be more of?<p>Still learning at age fifty,
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pg
Boy, I wish someone had asked this before.

The best posts are ones that say something surprising (e.g. not just a
reporter writing a routine story about a familiar topic), and say it in a
convincing way, with depth of argument, and numbers, if applicable.

Posts about how to do things oneself, and how things work, tend to be
particularly appreciated. This is an audience that likes to know the details.

Posts don't have to be about hacking, so long as they talk in detail about
something novel or surprising. Though arguably anything that talks about the
internal details of how something works _is_ about hacking, in the broader
sense.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411994>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406885>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418776>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414330>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418329>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414226>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414502>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418098>

~~~
snprbob86
Three of those links were a different color because they were not in my
browser history. I immediately middle-clicked each of them.

~~~
patio11
Holy cow -- middle clicking opens in a new tab?! I love you.

~~~
randomwalker
My first thought on reading that was, "some people don't know that?!"

My immediate next thought was, "I wonder what obvious things _I_ don't know
that might save me countless hours."

Is there a wiki for this sort of thing? There needs to be one.

~~~
ivankirigin
apple-shift-t reopens closed tabs in firefox

~~~
mark_h
You are my hero.

I presume that's built in? I've been using TMP to get the same functionality,
but it uses F12 which gets swallowed by firebug if you have that enabled.

~~~
ivankirigin
heh. Funny thing is that I post or tweet this about once a week. It's my pet
project to tell more people about this.

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swombat
I find most of the content on HN great - have a look at the front page now,
it's largely balanced and good. The list pg posted is also spot on.

My only qualm is with articles like 90% of those on
<http://www.reddit.com/r/politics> and <http://www.reddit.com/r/business> . I
believe that if we don't keep a watchful eye on things, HN will turn into
something similarly intelligence-free and I'd hate to see that happen.

~~~
ojbyrne
I think the fundamental difference is that there's no real effort here to
appeal to a wider audience. In fact there seem to be some things done (lack of
a "fancy" design for starters) to discourage that.

------
raju
IMO HN sees hackers with a wide range of interests. I personally like to read
anything that tickles my intellectual curiosity, from programming topics, to
articles covering the current financial crisis (of which I know very little,
BTW :D) [Needless to say every now and then I come across an article that
introduced me to a topic that I knew nothing of, and it has subsequently found
itself on my "like" list]

Right now as I write this the top 3 articles on HN cover how to load a plan,
an article on the current financial debacle, and the highly optimized square
root calculation used by the makers of Quake. I read all three, and upvoted
all three (did not comment on any).

IMO I would not worry about what articles other hackers find interesting, post
those that _you_ do. The voting process will separate the wheat from the
chaff.

After that long response, personally, I tend to like to read about the new
language/technology that I have currently immersed myself in, but I tend not
to post all the articles that I read to avoid making HN a
www.reddit.com/r/<insert language here> clone.

I think for the most part, submit what you feel is interesting, and every now
and then a comment will tell you that you messed up (I know I have had a few,
and have apologized for the same).

Happy Posting...

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Mystalic
Anything that's intellectually stimulating to entrepreneurs and hackers. 99.9%
of the people who visit Hacker News are in one or both categories.

Problem solving? Ground-breaking tech news? News about YCombinator start-ups?
Better development methods? Ways to raise funds? Ideas that grate against the
system?

Bring them on.

------
danw
Submit stuff that interests you with a title. If the community agrees it'll
also get upvoted, if not no harm. Unless you're flooding the new page, which
can happen accidentally sometimes.

------
Tichy
Assume that you are a hacker, then submit stuff that interests you?

~~~
tokenadult
I think it would be fair to say that I am not a hacker, although my oldest son
aspires to be a hacker. So some of my bias in what I find interesting to post
here is

a) what is good groundwork-laying information for a YOUNG hacker?

or

b) what contributes to a broad, complete education for hackers of any age?

~~~
silentbicycle
He might like David Macaulay's _The Way Things Work_ (
<http://www.amazon.com/New-Way-Things-Work/dp/0395938473/> ).

Also, libraries in general, including university libraries. Some books on
homeschooling (such as Grace Llewellyn's _Teenage Liberation Handbook_) are
full of pointers for self-study.

~~~
tokenadult
Yes, Macaulay's _The Way Things Work_ is a wonderful book. He's a little bit
older than I think you may have guessed he is. His younger siblings like that
book too.

Libraries in general are where I spend much of my life. I definitely like to
bring all my children to libraries at every opportunity. Thanks for mentioning
The Teenage Liberation Handbook in your reply. Some older hackers may find
that very interesting as a way to hack getting an education.

~~~
silentbicycle
Sure thing. Focus on nurturing the desire to keep learning, rather than
whatever specific, short term interests their variety of "hacking" implies.

