

Hacker News - pg
http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

======
iamwil
I've been reading less of ycombo news lately since it was just mostly articles
on how to get VC funding and recent hoopla, and not really interesting things
on the edges/fringes of markets, society, and technology. Imo, those are what
you have to pay attention to, in order to have any type of gauge as to the
probable direction of the future.

I've submitted a share of "interesting" things, but they're usually drowned
out by "easy reading" Hopefully, the human editor factor will allow the
proposed indirect control of the swarm.

I've had some interesting discussions over at octonews--but it's a different
niche--hardware/sci/tech/health. I'd love it if yc.news is able to turn itself
into hacker news. I had missed the mid 2006 reddit, and hearing great insight
is often more valuable than the actual article itself. Not that how to fill
out a term sheet, analysis on facebook, or top ten things to get started on
your startup isn't interesting, but one can only take so much of that in the
last 3 months.

I cheer the new direction

~~~
vlad
I probably wasn't the only one who wasn't too sure about refocusing the site.
One negative is that for those of us outside the Silicon Valley or
YCombinator, it's possible that the articles and comments would focus more on
programming than startup advice. On the other hand, maybe it would be great to
refocus every 6 months. It would be a very unique idea. This is not to
disrespect what you've done--thank you for the articles, startup school, this
site, community, and ycombinator.

------
jsjenkins168
I like new name, but honestly dont think the content itself will change very
much. I've noticed most submissions are generally hacker-centric anyway,
although having the name of the site reflect this probably more accurately
hones the focus. I think generally the content being submitted will be a
reflection of the type of users using the site, regardless of the official
mission statement. Manually moderating only goes so far...

Considering that, I would personally like to see this site make a conscious
effort to remain "grass roots" rather than focus on growth. I love this forum
because of the relatively high concentration of smart people who post here. I
doest look like PG has any monetary objectives with this site (hence no ads),
so I think simple word of mouth between hackers rather than deliberate
promotion will keep content quality higher going forward.

The proposed rating system is brilliant.. I give props to whoever thought of
that one!

Edit: I just realized that the new weighted voting system could have an
unintended chilling effect on voting.. If smart users worry that placing a
vote might adversely affect their "vote weight" on a post deemed by the admins
as a dumb story, they might just refrain from doing so all together.

~~~
pretzel
I agree with the edit. A good system should be working smarter and more
pointedly. If you are already implementing a system that is smart enough to
detect if votes agree with a editors system, wouldn't it be better to just
detect if everyone else's votes agree with your own personal ones and then
show such things?

The whole notion of having an ivory tower that tries to shut itself off from
other people because they degrade conversation is like security through
obscurity. What this and reddit needs are a proper recommendation system,
which could be based on tagging. Reddit says they are going to do this, but
even then I don't imagine it will be an overly complicated tagging regime
(even though they are taking long enough to roll it out). Once you get into
basic tagging (eg just a number of strings) you really have a subset of an
ontology, so the next logical step is to build it into a big proper one like
freebase is doing, which has proper datatypes for each tag value, which can
then be other objects in a database. In this way articles can have a set of
tags, like a category, a rating of intellectualness, etc. These tags should be
modifiable and addable. People should be able to have different values that
reflect what they think of them. The tags that are most relevant should be
displayed. An article could have a quality value that some could rate highly,
and some poorly. Then the system, based on your own past tagging, can predict
what default value yours should have. It's much like the netflix challenge
(which is 80% solved), only its not just for one value of one tag, and the
values are more complicated.

Anyway, I've thought this through too much because I am half way to solving it
myself (hopefully!). We'll see if it works when I start pulling people away
from here :p

~~~
whacked_new
Similar system here.

If you're halfway through the task, that's significant work, assuming that
"half" inclues the AI. Does your tagging system work off a dictionary?

------
dfranke
Thanks. My productivity just went into a corner and shot itself.

------
darragjm
I look forward to seeing where this idea leads the site, but I do have one
suggestion...

While I'm interested in all things hackerly, I first started visiting this
site for tips and stories specifically about startups. My point being: while
most people here are all for changing the focus to anything hacker-related,
I'm sure there are many newcomers who are looking specifically for startup-
related info. Perhaps we can retain a sub-site, startup tag or filter that
will show only startup news for those people?

~~~
pg
If we manage to reproduce the sort of links reddit had in mid 2006, we'll have
plenty of startup related stuff mixed in.

~~~
darragjm
I'm sure there will too, but a feature that allows you to only view startup
news might be a welcome addition for the portion of news.yc visitors (which
I'm guessing is a majority) that come specifically for startup information. At
the very least it will differentiate the site from the likes of the MAKE blog,
hackszine, etc, which I'm sure will carry a lot of the same content.

------
henning
I've been wanting this for a long time.

programming.reddit is occasionally pretty good, but sometimes there's just
something interesting which isn't strictly programming per se. This fills that
gap perfectly.

also: "Most forums degrade over time, but we don't think that's inevitable."

it isn't, it just requires eternal vigilance on the part of
moderators/editors. the SomethingAwful forums are in the 10s of thousands and
they're still quality because of Lowtax's willingness to ban people.

~~~
whacked_new
Doesn't seem to be a very thoroughly thought-out move to me. It is inevitable
if current users are willing to compromise. And given the amount of gray-area,
I think they are.

Quality doesn't just vanish. It's eroded away like the hair cells in your ear.
When you realize it's gone it's not going to come back without clever
engineering.

So it's not just as simple as changing the name of a forum, declaring a shift
in the theme, that would move the forum in one direction or another. Unless
you have superusers and/or admins. The analogy is to slashdot, or to reddit.
Keeping the reddit-style system means increasing popularity leads, without a
doubt, scattered focus. Keeping the focus implies a shift in the current
moderation system (unless there are invisible superusers lurking around).

The flaw of forums is not in the rules, not the theme, not the users, but in
the system design. Change it, or compromise. Either way, whatever is written
so confidently on hackernews.html will not be as simple as "I decide it so."

The exception to my argument is if growth of userbase isn't a goal. I'm not
sure if that's the case here though.

------
rams
Paul, it would be good, if at this point, you make the Hacker News Karma rules
transparent. It would be good to have a page that explains how the Karma works
and the other rules as well. It was one of the most irritating things with
reddit, and the irritation only increased when they got sold ;-)

~~~
palish
The best way to get karma is to not care about getting karma. Just say what
you feel.

------
donna
Thanks for putting in the time and effort to express the site's intention. My
experience on YC News has been extremely satisfiing re tech and creativity
discussions.

------
nickb
Why is YCNews trying to be programming.reddit? I think there's plenty of
"Hacker News" websites out there and there's no
investor/entrepreneurship/startup news sites. The focus of the site will be
lost now :(

~~~
pg
Programming.reddit.com is mostly about programming. But that's not all hackers
are interested in.

~~~
nickb
So you're trying to be the next reddit.com since that's mostly what "hackers"
are interested in?

Also, the choice of the word "hacker" is horrible. Yes, I know the difference
between cracker and hacker but you ask anyone out there what a hacker is and
they'll tell you it's someone who "hacks websites and steals credit cards." To
change that perception is a next to impossible task. So, I'm sure we'll enjoy
a bunch of newbies coming here and asking how to "haxor" their friend's email
account.

I don't like this change one bit. Are you trying to increase the amount of
traffic on this site?

~~~
pg
We're trying to be the _previous_ reddit.com.

As for the word "hacker," there is no uncertainty about what it means among
hackers themselves. And our sense of the word is spreading, not contracting. I
saw a headline in the NYT a couple weeks ago that used "hack" in the good
sense.

~~~
nickb
Previous reddit lasted 3 months tops before it degraded into a lot of
nonsense. What makes you think that n.yc will last even that long before it
gets flooded with crap?

The whole appeal of this site was that you could spend 10 min reading top few
stories and you'd get a pretty good idea what's going on in the YC, VC, angel,
investment community. Now we'll have to spend tens of minutes weeding through
all kinds of topic that just waste your time.

Why not start a new website with this new theme? Since YC i a seed stage
investment firm, what exactly does "Hacker News" have to do with YC focus and
mantra focus?! It is a subdomain of an investment firm so the focus and
direction of n.yc really makes very little sense.

~~~
dfranke
Reddit held out longer than three months. I remember remarking to spez during
Startup School '06 that I had noticed a recent, slight downtrend in quality.
That was around the time that random photographs started appearing on the
front page, and a couple weeks after the famous "Paul Graham Eats Breakfast"
post. But it was far from nonsense then: the majority of front page content
was still excellent. Reddit launched in late summer '05, so that's at least 8
months that it held out.

------
mattculbreth
This is good, I think. If it avoids the problems that Reddit ran into it's
wicked cool.

However, doesn't this go away from the ideas of the social network, user-
driven, "wisdom of crowds"? Do you have the problem now of the group not
choosing which stories are good vs. which are agreeable to the human editors?

~~~
eposts
Yes from the write up it seems to be moving from "wisdom of crowds" to "wisdom
of AI". The editors will be "training" the system to recognize a good story.
PG is probably hoping that one day the system will be able to tell a good
story from a bad one without any help from editors.

~~~
euccastro
That 'training' thing might have been more metaphorical than that..

------
vlad
I don't think you mentioned the number one reason why you did this... to reach
out to programmers in general and then trick them into wanting to do a startup
via peer pressure, so we have more founders and you have more options to
invest in. ;)

------
trekker7
Awesome move. One thing I always missed on early reddit and Startup News was
Slashdot's comment-tagging system; comments are not only voted up and down but
tagged with "interesting", "funny", "insightful", etc. Also, there's an
absolute score on Slashdot comments (1 -> 5) so it's easy to see off-hand what
the really good comments are.

In general, my point is that on social news sites, the comments are often
_just_ as interesting as the stories themselves. This is why (at least I
think) Slashdot is so great. More software and techniques to organize and
enhance comment browsing would be really cool.

------
runningskull
You are absolutely right about hackers caring about other things than
business, but we already have a hundred places to get all that information
online. The reason I liked this site is that it had a purpose: to provide news
about startups. With a focus like that, the site is unlikely to ever go the
route of reddit (the internet version of chain letters and "my dad can beat up
your dad").

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE change it back. If you want to launch another site for
hacker news, I'll be the first to subscribe, but PLEASE give us back startup
news!

------
vegashacker
Will we be able to see our "voting power" number? I'm assuming no.

~~~
palish
Well, we'll either be seeing floating-point karma, or we just won't see story
and comment karma increase anymore when we upvote them if we have a < 1 vote
weight.

~~~
vegashacker
Ah, good point. We can just look and see what happens when we upvote a story.
Unless, of course, voting power varies based on the popularity of a story --
then it's more complicated.

------
dood
Thinking aloud:

Something about the idea of oracles makes me recoil. The obvious problem is
that this approach may reinforce groupthink, both algorithmically and
socially. And groupthink is already a considerable problem in these sort of
systems. But then... this solution almost represents an acceptance of the
inevitability of groupthink, kind of an attempt to steer the groupthink. Hmm.
Perhaps this method would work best by working specifically with edge-cases -
the best and worst posts, gently massaging out the toxic before it gets a
chance to grow roots. It may not even be necessary to include good posts,
since the actual problem to be solved is keeping out the crap.

But I am excited to see this kind of community flourish again, whatever shape
it takes!

~~~
jsmcgd
I'm also wincing slightly at the thought of oracles. Could it not be
sufficient just to clearly define scope and quality standards and let the
current karma system do its thing? Regardless, I'm loving the new direction.

------
vikram
I can't doubt the motives. But I have a theory on why some days there isn't
much to read and why reddit had great links in 2006.

At that time people put the best of their bookmarks on reddit. Later there
wasn't much good content left in the stash. IMO link submissions are unlikely
to change. No matter what you do.

I think one way we can have interesting dialog on the site is by asking really
good starting questions. Most questions so far have been about asking for
feedback. Which are interesting for the people asking for feedback and the
people giving feedback, but not that great for the rest.

------
Jd
Love the idea. Very curious to see how it will play out.

One concern is that the trolls will upmod all stories that are already
upmodded (for instance, automatically upmodding all comments and links posted
by PG) in order to increase their vote's worth. One observes similar things on
reddit already. It is much easier psychologically to jump on a trend than to
do something truly interesting, but the truly interesting and innovative is
rarely awarded immediately with recognition.

~~~
palish
That's fixed by scaling the vote weight offset by how popular a story is. That
is, the first voters on a new story are scaled more than the later voters.
Voting on pg's comments and stories probably shouldn't affect vote weight, for
the same reason he's not on the leaderboard.

~~~
Jd
Yes, you're right. I was thinking the same thing this afternoon as I was
driving around.

However, one problem that continues to present itself is the cumulative nature
of karma accretion. Only if there is a completely separate scaling mechanism
which determines vote weight independent of karma could be this avoided.

Otherwise even if an upmodder gets less for voting up PG (or Nostra) stories,
they still get something.

~~~
palish
That isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. It means they're participating in
YC news.

Besides, I bet the vote weight curve isn't linear.. It's probably logarithmic,
so you'll see diminishing returns.

The real question to ask is, "Why would people want a large vote weight?" The
only malicious reason is to get something meaningless to the frontpage really
quickly. But that will still render them powerless immediately if it's flagged
as nonsense.

Besides, at least one other person will still have to agree with you to get it
to the front page. This sort of guard is to prevent your votes from getting
things to the front page if you upvote nonsense.

------
eposts
"We're going to have a group of human editors who train the system in what
counts as a good story"

A knowledge based system - I am eagerly awaiting the new voting system.

------
blats
Yep, the stories are already much more interesting. I just blew an hour when I
only sat down to check my email. Great. Guess I'm going to have to call in
hacker to work.

------
brett
Well, the name change at least totally ruins the effect of my animating the
site title: <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=crapface>

Also the rest of the menu did not disappear before. And you've already closed
the hole so I can't fix it.

------
mojuba
I'm glad Reddit is back - well, in a way. And thanks to the Hacker News team.

~~~
eposts
slashdot -> reddit -> programming.reddit -> hacker news -> ???

~~~
dfranke
I actually started reading /. again a while back. The quality of the
discussion there has gone up quite a bit ever since the kiddies and trolls
defected to Digg and Reddit.

~~~
Elfan
The breadth of people who read slashdot is still an advantage I have not seen
duplicated elsewhere. There are many sites where programming stories will be
comented on by programmers. There are not so many where particle physics
stories are commented on by particle physicists.

------
palish
Random thought: this shows the importance of choosing good names. If they had
called it "startup.ycombinator.com" to start then they couldn't rename it to
"hacker news" now. Same is true in programming.

------
aston
Cool. Who are these oracles judging good vs. bad stories going to be?

~~~
pg
I don't know if they'd want to be outed, but as you might expect I'll be one
of them.

~~~
ivankirigin
You've just created a way for people to game the system. Presumably, you'll
submit stories you think are appropriate. Upmodding stories you submit will
increase the power of the modder's vote. Avoid revealing the other oracles.

~~~
bigidea
Since everyone will have weighted voting power, all you will have to do anyway
to game the system is upvote anything with a lot of votes. Steadily build up
your karma with this bandwagon method, and then _bam_ spring some ad-infested
blog spam upon everyone.

~~~
rms
This can be accounted for by giving more weight to those who vote for a story
early in its accumulation of points. The biggest voting power boost is given
to someone who gives a story its first point.

------
Keios
Glad you expanded, now I can read some more interesting stuff...

------
ivankirigin
This sounds like something I would pay attention to even more than news.yc.
Awesome.

I especially love the innovative karma policy.

------
inchforward
What is a slashdotting from Hacker News called?

~~~
dfranke
A web server that isn't very powerful.

------
Readmore
So I should find the stories that PG votes up and then vote them up so I get a
'louder voice'? Sounds good to me ;)

------
byrneseyeview
How mean is "mean"?

Would the new news.yc ban richardkulisz or pica (assuming they both stayed on
topic)?

~~~
pg
Pica's comments on reddit seem to be invisible, so I can't say, but
richardkulisz, definitely. His comments are loaded with ad hominems.

~~~
byrneseyeview
She's deleted them recently. Google Reader still has them, so:

"Although criminals harm society, and slaves are seeking freedom, from the
point of the criminal or slave (who is a criminal, de jure, for running away),
the outcome is the same: very negative feedback.

You mention "the value pyramid". I don't see that: if you get caught and
"massa" cuts your big toes off, you are back where you started, plus a
whipping and minus your big toes.

You'll be gimping around for a long time after that.

The only good thing is that at that point, you can't be sold off to work in
the rice. But that's about it; you are pretty screwed.

The only way it works is if you've got a chance of getting away. Then it could
be worth it. As most slaves had no chance of getting away, they were nuts to
do it."

There's a racist crack, and a very unpopular viewpoint, but as far as I know
she's actually debating ideas, not just baiting people.

Is this kind of thing acceptable?

------
ahsonwardak
It's always useful to change it up a little bit. It'll give it some new life.

------
thomasswift
I feel cooler reading 'Hacker News', but where are the hacks?

------
mhartl
This is great (hacker) news. Thanks!

------
rms
Thanks Paul.

------
edu
sweet news.

