
The frontpage with a threshold of 100 points - pg
http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100
======
andrewljohnson
Not that this type of experiment is bad, but why is the UI so completely
neglected? Is this a matter of thinking it's not important, because it's not
fun work, or because it can all be customized with grease monkeys? Or what?

I think the quality of stories on HN is pretty good. What I'd much prefer to
see any amount of attention given to is things like:

1) Let me take back a vote. Particularly on mobile, I misclick those tiny
arrows a lot.

2) Let me comment inline. Having other comments, besides the parent around for
examination while commenting would probably help overall comment quality.

3) Fix the mobile interface. It's impossible to use HN on mobile iPhone and
Android handhelds. Making a slightly modified styled sheet with JavaScript is
trivial.

4) Support someone making an app, or commission one. As far as I can tell, the
current HN apps are all kind of buggy and have little updating. There are lots
of young neophytes who'd love to work on this, particularly if sanctioned, and
a funded effort would lead to a better product.

These basic UI improvements don't even seem to be on the radar. Also, I'll
add, the story-killing on this site is pretty heavy-handed, yet capricious.
Same with the title-editing. What constitutes a "hacker-centric" story changes
with the mood of the moderators, and the tendency to just change each title to
the original headline is misguided. I also think that the special privileges
given to YC companies corrupts the whole system.

If there were any other community like this, people would be driven away by
the neglected UI and the Star Chamber that governs the content. But there
isn't, so there's no pressure to do anything but midnight HN science
experiments. I should just pray for some competition I guess...

~~~
pg
_why is the UI so completely neglected?_

Because when I spend time on HN my top priority is features that will make the
content better. I believe that matches the priorities of the users-- that
users would rather use a site with good stories and comments and a primitive
UI than one with a slick UI and worse stories and comments. And time is a
zero-sum game. Spending more time on UI = spending less on quality.

The focus on content quality above all is the reason you find yourself saying
later "If there were any other community like this..."

You're simply wrong about the moderation. Nearly every story that gets killed
is either autokilled, or a dup, or flagged to death by users. I would guess
moderators manually kill less than 10 non-dup stories a day. You're also wrong
that YC cos get special privileges.

~~~
andrewljohnson
1) I could accept I'm wrong about stories being killed by humans, but I know
the titles get edited by humans. I remember one story I posted about some
really ancient, accurate maps, and I made the title something like "Accurate
maps from the 1500s unearthed." And then some moderator made it the story
headline instead "Named building in DC hosts map show" or something equally
uninformative.

2) I'm positive YC companies get at least one special privilege - the ability
to post jobs.

3) I've been told YC accounts are excluded from anti-spam measures, but I
can't prove it.

EDIT: Also, regarding the zero-sum-game argument. All of us developers know we
have limited time to spend on things. But a HUGE change to a non-priority that
takes almost no time (for example improving the CSS on mobile) should be
squeezed in between these experiments that may or may not make the content
better, and take hours.

~~~
tptacek
I like the UI. I know it's hard for some to believe, but it's stark and
functional and fast and mostly stays out of the way; it works. The comment
scores need to be hidden for comments you didn't write; other than that,
what's to improve? Taking back votes? How about, just forget about the vote.

If HN has a problem with titles, it's with _not enough_ stores having their
titles rewritten to the article original.

~~~
dionidium
_The comment scores need to be hidden for comments you didn't write_

People keep saying this, but it would severely limit the utility of the site.
When I chance upon a post with more than ~50 comments, I only want to read the
6-7 or so that the community has agreed are best. I perceive a positive
correlation between comment scores and quality. That is, the odds that a post
with 50 points contains good content do empirically seem to be higher than for
posts with 2 points.

In short: I need a comment filter that is more strict than than simply
"appears on Hacker News". I don't want to read every single one.

~~~
tptacek
Comments are sorted based in part on votes. That's fine. The system we have
now isn't picking out the best comments; it's picking out my comments.

~~~
alexophile
I like using votes to determine whether or not it's worth devling into a deep
thread. If there's a conversation that goes 5 levels deep, you can just scan
the bottom layers - if they're getting votes, then it's likely to be a
worthwhile conversation.

Similarly, if there's a bunch of responses with a score of 1 with replies
forking off all over the place, having a visible score lets you catch that at-
a-glance and avoid bothering with a conversation that is clearly digressing.

------
_delirium
Any chance of a ranged version, like "over 5, but under 200"? For some reason,
while upvoted stories are mostly good, the _most_ upvoted stories less often
interest me, since they seem to be disproportionately about politics,
business, self-help/motivation, or some sort of drama. This list is almost a
perfect list of stories I'd like to filter out:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/best> (ok, there's some good stuff in there too,
but it's not bad as a heuristic).

~~~
xenophanes
plus stuff with 500 points stays on the list longer, can get too stale

~~~
listic
No, articles get deprecated quite soon anyway. Try substituting 100 for 500 in
the URL: you only get 1 article currently.

~~~
xenophanes
You're wrong and that test is misleading.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=200>

I'm seeing 380 points, 11 days old is ahead of 205 points and 4 days old.

------
gcv
While this is a really, really tempting front page, won't this just encourage
groupthink? HN doesn't suffer from this as much it might, but it has its
share. In addition, interesting stories languish unnoticed on /newest all the
time, and if enough people switch to an >100 front page, articles with just
5-10 points have an even smaller chance of being noticed.

pg, I'm sure you considered this problem; could you talk a bit about your
thinking behind this filter?

~~~
pg
_could you talk a bit about your thinking behind this filter?_

"A lot of people have asked for it. It would be easy to write. Let's try it
and see what happens."

~~~
netcan
Do you have some sort of pre-existing test for whether or not a feature is
good at the time you implement it. Some way of knowing if it's good.

------
ary
This has probably been suggested before, but can we just get rid of the points
display (story, comment, & user) altogether? The automated sorting on this
data has always been enough for me, and I can't think of a reason why any of
us needs to know the exact point total of any of these things (except maybe
karma).

I suppose there are some out there that would like to know an individual
user's karma as a quick indicator of worthiness for X. Aside from this I'd be
thrilled to see the number games and measuring sticks go away.

~~~
tomn
This doesn't really work, because things with high points can be anywhere on
the page after they've stopped getting votes -- if you look at the front page,
the stories aren't in point order by any means.

Although this would be bad for the community (people need to see the low-point
articles for them to get voted on), you could have a page that sorts all
stories by number of points, and allows you to remove them either by clicking
on them, or marking them as uninteresting. It would solve the 'problem' of
missing articles when I'm away at least.

I guess you could have some kind of mix of new and highly voted articles,
which could be interesting?

------
Encosia
Of course, if many people used that threshold, almost no story would ever
reach 100 points in the first place.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
This, to me, seems to be the dilemma. The more features like this there are,
filtering the input so we only see the "good stuff", the fewer eyes there are
on the new submissions, and so the greater the chance that really some
excellent submissions will never be seen.

More and more we're suggesting that people look at the "newest" page instead
of just the "news" page to try to make sure that good submissions get their
chance, and bad submissions get flagged, and yet here's another facility to
take people away from the "newest" page.

Don't get me wrong, I think this is a great facility, and I'm pretty sure I'll
be using it on occasion, but I'll also hang out on the "newest" page, because
that's where the genuinely interesting stuff appears, often getting no
upvotes, because it was never seen.

~~~
mooism2
Maybe "front-page-with-100-points" is the sort of place newbies should be
encouraged to check, and mainly more established users should be encouraged to
check "newest".

------
Groxx
Doesn't seem precise...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=489> (489) doesn't see a thread with
490 points, but <http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=484> (484) does.
Caching? Rounding? Thread in question:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1990498>

Still, awesome, many thanks! Especially because it drags up a bunch of good-
but-older entries that I may have missed.

~~~
pg
Oops, that was a bug; fixed.

~~~
swah
See, static typing won't help you there!

~~~
Groxx
I totally got a "where is your god now?!"[1] vibe from this.

[1]: [http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/11/24/where-is-your-
dog-n...](http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/11/24/where-is-your-dog-now/)

------
resdirector
I'd like an option alongside noprocrast and showdead:

* hidekarma

For your view only, it hides the karma in the top right, and hides the number
of points next to each article and comment.

I, personally, find karma to be a distraction...I'm not afraid to admit that I
subconsciously check my karma score every time I log in, and _very_
occasionally catch myself "karma whoring"...that is, writing comments or
submitting articles in a way that will improve my karma, instead of
concentrating on writing something intelligent (yes, they should be the same,
but they're not).

------
swah
<http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=9000>

~~~
pg
Getting no results from over doesn't mean there haven't been any items with
that many points (though in fact there haven't been any with 9000 points).
Over doesn't pull stuff off disk. It just applies a stricter filter to the
pool of recent stories from which the frontpage is generated.

~~~
warp
I assume swah wasn't expecting any results, it is most likely a reference to
<http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-over-9000> .

------
jeffmiller
Twitter feed with a threshold of 100 points: <http://twitter.com/newsyc100>

~~~
eneveu
Twitter feed is nice, but the RSS feed is a lot more useful IMO (
<http://feeds.feedburner.com/newsyc100> ).

When I first saw your post ( [http://jeffmiller.github.com/2010/07/23/a-cure-
for-hacker-ne...](http://jeffmiller.github.com/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-
news-overload) ), I missed the RSS feed links, and started looking for ways to
convert a twitter feed to an RSS feed (I use Google Reader)... But then I saw
the light :)

By the way, thanks a lot for making this, Jeff. I've been using your feeds
almost daily since August. I used to spend a lot of time scanning the /best
page for unread articles. No more!

------
blehn
Is it just me, or have the front page point totals exploded in the last few
months?

pg — care to share any traffic data?

~~~
petercooper
I've also noticed this. Seemed to be between September-November to me. Links
fly off of the first page of /new a lot quicker than before and I've seen a
lot of good ones get no further than 2 or 3 points - it's a crapshoot when you
submit something now. I've also had a lot more people contact me with "check
out this post" type stuff.

~~~
ww520
One of the purposes of Previous Look is to capture the fast changing content
of a webpage like /new so that past content can be reviewed quickly. For now
<http://www.previouslook.com/hnews/new> has an 15-minute interval snapshot
window, which seems to be enough to not miss anything.

~~~
petercooper
I like it, though I might stick to the version I developed two months ago -
<http://hackerslide.com/> \- as I prefer HN's natural colors ;-)

~~~
ww520
That looks cool! Good work.

------
gjenkin
This would be a great addition to the nav. I can imagine having 3 modes of
viewing submissions: "top" (the current default), "new", and "popular" (for
>100 votes). I already switch back and forth between the default (or "top")
view and the "new" view. This allows me to get a good mix of seeing what the
HN algorithm thinks is interesting, as well as what interesting stuff the
community is discovering out there on the web. I can see this being well
augmented by a third view that presents what's popular to the HN community.

Of course, adding another nav element gets tricky. How many nav links do you
need before you start culling or redesigning? FWIW, it seems that grouping nav
into 2 sections might be useful. One section would be focused on sorting the
stream (top, new, popular). The other section would be focused on filtering
the stream (threads, comments, ask, jobs). "Submit" is more of an action than
a filter or sort, and might be better positioned as a control outside of the
nav.

------
quizbiz
It just occurred to me that while I vote up great comments, I don't remember
the last time I gave an up-vote to a thread. Am I atypical?

~~~
lukeschlather
I doubt it. I think most of us are deliberately conservative to offset the
lack of downvotes.

~~~
forza
Isn't that the opposite to what you should do? If you are interested in
curbing 'bad' stories you should probably vote for more stories, effectively
'downvoting' what you don't vote for.

~~~
swolchok
Not if you think that a lot of crap gets voted up and truly good stories are
few and far between.

------
Nogwater
Can we get filters like this for the official RSS feed?

~~~
keyle
I agree, this would be very powerful coupled with something like feedmyinbox.

------
gasull
Twitter and RSS feeds for HN stories over 20, 50, 100 and 150 points:

[http://jeffmiller.github.com/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-
ne...](http://jeffmiller.github.com/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-
overload)

EDIT: Why the downvotes?

------
da5e
I think this is great as an option where we can fill in our own threshold.
It's another way to play with the feed. I prefer the "newest" setting myself.
It's incredibly quick to scan the headlines to see what I'm in the mood for
that day. Or I can search with "news.ycombinator.com: searchterm" if I'm
looking some particular subject matter. But sometimes it's fun to visit the
lists too. news.ycombinator.com/lists Perhaps a couple of those options should
go on the top menu.

Maybe the top menu should be Hacker News new 100+ searchterm best active
bestcomments etc.

------
swah
I'm seeing duplicate entries, for example on:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=250>

The last 4 entries are duplicated.

~~~
by
Curiously I see an example of duplicates with slightly different points. Maybe
something is not enclosed properly in a transaction and the list is being
generated partly before and partly after an update has been applied.

On the 100 points version I see:

27\. The only script in your head (headjs.com) 248 points by timf 12 days ago
| comments

28\. The only script in your head (headjs.com) 247 points by timf 12 days ago
| comments

------
abecedarius
Upvoted just 'cause it was at 99 points. [Added: I think the temptation to do
this shows a (minor and obvious) misincentive, like we used to see on IRC when
I published weekly stats on the chat in #C.]

------
jscore
Great, as I was JUST thinking of making a chrome extension to filter posts
with 100+ points.

~~~
Groxx
I've been thinking along those lines as well, but it's kinda hairy to do so...
you'd have to load a few (or many, depending on the limit) pages, and inject
their results into the viewed-page.

Seems like more bandwidth than it's worth. This is (obviously) a better
solution though.

------
dholowiski
Even better I changed it to 200 points and found some great gems I had missed.

------
wowfat
Good but if everyone starts to filter by 100+ then how will good new
submissions make it to the top? We need people looking at new submissions and
upvoting good ones all the time!

------
itsnotvalid
Is there any link to this new feature instead of manually typing this or
saving this to a bookmark (or any other ways besides a proper hyper-link)?

------
ojbyrne
Just a thought that occurred to me. Why does there have to be 2 levels (new
and frontpage)? Why not 3 levels. New, Frontpage, "Best" or something.

~~~
JacobAldridge
Something like this - <http://news.ycombinator.com/best> ?

------
bootload
the choice of 100pts is pretty good though it's spread over 2 pages. I tried a
quick graph hack to visualise, _"Number of points required to fill 1 page of
stories (30)?"_ ~ <http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/5256341554/>

------
damoncali
I'd prefer under?points=x

The very highly upvoted articles seem more likely to be trendy and/or
sensational.

------
cmadan
the tablet article by pg twice is listed twice here. bug?
<http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=300>

------
spoiledtechie
any chance with making it dynamic? I tried changing the number from 100 to 10
and it didn't work. Went back to 100.

------
revorad
Wow, looks a lot more interesting.

------
robwgibbons
This post itself has almost 100 points. Soon it will be on the 100-point
threshold page!

