
Meet the People Taking over Hacker News - pg
http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hacker-news
======
jl
As PG's wife, I think I am the only person who knows exactly how much time,
energy and thought he devoted to Hacker News. More than most HN users would
guess, that's for sure. I don't think he ever planned it that way and I'm
certain this site stole valuable brain power that could have been focused on
writing essays. So thank you Paul for spending so much time making Hacker News
such a great place to visit each day.

~~~
noonespecial
I was a fan of the essays from way back. It seemed to me like HN was an
extension of that process. Almost like "the final essay". The one that is
still being written.

~~~
EC1
I smell an HN movie.

~~~
BerislavLopac
Nah, not enough drama.

~~~
EC1
More like nothing but drama.

~~~
neya
I did not downvote you, but, in a moment like this, when a man who has devoted
a significant portion of his life to this community, is departing the very
community, are you sure you want to just club all the emotion into a single
monotonous word like 'drama' ? Why so much negativity??

~~~
freehunter
I'm pretty sure it was a joke, from both posters.

~~~
BerislavLopac
My comment above ("not enough drama") was directed at the film industry, which
(IMO) would never look into making something like YC and HN to a movie. There
isn't a clear antagonist, no dramatic turns of events, no "drama" in the sense
they're using to sell. I really see no logic behind that idea being
downvoted... :-/

------
tptacek
Daniel Gackle ('gruseom) is an absurdly great choice as moderator. I've never
been so optimistic about HN. Great call. Daniel is possibly one of the least
knee-jerk people I know.

Uncloaked human moderation is also fantastic news.

~~~
tokenadult
_Daniel Gackle ( 'gruseom) is an absurdly great choice as moderator._

Hear. Hear.

His submission list

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=gruseom](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=gruseom)

is a fine example of articles that "gratify intellectual curiosity." This
leadership adjustment bodes well for the future of HN as a community for
thoughtful discussion.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "His submission list
[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=gruseom](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=gruseom)
is a fine example of articles that "gratify intellectual curiosity.""

While I agree with you it's interesting that only one submission in the last
84 days has had significant up votes. What does that say about the people on
HN or the kind of stories they are looking to find here?

~~~
sillysaurus3
It seems like the problem might be that there's such a short amount of time to
discover good content that gets submitted. During peak times, a submission can
be pushed off the first page of /newest within ~20 minutes. If that's a
problem, then one solution might be to change the number of items displayed on
the new page from 30 to 120.

I wouldn't be surprised if the first page of /newest gets 5x to 10x more views
than the second page. People like scrolling; people click much less
frequently. So upping the number of posts shown on the new page to 120 should
give better content more time to be discovered.

Another idea is to tweak the new page so that the first page of /newest shows
every new submission for exactly two hours. That is, page 1 would consist of
submissions that are 1 minute to 2 hours old.

Also, maybe some kind of reminder to check the new page every so often would
help, but that's probably a bit heavy-handed.

~~~
gwern
> I wouldn't be surprised if the first page of /newest gets 5x to 10x more
> views than the second page.

My guess is way way less (not that /newest gets any traffic as it is). I
regularly visit /newest to contribute a bit of voting, and I don't think I've
ever bothered with the second page.

~~~
waterlesscloud
There's no point in visiting the second page. Even if you upvote something
there, it's the only upvote it will get.

------
dang
A couple of personal points that I may as well insert here.

The account I'm now using, dang, was used briefly in 2010 by someone who
didn't leave an email address. I feel bad for not being able to ask them if
they still want it, so I'm considering this an indefinite loan. If you're the
original owner, please email me and I'll give it back to you. The reason I
want the name dang is that (a) it's a version of my real name and (b) it's
something you say when you make a mistake.

Second, very minor, but I need to leave this discussion for a bit while I bike
to a different location. After that, I'll be in the thread for a few hours...
but I'm not giving up my bike ride for this :)

~~~
ericb
Being a moderator and giving the name back sort of smells funny to me. Sort of
like selling a used police car with the original lights and paint job to non-
police? Just a thought...

Maybe limit the offer to return it to some time period, then keep it if you
don't hear back?

~~~
dang
Good point. I was thinking that because it's just software, we could restore
the old account to its exact prior state. But the attention that accrues to a
moderator account would make that impossible. So I guess I'll keep the offer
open for three months, after which we can make some other arrangement.

I probably should have picked a different name, but I was swayed by
sentimental considerations: it was my email handle at my first job, and, my
code tends to be about twice as long as pg's so maybe my username should be
too.

~~~
argumentum
Maybe you could give yourself and other admin/mods a different color for your
username. Then there can be 2 "dangs" (of course this may need some hacking).

------
nikcub
I guess i'll hijack this thread to ask anybody else if they have noticed a
slip in quality of front page? I used to check HN first thing and read 50%+ of
frontpage stories, now I barely click one or two.

When there is something interesting, I've often read it elsewhere, or its an
Ars re-hash of a story from yesterday. When I submit stories I find
interesting and HN-worthy, I find them at 3-4 points having been submitted 12
hours ago.

My perception is that the HN frontpage is being gamed more by social marketing
teams, journalists who work for re-spamming blogs and growth hackers. The
types of stories are more soft news, marketing from co's etc. than much more
hard-tech.

As an aside, right now the homepage is unusually good - must be because it's a
weekend and the social media hackers are at home.

~~~
tptacek
It's not as good as it has been in the (far) past, but it's better than it was
at its nadir, when the front page was saturated by stories from a few
obviously baiting sites on a very few topics.

One thing that does seem to have gotten persistently worse is the process of
getting a good story onto the front page. Mediocre stories with immediate or
simple appeal do seem to be doing a better job of outcompeting Rilke than they
ever have in the past.

It's a good site for halfway-decent posts about Golang or CSS compilers.
Thankfully, it's become less hospitable for nakedly ambitious Bitcoin
cheerleading or comically inept copyright law analyses. It would be great if
the site could come up with some way to let the kinds of posts 'gruseom's
submission log models get some space on the front page, but it would be bad if
that attempt reverted us back to the worst of the Venturebeat and Techdirt
days.

~~~
nikcub
> One thing that does seem to have gotten persistently worse is the process of
> getting a good story onto the front page.

Completely agree. The Business Week cover story on new details from the Target
data breach got 16 upvotes:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7391406](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7391406)

It was submitted with 5 other URLs and each got a point or two.

Another example, the excellent NyTimes story on the NSA breaching Chinese
telco companies to hack Huawei got 10 points:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7450963](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7450963)

The NYTimes version was the canonical source.

There was a great WSJ report on Google adapting to the app age which was
heavily shared on Twitter, 1 point on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7375529](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7375529)

Bill Gates Rolling Stone interview, 1 point (although re-blogs of excerpts
ranked):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7393830](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7393830)

BW on Satya Nadella managing the legacy of Ballmer's Microsoft board, 4
points:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7348628](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7348628)

These are stories I quickly recalled from the last ~week that I enjoyed, all
just happen to not register on HN.

If I go through my queue on pocket i'm certain there would be many more
examples. I'd estimate less than 10% of what I now save on pocket for reading
is sources from HN.

My take is that there was an influx of non-tech people wanting to find out
what tech people were reading about. If you subscribe to the usual tech blogs
you'll find (or would have found) that a lot of their stories are/were sources
from here or are reblogs[0]. This mass of new users has now affected what is
selected and how.

[0] Example, Notch tweets that they are canceling their Oculus deal. His tweet
gets 8 points:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469714](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469714)

A Next Web story which is nothing more than the tweet embedded in a page of
ads gets 823 points:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469829](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469829)

~~~
dang
Ok, now you have me worried. This is a problem. We want the best stories on
the front page as well as the best version of each story. We certainly don't
want knockoffs.

One thing you can do when you know of a better version of a story is post its
URL in the thread along with a clear explanation of why it's better. We see
most of those, and often use them. (Edit: and maybe we should have a textually
unique string, à la hashtags, that people can insert in such comments. Then I
can write code to make sure I see them all.)

That, however, will do nothing to help HN get stories that it's missing
completely, since there won't be any such thread to comment in. You seem to be
saying we're missing most of those. How can we fix that?

~~~
sillysaurus3
_That, however, will do nothing to help HN get stories that it 's missing
completely, since there won't be any such thread to comment in. You seem to be
saying we're missing most of those. How can we fix that?_

One idea is to change the rules so that users are allowed to resubmit stories
that received fewer than four upvotes after 24 hours. Right now you risk
getting banned for doing that.

It might be a bad idea since the resubmissions will push more legitimate
stories out of the new submission queue more quickly, though.

Another idea is to increase the number of stories displayed on
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newest](https://news.ycombinator.com/newest)
from 30 to 120. At this point, if your submission drops off the first page of
/newest then it's pretty hopeless that it'll be seen by anyone. Showing 120
stories at once will give good content more time to get onto the front page
where more people will see it.

~~~
gphilip
> Another idea is to increase the number of stories displayed on
> [https://news.ycombinator.com/newest](https://news.ycombinator.com/newest)
> from 30 to 120. At this point, if your submission drops off the first page
> of /newest then it's pretty hopeless that it'll be seen by anyone. Showing
> 120 stories at once will give good content more time to get onto the front
> page where more people will see it.

Or: show a random 30-subset of the newest 120 stories on /newest, and refresh
this 30-subset per view/per time interval. Set this up to get the best of both
options: at any point in time the newest 120 stories would be on /newest for
_someone_ , and there would only be 30 stories to look at for any _one_
person. This will also give people more incentive to go check /newest once in
a while, since they would, more often than now, find many more as-yet-unseen
stories there each time.

------
Titanous
Now that the moderator's identity is public, a useful next step would be a
public log of all moderator actions. lobste.rs has one[1] and the transparency
is great.

[1] [https://lobste.rs/moderations](https://lobste.rs/moderations)

~~~
tptacek
A log of moderator actions seems like an invitation to many years of debate
over the moderator's actions. The current system, of sporadic conspiracy
theories regarding moderation, actually seems preferable to me.

~~~
voicereasonish
The far more damaging part of HN IMHO is the silent banning. It's a very ugly
sledgehammer which is routinely used to censor dissenting voices. Victims of
it have no real recourse even if they do notice they've been censored. It
doesn't make for an open relaxed environment where people can express their
opinion.

It's a lame, lazy and flawed system of moderation which ends up with a ton of
false positives.

I wouldn't be surprised if this comment gets me silent banned!

~~~
pg
Is there a forum that doesn't ban people?

~~~
krapp
On other forums, when you've been banned, you get an email or message telling
you why and you no longer have access to that account. You also probably will
have gotten a few warnings from moderators before that point.

~~~
sanswork
When the barrier to entry is 0 this is an ineffective strategy. From my
experiences moderating a fairly large geographic area forum negative
influences on the community do and will just recreate a new account
immediately and resume when you do that. At least this way you delay that from
happening for a while and force them to expel effort on nothing.

~~~
krapp
Maybe, but determined trolls will adapt to just about any environment - here,
for instance, people just create sockpuppet accounts (HN doesn't track account
IPs I guess)

When it applies to the most egregious of problem users then it works as
intended, but there have been cases where people have been, apparently,
posting while banned for some slight, and providing reasonable content. That
suggests to me that some banned users might be amenable to a warning or might
well change their behavior if they were made aware that their actions were
intolerable.

Also, it makes no sense to me to continue using up the site's resources
stringing people along who, by definition, the staff doesn't want there.
Although I admit I have no idea how much of a problem that is with HN itself,
since it doesn't use a database.

~~~
sanswork
Tracking IPs doesn't help that much. Even non-technical trolls discover
proxies quickly.

Because you cannot stop them so at this point it is less about saving
resources and more about harm reduction. It's unfortunate some people who
probably would change get caught up in it but it's really a small price to
pay(their not having their comments public but still being able to use the
site normally) for the greater enjoyment.

------
rdl
This seems like a great change. A dream team, and it's interesting to learn
who the secret moderator has been!

My fantasy would be some way of fixing /newest as well as adding topic tags;
perhaps topic tags just within /newest. I'd be happy to read everything in
/newest which matches: security, crypto, hypervisor, hardware, wireless, ...;
I basically find it unusable as it is now.

I don't find the level of (in)civility to be a personal deterrent, but I grew
up on EFnet and alt.*, so that would be an almost 4chanian bar. I do dislike
when it deters worthwhile contributions from people who are less thick
skinned. I'd generally err on the side of "let people say stupid things so
they can be debunked in public" vs. "censorship", but at some point lack of
filtering becomes a form of censorship of its own (crapflooding, etc.)

~~~
jl
It's funny, I just wrote a blog post yesterday about how I don't contribute to
many public discussions because I'm too afraid of the hostility that can come
along with my participation (I'm pretty thin skinned). I haven't posted it yet
specifically because I was agonizing over what I say getting picked apart
sentence by sentence by an angry HN mob. I probably won't ever publish it. I
hope Daniel can do more to fix the nastiness that can exist here on HN.

~~~
Pacabel
Quality discussion isn't supposed to always feel good. Nor is it a bad thing
when what you've expressed is heavily analyzed and perhaps contested.

It's really no different than physical exercise. Yes, it can be painful in the
short term, but over time it allows adaptation that increases strength and
robustness.

~~~
reeses
This comment is a fine example of jl's points. While the tone was not rude or
aggressive, commenting merely to contradict and to attempt to invalidate
specific points, out of context, is unhelpful to someone who is self aware
enough to admit they are pretty, thin, and skinny. (We know our own and can
read through the code.)

Jl is probably aware that this sensitivity can be overcome, and how to do so.
Sometimes it's ok to pass over a thing in silence instead of telling a
stranger to smile.

~~~
hueving
>Sometimes it's ok to pass over a thing in silence instead of telling a
stranger to smile.

That's not how I interpreted Pacabel's response. I interpreted it more like
him/her telling jl that his expectations of Daniel 'fixing' HN to ban
critiques are unrealistic.

~~~
rdl
When someone comments with "I don't contribute to many public discussions
because I'm too afraid of the hostility that can come along with my
participation (I'm pretty thin skinned)", it's probably fair to say anyone
responding and trying to be helpful should take that into account...

(I felt slightly bad about my response, in retrospect; I meant "YC partners
seem to be subject to particularly harsh criticism, which is unfair. Perhaps
if you were anonymous it would be less aggressive trolling directed at you."
I'm sure jl has thought of that of course.)

------
stickhandle
_> > I don't think he plans to change much about the appearance of the site_

On the whole, that's good. I would ask @kevin to _make comment threads
collapsible_. Works that way on my hn android app and I love what it adds to
the comment reading experience.

~~~
pbiggar
the hacker news enhancement suite
([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
enhanc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm?hl=en)) is attractive and has
collapsible comments. It would be great to see HN incorporate the design and
some of the features (notifying you of the changes since you last read the
story, for example, is amazing!)

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
Any alternative for FF?

~~~
krg
For the collapsible comments, I've been using Greasemonkey along with this
user script:
[http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/138037](http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/138037)

------
suyash
PG: '... the fact that we get roughly equal grief for HN comments being bad
and for being too quick to ban people is a sign he's been doing a good job so
far.'

\- Not in all cases, some times honest opinions and straight talk might come
across as rude but it's not meant that way. Strict Policing should also
provide a way for sincere members to Voice their concern or Appeal if they get
'removed' or 'shadow banned' which happens quite often. Let me know your
thoughts please.

~~~
DanBC
People who get banned can either start again with a new account or can write a
short email showing understanding of why they got banned and asking to be
unbanned. Sometimes bans are weird accidents and writing a short email asking
why you were banned will get an unban.

~~~
stefantalpalaru
The whole point of shadow-banning is tricking the banned user into thinking he
doesn't need to make a new account.

Yes, sometimes groveling in front of the abuser will get you a pass ("but just
this once"). No, not all those abused will do it.

I can't decide if a scenario where people are banned by accident is better or
worse than one with evil moderators abusing their powers.

~~~
dang
Oh, good grief. "Grovelling in front of the abuser?" I've been doing this job
since October 2012 and I can't remember a single case where we refused a
polite request, or even most rude ones. I'm pretty sure it's not we who are
committing the abuses here.

One of the secondary reasons why I asked PG to out me is that it's super
frustrating not to be able to defend the site and the team when people make
sinister and unfair insinuations. I'll probably get it out of my system in a
few days, but hoo boy has that been frustrating.

~~~
hueving
>Oh, good grief. "Grovelling in front of the abuser?" I've been doing this job
since October 2012 and I can't remember a single case where we refused a
polite request, or even most rude ones.

Groveling is the perception that some of the people (including me) have when
deciding what to do when they get shadow-banned. So I just end up dropping the
old account and any reputation it may have gained over its lifetime to start
over.

I understand that it's dramatic, but from the outside it feels like a process
of begging for forgiveness for committing some infraction you don't even
understand. To rub salt in the wound, we aren't even given the dignity of
knowing when we have uttered words that violate the secret book of acceptable
comments. We just have to infer after a sudden decline in comment engagement
that we have been shadow-banned. This is infuriating to say the least. For a
site to have a sanctioned method of giving regular users a permanent
punishment which causes them to pour effort into providing comments that land
muted is repulsive to me.

I apologize for ranting, but I have yet to see a strong logically sound
defense of this practice. It's one of the worst 'fuck-you' features I've seen
a site implement towards its users that make critical comments. Critical
discourse is what makes this site great! Unaccountable shadow-bans chill
critical discourse regardless of their intent.

I beg you to reconsider the practice in its current form. As I mentioned
elsewhere, someone intentionally trolling will verify that they aren't shadow-
banned anyway. The people shadow-banning hurts the worst are the ones who
don't expect to be shadow-banned (i.e. genuine commenters).

~~~
dang
Okay, I hear you and appreciate that you put some real feeling into what you
wrote there. That's genuinely helpful—more than you might think—and quite
rare.

If it's true that what people really need is feedback about what they're doing
that's inappropriate for HN, and if we'd only give it to them then they would
respond by adjusting their behavior, then I have to agree with you: we should
find a way to give that feedback. It would be a clear path to improving the
site and correcting some of its dysfunction. I'm not sure that it is true, but
I hope it is and am willing to test the idea. But we'd need a way to do it
that would scale.

~~~
Poiesis
I don't really have a dog in this fight, but:

> People who get banned can either start again with a new account or can write
> a short email showing understanding of why they got banned and asking to be
> unbanned.

The issue people are bringing up is, what happens when the banee doesn't know
why they got banned (not to mention _that_ they got banned)?

For what it's worth, I usually point out Metafilter as a site that seem to do
moderation pretty well. There are of course a number of important differences
in the way the sites work, but I bet there are a great many lessons that could
be shared in both directions.

~~~
DanBC
People send email to those they think have been incorrectly banned.

Thus the importance of correct email addresses in the user's profile.

------
CamperBob2
I don't think I've seen any mention of what's going to happen with the
"pending comments" plan that raised some controversy on HN a few days ago (and
which I feel is a suboptimal idea that solves a problem nobody has while
creating a host of brand new ones). Is this still in the works?

~~~
pg
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484304)

~~~
CamperBob2
Thanks -- sounds like a good call.

------
susi22
"Kat Manalac (katm) and Garry Tan (garry) will be the voice of YC on HN.
They'll be the ones who respond to most "Ask YC" posts and individual comments
related to YC."

but the guidelines say:

"Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions
about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to
say something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com."

Should they be updated?

~~~
pg
It's ok to ask something of general interest. The point is that HN is not YC
customer support.

------
6thSigma
HN usernames would be helpful in the post.

~~~
pg
Good point; added them.

------
Nux
Though having a community obsessed with speed, optimisation and scale, HN is
the slowest site in my bookmarks, by FAR, not to mention the times when it's
not working at all, sending people to a twitter page (happens every day).

I hope this issue will get addressed, too.

~~~
riffraff
funny, for me HN is fast enough that is the first thing I try to load of
something seems broken with my connection.

Gmail, twitter, facebook, kongregate etc will fail miserably but the tiny
table-based HN code will load 99%& of the time.

~~~
kshay
This may just be the cache headers. Most sites have caching that tells
browsers either "never cache this site" or "cache for a short time, but after
that you must fetch a fresh version and can't use the cached version." HN's
say "always _try_ to fetch a fresh version, but if that fails, it's fine to
show the user the cached version." So if your connection is actually down (vs.
just slow), your browser's old cache of HN may still display, unlike most
other sites.

------
coupdejarnac
I recently began reading HN, and I really appreciate the quality of this
forum. I was on Slashdot at the beginning, and having watched it slide into
irrelevance with poor quality comments, it's heartening to find a place like
HN. So, thank you.

~~~
Pacabel
As a former long-time Slashdot reader, the progressively-worse site designs
were far, far more disruptive and harmful than any changes in the quality of
the discussion might have been.

Their beta site was what made me stop visiting earlier this year. The fact
that such an unusable design could seriously be considered in the first place
was partly responsible. Their lack of action when confronted with lots of very
legitimate concern regarding the beta site was also responsible.

Maybe things have changed since then. But I wouldn't know for sure, having not
bothered to go back there.

------
nubela
pg: Might I ask now that you are leaving these "obligations" behind to great
people, what will you be doing with the spare cpu cycles?

~~~
pg
What I was doing before I started YC: writing and programming.

~~~
S4M
Do you have particular projects worth mentioning here? How about Arc?

~~~
pg
I'm going to keep writing essays. I don't usually decide what to write very
far in advance though.

Yes, I'll be working on Arc again. (I've been working _in_ Arc regularly,
since HN is written in it, but I haven't been able to spend much time thinking
about the core language for the last 5 years or so.)

~~~
oskarth
It'd be interesting to hear what you think about Rich Hickey's work on
Clojure. Things that surprised you in a good way, and things that you think it
got wrong (i.e. things that won't be on the surviving main branch). I'm sure
other lisp programmers would like to know your thoughts on this since Clojure
has got itself quite a reputation in the last five years.

~~~
pg
I know almost nothing about Clojure. I saw some example code around 7 years
ago, but I don't remember it well.

------
staunch
I just wish Hacker News would become a much better place for showing off and
discussing projects. We have so many hackers here making things and it's
almost entirely hidden from view. There's too much noise and no real place to
post. A very simple but huge improvement would be a dedicated place for "Show
HN" posts, but so much more could be done.

~~~
DanBC
It would be great if the criticism that accompanies "Show HN" posts was more
useful and less vicious.

~~~
cmbaus
I have to agree. I've been working on a prototype for an app that I think is
pretty cool, but I'm afraid to release here it in an early state. I'm
concerned the focus will be on what it isn't versus what it could be.

It is one thing to provide constructive criticism. It is another to be
condescending. Unfortunately, and maybe it is just human nature, but I think
we see too much of the second.

I'd love to see more help in getting projects off the ground. That would be a
great compliment to Y Combinator. Since many Y Combinator alum are on the
site, they could use their experience to help HN contributors who aren't in
the YC program.

------
JeremyMorgan
This place is one that really seems to "get" their community and what we
really want out of this place. I think not relying on it as a revenue source
gives the powers that be the freedom to really serve the community. They're
lucky to be in that spot and they're using it wisely.

Nice choices and it'll be cool to how it's going to move forward.

------
davidw
A few comments:

I hope that with perhaps a bit more time available, dang will be able to kill
more political stories as well as 'outrage' stories about things not very
directly connected to tech/startups - those articles that get you riled up,
but really don't lead to any productive or interesting discussions.

More importantly, a big thanks to everyone involved! I live pretty far from
Silicon Valley or anywhere else where everyone eats sleeps and breathes tech,
so it's always been nice to have this window into that world.

~~~
dang
Hi David. Yes, we're going to move further in that direction. You probably
noticed, to pick one example, that there have been almost no Ukraine/Crimea
stories on the front page.

I doubt that we'll try to ban political stories altogether, partly because
some (e.g. Snowden) do overlap with HN's core topics, but mainly because it's
hard to define "political".

But "articles that get you riled up, but really don't lead to any productive
or interesting discussions" is, to me, a narrower and clearer criterion that
is pretty easy to apply fairly. PG has spoken about it in similar terms. I
think we'll probably get more active about those. But we won't do anything
major very quickly.

~~~
davidw
Awesome, thanks!

Here's another random idea. I think it would be more difficult to code up, but
there are certain comments where I think "ok, this is a wrong answer, but in
good faith". Those should get "pinned" at 0 karma. Other comments should get
pinned at 1 - I wouldn't want to see them cross over into negative territory,
but they aren't great either. I would envision this working by clicking a 1 or
a 0, and as votes go up or down for the comment, my contribution changes as a
consequence. Say I click 0 when it's at 1. It goes to 0. Others pile on, and
it goes to -1. At that point my downvote actually becomes an upvote to push it
back towards 0.

All those dynamic calculations would probably be a PITA, so I can completely
understand something like that not seeing the light of day, but I just thought
it was an interesting idea in terms of being able to say "ok, this is not a
_good_ comment, but it's not a mean one or anything, so it should have a floor
under it".

~~~
dang
I fear that would be hard to implement, but what you describe already happens
informally to some extent: if people see an innocuous comment faded out, they
sometimes upvote it to put it back in black. I like this and hope we can get
the community to practice it more.

~~~
waterhouse
Conceptually it seems relatively simple: each voter supplies a "desired
score", which would be +∞ and -∞ for regular upvotes and downvotes
respectively, and 0 or other integers for those who want to be fancy. Then you
can decide whether n is the correct score, or too high or too low, by assuming
everyone wanting a number above n votes +1, everyone below n votes -1, and
everyone who wants n votes -1, 0, or 1 as necessary to keep the score as n.
(If k people wanted n, then if the score from everyone else is within [n-k,
n+k], then n is the right score.) Updating the score one vote at a time seems
doable. It would require storing the entire voting history with each comment,
though, which would probably require changing things and be a pain.

Then the problem I see is with the user interface: most people wouldn't want
to use it, and it would clutter things up (a numeric input field, or a
specialized "vote towards 0" button). I guess it could be a setting that
individual users could enable. I'd hazard a guess it would be deemed not worth
the trouble.

------
argumentum
One of the things I admire most about PG is that everything he creates seem
like extensions of his mind. He, more than anyone else I've ever met, seems to
take life as a genuine exploration: not just of the world, but of himself.

It's kind of sad to see him "sign of" HN and YC so quickly and without fuss.
Part of me wants a grander send-off, with commemorations, "look backs",
speeches etc. He certainly would deserve this, though I doubt he'd want it.

But it's not really that sad, because each act of his life's play has been
greater than the last. Having been so inspired by what he's done so far, I can
only imagine what comes next.

Thanks PG for Hacker News and Y-combinator .. both have changed the world for
the better. Also, thanks for handing them off to such awesome hackers, who
will certainly carry them on and up.

------
ElliotH
Really excited to hear about the new tools, and mobile support.

~~~
jonah
I've been using this version on my mobile devices:
[http://hn.premii.com/](http://hn.premii.com/) It's very slick and works well
99% of the time.

~~~
balac
I have also been using this for a while, it also has an excellent tablet
interface.

------
darkstar999
Just out of curiosity from a business standpoint, is this budgeted as
marketing for YC?

~~~
dang
I don't know anything about budgets, and Kat and Garry (and Sam!) will speak
for YC, but here's how I see the HN part of your question.

To me, YC and HN are like the business and editorial sides of a newspaper.
They're one company, but optimize for different things. YC optimizes for great
startups. HN optimizes for great content, that is, for curiosity. For HN to be
"marketing for YC" would be like a newspaper's stories being "marketing for
its advertisers". That would be a bad newspaper. Intellectual curiosity, the
core value here
([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html))
would wither.

In other words, the way for HN to benefit YC is to just have the highest-
quality content it can. That seems so obvious to me that I hope it is to
everybody else too.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _For HN to be "marketing for YC" would be like a newspaper's stories being
> "marketing for its advertisers". That would be a bad newspaper._ //

Many (most?) newspapers have some stories that are very directly marketing for
their advertisers - newspaper runs a story on bra-fittings and so sells
advertising space to fashion companies.

In fact isn't this how newspapers work: they sell advertising. If the stories
are "poor" (which characteristic is modified according to the target audience)
then the paper doesn't sell and the advertiser gets fewer impressions. The
paper promotes itself, wins pageviews and sell ads on the number of pageviews
it's getting. Advertisers get impressions and the system feeds-back allowing
the paper to grow, charge more and continue creating "news".

Isn't that exactly marketing for the advertisers?

Indeed looking at a NYT Magazine story at random I find not only regular
advertising but the author's byline is also advertising a book. That makes me
wonder if they're managing to sell much of the story space too.

In part I'd assumed that HN was created in order to provide buzz/feedback for
YC companies and serve the purposes of YC (eg market information)? Indeed from
the user perspective there's no way to know, with secret moderation, if any
particular story has been "unfairly" promoted or quashed; just as with dead-
tree publications.

~~~
dang
What you describe isn't what I had in mind. I was thinking of the old-
fashioned hard-boiled editor who says things like "over my dead body" and
"give my regards to the President, but we won't be changing that story", and
who offers his resignation on a regular basis. I'm pretty sure they didn't
just exist in movies. Admittedly you probably have to go back to the glory
days of print journalism to find them.

~~~
horacio
You don't have to go that far back to find an editor who's willing to pay the
symbolic price when it comes to influencing customers and advertisers by
modifying press coverage.

Just last week, Ben Richardson, Bloomberg News' editor-at-large for Asia,
resigned his post over Bloomberg management's pressure on their journalists to
refrain from producing articles critical of China.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/09/world/asia/bloomberg-
news-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/09/world/asia/bloomberg-news-is-said-
to-curb-articles-that-might-anger-china.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

------
SeanDav
I can testify personally to the effort that these guys put in. Nick Sivo
(kogir) spent much more time on me with a problem than I ever would have
expected. Thanks Nick and congrats to all the HN guys on their official roles!

------
craigmccaskill
Daniel Gackle (dang/gruseom) is a great guy. My wife and I have had the
fortune of hosting him via Airbnb during a couple of his visits to MTV.
Fantastic conversation from what's obviously a really smart dude.

------
bakhy
"the fact that we get roughly equal grief for HN comments being bad and for
being too quick to ban people is a sign he's been doing a good job so far." \-
lol. spoken like an economist :) it's a pretty weak sign* , but i will assume
the decision is not based solely on counting emails.

(*) try banning constructive commenters on the site. you would then probably
also receive complaints about banning and comment shittiness in equal measure.

------
grinich
How big is HN today? Pageviews, MAU, votes/day, etc.

------
jasonwen
I was indeed surprised when i checked HN on mobile last week. The simple
layout would suggest it would scale on mobile. Glad it's being worked on.

------
pron
I'd like to make what might probably be an unpopular suggestion, but I'll make
it nonetheless :)

Perhaps you should simply block all comments on those stories that are likely
to cause some "nonconstructive" (I don't really like the term) controversy or
those whose subject has already been discussed on other stories, rather than
killing them (dropping them from the front page, that is).

The reason I'm offering this is because of an argument I had with dang
(gruseom) about a week ago over a story that expressed a very clear political
opinion (which was particularly pertinent to HN). The reason it's important
for these stories to be featured on the front page is that much of what is
done in Silicon Valley is extremely political – from Uber to the latest GitHub
scandal. I completely understand the desire for HN to stay away from politics,
but that's not the result. _Seemingly_ shying away from politics is itself a
very powerful political statement, which is often apparent to anyone reading
HN when something important is going on. It either communicates that you don't
understand what politics is and your role in it, reduces the role of engineers
to that of mere technicians at the same time most of them claim to be the
exact opposite, or sends a message of silent agreement with the status quo. In
fact, this was one of the main points of that killed story.

Just as an example – unrelated to that particular argument – featuring stories
about Uber's success while dropping stories expressing outrage over their
practices either expresses agreement with their behavior or a lack of
understanding of how political is everything they do. "Outrage" over Uber
isn't any less "constructive" _or political_ than a discussion of, say, how
much money they're making and how.

HN isn't /r/programming. It is not a technical discussion site (although it is
that, too), but one for all things SV or hacker-related, including the effect
of technology on society and vice-versa. As such, HN can't hide from political
discussions over those very issues.

But because "political" stories can and often do generate heated and sometimes
bigoted debates, it might be best to conserve the site's desired collegial
atmosphere by simply banning comments on certain stories. Dropping them from
the front page sends a clear message that leaves a very bad taste in many of
the readers. Letting them be, but prohibiting debate in the comments says:
this is an important opinion that many of our readers think you should be
exposed to. Read it or not as you wish, or post an opposite thoughtful
opinion, but don't bicker over it.

------
ancarda
Are there any plans to opensource HN? A while ago there seemed to be an
indication it would happen eventually but it was removed about a month later:
[https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/commit/350fba6dfec1c23a0b76...](https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/commit/350fba6dfec1c23a0b764851c634a3e0fdcc3ac0)

------
compare
Killing the mean and stupid stuff is great... but wish someone would kill the
genuine but dismissive and negative stuff too.

~~~
dang
Unfortunately, I don't know of any objective and fair way to do that. That
doesn't mean we don't care about the problem, though. We do care about it and
are working on it, and I've been looking at the data a _lot_.

Ultimately, though, the solutions are going to have to mostly involve the
community. We'll probably be posting about this more in the coming days.

~~~
tptacek
Well, now that you're outed and running the place, let me tell you exactly
what I think you should do:

1\. Click over to whatever textbox allows you to edit the site guidelines.

2\. Clarify the "what's on topic" clause.

3\. Add a "criticisms must be constructive", perhaps deriving it from Paul
Graham's "colleagues working together to uncover the truth" wording from the
Pending Comments announcement.

Start by spelling out the norms you want to see here, and we can all work to
move the site in that direction without having to nail down the statutory
language or figure out what 100 lines of lisp will best implement them.

~~~
britta
Yes, we need more detailed guidelines. I was talking about this over in one of
the pending comments threads
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484304)),
but "be civil", no name calling, and "no classic flamewar topics" are also way
too vague. They're not a clear and enforceable code of conduct.

~~~
tptacek
Wikipedia has some norms that, if imperfect, actually do seem to impact the
site. "Civility" is a norm that seems to have a significant impact, and it's
hard to think of a case in which incivility --- which is prominently featured
every day on HN --- is ever worth hosting here. "Assume Good Faith" is another
norm that seems to cut pretty closely to what Paul Graham was trying to say
with his "collegiality" norm.

~~~
britta
Yeah, that's an interesting example. Wikipedia spells out "civility" in great
detail -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Civility#Avoiding_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Civility#Avoiding_incivility)
has friendly human-readable advice to prevent incivility, like "Not
sufficiently explaining edits can be perceived as uncivil" and "Other people
can misread your passion as aggression". And
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Civility#Identifying...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Civility#Identifying_incivility)
provides a reasonably comprehensive list of types of incivility, to help
identify what breaks the guideline. And then there's a stated process for
dealing with serious problems.

~~~
tptacek
Wikipedia's impressive documentation goes hand-in-hand with a Wikipedia
community problem --- lawyering. Spelling norms out in that level of detail
risks making a sport of out spotting and "enforcing" the norms.

Wikipedia's problem-solving mechanisms are impressive and effective for a
project with a single coherent goal, but they aren't good at fostering
community. In fact, they do the opposite thing: they artificially factionalize
the community, which holds together despite and not because of those
mechanisms.

~~~
britta
Sure, it gets messy to try to comprehensively document all types of incivility
and only enforce what is described there. HN would benefit from a friendly
middle ground between that legalistic style and simply saying "be civil".

------
hyp0
Into these winds of change, I'd like to again toss my suggestion that never
takes off:

Divide HN into two "sub-HNs", one for "intellectual curiosity", the other for
everything else (e.g. startup news, web frameworks, A/B testing, meta-HN...
even those YC startup announcements).

------
jebblue
About making it look better on mobile, I'm getting back into front end work
lately and am finding jQuery Mobile to very interesting. It takes a lot of the
pain out of dealing with JavaScript and looks it nice. This means it is
possible to teach old dogs new tricks.

------
tsomctl
_but users will be happy to hear he has a plan to make it work better on
mobile devices._

iPhone 4s user here. This scares me. Unlike almost every other site, Hacker
News currently works great in mobile Safari.

~~~
dshankar
I disagree. It's incredibly difficult to hit the tiny buttons on mobile & I
occasionally end up downvoting when I intended to upvote (or vice versa).

------
jedberg
I was hoping you would hire Nick too so that he'd have more time to work on
the code. I've been trying to get some changes to the spam filter through for
a while. :)

~~~
kogir
I've actually been full time for 1.5 years now, but large parts of that were
learning, chasing down theories, and fighting fires.

For spam and abuse, I'd love to move the logic to a separate system where I
can use resources less carefully and not worry about taking down the site.

------
gus_massa
I hope that you are still going hang out here to write oneliners.

------
mrfusion
I was kind of hoping to read about leftover swap space on Linux :-(

What gets put there? Could passwords be on it even after you shut down your
computer?

------
joeblau
Is it still going to run on one machine, or are we going to get that cloud
upgrade?

Edit: Or did we already get that cloud upgrade and I missed it?

~~~
alexchamberlain
Does it need to? What would the user facing benefit be? Never found HN to be
slow.

~~~
iancarroll
HN has had at least two server failures I can recall within the last year.

~~~
jffry
Wasn't the last big "server failure" due to a hard drive kicking the bucket?

~~~
iancarroll
I don't exactly remember but a cloud solution would have prevented that. :)

Edit: oh, I'm talking about failures that were not planned

~~~
alexchamberlain
A pair of dedicated servers would have worked too. In my line everyone wants
to use multiple threads, but the same thing stands: using the cloud doesn't
fix everything.

------
sktrdie
If they change the UI they'll probably break 100+ apps that are using HTML
scraping to get HN's data.

~~~
krapp
Well, they should have an API, then it wouldn't matter. Until they changed the
API.

------
wdr1
On behalf of the community, thanks PG!

------
orlandob
HN is my #1 source of information on the internet. Without HN (an HN ALGOLIA!)
I'd be lost.

------
rafeed
Great news on the mobile front.

Thanks for HN, pg!

------
EGreg
What are the two senses of the word thoughtful? Is it a Cali thing? :)

~~~
roryokane
I’m guessing “kind to others (thinks of others’ well-being)” and “thinks a lot
(about intellectual things)”.

------
stefantalpalaru
So which one of you guys knows how to make non-expiring pagination links?

------
sillysaurus3
Thank you for creating HN.

~~~
AlexanderDhoore
Changed my life.

~~~
el_duderino
eh

~~~
smtddr
It's possible.

An open-house at expression.edu and one minute phone call from Pixar while I
was driving to my old job changed mine _(long story)_ ...and no, I didn't get
the job. I don't even work in the computer-graphics field. I just took a wild
shot in the dark, but it was the small snowball that started rolling down a
very tall hill. By the time it reached the bottom, my life reached the top.
Inspiration to change your life can come from anywhere; especially unexpected
sources. I'd say HN is more expected than my failed phone interview.

------
jbeja
I love this site!.

~~~
jbeja
And the downvotes are for?

~~~
mst
I would suspect the complete lack of content; we like our signal to noise
ratio to be as high as possible around here, and applause lights don't really
contribute to signal. Sorry.

~~~
jbeja
Ok!.

~~~
jrockway
The "!" acts equivalently to a "." in ending a sentence. No need to use both!.
But it is kind of fun, now that you mention it!.

------
jdp23
I for one welcome our new YCombinatorial overlords!

