

Ask HN: Does anyone else miss "Ask HN?" - Magneus

Hey gang,<p>It seems that fewer and fewer discussion threads are prefaced with "Ask HN." I'm not sure if it was ever a formal rule, but I find it much easier to parse through the headlines when "Ask HN" clearly marks all discussion-only items, while its absence indicates a news item.<p>Are other people feeling the same way?<p>If so, how do we encourage this practice to continue?
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someperson
pg recently created this page: <http://news.ycombinator.com/ask>

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profquail
I think the poster's point was that "Ask HN" posts are becoming less common
(either posted less frequently, or just aren't voted up to the front page as
often as they used to be).

I'll admit that I miss this a lot too, to the point where I often just go
through and upvote all except the most trival "Ask HN" posts. The ability to
ask for good advice from a very smart group of people was once one of the best
features of this site.

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samwillis
I had a look through /newest and there seems to be roughly one new Ask HN post
an hour although with the quantity of new submissions that HN get every hour
they quickly move off the first page.

I suspect that the posts don't stay visible on /newest long enough for a
discussion to start and for the normal voter to find it worth voting for. I
submitted an Ask HN post yesterday and it was off the bottom of /newest in
little over an hour and a half, that is not long enough for a discussion to
have become interesting.

I don't know if there is something that could or should be changed to improve
this, maybe an /ask/newest?

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njl
I had a couple of submissions that I thought were pretty reasonable, but
disappeared without a trace. I now make it a habit to go through /newest when
I visit HN. I view it as a little work to curate a community that I get a lot
of value from.

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jacquesm
All the ask hn's are now grouped together and linked from the top of every
page. It's actually _much_ easier to find them now because they effectively
have a longer life than they ever did before.

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imp
I've found myself going through the HN archives when I'm looking for advice.
Part of the issue with fewer ask HN questions may be that a lot of common
questions have now been answered. I do think those posts are more fun to read
and comment on though.

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nekopa
Agreed. I have wanted to ask quite a few questions here, but a lot of times a
look on searchyc has found the answers. I found it especially useful for
finding books about certain subjects.

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elblanco
I tried one recently that went nowhere.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1263934>

I think they just aren't popular anymore.

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chrislo
The other thing I miss is Hacker Hacker News (<http://hackerhackernews.com/>)
- I wish something like that were built into HN.

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thedjpetersen
It appears that he provides the source from the main
page(<http://bitbucket.org/sqs/hhn/src>) so if you wanted you could get
something close to it running if you want.

