
Ask PG: Why don’t you open source HN? - muellerwolfram
I hope it didn’t get asked before, I couldn’t find anything.<p>There was a question recently, about why you don’t improve the HTML of HN, where you said <i>"When the HTML is the most important thing to work on."</i>(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4927231)<p>I agree that the markup is relatively unimportant compared to features that I think could really improve the functionality and quality of the site, and I bet you have a long wishlist of features yourself.<p>But between the lines I interpreted that that list might be way longer, than the time that is available to you, allows you to work on it.<p>So why don’t you open source HN? I get that with a project that is important to someone, it’s hard to give away control. But you can still be the project lead, you could still have the last call and I feel to open up the project will lead to great feature discussions and ultimately a better hn.<p>Have you ever considered open sourcing it? And what’s the thought process on your decision?
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jff
It's simple but effective. The pages load quickly and look pretty decent in
many different browsers.

I'm really happy that HN isn't your typical constantly-mutating, constantly
growing news site, adding a new social share button and 2KB of new Javascript
every week. Please, pg, _don't_ start taking pull requests or anything like
that, it's great the way it is.

Edit: look at the current top story. A pretty but not especially functional
Facebook redesign, proposed as the latest in a long line of changes that the
users pretty much always disliked. There's my point.

~~~
ramblerman
It's fine. It does what it's supposed to that's true. There are a few items
however, that should really have been tackled in the many years this site has
now been running imo.

\- You can't take away an upvote. Misclick is just bad luck

\- user settings have some really obscure settings that aren't explained like
showdead / noprocrast / maxvisit / minaway

\- The "Unknown or expired link" is just a bad solution, either redirect me to
the front page when that happens, or find an alternative way to deal with it.

~~~
alexanderh
That last one always gets me... Cant believe its been that way for so long,
considering the type of people who visit this site....

There's "not having time to work on it" and then theres "complete
abandonment."

I do sort of agree with OP that at least adding a few more people onto a team
would be good, if not full on opensourcing it.

But hey, Reddit is always open source. And someone could always open their own
site out of its source code and try to one-up HackerNews. Competition breads
innovation.

~~~
olivier1664
I use <http://hckrnews.com/> to avoid the expired-link error

~~~
chandru89new
I just recently stumbled on it and boy oh boy, that's much better than HN
itself. Not complaining about HN but I'm from the time of the web when things
got a little better than the table-like structure of HN. I do feel comfortable
when there's a better interface/design.

On a slightly off-topic talk, I think the whole thing basically boils down to
the crux. People aren't too bothered to change the looks of HN because it just
works good as it is and that's most important. Now, ages from now Apple's
design philosophy might look pretty old but may be people will be okay with
that because it's a brand. I tend to think of HN like that.

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tptacek
Two big reasons people miss:

(a) HN is the front-end and back-end of a bunch of YC business processes.

(b) The voting ring and antispam features rely on obscurity; they are game-
able.

The code for older versions of HN is available, but you'd be better off with
the code for lobste.rs.

~~~
zmitri
Not only that, there's a variety of mechanisms built in to boost/identify YC
users to other YCers to provide mechanisms of boosting their submitted
stories. HN in itself is like a giant voter ring in that way.

~~~
wglb
Do you have specific evidence of that?

~~~
codewright
It's pretty well known. Don't know that I'd use the term voter ring though.

It's just that if you're in a YC batch or an alum you get posts, especially
job posts, boosted.

I wouldn't pay much mind to this talk of mechanisms and gaming systems, sounds
like post-hoc reasoning by outsiders.

~~~
tptacek
There is more than that going on.

~~~
codewright
Not that I'm surprised, but I have to imagine it would take the form of the
quasi-benign backslapping I saw on Reddit.

------
wmf
The source is called news.arc and you can find old versions on the Web, e.g.
<https://github.com/nex3/arc/>
<https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/lib/how-to-run-news>

~~~
muellerwolfram
thanks, but to clarify: I'm not proposing to open source it for the purpose of
looking at the code or forking my own HN-version.

instead i'm proposing that building _this_ site becomes an community effort,
with open feature discussions and people committing code to the HN code base.

there is an army of people who deeply care about HN, and are very skilled to
help out. i think it would be smart to use that asset.

~~~
wmf
For whatever reason pg just doesn't want to do that. Perhaps he doesn't want
building HN itself to become a distraction (for other people) from building
more useful stuff like startups. There may be a sort of contradiction where
ninja rockstar programmers are too valuable to waste on improving HN, but HN
is simultaneously too important to be put in the hands of mediocre
programmers.

HN is kind of a double-edged sword because while it is educational it's also
distracting and addictive. If making HN better also makes it more of a time-
suck, the exercise could be a net negative for the community.

~~~
alexanderh
Reddit aint what it used to be.

Tech oriented users are exiling to other places, including here.

People are disappointed with the current featureset.

I smell opportunity for someone.

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wyuenho
It is open sourced.

<https://github.com/wting/hackernews>

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pg
I don't have time to manage such a project. I don't think it's necessary
anyway. The reason HN lacks x cool feature is not that I expend no energy on
the site, but that I expend all my energy on what users actually care about,
which is not features but the content.

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unimpressive
It's written in an experimental language, as an experimental side project[0],
on a single machine in...I like to think it's PG's basement.

Considering this, it's probably not a service that can be "open sourced" as
the number of people who can actually work on it appears to be PG. And PG is
probably too busy to even act as the project lead.

[0]: It's not so experimental anymore...

~~~
philip1209
YCombinator is listed as in the Rackspace Startup Program [0] - I'm on my
phone so I haven't had a chance to do due diligence, but is HN hosted on a
Rackspace server?

[0]<http://www.rackspacestartups.com/>

~~~
harshreality
HN is hosted at SoftLayer in Houston, TX. The IP block and reverse DNS
indicate hosting by ThePlanet; ThePlanet merged into SoftLayer.

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sgdesign
Might I mention that I'm building an open-source HN clone with Meteor? It's a
great starting point if you want to build your own HN-style community, and
it's also the only real-time HN clone as far as I know:

<http://telesc.pe>

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Mz
I started to reply last night when there were only two comments, but then
decided to stfu and leave the discussion to real hackers. After skimming what
real hackers have said, I think my observation is still relevant:

A) There are plenty of people already tweaking hn in the form of "add ons"
like hnnotify.com. That piece already exists and without being the kind of
problem that this approach would become.

B) People seem to routinely miss that hn is part of the yc business process.
(I honestly don't get how anyone can miss that but posts like this one clearly
do. I was a homemaker for eons and I get it.) You know, that is just slightly
relevant to how and why things get done the way they are (aka _central_ to the
decision making process). This doesn't make good business sense, for reasons
other more informed members have already covered.

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deanclatworthy
The biggest annoyance for me is that this design isn't responsive. It's
incredibly hard to read on my iPhone. At the very least let someone commit a
dozen or so lines of CSS which includes a media query to make the design look
better on mobile!

~~~
joepour
I use news:yc on my iPhone. It works great and has an Instapaper "Read later"
option which is exactly what I was looking for!

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jaddison
I'd hazard that opening the source makes it easier to game the algorithm; so
with that in mind, keeping it closed means one less vector for people to play.

I'm certainly not against open source - just trying to provide a possible
answer.

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piotr_krzyzek
Call me wrong on this one, but if you really are interested in the code for HN
why not create your own? From what I've seen so far, HN is great n' all but
the logic behind it seems pretty trivial (excluding the whole anti-spam module
& related stuff).

The HTML for HN is ultra simple so, there you already have a front-send pretty
much done.

This reply box is pretty simple as well: a input box and a submit button.

Add some filters/sorts and other misc features and you have your own version
of HN.

Not saying it's 'easy', but it's not that difficult.

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AlexRa
I didn't come into this with an opinion, but I have to admit it looks like the
pro-open source argument is making a much stronger case and has countered
almost every objection.

~~~
muellerwolfram
as the OP I'm obviously biased, but I feel so too. At the same time it looks
like more people seemed to be against it though. I would still like to hear pg
thoughts on this...

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codex
Open source gives away value (in effect, destroying it for the previous
owner), sometimes for very little benefit. Why would pg open source the site
and open HN up to a myriad of competitors? HN needs a large user base so that
YC companies can promote themselves here. HN is not like the Linux kernel. The
code is not complex. It doesn't need thousands of contributors nor would the
benefits of extra features be worth the business cost.

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Felix21
When I first saw this, I was excited thinking this will be something about
making the code base of HN available so we can use it to deploy similar sites
on other topics with relative ease.

But to have the hacker news itself the product of an open source project, HELL
NO. I can't even think of one way that would be a good thing.

Hacker news is perfect the way it is.

~~~
Zak
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, HN is already open source in that sense.
See <http://arclanguage.org/> \- it's the example app (news.arc). A git mirror
is here: <https://github.com/wting/hackernews>

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gedrap
> I bet you have a long wishlist of features yourself.

I think that's the main reason why it's not. It's fine as it is. The minimal
features list and quirky HTML is part of HN identity.

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090178
Non coder speaking. I have tried the plug in "answers" from wpmu. Org running
on wordpress. Ok, nothing sexy. Themesforest also has plug in for sale. My 2
cents

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j45
I'm not sure why anyone couldn't reasonably build their own pretty quickly.
reddit publishes their source code.

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soapdog
Isn't HN just racket + arc + news.arc?

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chrishan
It will be more interesting if the years' data on HN can be made available to
public.

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sivanmz
Please have mercy on iPhone users' eyes and specify font-sizes in em

~~~
ronnier
I made a mobile version sometime ago. <http://ihackernews.com>

~~~
klausjensen
And a great one that is, I use it on my mobile devices.

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TallboyOne
I've always wondered how one goes about building a voting ring.

