While we're at it - thanks, Dang. You do a lot of hard work keeping HN a place worth visiting. I even appreciated the time or two you corrected me personally.
The comments sections of most online forums are about useless and I know that places like HN don't stay this way by accident.
The quality of the comments here is so high that I often preface my Google searches with "site:news.ycombinator.com" when I'm researching technical stuff.
Sometimes I'm more interested in the tech scene's opinion on an article than the actual article itself.
Other times, if an article is excessively long, or is a video, I look for someone that summarised the gist.
On that note - am I the only one who would prefer to read transcripts of videos than watch videos themselves? Specifically news sites that only have the video report and not any accompanying text.
100% agree - it especially irks me on certain blogs where there is clearly a script that the person is going off of, but they can't be arsed to post that alongside the video of them talking into a camera. Or worse, a technical subject, where they are performing a complicated set of steps, including arcane terminal incantations. Lossy video compression really helps out with making that readable \s.
It doesn't help that I'm basically in one ear and out the other with my auditory memory and almost photographic visually...
A decade ago I would have agreed with you. In blogging's heyday in general I found online articles to be of much higher value than the comments, especially as Slashdot descended into pure meme-dom.
But these days there is a confluence of factors that have driven average web content quality through the floor. Whether it's the highly tuned click-bait industry, the easy accessibility of turnkey viral content platforms like Medium encouraging banal populist "think" pieces, or just the mainstreaming of tech startups as an average career path, whatever it is the average article I see these days is worth far less than the attention it expects.
I'm not sure whether HN comments are the best use of my time either, but middlebrow dismissals not withstanding, at least they aren't a race to the bottom.
When I'm browsing from the airplane wifi I just can't afford to waste 4 megas in just trying to open a simple text site (that will not charge completely by the way). So I open HN and I´m still able to read about the news but just expending a few Ks for each one.
Lots of special tools. I'm working on revising them so we can open-source the parts that are useful for general reading.
Right now it's a Chrome extension, but I'd love to serve it as plain JS. Anybody know if you can give a web app privileges to open and close tabs without making it a browser extension?
(Don't worry, btw; if we ever publish this it will be entirely opt-in.)
You can open tabs using `var w = window.open()`, and close them using `w.close()`
Only thing is users must disable popup blocking for HN, in the unlikely case that you want to open more than 2 links at once, or open links when the user doesn't click something (like onload).
EDIT: I know this isn't reddit but I couldn't resist. Dan it's admirable how nice and down-to-earth you are in spite of all the stuff you see here everyday...huge thanks for all your work in making HN what it is.
You can do that with local storage. Not sure if there's an existing project that simplifies the process but the general idea is to use it as a hash map that's available to all tabs attached to the same domain.
You'd have to synchronize things yourself to prevent tripping over yourself. Ditto for firing off functions in response to events (i.e. Poll loop and fire handler).
Yes: there's a couple ways to do it, but the most common is to use localStorage and the 'storage' event, which will post in every open window when you modify localStorage.
It's very easy to check for localStorage support (some people disable it just like cookies) and it works, I think, everywhere except Opera, in almost every mainstream version.
Also something that could be promising depending on the circumstances you could use a shared webworker. They allow you to share a webworker script across multiple tabs. I think you have to be from the same domain, but I assume that you have to do that for local storage.
AFAIU postMessage() works between the frames (even cross-origin) within a tab. If you need communication between the tabs, localStorage is the way to go
`postMessage()` works between ANY window references -- tabs or frames. As long as you have a reference to the window (which you will if you call `window.open()`) then you can post messages to it.
Can you elaborate on what the extension does? e.g., for moderating comments more effectively, for reading deeply nested comments, some kind of internal actions we don't have access to, etc.
Hmm, let's see. It does a lot of moderatory things, but general readery things include highlighting stories or commments and jumping to related pages (e.g. the story url, the thread url, the user's profile page, the user's comments page, other stories from that domain), opening and closing those tabs; navigating up and down comment trees (go to parent, go to prev/next sibling); marking stories or comments as 'seen' and thus hiding them, but keeping track of whether 'seen' items have changed and displaying how they changed; finding comments that match regexes and highlighting the matches; if a comment contains a url, open that url in a new tab; jump around between open tabs; go to the root url of a comment (i.e. the original story item); select text and open tabs based on that text; show HN search results in the form of an HN story list that looks like the front page; take various actions based on what's in the clipboard, or copy HN urls or titles to the clipboard; filter stories or comments being displayed according to various criteria; upvote or flag a post; go to the internet archive for a url; show the current rank of a story on pages other than the front page; request the 'more' url at the bottom of a page and inline its results instead of navigating to it. Edit: I forgot one of my favorites, which is aligning the current selection to the center, top, or bottom of the window, a la ctrl+L in Emacs.
It's all done by keyboard shortcuts, which means the mapping to keys is pretty complicated and not as consistent as I'd like.
Edit: It's also written in a Lisp we made that only three of you have ever heard of :)
I recommend you not let the perfect be the enemy of the good on this, and go full-on Dwarf Fortress with this, bizarre undocumented keybindings and all.
That's a great list. Some of these specific features I've considered building as an extension from a reader perspective. Especially for dealing with deeply nested comments, and "find the top HN discussion if any for this URL that I'm currently on".
And you can compile that Lisp to JavaScript to build the Chrome extension?
Unfortunately I don't think so. In fact you can't even specify that you want it to be a tab, as opposed to a new window, but the default in all major browsers is a tab these days.
I haven't tested, but you might be able to kind of fake it by having the tab immediately before the one you want to open do the opening. That wouldn't work for tabs that have opened external sites (the stories themselves), but you could at least send a message to one of the other HN tabs telling it to open your new tab, which should give you some control.
I see. The Chrome.tabs library that I use does allow this. Your clever workaround might be enough though.
While I'm at it, is there a way to give a regular web app the kind of permissions that a Chrome extension manifest can give? It isn't just tab mechanics I need, but clipboard access and cross-domain privileges. Obviously this would still require client consent (and might still be Chrome-only) but it would be easier than an extension with all its deployment headaches.
There's a clipboard API [1] in newest browsers but browser support varies.
Regarding cross-domain, what do you want to do exactly? In general there's no built-in support at least in Firefox to override default same-origin policy, but there are Chrome/Firefox extensions that for instance inject CORS headers to each response.
Edit: In Chrome, it seems you can disable same-origin policy with command line flag [2]
I might be forgetting something but I think the main use of cross-domain privileges is so that my keyboard shortcuts still work on story pages. That way, if I open (say) a NYT article that is currently highlighted on the front page, I can jump back to the front page when I'm done looking at it.
Technical answer to !extension: user scripting, e.g. Greasemonkey or Tampermonkey. Not quite as easy to deliver as an extension, but provides greater power such as opt-in violation of same origin policy and global variables shared across execution contexts.
The nice thing about user scripts is that there is no packaging or bundling. The advantage of Greasemonkey over Tampermonkey is it uses files rather than storing scripts in a database.
I'd be scared to show it as is because we get in trouble when admin-specific stuff shows up in screenshots. There once was a controversy because 'kill', 'blast', and 'nuke' links showed up in a screen shot, despite the fact that they were all defined in the version of the HN source code that pg published years ago.
A Show HN will certainly be in order if we ever publish it, though.
Since this looks like the tech support thread, I'll add that
> opening and closing those tabs when desired
will only work with window.open if the moderation tool's window owns the tabs in question. So if you open a HN tab randomly or from another site or wherever, the moderation tool won't have opened it, and so it won't be able to close it.
reddit has RES. People are used to browser extensions, and this doesn't sound like it'd cooperate too well on a phone or similar device, so I say just release the extension.
As for fun-sounding feature names, just make a help page in the extension describing how everything works. Maybe call the help page "spoilers" or something. :D
Oh and can I be the fourth person to know what Lisp you wrote this in? :D
I'm in the process of porting it from Parenscript (which we didn't create but worked on quite a bit) to Lumen (which we did create). Parenscript is better known—perhaps a dozen people have heard of it.
Lumen is an experiment in making a Lisp (or a Lisp-like thing, depending on how finicky you are about the name) in which the universal data structure isn't a list but a hashmap (hashtable, whatever you call it). That's because hashmaps have proven to be the most convenient thing for exploratory programming. So instead of 'everything is a list, including source code', you get 'everything is a hashmap, including source code'.
We also wanted it to be self-hosted, and to compile (transpile) to Lua as well as JS, in as straightforward a way as possible. JS and Lua are very close semantically, so our approach with Lumen was to take the semantic intersection of those two and then build the simplest thing we could on top of it. As a result, it's quite different from Arc, which is semantically a classical Lisp.
Here are a couple of old comments I posted about this idea, before Scott implemented it:
I actually optimize for the comments, heh. I open HN links in new tabs and then wait a day or two for the discussion to complete before reading through them. So I don't end up refreshing for new comments or re-reading the same ones.
There are a couple downsides to this though: One, I generally miss the window for participation. Two, my browser is perpetually filled with dozens of HN tabs.
I don't know who dang is, and I don't go on HN enough for it to really matter to me. I'm not really part of the HN culture, I just come here for the occasional new software that might be of interest to me. It's likely there's a lot of people in the same boat including the person you responded to.
Not sure why your comment's light grey, but dang is... a/the moderator or the guy who runs HN or? I know it's something like that, and I just tried to look it up so I could tell you definitively, but I can't seem to find it stated explicitly anywhere here. Seems fair that a casual site user wouldn't know, if I'm not even entirely certain, and I'm on here every day.
I often read the comments first, and then read the article. I love comments sections in general (Gawker, Gothamist, NYT come to mind in terms of decent commenters), but I've never learned as much as in the HN comments section.
Depends if anything controversial has been posted that day. Some topics I read get hundreds of comments, some get about 3. So I guess it depends on whether there's a political war going on or some giant controversy in internet land, or whether anyone's staying reasonable for a few days or so.
This is something (perhaps the only thing) I miss here which reddit has: /r/bestof. Comments, no matter how good, never end up on /news and so anyone who isn't reading the rest of the discussion in question will never see them.
Come to think of it, is there any technical limitation on having comments submitted as stories? Maybe it's just a cultural issue (i.e., there is no culture of submitting comments as stories here).
There's no technical limitation. In fact bugs have occasionally caused comments to appear on the front page.
A genuine technical limitation is that poll options don't work like other items ('item' is what the code calls posts like stories, comments, and job ads), which caused some trouble last week.
Is it possible to implement features similar to the above without being a ycombinator insider? Since upvotes aren't visible on comments, other than comments you made yourself, how could you calculate it? (Are the upvotes on comments available through an API for example?)
I'm pretty sure that's happened. I even recall someone doing some recursion trick with it - which I just tried, but I can't edit the URL after submission. (Maybe you used to be able to?)
/bestcomments, despite its name, is most-upvoted, which is not the same. The Macro's highlights are more interesting, but at the moment they're collected almost entirely by me and a few others pinging Colleen on chat.
I think a community process for surfacing the best stuff—not by upvoting, but by e.g. nominating one best thing each per day—could yield interesting results.
I imagine HN comments would have a ton of tags generated by such an approach. So, a straight-forward search engine for them could help too. Not a Big Data guy so I can't do recommendations. However, this DARPA-funded, Watson alternative was open-sourced and might do interesting things for HN data:
The algorithms for calculating the best comments on reddit are semi-secret to prevent people from gaming them, but I'm sure you could convince them to give you a copy of the code if you want to see the math behind it. If you need help let me know.
>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 hn@ycombinator.com.
This may not specifically fall in that category, but you may still want to email if you don't get your answer here.
Too often comment chains devolve into nitpicking, pedantry, and into off-topic discussion where two people fight tooth and nail for Internet Points.
From a technical perspective I get little or nothing from them, and from a discussion standpoint there's little reason for me to spend my time watching people nitpick each other over things that nobody in the community cares about.
Don't forget the obligatory 18-comment critique of the OP site's design choices regarding page size, font, color scheme, and scrollbar and/or back button hijacking, not to mention hosting and CDN critique. It's common enough to warrant its own segregated meta thread for every post to keep it out of the on-topic discussion.
I'm here for almost 4 years now, and I see this comment probably once a month. For such large and diverse community as HN, it is doing exceptionally well.
Lobste.rs is like HN but smaller and more closely-knit. Mail me if you want an invite.
Metafilter doesn't have the same technical focus and has a markedly different overall tone, but is pretty much immune from the "reddit effect" due to a lack of upvotes/downvotes, good moderation, and one-time $5 signup fee.
The comments sections of most online forums are about useless and I know that places like HN don't stay this way by accident.