Great. It's a good idea to have a HN-like platform with a narrower focus. Another idea would be to add focus areas to HN itself, maybe similar to subreddits. When I currently scan the "new" pages, I find less than 3% of the posts interesting.
Personally I like the fact that some days I find very little of interest. It keeps me focused. Sometimes there can be too much content in our daily lives.
Well, then just don't look at it and focus on other things; that's what I do; but when I then come back later it's practically impossible to keep up and scan the whole stuff just to find the very few interesting posts; it would be much more efficient (with a positive effect on the ability to concentrate on the essential things) to just scan a pre-selected focus area.
I love it the way it is. If I miss out on an interesting story, so be it. But having all the other stories in between helps me looking left or right. I might not be knee deep into genomics, but that one article could just be interesting. I prefer that over tailored content. That’s what I use reddit is for.
You don't need to sub-divide areas of endeavor. You could have all research, vs all practice, and maybe a place to stuff things that will cause political engagement and heated discussion? I dunno, /. did that and the proliferation of flame-bait stories still killed the site for me.
Honestly I think this is a feature, not a bug. I like that there's a bunch of things I don't find interesting. Sometimes I'll read stuff in not drawn to anyway, mostly just for the (typically) insightful commentary on this site. I've learned countless new things because of it, and things I didn't find immediately interesting turned into a topic of interest.
Case in point: the other day there was a posting about scanning old scrolls for text, and I found the topic dull. Reading the commentary I learn about the Ea-Nasir tabled[1] and found it both amusing and interesting. I also learned there's a whole subreddit dedicated to this topic, and reading through some of the funnies I decided to go back and read the actual article about scanning the scrolls. I then learned much more than I thought I wanted to learn about true intricate process and labor involved in doing this work, and found it quite interesting indeed.
So yeah, I'd much rather a high percentage of posts on this site continue to be about topics I have no immediate interest in, because you never know...
When something seems boring on HN I open it and go straight to the comments.
Also, I have this weird effect, when reading something not on HN, in the end I forget, and look for the button wondering what HN has to say about it. The disappointment each and every time..
This is going to sound overly simplistic, but maybe don't scan "new", then? Just look at the front page, where the stuff that interests people has bubbled up. And if nothing there interests you, maybe your interests have simply diverged from what the rest of HN finds interesting. There is nothing wrong with that from either side.
"When I currently scan the "new" pages, I find less than 3% of the posts interesting."
I find general News sites unreadable. Just trash, shitloads of advertisements, they try to blur the line between news and advertisement. You can't even navigate this stuff without an adblocker.
Using an RSS reader with selected feeds, helps a lot. Especially since you will have many blogs that rarely post something and without an RSSReader you would not be able to follow them.
I'm talking about this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest; it's just every post in chronological order. The selective RSS reader only helps if someone (or a good individualized algorithm) has done the selection.
I like how random/catch-all it is. I don’t have to go through a million subs and just check what’s there and always find something interesting and unique. It’s why I hang in resetera.com (etc) even though I can’t stand the community.
Does it matter? If I submit a link that doesn't interest HNers, it won't be voted for or commented on and will have basically no effect on anybody here.
I wonder if it would be interesting to make a blog that looks like the HN UI. Then when you click a link it shows the full article first rather than the comment thread. It's a nice minimalistic design imo.
I use an RSS reader and see the title, the link to the article, and the link to the comment thread. This is currently my favourite way to read HN and I think there’s benefit to having both be only one click away
Love the idea! However, it seems that you’re running a non-mobile friendly version of the hacker news design. Making it responsive would be greatly appreciated!
Yeah. I need to work on the mobile version. Just haven't had time. An TBH I know little about responsive design. Where should I start?
It's currently set up on a VPS running news.arc in a screen session connected to the Internet via Cloudflare Tunnel. If it falls over while I'm out today... sorry!
Use @media queries to modify the CSS rules. The bare-bones approach is a breakpoint around 1024 width where everything below is 100% width (with a small margin/padding if you like). That way smaller tablets and phones have a decent experience without horizontal scrollbars.
My initial reaction is that this is yet another place in a growing list for retro stuff, and many of the very active retro people are already sharing news and interesting links on Reddit, Xitter, Bluesky and the Fediverse; for example, I see Ken Shirriff is well represented on OP's site, but I am following him and others, and converse directly with them, on the socials anyway.
The saving grace is that, as an aggregator, there's an rss feed so the site contents can come my way rather than needing to go have a looksee, however I am more likely to comment elsewhere where I have an established account rather than create yet another one to use and manage for yet another site to visit.
Idea: what if we had a "federated" network of hacker news like sites based on ActivityPub?
I understand that there are already federated reddit clones but I think this may be a cool project to learn more about ActivityPub.
> Idea: what if we had a "federated" network of hacker news like sites based on ActivityPub?
HackerNews is already a news aggregation service, just like Reddit, countless other Reddit clones, lobste.rs, and most fediverse platforms.
Just drop by one of the many Lemmy servers and create a community. There's no need to overcomplicate things. You can even create and manage your own instance if that's your thing.
You may have missed the last sentence of my comment. I just think it could be a nice thing to create for educational reasons, I'm aware of lemmys existence.
First, I love the idea, and thank you for building this.
I have some accessibility feedback on your blog, though, which I'm just now reading. The visited link color is nearly indistinguishable from the body text. I returned to some pages to revisit links and couldn't find them without close inspection.
Seems like what people do in Reddit where they want to make a separate subreddit and it ends up being a waste. Why not post these links here? I would read them.
Btw: seems to work when you drop the /news at the end (just the site name). Perhaps make that a permanent feature? (unless you plan to have other content on that site of course). Or use a subdomain like HN does.
Another reason that this resource is amazing: a lot of retro work/reverse-engineering etc. is done in communities for different platforms + architectures. Some cross-pollination would be fantastic.
Would love to hear what enhancements retro folks would like. The one thing I plan to add shortly is tags so that it's possible to filter by say 6502 or c64 or zelda or ...
I'd vote against that. You end up with two people going back and forth which usually isn't great for everybody else. I really like the HN model. It encourages you to say what you are going to say and get out of the thread.
If you do need or want to see the responses, you can do that easily enough by looking at your own comments. A little friction here is a good thing IMHO.
It seems like a lot of the suggestions here would turn it into something more like Reddit. That already exists. No point in recreating it.
My ISP just fucked up their interface and I cannot create aliases anymore.
For Two Stop Bits, you can put anything as e-mail, they don't try to confirm it anyway.
I built HN for law using Python. At first it was quite slow, but after doing some tweaks, it loads just as fast as HN. Check it out: https://courtroom.sixftone-mlh.repl.co/
The feature I want most from hackernews: I want to make sure I don't miss any frontpage post in a topic of my interest.
It could be a browser extension that shows a little star beside the title, or maybe a program on my machine that emails me a bunch of those links at the end of everyday. Either way, no ML or trying to predict what I want - I'm just going to give it some keywords.
Now matching a keyword to a post can benefit from some nlp, and that'd be fine. Something simple like tf-idf should probably be enough. As long as the recall is close 100%, low precision is okay.
Leveraging https://hackyournews.com for the dehyped titles and article summaries would help even more, and probably allow the keywords to surface more consistently.
This looks bad on mobile and has the classic “desktop zoomed out view”. Looks like it must be missing the correct HTML meta properties. Should be an easy fix.
I think https://www.vogons.org has the PC/DOS/Windows 9x parts already covered, it might be best to concentrate on non-x86 retrocomputing & gaming instead.
On the topic of retro computing and gaming: I really want to make retro computer games, but without the retro computer environment. Things like PICO-8 are great but lean heavily on making the whole experience retro.
Awesome website!
Honestly I do believe there is audience large enough to sustain a hn for retro computing and gaming. Truth be told a lot of those types of posts get drowned out here by business and programming posts.
Lots of comments about how to improve the project and the “secret sauce” of Hacker News.
The real secret to Hacker News is the ability to attract a large target audience on an ongoing basis to view and contribute. It is the most difficult part of most software projects and especially social ones. Every HN-like project needs to have a plan around this. Andrew Chen explains it well in his book “The Cold Start Problem”.
> The real secret to Hacker News is the ability to attract a large target audience on an ongoing basis to view and contribute.
This might be a good time to mention voat. It was a better reddit than reddit, it had a superior UX, it performed better as well, but ultimately the community was utter shit.
Social networking services are not a technical challenge.
Reddit was a great community with its own character and norms prior to the great Digg exodus. It mostly managed to hold onto them, at least while it still made some kind of sense to think about reddit as one community vs. 10,000 subreddits.
They each had an AND attached to it that made them better.
Facebook was just like MySpace AND everyone at your university is on it (which then became timeline/news feed, and chat was added, etc.)
Reddit was just like digg (front page of the internet) AND had thousands of niche communities you could connect to
Voat was just like Reddit but had no AND that caused users to stick around. Discord is more of a threat because it is a community hub AND it provides live chat, voice channels, video sharing, etc.
Software clones are easy. Providing that AND is what makes companies stand apart and thrive
I don't think it's a valid take. If the incumbent is doing a shit job and pushing it's entire userbase always, providing the same service without being shit is definitely a good sales pitch.
I have scraped the comments here at random. There’s plenty of “violations” that are missed.
This comment feels like confirmation bias relative to my measure.
That people believe it’s a certain type of forum likely plays as much or more of a role than moderation. It intentionally does not function like Reddit or Twitter and that makes obvious what content is favored.
The two together are key. There are many subreddits which had a great culture but mods went underwater when the sub hit ~100k, the point where every sub becomes closer to the norm. And obviously you can't just pay a mod to create something special, it takes two.
you're just in the pot as the water warms. Take a critical look at HN now vs. 10 years ago; it has change immensly. The key question is has the core integrity of the original project been violated? That's less clear.
It does make me wish that HN somehow “spoke to” mastodon/other activity pub servers or something. I wouldnt mind the posts that float up to the front page here coming up in other places.
Thankfully the people that post here do tend to be people using federated social media as well haha
Which isn’t that bad. On a smaller scale it’s like a blog author who promotes their own book. It means the ads can be fairly unobtrusive and not mine you for data, while at the same time being highly targeted to a specific audience.
My respect for dang is enormous. I would love a peek behind the curtain. I have no idea how this site maintains the quality it does. I see only a fraction of the work Dan does and I can only think he lives in some weird quantum bubble where he has 489 hours in every day.
