Hacker News Highlights[0] is something I didn't even know I needed. There's some great content to be found here (including some insightful comments), but the sheer volume of content means I'm probably missing out on most of it.
Hacker Newsletter and HN Daily have filled this role for a while now for me. I read the highlights over lunch or on the train, and otherwise try to avoid HN during the day (heh, mostly).
Not the most optimal (or cordial) way to convince people that they've made a less optimal decision. It also doesn't explain why you're mad, or what alternative you're suggesting.
I don't care that much about "optimal (or cordial)," and I'm not all that mad. Distrusting "duck"/"Kale Davis" is probably a good idea, but you're of course free to do what you want.
Granted, the browser-snapshot-of-comment may not be the best presentation technique, especially as HN layout causes the comment to clip at small browser widths.
A fix for this (without having to redesign HN) would be to create an embedable widget that takes in a HN comment ID and retrieves it from the HN API, then style the response so it matches the theme.
Would be great for someone to connect a browser plugin that somehow highlights exceptional comments that might be hidden. Maybe people > X,000 karma get to highlight one a day.
Ideally it would also highlight ones that were featured on The Macro
> the sheer volume of content means I'm probably missing
> out on most of it.
I guess I'm one of those old-timers who misses the days when the submissions were more focused on startups and less about government policy, macro economics, and whatever else. (I'm quite biased toward consuming information that is useful and actionable rather than merely interesting, so I realize that puts me at odds with the site's stated policy.)
1000000000% agree. I think the site is pretty bad at hosting political discussions, and, worse, that the resulting discussions are tedious. There are very few long-time readers of HN who can honestly say they'd have a hard time predicting what HN will say about any given political issue.
For example - any thread even tangentially related to the Paris attacks recently. There are probably still subthreads simmering over whether Islam is really a death cult or no more evil than Christianity or whether the West really had it coming, or whether maybe we should just nuke all of Asia and be done with it. Except really it was all a false flag operation by the New World Order because Snowden. For a while, the comments page was practically toxic - and every bit of it entirely predictable.
I'm starting to see now why some people say engineers can be prone to rigid and extremist political views. When your day job requires you to prove things to a certain degree of correctness, maybe it makes sense to believe the world and people should work the same way. There seems to be far too much cynicism, vitriol and condescension here around some subjects, and too many people who seem to think those are the qualities of a keen intellect. Maybe politics is one of those fields everyone just thinks they're an expert at.
> There are very few long-time readers of HN who can honestly say they'd have a hard time predicting what HN will say about any given political issue.
While the political discussions on HN are predictable, I do think the overall politics of the site have shifted significantly over time. Six or seven years ago I was pretty much the token crazy liberal or whatever. Whereas now my politics generally aren't even noticeably out of the mainstream, without my views having shifted significantly on most issues.
There are very few long-time readers of HN who can honestly say they'd have a hard time predicting what HN will say about any given political issue.
The only issue I have predicting that stuff here is related to the surprise I sometimes feel at how much the bias of this site has drifted over the past couple of years. There's definitely been a pronounced uptick in the prevalence of left'ish wing /socialist'ist thinking here. At one time opinions focusing on individual rights, free markets, etc. were mainstream here. Now they routinely get heavily downvoted.
I guess I'm one of those old-timers who misses the days when the submissions were more focused on startups and less about government policy, macro economics, and whatever else
Put me in the same category, FWIW. I've adjusted to the new way of things, and just accept it for what it is. But I would prefer less politics, world affairs, economics, etc., and more focus on tech and startups.
I don't think most of the policy stuff is even all that 'interesting'. 'Interesting' is learning something new for the sake of learning about the world. Most of the policy stuff is more like "look at this outrageous thing!". In many cases, it's true that the thing in question is important - probably more important than startups/hacking - but there are plenty of other places for those kinds of links/discussions.
Everyone has their own conscious and unconscious biases for news preferences.
At least as far as my conscious, I like to use "Does this better help me relate to the world?" as a yardstick.
I don't think anyone would argue that it's best practice to make decisions with substantial amounts of missing knowledge, yet I feel like there are a huge number of startups founded via the "I am a white, middle-class, college-attending male, and this is one of my problems that I want to solve" selector.
That's all well and good, I don't expect every freshman to be an expert on {insert problem outside that subclass} for {insert region outside US/EUR}, but... if we're serious about solving important world problems, then the people who are going to solve them need to at least be aware that it's a problem.
Someone should start a petition to change the name back to startup news.
edit: I should have written a more than a single sentence. Obviously I'm joking; hn is what it is now and it's not going to go back to the good old days.
There is a point that is worth making though: when the site was focused on startups it was a much nicer place and people posting new things got help in the comments section rather than just commentary and opinions. That has been lost mostly because of the growth in users but I can't help think that the increase in scope had a negative impact too.
I think the change in proportion of news devoted to startups is at least partially driven by changes to business journalism and business in general. Covering startups as startups is much more common in mainstream business journalism. Culturally, "startup" has become associated with a larger cluster of concepts than it was five years ago and it is not surprising when I see a new small business referred to as a startup. A few years ago, 10 Strategies for Marketing my Startup would be more likely to fall in the intersection of useful and actionable and interesting. These days the level of general knowledge about startups is higher (e.g. Altman's Stanford class and recent handbook). There was a time when "growth hacking" was an HN "trending topic". Today, we live in a time where it's been dissected and found to be a poor fit for a startup's core business strategy.
The third factor is that I think the standards of HN have become higher. Many of the VC blogs that used to make the front page look a bit flat compared to today's median...it used to be that the the 200-500 word daily thoughts and opinions of "important" people made the front page despite lacking supporting evidence. These days that seems less common.
Brian Kernighan's recent lecture on language design, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg4U4r_AgJU, is an example (not sure if it was on hacker news). I'm working on SIMD in Go and don't want to make avoidable mistakes.
I'd particularly like to see examples of the kind of content people think used to appear on HN and doesn't anymore. My guess is that this is more nostalgia bias than reality, but if that's wrong, we need to know.
Here are a couple of examples of the kind of content that I think would have been upvoted 5-6 years ago, but nowadays seems to die in the /new queue or not even make it that far.
They're not truly stellar, outstanding examples because I don't have enough time to dig through 100 to find 5 that would fit, but I found them pretty interesting and think that 6 years ago they would have gotten at least some upvotes and discussion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10606780 - actionable suggestions backed up by practical experience. Slightly shilling his new startup, but also interesting and worth a read. I added it to my bookmarks. 1 upvote in the /new queue, from me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10606876 - Found on Medium, wasn't even submitted to HN. Interesting discussion, actionable advice, focused on very HN-centric topic (Lean Startup). No upvotes so far.
Overall, I find that I have better luck discovering this kind of content on HN these days from reading /new than reading the front page. However, that still involves kissing a LOT of frogs because of the /new signal-to-noise ratio. I almost never see this sort of content make it to the front page in 2015.
I've been meaning to test to see if I'm subject to nostalgia bias on this. Any suggestions for how to do so?
FWIW, I have a VERY strong feeling that the content on HN has shifted since about five years ago, to the point that I've been trying to find a site that has more of the entrepreneurship / practical advice that I used to see on HN a lot. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10190783 )
However, I don't have data to back it up (yet).
I can't swear that these things don't appear on HN any more, but in terms of what I'm looking for, and used to find on HN, I'd say stuff like Brennan Dunn or Jason Cohen's writing on practical entrepreneurship:
I very, very rarely see posts like that upvoted on HN any more. And if it does briefly appear, it tends to get significantly downvoted and criticised - I recall an Empire Flippers article recently that took a lot of flak in the comments section (despite defence from Patio11 amongst others) and disappeared.
More tech / programming-focused stuff bubbles up with some regularity, but the micro-ISV / lifestyle business and even startup advice hardly ever appears from what I see.
I definitely see your perspective and agree with you in principle.. but on the other hand, for a lot of these topics it is really difficult to find a forum for intelligent and at least superficially science/fact-based discussion from more-informed-than-average people.
I also think that macro economics are pretty important if you're trying to divine a profit from the startup world. If you believe we're in a bubble, you can't really afford to not be aware of what's happening in both the financial markets and consumer markets..
The problem is that once you allow that crack in the wall, articles that generate outrage and comments and clicks all flood through. For example, on the front page right now is this article about pharma pricing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10595041. Is it likely to draw measured, informative comments about how your business should approach pricing and PR, or is it likely to draw yet another tedious flamewar about health care policy?
I think it's reasonable that knowing macroeconomics news is important to running a business, but it's not the case that everything that's important to running a business has to be on HN. It's hard to run a business if you are constantly fighting with your spouse/partner/whatever, but that shouldn't mean flooding the front page with relationship advice.
I'm with you. But I've made my peace with it and found a way to make it useful. Most of the news these days is click/flame bait. I just check HN first. The top rated comments on most of these stories is a pretty good barometer of if I need to care or not. Usually not.
HN is a meta-filter for mainstream news if you use it right.
But yes. Very yes. The "how I did this cool thing" story is sorely missed. A front page full of hope and awesome was a welcome sight each morning.
> The "how I did this cool thing" story is sorely missed.
Are you sure there are less of those? I'm not. Certainly they're as on topic as ever, and continue to make the front page. I'm not aware of a lot of such stories that get submitted but not upvoted.
No questions. Although as UI Designer/Developer with 10 years experience under my belt, I have to say I'm in love with site's design. If the content matches in caliber, we're in for a treat.
Looking forward to read great stories/articles from all partners.
That's something I wished I had the time for when I was in YC.. i.e. individually talking to each partners and learning about the previous startups and great stories they'd be willing to share. Hopefully we could read some of them on the Macro : )
For now, the best place to send them is macro@ycombinator.com. I think it will make sense to set up a dedicated HN Highlights submission address eventually!
Really impressed by the fast page loads and readability. This matters more than anything and they nailed it. I wish other publications thought like this.
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It was difficult to decide how to handle comments and whether to have them at all, so we opted to just leave them out for now. I like both of those ideas -- adding in a link to an article's analogous HN thread, and the official submit bot.
Comment threads are infinite, sprawling, and often infuriating. It's nice to have a peaceful place aside from that. Us commenters will find a way to comment anyway.
Very much this, I use Ublock Origin to hide comments on all the news stuff I consume since they are generally just noise that detracts from good content (outside of specific sub-reddits and this place anyway).
that's a great use! I'm gonna do that. I've been blocking headers and footers of webpages because I have a 16:9 screen and need all the vertical space can get. as "web 1.0" as it sounds, I love that I get to decide how webpages appear on my computer.
They might really tie together the fixpoint loop if they turn HN into some kind of post-StackOverflow type reputation forum for hackers and businesspeople.
Investors need reputable hunches, companies need insights and clever people, and commenters love to gain social karma status especially if it might land them better jobs or chances to talk with interesting/rich/powerful people.
Discussion is fundamental to the whole ecosystem. HN is a primitive weekend hack yet still pretty valuable.
Cool idea. Little niggle though - the body font for articles etc. is a bit illegible. I think removing "webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased" and letting it default to "subpixel-antialiased" on the paragraph text makes it a lot better: http://imgur.com/sVPPPwK (before/after comparison).
Ooshma here. Loving the new website. Was a crazy experience to open up with Colleen on the inaugural Q&A. Thanks Colleen for an incredible interview, and congrats Colleen, Kevin, and YC on a successful launch!
Great name! I'm wondering if this will be like Reddit's Upvoted trying to surface interesting content from Hacker News, or if this will be focused on allowing submissions and collecting ideas to distribute as a publication? Looking forward to seeing what comes out of it.
Bug report: URLs are broken in the articles - they append to the article's address. See e.g. [0].
EDIT: I've been seeing a steady increase of this particular bug on the Internet, usually in blog and news articles. I wonder if this isn't a direct consequence of browser vendors removing protocol from the address bar? I.e. people just copy-paste a part of an address and don't notice that the browser didn't append the protocol part.
Ah, I see. Ok, normally the 'colofon' pages I'm familiar with - especially with publications like periodicals - will include that info but only as an afterthought or a footnote, the 'meat' is the details behind the publisher, addresses, people involved (editor) and so on.
Historically, you're right, but it strikes me that I haven't read a book in the last ten years whose labeled colophon didn't focus on typesetting. Of course, all the publication information is in the front matter, just not labeled in the same way.
Would it be possible to have the macro available using the HN ui and accessible from a link in the orange nav bar? (Don't read this as a criticism of your design; I just think it would be more convenient).
Love the idea. I'm glad to hear they are using Middleman for the site, it has been a joy to develop with. I highly recommend checking it out if you're looking to build a static site [0].
Haven't had a chance to read the articles yet, but I'm a fan of how well designed the site feels while still feeling like I'm on hacker news. That slight motion on the tab hover states feels very nice and the large orange block of text is great. I can't help but read the headline.
Question for the Macro peeps: Does one still need to subscribe for the publication if already on YC mailing list? My inbox is currently chaos land and I want to avoid duplicate missives.
I noticed a typo in one of the articles. Any thought to open-sourcing the Middleman repo so individuals can submit pull requests for fixes such as this?
[0] http://macro.ycombinator.com/articles/2015/11/hacker-news-hi...