Hacker News News A bunch of small things have been improved lately. Comment fields now last for 30 minutes. There's a "More" link on threads pages like the ones on other list pages, so you can now see the last 300 of someone's comments. There's a new "delay" field in your profile that lets you specify the delay (in minutes) between when you create a comment and when it's visible to others; this was added because many users edit comments immediately after posting them. And there's also a new "flag" link on stories and comments that lets users flag spam and trolling. One of the problems we're working on now is the tendency for people to "pile on" and downvote comments they disapprove of to extreme negative scores. This seems to go too far sometimes. We're trying various things to fix it. One is to gradually increase the karma threshold for the appearance of the downarrow. Another is to gray down comments with negative scores to near invisibility, in the hope that this will cause downvotes to tail off. (Another is simply to ask users: Please don't downvote comments that are only mildly mistaken or disagreeable to scores as low as -10. That kind of score should only be for spams and trolls.) There's been one more change: user accounts are now lazily loaded, which has made server restarts more than twice as fast. 24 Mar: Effects of TechCrunch Article A lot of people were curious about what the TechCrunch article did to News.YC's traffic. Enough time has now passed that the oscillations have settled down, and it looks as if the result was an increase of about 20% in unique IPs per day. There has been some dilution as a result. The stories that get voted up are not quite as good, and the average tone in comment threads is slightly less polite. But this has happened before when there were influxes new of users, and every time so far the effects have worn off as they got used to the culture of the site. Though we've never had an influx like this before, we're optimistic the same thing will happen this time. Since polls are so common on News.YC, we just added explicit support for them. To prevent the site being swamped by polls for the next few days, we'd appreciate it if you'd only use this feature because there was something you already wanted to ask. There isn't currently any link to it, so you have to go to http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll to make a poll, and for the time being only users with over 200 karma can make them. Once people get used to this we'll open it up to everyone. Today is News.YC's first birthday. Over the past year, traffic has grown fairly steadily. Initially we were getting around 1600 uniques a day. Lately it's been 8-9,000. But what pleases us most is the feeling of community that has grown up here. Thanks, everyone. 12 Jan: Reset Password, Change Color Users can finally reset their passwords. There's a link on the profile page. Users with over 250 karma will notice another field in their profile, which lets them change the color of the bar at the top. We'd long been wanting to do something special for the users who contribute most to the site, but were reluctant to do one of the usual things like display their usernames in red or put stars next to them lest new users felt their opinions counted less. 9 Jan: What News.YC is about (so far) Here are the 100 most common words in submission titles, with articles, connectives, and so on removed, in order of frequency: google startup web facebook yc new ask why social app business microsoft |2.0| software world iphone video apple idea site user free vc online internet open search network year news mobile like best hacker make way good |10| ruby application time future ad top first language programming use code service vs |2007| now design rails lisp launches yahoo amazon developer over million data javascript life thing interview music us company source founder using tech python people game big work great tip most know blog job book programmer entrepreneur problem platform next website need computer better |2008| money where project ownInteresting how much it sounds like some cryptic note to self. The latest version of News.YC is now about 50% faster. It generates the frontpage for a logged-in user in about 50 msec, vs 77 previously. For most users this will be lost in the latency, but it does at least mean the application is getting faster rather than slower. There have been a bunch of other small improvements lately, including More links at the bottom of lists of comments. A bunch of bugs involving edge cases in the formatting of comments got fixed during YC's annual migration. There are now no known problems. There's also finally a brief explanation of the formatting options, and a link to it next to every field supporting formatting. Note two changes: Text has to be indented at least two spaces to be treated as code; when it was one, people kept doing it by accident. Also, an asterisk followed by a whitespace character no longer turns on italicization; people were hitting that by accident too. 7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero. 20 August: Six-month anniversary Today is the six-month anniversary of the launch of News.YC. So far the growth rate seems to be about 5x per year. (These graphs would look more impressive if they had the usual aspect ratio.) It looks as if broadening the focus of the site has made it more engaging, because there are more page views per user, but it's still too early to say for sure. As of today we've expanded the focus of News.YC from startup news to hacker news generally. 6 August: Top users by karma per submission Recently a user asked which Startup News users had the most karma per submission. Since the server has a read-eval-print loop this is straightforward to figure out:
(bestn 20
(compare > [_ 2])
(map (fn (user)
(withs (stories (keep astory (submissions user))
ns (len stories))
(list user
ns
(if (> ns 10)
(median (map [_ 'score] stories))
0))))
(news-users))))
Here are the users with over 10 submissions who have the
highest median points per submission:
(paul 43 12) (aston 12 9) (socmoth 11 9) (andrew_null 23 8) (waleedka 14 8) (nivi 12 7) (toffer 32 6) (kul 23 6) (jkush 43 5) (jkopelman 39 5) (Alex3917 34 5) (sharpshoot 85 5) (palish 31 5) (BioGeek 19 5) (brett 174 5) (dfranke 14 5) (gustaf 12 5) (pg 198 5)Congratulations to Paul Buchheit (and thanks)! 4 August: Protection against karma bombing A few days ago a user methodically downmodded several other users' old comments to kill their karma. To prevent this happening in future, the downarrow now disappears off comments more than a day old. Also the karmas and story/comment scores affected have been restored to whatever they would have been without those downvotes. We just released a new version of news.yc that fixes a bunch of small things that bothered users. Vote urls for logged in users are now static urls instead of hashes representing closures. This makes the site significantly faster, and makes hash keys expire more slowly for cases that really need them (like form submissions). We hope this will save users from seeing "expired link" after taking a long time to submit a form. Also, there are now "More" links at the bottom of every page that displays a list of stories, not just the front page; and long urls in comments get truncated so they don't mess up the page width. The latest version lets you delete submissions and comments. For those who care about the details, there are now two different ways to get rid of something: to mark it as dead, which is for editors to do to spams and offtopic submissions, and to delete it, which is for submitters who change their minds. The reason for the distinction between killing and deleting is to avoid accusations of censorship. Anyone who does want to see the stuff killed by the editors can do it by setting showdead to yes in his profile. But it seemed right to offer submitters a more thorough sort of deletion for their own stuff. 12 June: Vote Without Refreshing The latest version of News.YC finally lets you vote without refreshing the page. Thanks to Paul Buchheit for writing the Javascript, and Trevor Blackwell for help integrating it. Sorry this took so long. Let us know if you notice any breakage. The latest version of News.YC has a new feature: a jobs page where you can see jobs posted by startups we've funded. The next best thing to starting a startup is to go work for one. Being one of the first hires at a new startup is very much like being a founder, both in what's expected of you and in how well you can do if the company succeeds. Some of the startups we've seed funded are now established companies. Others are still just a couple guys in an apartment. What all the companies on news.ycombinator/jobs have in common is that they impressed us enough to bet our own money on them. So if you want to join a startup, there is probably no more concentrated source of good leads. 11 April: New much faster version
We just launched a new version that is 2-3x faster, thanks to Robert
Morris, who rewrote some of the innards of Arc not to cons so much.
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