What does HackerNews think of hacker-news-undocumented?
Some of the hidden norms about Hacker News not otherwise covered in the Guidelines and the FAQ.
"Additionally, founders of YC companies see each other's usernames show up in orange, which — although not an explicit benefit — does allow fellow YC founders to immediately identify one another in discussions."
The real features are hidden from us plebes.
Most active current discussions (popular controversial ones tend to end there): https://news.ycombinator.com/active
(from the lists page https://news.ycombinator.com/lists)
See also:
>A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors
>After users reach 501 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment.
You have now 26 karma and you could submit a question, so I assume there's either no minimum karma or it's very low. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the submitter's karma plays a role in the ranking or flagging logic (they might pay more attention to flame or spam topics for new accounts).
There's this repo that documents other things, though not what you asked, I'm not sure if it's still correct https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
Downvotes and more are unofficially documented here.
Mostly I agree with your take, my assumption is that the karma requirement for downvoting is to help prevent downvote spam, but that's just me making crap up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36011856
user mikequinan posted a link to:
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
where you can find many details on how HN works (and also some reasons why it is designed in such a way).
There is an unofficial list of undocumented HN features maintained by minimaxir
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
@OP: You need 501 karma to see the downvote button. Use it wisely.
Here you go: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
1. There is a lot of stuff in the HN Undocumented norms repo[0] that would be potentially good candidates.
2. Clear up some of the oft repeated norms around disagreement and downvotes. Downvotes in general (when do you get access to the downvote, what they are for, why there are no submission downvotes, etc).
3. Information about posting: reposting, file types (since only pdfs and videos are mentioned explicitly), pay walls. Add a note about year tags.
4. Info about why titles are sometimes changed automatically (since this is often confusing to people).
5. An explicit call out that bots and entirely (or almost entirely) generated comments are banned, with allowances for comments with substantial human contribution quoting eg ChatGPT output.
J/K, I believe it has something to do with karma level. You still have a pretty low karma amount.
I would submit we should be cautious with metaobservations like, "this is much older than other sites," because we should be trying to prove ourselves wrong, whereas these sorts of metaobservations amplify confirmation bias. I'm not saying skepticism is unwarranted, just that we need to be careful with this sort of reasoning.
As a side note, I've seen people strike through stuff out on HN, and I'd like to strike through this claim to emphasize there's a correction; it's not in the undocumented features repo[1], and I've tried a few standard things like ~this~ and ~~this~~ and -this- and --this-- and have never figured it out. Can anyone tell me what the markdown is?
> Here you go, my first page of hits on mobile: https://imgur.com/a/zSL5fVX
> Only when I got to my laptop now did the set of links differ: https://imgur.com/a/EuUt7U5
> Clearly not the same set of results for the same search.
Re: this site's guidelines, I find your comment here a little disingenuous and far too generous towards HN's "guidelines". The mere fact that such content as this exists suggests that HN's guidelines are quite opaque: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
>The FAQ notes that submission rank is impacted by "software which downweights overheated discussions." A good rule of thumb for this effect is when the number of comments on a submission exceeds its score.
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
I recommend checking https://news.ycombinator.com/active ("Most active current discussions") once per day to find these discussions.
>If a user has 31 Karma, they can flag submissions.
There is a list here https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
and
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
and a handful of posts by dang, sama, pg, etc. over the course of the years. most of the rest is what long-time users have just figured out through observation. There's a Git repo[1] out there that aggregates a lot of that stuff, but keep in mind that it's technically unofficial. That said, I think most of what's there is widely considered to be correct.
A feature which has been very helpful a couple of times is the noprocrast setting, which you can get to boot you off HN for a while if you spend too much time here.
If you click thread at the top it's not hard to see if your recent comments have replies.
Sometimes I look at https://hckrnews.com/ which just shows the recent top stories in chronological order.
Also see this github page about undocumented HN features https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
If you want to add to HN, go to new and upvote good stories. Go to ask and answer questions. Go to show and give people feedback. Submit fascinating things. Write awesome things yourself and submit them. Teach us something. (Ask not what HN can do for you etc) Good luck.
One of the few issues that I've faced is pagination of the comments and occasionally "dang" might pop up to paginate the comments on heavily trending/debated topics.
My 2 cents would be to enable pagination after a set number of comments, so that it doesn't go on and on, on mobiles.
BTW, I really like this kind of website design as its minimal enough to load on terrible connections and easily viewable.
> Personally, I’d stay at 3. I’d also wait at least a day between re-posts (and try re-posting at different time slots).
Wow, that's not how I parsed the very same reposting rules. If I'm about to submit something and I found an older submission with the same URL, my personal rule is that it should be older than a year ago before I'd submit it again. Three posts with the same URL for three consecutive days seems a bit too much.
> Hacker News is moderated mainly by dang aka Dan Gackle (pronounced ‘Gackley’). He’s not of asian descent
??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
https://news.ycombinator.com/invited
as reported by the unofficial
The point is, being an arsehole is my right and asking about it is a hippa violation and my name is Karen and I want to speak to the manager! /s
Edit: thinking about it, I have been quite unpopular recently as I'm not super on board with big tech being evil or monopolies law being the right tool to fix it...
Edit2: I think this is the page I mentioned above
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
The launches page is in this section:
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hacker...
Correct, -4 is the lowest a comment can go: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
Yes there is an un-official list of undocumented hacker news features: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
The most recent change I remember was when Twitter and GitHub posts were split based on the user the link belonged to (i.e. GitHub.com/dang is different than github.com/torvalds now).
More seriously these posts got me interested in what features besides downvoting would be added at various karma levels which led me to your git page on the topic. Linked here for others interested:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2456602
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3848762
TLDR; Green Accounts are for users who are under 5 days old. You can see all their submissions at - http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories
[Edit to add, Or perhaps it is 14 days as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3848820]
Double Edit: Confirmed, 14 days (not 5). See https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented for a full list
More info here: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
According to this source ,
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sctb
are moderators(also they replied to my email),so i can say that they are putting great effort in running hn.
501 karma for downvoting
I just tried posting "10 ways to test if this title works on HN" (the number thing being one I recall encountering before). The title was automatically changed to "How to test if this title works on HN". So there is definitely support for automatically editing some common clickbait title phrases.
It seems to be regex, I tried again with "12 ways to test if HN automatically formats titles" and it was also changed to "How to test ...".
If it breaks your title, you can fix it manually! You should see an `edit` under the title that will link to you an editing page that allows you to edit the title. This works with both link posts and text posts. I was able to change the title of my test post back to "10 ways to test ..." and it correctly updated to show that title with no modifications.
And I just now realized that this is actually one of the probably few things not mentioned on that one repo [1] that documents undocumented HN features!
This might help answer some of your burning questions.
Speaking of the leaderboard, I was actually curious how it was organized: there are some people missing from it that I would expect to be there, like 'pg. How is that list generated?
You could also subscribe to HN on feed reader with such limitations, https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/ and http://hnapp.com/ are two that I have used in the past. e.g. https://hnrss.org/newest?comments=100 and http://hnapp.com/rss?q=comments%3E100 creates a feed limited by number of comments.
In the end I decided RSS wasn't ideal way to follow HN though, and for quite some time I have been using https://hckrnews.com/ almost exclusively to skim through top 10 posts for each day. Or top 20 or top 50%, if you have more free time. Plus I like the table layout, with comments/points in their respective columns.
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
...mentioned 2 hours as the limit on an edit. I don't know what it currently is. You're past 2 hour mark, though. Might explain it.
I learned about the reply button because I too was once wondering why it sometimes doesn't appear, and I Googled it.
It seems that sometimes, high karma accounts can submit a dupe. But I don't think it always works. Maybe it's a lower dupe submission check timeout.
As for submissions, I'd recommend trying to land in the American morning/early European afternoon. That's when most people seem to browse and thus you have a better chance of getting upvoted to the front page.
You may also be interested in this: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
You can read more about undocumented features of Hacker News here [1].
[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/classic
Quite a cool coincidence!