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.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

"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.

At some point, /meta may be useful to record comments and threads which lead to HN improvements. A parallel universe to https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented.
Front page submissions for a given day: https://news.ycombinator.com/front

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

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

>After users reach 501 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment.

In addition to the explanation others provided here [1] are some additional undocumented features that someone wrote that may be helpful.

[1] - https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

Yes, we can see your submission and we can comment on it.

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

> Occasionally, there will be a thin black bar at the top of the top bar, in memoriam of a significant figure in the tech/science community dying. A Hacker News submission about the death will usually be on the front page at that time.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

On that note, here[1] is a resource with some more undocumented HN features.

[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

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.

In another thread today:

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).

I agree. More info.

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.

Some suggestions:

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.

[0] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

Note that "favorites" are public - I can view your favorited links and comments and you can view mine. (You like arthropod illustrations huh?) But your list of upvotes is private, so you can treat that like a private list of favorites.

more: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

I agree. There is an unofficial list of undocumented features maintained by minimaxir https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
What, you didn't buy HN Premium+ for the 10x posting rate?

J/K, I believe it has something to do with karma level. You still have a pretty low karma amount.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

I am not aware of any. Here [1] are the less-than-documented features. I can't speak for the 3rd party apps some people use that front-end HN as I have never used them.

[1] - https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

For sure, thanks for keeping me honest. I'm a decidedly a nonexpert, I just watch some documentaries and such.

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?

[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

As per my comment on your other thread:

> 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

Too many comments (and a couple of user flags probably):

>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.

>After users reach 501 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment.

>If a user has 31 Karma, they can flag submissions.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

Downvoting is karma-gated to prevent abuse. Keep contributing to the community until you have 501 or greater karma and downvote will become available.

There is a list here https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

There isn't a ton of documentation per-se about HN behavior. There is:

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.

[1]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

I think the key is to programmatically design a moderation system that strikes a balance between free speech and censorship while empowering communities to moderate themselves as much as possible. HackerNews is a decent example of the latter. HN has systems in place [1] which allow for the community to moderate itself quite well without the need for intervention by a mod/admin. This is very important for shifting control/power towards the community rather than mods/admins. It's one of my favorite aspects of this site. Besides that, I think implementing elements of democracy into this system would also be very beneficial. Communities should be able to vote to elect, remove, or otherwise modify existing moderators. The issue will be doing this in a transparent and verifiable way that cannot be manipulated.

[1]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

The best thing about HN is being introduced to new things, so I wouldn't want to limit that by filtering by what I already know about.

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.

Hacker News has many undocumented features [1] which should give you some insight into how/why this happened.

[1]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

Not sure where I read this, but there are few features that are undocumented on the website probably! But some of them are mentioned here: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

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.

A collaborative resource with more information about undocumented/norms on HN: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

> 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...

You have to have 31 karma to vouch for a comment. If you vouch for too many comments that break site guidelines, you’ll have the vouch feature taken away.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356579

Official practice (see FAQ): please also consider page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/invited

as reported by the unofficial

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

Who knows? There is a page someone put together somewhere that I think addresses some of the HN automated rules I think but I can't find it quickly.

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 FAQ answers questions about Karma posts. [1] It is entirely possible that other posts have been upvoted prior to your post. As for undocumented features, there is this post [2] on github and is not written by the moderators. It includes some anecdotal information that may not be 100% accurate.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[2] - https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

> the reputation floor -4 for a comment, not zero as they suggest

Correct, -4 is the lowest a comment can go: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

> Is there a some kind of index/glossary of HN features where we can look for?

Yes there is an un-official list of undocumented hacker news features: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

There are new features/changes added often, many are documented here (not with dates, but you can get an idea of when things change based on the commit history): 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).

You may find this page helpful, I know I did (In the sense that it let me better understand what all was going on).

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

You may be interested in this repo that contains some details on the other undocumented features of HN:

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

I hear that if you reach rank 50 or above on the HN leaderboard you gain the ability to have your posts appear with in rainbow colours but those who have it are too wise to use this power.

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://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

Here [1] are some undocumented features of HN. The Guidelines and FAQ below have more details. If you hang out for a while you will get the gist of it.

[1] - https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

I don't know the answer to any of your questions, but you could try asking in an issue on https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
I was about to add a snarky "Easy answer: Read the HN F.A.Q. level comment but after a bit of looking around the answer isn't obvious (yet somehow I sort of knew it through being a HN user) and using the Search box didn't return anything useful so instead of snark I used a bit of google-fu & here's your answer. HTH.

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

You can flag submission when you have 51, downvote after 250. https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented Those links are otherwise hidden, but not really secret because the features are mentioned in the FAQ.
Dead comments can be resurrected by people vouching for them. If you think a comment from a banned account is something that should be shown, click on its timestamp and then click "vouch". I usually look at the user's other comments first, to see who I'm vouching for.

More info here: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

See

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.

There are tons of hidden HN features unlocked at different thresholds. https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

501 karma for downvoting

HN does this with some words, mostly ones that would typically be used in a clickbaity way, I believe.

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!

[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

Hmm, I'm not sure. Not because I want to "preserve my karma value" or anything but I am fearful of tricks like these because they seem to be somewhat close to "engagement" hacks. I do enjoy seeing new users and would like for there to be ways for them to contribute, but I am not really a fan of outright gamification. Personally, when I started contributing I was a bit hesitant because I didn't know how to "do it right"–it takes a bit getting used to commenting here, so I actually think a bit more detailed FAQ would be really nice. It's always fun to discover something new about Hacker News and share it around once you've been here for a while, and I think you could still keep some of those little secrets for people to find, but I think at least some of https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented would be nice to know upon joining.

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?

Did you know you can edit your comments for two hours? Click "edit" above the comment.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

There's also https://news.ycombinator.com/best as an alternative for a similar purpose. I learned about those two and other undocumented features from https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

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.

The oldest rules...

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.

Sadly, I don't think so. The best source I know of is https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented, but it's missing a lot of stuff like that bit about the reply button.

I learned about the reply button because I too was once wondering why it sometimes doesn't appear, and I Googled it.

Yep, this is 100% true. Discourse on gender related topics on HN is digusting at best, and gender related articles are prolifically flagged. More undocumented behavior here: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
> How? When I post something and it happens to be recently posted, it automatically becomes an upvote.

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

If a user has 31 Karma, they can flag submissions. Although submissions cannot be downvoted, flags act as a "super" downvote and enough flags will strongly reduce the rank of the submission, or kill it entirely (flagging is supposed to be used for submissions which break the site guidelines, but that isn't always the case in practice). A submission that's flagged to death will have a [flagged] tag. Comments behave similarly. See: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented for more.
After users reach 501 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment

You can read more about undocumented features of Hacker News here [1].

[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

I found this page of undocumented HN tips [1], finds Hacker News Classic [2] and the top post there was Hacker News Classics [3].

[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/classic

[3] http://jsomers.net/hn/

Quite a cool coincidence!