7 ms·

Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018

413 points by craigcannon 8y ago

slg 8y ago
This is great. I have never seen this posted before on HN so I did a search and saw these have been put together sporadically for at least the last three years with seemingly little engagement. I wonder why that is. These posts highlight some of the best things about this website/community. I would love to see them more often or have them receive more promotion.
- citilife 8y ago
  You can subscribe to receive the emails. I do and often there's pretty interesting stuff in there.
  - slg 8y ago
    Is the subscribe link at the bottom of that page specifically for this type of stuff? There is nothing visually connecting that to the article and it only uses the vague phrase "updates from Y Combinator". I am one of those HN users who comes here for the tech topics much more than the startup topics. I therefore don't have much interest in Y Combinator outside of being thankful that they host this site. I don't really want every blog entry they post to be emailed to me but I will happily sign up if it is more this type of content.
    - citilife 8y ago
      It's all the blog entries, but usually formatted fairly well. There aren't too many blog entries (five or so), and typically ones that make HN are highlighted more. All that being said, I see your point.
    - aasasd 8y ago
      There's an RSS/Atom feed, so you could set up a filter in IFTTT or a similar app or service.
- smacktoward 8y ago
  If engagement is the priority, my suggestion would be to build this curation into HN itself instead of using a post on a separate blog. Give the admins a way to tag a comment as highlighted, then present those comments in some visually distinct way and add a link to the nav that jumps you to a list of all highlighted comments.
  - shawn 8y ago
    Not a good idea. Some of the admins don't have very good taste, for starters. They also play favoratism, and whether your comments do well on HN is highly dependent on whether they (dis)like you. PG also tried something like that by highlighting users with high average karma. It fractured the community.
  - brianpan 8y ago
    After reading the post, I feel like maybe not everything needs to be optimized for well-defined priorities. :)
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > these have been put together sporadically for at least the last three years with seemingly little engagement. I wonder why that is. Because HN readers are more likely to engage with the comments themselves?
morley 8y ago
I really like the concept of this article and would love to see this quarterly, bi-monthly, or monthly! I also would prefer if the comment text were rendered in actual text instead of screenshots, as the low resolution is really obvious. Hope true text makes it into the next one of these.
- l33tbro 8y ago
  Tap/click the rendered text and it will link to the original text post.
citilife 8y ago
My personal favorite (which I was involved in), was people willing to openly test one my applications: https://twitter.com/AustinGWalters/status/1041894765439201281 https://twitter.com/AustinGWalters/status/104189476543920128... It was fun / exciting to see it work, plus from all the emails I got there was a lot of interest. I personally enjoy the collaborative nature of Hacker News, although these posts are also interesting and highlight the breadth of knowledge here. From the list in the post, my personal favorite was meeting Rick Jay: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18555353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18555353
- gkoberger 8y ago
  For anyone else who couldn't figure out what's going on, the context is that the app he built (https://hnprofile.com/ https://hnprofile.com/) has a disabled (for privacy reasons) feature that can figure out alternate HN accounts based on speech patterns. Here's the link to the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981
gist 8y ago
> Here are some of our favorite Hacker News comments a) Who is 'our'? And why is HN typically opaque like this? [1] b) Why are they some of your favorite comments? Reasons? [1] As I have noted in the past in comments I have made the mods don't even say they are mods. It's like a secret society where you have to figure it out over time or be clued in. Example dang's profile [2] doesn't say he is a mod. Even PG's profile said 'bug fixer'. [3] Why have people infer the relationship. What's preventing anyone from coming up with a handle and the acting like a mod? [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg
- sctb 8y ago
  a) For this one, it's just an opaque Y Combinator. A highlights post is about the highlights. b) 'Cause we thought they were interesting. Don't you think some of these are interesting? > Why have people infer the relationship. 'Cause It's like a secret society where you have to figure it out over time or be clued in. > What's preventing anyone from coming up with a handle and the acting like a mod? Nothing! It's a community site, and communities can function surprisingly well without too much ceremony.
  - gist 8y ago
    > Don't you think some of these are interesting? Because there is so much that someone can read it is usually helpful to have additional information so you can decide if it's worth reading. Now I am not a Bill Gates fan in any way, and I am not saying you should go into the depth that he does, but as an example look at what he does when he recommends a book. He doesn't just say 'this is something I find interesting'. https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Educated https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Educated > 'Cause It's like a secret society where you have to figure it out over time or be clued in. Hah well this thinking is similar to, say, Twitter which on purpose makes things difficult for the ordinary man and the beginner. Will note that Apple took a different attitude with the iphone in 2007 and we know how that ended up. So sure why not be more welcoming to newcomers?
    - 8y ago
yread 8y ago
These are great. I also try to collect interesting discussions and comments at https://www.reddit.com/r/HNDepthHub https://www.reddit.com/r/HNDepthHub I would appreciate other contributors.
- exist 8y ago
  This is great. Thank you.
rolleiflex 8y ago
I did not intend to read this from beginning to the end. Talk about a sticky article. Consider quoting the text directly though. Making images of text is probably the most inaccessible thing imaginable. Should take less than a hundred lines of CSS to create a believable HN container in a div.
- intertextuality 8y ago
  > Making images of text is probably the most inaccessible thing imaginable. Agreed. I love the concept of this site, but it would load significantly faster and provide better user experience if it utilized text instead. Loading this website took me 9.41 seconds. Images don't scale, and people using screenreaders would be out of luck, for starters.
- antoineMoPa 8y ago
  Or just copy paste the text to the image alt="" and voilà.
- alehul 8y ago
  If you click on the images, it'll open to the actual comment in text form. While load times for images are worse, this format provides some handy advantages, namely the ability to look through that thread and see more context, read the related article, etc.
  - bigiain 8y ago
    No advantages that a css/html rendered version of the same thing doesn't have, with the loss of accessibility that you'd get using the alternative approach. This is just "the easy way out". Justifying it otherwise is wrong, in my opinion...
    - alehul 8y ago
      That's fair, and true from an engineering perspective. I imagine for YC it comes down to, as with nearly every other company, a prioritization problem. With the exception of companies like FB with millions of users, the priority of creating a css/html rendered version of text to prevent people from having to click through to copy is quite low. I suppose I'm defending the image as being the more useful of the two "easy way outs" that are likely to be implemented. :)
qznc 8y ago
Nobody made some Advent of HN with the 24 best links of the year?
ratsimihah 8y ago
re The Shipping Forecast: people actually have to leave London because of Brexit? O_o
- shrikant 8y ago
  The Conservative government's "hostile environment" host of policies and rhetoric can be quite distasteful to immigrants just trying to live and work in the UK.
  - ratsimihah 8y ago
    I wasn't aware. I came to work in London a year ago and at our company it's like nothing ever happened, which might change I guess.
kreetx 8y ago
I probably get downvoted to hell for this, but: although the picks were interesting I didn't think they were as good for making it worth putting a list together. Looking at hn front page and checking through the comments I find something on similar excitement levels perhaps every third day. Don't mean to discourage the authors, simply saying how I felt.
- fhood 8y ago
  A lot of these comments were from people with incredible first hand experience of the topic at hand. The crash bandicoot dev for instance. These kind of comments do crop up from time to time, but I really enjoyed having them in a single condensed place, as I ended up missing the majority of them in the wild.
rmason 8y ago
Thank you so much for doing this for the community. I recognized a few comments that I'd read previously but a lot of them were new. I can't read everything simply because I've got lines of code to write in between multiple visits to HN daily!
- csunbird 8y ago
  I'm surprised that I could recall reading some of the comments :)
hirundo 8y ago
It'd be nice if Hacker News had automated pages that showed the most upvoted and the most voted (up or down) comments for {time period}.
- lettergram 8y ago
  You can use the search page at the bottom of the page
- temp71863295 8y ago
  Hacker News does have a dynamically updated page for the “best comments”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18603578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18603578
TACIXAT 8y ago
These would be cool if the comments were embedded to make the page more accessible, rather than just screenshots (granted, there are links).
temp71863295 8y ago
Hacker News generates a list of “best comments” that updates based on the rank and age of the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
Dowwie 8y ago
I appreciate a curated list such as this. Only a few were items were familiar to me.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
aresant 8y ago
Format of the screenshots reminded me a lot of embedded Twitter posts - would love to see embeddable HN comments :)
new_here 8y ago
This self gratification is a bit distasteful.
Beltiras 8y ago
Instead of screenshotting, I'd love it if HN comments were embeddable like social media posts. Wouldn't it be a minimal project to extend the HN codebase for it?
veddox 8y ago
The computer-crashing portfolio comment was hilarious! (Hadn't seen that one myself.) They didn't pick the best comment from the thread on bad codebases, but that whole discussion was ... enlightening.
raihansaputra 8y ago
I kinda did the same with all of my favorite comments (not including screenshots on my desktop/my phone) and compiled what should be a pretty good guide for me. But if I have to put another quote in: It's hard to act according to my knowledge/thinking. https://raihansaputra.com/hn-wisdom/ https://raihansaputra.com/hn-wisdom/
vtesucks 8y ago
Also needs mention: N-gate.com

413 points by craigcannon 8y ago

slg 8y ago

This is great. I have never seen this posted before on HN so I did a search and saw these have been put together sporadically for at least the last three years with seemingly little engagement. I wonder why that is. These posts highlight some of the best things about this website/community. I would love to see them more often or have them receive more promotion.

citilife 8y ago
You can subscribe to receive the emails. I do and often there's pretty interesting stuff in there.
- slg 8y ago
  Is the subscribe link at the bottom of that page specifically for this type of stuff? There is nothing visually connecting that to the article and it only uses the vague phrase "updates from Y Combinator". I am one of those HN users who comes here for the tech topics much more than the startup topics. I therefore don't have much interest in Y Combinator outside of being thankful that they host this site. I don't really want every blog entry they post to be emailed to me but I will happily sign up if it is more this type of content.
  - citilife 8y ago
    It's all the blog entries, but usually formatted fairly well. There aren't too many blog entries (five or so), and typically ones that make HN are highlighted more. All that being said, I see your point.
  - aasasd 8y ago
    There's an RSS/Atom feed, so you could set up a filter in IFTTT or a similar app or service.
smacktoward 8y ago
If engagement is the priority, my suggestion would be to build this curation into HN itself instead of using a post on a separate blog. Give the admins a way to tag a comment as highlighted, then present those comments in some visually distinct way and add a link to the nav that jumps you to a list of all highlighted comments.
- shawn 8y ago
  Not a good idea. Some of the admins don't have very good taste, for starters. They also play favoratism, and whether your comments do well on HN is highly dependent on whether they (dis)like you. PG also tried something like that by highlighting users with high average karma. It fractured the community.
- brianpan 8y ago
  After reading the post, I feel like maybe not everything needs to be optimized for well-defined priorities. :)
dragonwriter 8y ago
> these have been put together sporadically for at least the last three years with seemingly little engagement. I wonder why that is. Because HN readers are more likely to engage with the comments themselves?

morley 8y ago

I really like the concept of this article and would love to see this quarterly, bi-monthly, or monthly! I also would prefer if the comment text were rendered in actual text instead of screenshots, as the low resolution is really obvious. Hope true text makes it into the next one of these.

l33tbro 8y ago
Tap/click the rendered text and it will link to the original text post.

citilife 8y ago

My personal favorite (which I was involved in), was people willing to openly test one my applications: https://twitter.com/AustinGWalters/status/1041894765439201281 https://twitter.com/AustinGWalters/status/104189476543920128... It was fun / exciting to see it work, plus from all the emails I got there was a lot of interest. I personally enjoy the collaborative nature of Hacker News, although these posts are also interesting and highlight the breadth of knowledge here. From the list in the post, my personal favorite was meeting Rick Jay: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18555353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18555353

gkoberger 8y ago
For anyone else who couldn't figure out what's going on, the context is that the app he built (https://hnprofile.com/ https://hnprofile.com/) has a disabled (for privacy reasons) feature that can figure out alternate HN accounts based on speech patterns. Here's the link to the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981

gist 8y ago

> Here are some of our favorite Hacker News comments a) Who is 'our'? And why is HN typically opaque like this? [1] b) Why are they some of your favorite comments? Reasons? [1] As I have noted in the past in comments I have made the mods don't even say they are mods. It's like a secret society where you have to figure it out over time or be clued in. Example dang's profile [2] doesn't say he is a mod. Even PG's profile said 'bug fixer'. [3] Why have people infer the relationship. What's preventing anyone from coming up with a handle and the acting like a mod? [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg

sctb 8y ago
a) For this one, it's just an opaque Y Combinator. A highlights post is about the highlights. b) 'Cause we thought they were interesting. Don't you think some of these are interesting? > Why have people infer the relationship. 'Cause It's like a secret society where you have to figure it out over time or be clued in. > What's preventing anyone from coming up with a handle and the acting like a mod? Nothing! It's a community site, and communities can function surprisingly well without too much ceremony.
- gist 8y ago
  > Don't you think some of these are interesting? Because there is so much that someone can read it is usually helpful to have additional information so you can decide if it's worth reading. Now I am not a Bill Gates fan in any way, and I am not saying you should go into the depth that he does, but as an example look at what he does when he recommends a book. He doesn't just say 'this is something I find interesting'. https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Educated https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Educated > 'Cause It's like a secret society where you have to figure it out over time or be clued in. Hah well this thinking is similar to, say, Twitter which on purpose makes things difficult for the ordinary man and the beginner. Will note that Apple took a different attitude with the iphone in 2007 and we know how that ended up. So sure why not be more welcoming to newcomers?
  - 8y ago

yread 8y ago

These are great. I also try to collect interesting discussions and comments at https://www.reddit.com/r/HNDepthHub https://www.reddit.com/r/HNDepthHub I would appreciate other contributors.

exist 8y ago
This is great. Thank you.

rolleiflex 8y ago

I did not intend to read this from beginning to the end. Talk about a sticky article. Consider quoting the text directly though. Making images of text is probably the most inaccessible thing imaginable. Should take less than a hundred lines of CSS to create a believable HN container in a div.

intertextuality 8y ago
> Making images of text is probably the most inaccessible thing imaginable. Agreed. I love the concept of this site, but it would load significantly faster and provide better user experience if it utilized text instead. Loading this website took me 9.41 seconds. Images don't scale, and people using screenreaders would be out of luck, for starters.
antoineMoPa 8y ago
Or just copy paste the text to the image alt="" and voilà.
alehul 8y ago
If you click on the images, it'll open to the actual comment in text form. While load times for images are worse, this format provides some handy advantages, namely the ability to look through that thread and see more context, read the related article, etc.
- bigiain 8y ago
  No advantages that a css/html rendered version of the same thing doesn't have, with the loss of accessibility that you'd get using the alternative approach. This is just "the easy way out". Justifying it otherwise is wrong, in my opinion...
  - alehul 8y ago
    That's fair, and true from an engineering perspective. I imagine for YC it comes down to, as with nearly every other company, a prioritization problem. With the exception of companies like FB with millions of users, the priority of creating a css/html rendered version of text to prevent people from having to click through to copy is quite low. I suppose I'm defending the image as being the more useful of the two "easy way outs" that are likely to be implemented. :)

qznc 8y ago

Nobody made some Advent of HN with the 24 best links of the year?

ratsimihah 8y ago

re The Shipping Forecast: people actually have to leave London because of Brexit? O_o

shrikant 8y ago
The Conservative government's "hostile environment" host of policies and rhetoric can be quite distasteful to immigrants just trying to live and work in the UK.
- ratsimihah 8y ago
  I wasn't aware. I came to work in London a year ago and at our company it's like nothing ever happened, which might change I guess.

kreetx 8y ago

I probably get downvoted to hell for this, but: although the picks were interesting I didn't think they were as good for making it worth putting a list together. Looking at hn front page and checking through the comments I find something on similar excitement levels perhaps every third day. Don't mean to discourage the authors, simply saying how I felt.

fhood 8y ago
A lot of these comments were from people with incredible first hand experience of the topic at hand. The crash bandicoot dev for instance. These kind of comments do crop up from time to time, but I really enjoyed having them in a single condensed place, as I ended up missing the majority of them in the wild.

rmason 8y ago

Thank you so much for doing this for the community. I recognized a few comments that I'd read previously but a lot of them were new. I can't read everything simply because I've got lines of code to write in between multiple visits to HN daily!

csunbird 8y ago
I'm surprised that I could recall reading some of the comments :)

hirundo 8y ago

It'd be nice if Hacker News had automated pages that showed the most upvoted and the most voted (up or down) comments for {time period}.

lettergram 8y ago
You can use the search page at the bottom of the page
temp71863295 8y ago
Hacker News does have a dynamically updated page for the “best comments”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18603578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18603578

TACIXAT 8y ago

These would be cool if the comments were embedded to make the page more accessible, rather than just screenshots (granted, there are links).

temp71863295 8y ago

Hacker News generates a list of “best comments” that updates based on the rank and age of the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

Dowwie 8y ago

I appreciate a curated list such as this. Only a few were items were familiar to me.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

aresant 8y ago

Format of the screenshots reminded me a lot of embedded Twitter posts - would love to see embeddable HN comments :)

new_here 8y ago

This self gratification is a bit distasteful.

Beltiras 8y ago

Instead of screenshotting, I'd love it if HN comments were embeddable like social media posts. Wouldn't it be a minimal project to extend the HN codebase for it?

veddox 8y ago

The computer-crashing portfolio comment was hilarious! (Hadn't seen that one myself.) They didn't pick the best comment from the thread on bad codebases, but that whole discussion was ... enlightening.

raihansaputra 8y ago

I kinda did the same with all of my favorite comments (not including screenshots on my desktop/my phone) and compiled what should be a pretty good guide for me. But if I have to put another quote in: It's hard to act according to my knowledge/thinking. https://raihansaputra.com/hn-wisdom/ https://raihansaputra.com/hn-wisdom/

vtesucks 8y ago

Also needs mention: N-gate.com