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A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors
- JonathanBuchh 5y agoPast threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482
- dang 5y agoThe current submission counts as a dupe because the story had major attention less than a year ago. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. Macroexpanded list: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018-20) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482 - April 2021 (255 comments) A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 - June 2020 (266 comments) A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292361 - June 2019 (25 comments) A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 - Feb 2019 (183 comments)
- JonathanBuchh 5y agoI apologize for submitting a duplicate. I wrongly assumed that I would not be allowed to submit a link if it had not garnered attention within the last year or so (now I know 10 months is not "the last year or so") by an automated system. I did not realize that this was a responsibility of the moderator and I am sorry for any inconvenience I may have caused.
- dang 5y agoNo worries and no need to apologize! The software catches some, users catch some, mods catch some, and the handful of dupes that end up getting through are basically harmless.
- codeptualize 5y agoWow! I didn't even realize I unlocked the custom top bar color, exciting! I'm going for a light grey haha.
- justusthane 5y agoI've been rocking #b0b0b0 for a while. I like the gray.
- atestu 5y agoIt is a great way to check if you're logged in. Mine is #fff
- JonathanBuchh 5y agoI've been using #F6F60 for a while now, since it makes the top bar the same color as the background. It is only a problem when you are on a page like /newest where the text in the navigation bar at the top of the current page turns white ("new" in this case) to indicate that you are not on the homepage. The lack of contrast makes it almost impossible to read.
- tentacleuno 5y agoThere's a list of colours people typically use, too![0] I personally use #3882cc. Played around with lots of different colours and that's the one I ended up on. After finding [0] not too long ago, I tried some other colours and ended up going back to this one. They just looked alien to me since I've had this one for what feels like forever. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors
- causi 5y agoEvery time this is posted I wonder why it doesn't cover shadow muting, where you're blocked from commenting for a while but only a see a "posting too fast" error. I thought it was automated but it's been claimed to be a manual decision. There are other behaviors I've observed but haven't confirmed. For example, highly controversial comments seem to sometimes be manually set to a point value of 1, even when they have dozens of replies making the real vote tally very unlikely to center on 1.
- javert 5y agoI want to echo what a [dead] sibling comment is saying: It's a problem that you get the "posting too fast" error only after you have typed a comment. Maybe a long and well thought-out one that took a lot of time and effort. I've had cases where I've saved the comment in a .txt and gone back to post it later, but of course the discussion will have moved on. I think the site should not even let you start typing if you are going to get the "posting too fast" error.
- pinephoneguy 5y agoI think this list is pretty old and the post rate limiting is a pretty recent feature from late last year IIRC.
- dang 5y agoNo, rate limiting goes all the way back to the origin of HN, or at least before my time.
- causi 5y agoShadow muting isn't directly related to how fast you're posting, but how many of your comments are downvoted within a certain period of time. If your comments are well-received you can make much more of them in a given span than if most or all of them are downvoted.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jaywalk 5y agoI had seen the black bar before, but didn't know what it was about.
- wing-_-nuts 5y agoI use RES on reddit, and I really miss having the ability to navigate through comments with j/k, nav to parent with p, enter to collapse, etc. I wish they'd add that on this site!
- dang 5y agoSomething like that is on the list to implement.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tentacleuno 5y ago> Accounts which are less than 2 weeks old will appear with a green username. I believe this is actually calculated using the date of the submission they have posted / commented on, instead of the current date. I've seen posts from 2010 where some people's comments have green usernames.
- dang 5y agoThat's a change since Max originally wrote the OP.
- tentacleuno 5y agoThanks dang! :)
- ipsin 5y ago"topics around diversity and inclusion in tech ... tend to be flagged to death by users" Ouch. Any readers have favorite HN-like forums where this doesn't happen?
- tediousdemise 5y agoIt’s not that people are against diversity and inclusion. It’s that they are against the insincere and awkwardly forced pushes for diversity and inclusion by companies. Forcing behaviors and pushing insincerity leads to noncompliance and resentment. The best type of diversity is, and always will be, organic.
- nawgz 5y agoAnd when organic processes produce no diversity, what then? Throw our hands up and call it insincerity on the part of anyone who decries the situation?
- tediousdemise 5y agoForce them at gunpoint, obviously. Jokes aside, the answer to that question is highly circumstantial. If you live in a very culturally/racially/ethnically homogeneous area, there probably won’t be much of a push for diversity because the place isn’t diverse by nature. Lack of diversity is not the problem that western society, namely the US, would have you believe.
- nawgz 5y ago> If you live in a very culturally/racially/ethnically homogeneous area What a crock. I don't mean to play identity politics but I can't imagine someone who isn't a white man saying this. I've never seen a tech team with a reasonable gender split, and I can assure you no one is living in a genderally homogenous area. Lack of diversity is a humungous problem in western society, and while I agree the place to address that may not be a company trying to execute merit-based hiring, it's clear if an entire system outputs only one category of person as successful, that system has deep biases and would be ripe for improvement by including other categories of person.
- grzm 5y agoFrom 10 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482 over 200 comments (Arguably a dupe, as it's been less than a year)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aaron695 5y ago
- adamrezich 5y agoit's worth noting that the "second-chance pool" doesn't have any kind of hard timeout on it–two days ago I got an email invitation to repost a link from five months ago (reposted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30438015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30438015), and when I asked why, dang explained it was because he was looking to send a second-chance resubmission invite for another, unrelated submission, chose another duplicate of something I submitted, and then went on a rabbit-hole that ended up with him coming across a different submission (the one linked above) from my account. I think that's pretty cool, and I had no idea it worked like that.
- dankwizard 5y agoThey talk about the second chance pool but don't include a link - Here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
- dang 5y agoThat link being public is another change since Max originally wrote the OP.
- dorianmariefr 5y agoReminder that it's a GitHub repository so anybody can post pull requests (I did so for the list of URLs of user-generated content when I was working on an HN scrapper)
- hammock 5y agoThe "web" button is gone for me. Anyone else?
- dang 5y agoThat's also a change since Max originally wrote the OP.
- minimaxir 5y agoList maintainer here, I'll work on adding the suggestions dang noted here.
- Leftium 5y agoI've noticed some "Show HN" posts have both text and a URL like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30446960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30446960 Is this an undocumented feature? Do the mods just turn the OP's first comment into text manually?
- tentacleuno 5y agoDang commented on this[0]. It's intentional. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30041122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30041122