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Ask PG: Why don’t you open source HN?
I hope it didn’t get asked before, I couldn’t find anything.
There was a question recently, about why you don’t improve the HTML of HN, where you said "When the HTML is the most important thing to work on."(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4927231)
I agree that the markup is relatively unimportant compared to features that I think could really improve the functionality and quality of the site, and I bet you have a long wishlist of features yourself.
But between the lines I interpreted that that list might be way longer, than the time that is available to you, allows you to work on it.
So why don’t you open source HN? I get that with a project that is important to someone, it’s hard to give away control. But you can still be the project lead, you could still have the last call and I feel to open up the project will lead to great feature discussions and ultimately a better hn.
Have you ever considered open sourcing it? And what’s the thought process on your decision?
- wmf 14y agoThe source is called news.arc and you can find old versions on the Web, e.g. https://github.com/nex3/arc/ https://github.com/nex3/arc/ https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/lib/how-to-run-news https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/lib/how-to-run-news
- muellerwolfram 14y agothanks, but to clarify: I'm not proposing to open source it for the purpose of looking at the code or forking my own HN-version. instead i'm proposing that building _this_ site becomes an community effort, with open feature discussions and people committing code to the HN code base. there is an army of people who deeply care about HN, and are very skilled to help out. i think it would be smart to use that asset.
- atomical 14y agoAs far as features go, diminishing returns at this point.
- drivebyacct2 14y agoReally? A mobile friendlier theme? Better markup? Arrows that are pressable? Being able to correct an incorrect comment vote? Those don't change the character of the site but would enhance its usability greatly.
- xentronium 14y agoThere are mobile clients for hn, arent't there?
- ryanhuff 14y agoMobile friendly is low hanging fruit. How many improper up/down votes have resulted because of an insanely difficult up/down arrow touch-point? I know that I am responsible for a few.
- wmf 14y agoFor whatever reason pg just doesn't want to do that. Perhaps he doesn't want building HN itself to become a distraction (for other people) from building more useful stuff like startups. There may be a sort of contradiction where ninja rockstar programmers are too valuable to waste on improving HN, but HN is simultaneously too important to be put in the hands of mediocre programmers. HN is kind of a double-edged sword because while it is educational it's also distracting and addictive. If making HN better also makes it more of a time-suck, the exercise could be a net negative for the community.
- alexanderh 14y agoReddit aint what it used to be. Tech oriented users are exiling to other places, including here. People are disappointed with the current featureset. I smell opportunity for someone.
- colechristensen 14y agoI think any improvements would make this site worse. It is so very common for projects to inflate with new features until they become useless piles of filth. The fact that HN is a bit clunky is a feature not a bug. It will only attract and retain a certain type.
- muellerwolfram 14y agoYou probably meant it slightly differently, but improvements that make things worse are per definition not improvements. I get that people don't want HN to get worse than it is. But i don't get why people think open sourcing it would result in that. I trust PG would be the kind of project lead who only accepts pull requests that would actually improve the site. And I trust the community has a lot of smart people who would come up with solutions that would actually improve this site.
- jaekwon 14y agoEh, _this_ site is a funnel of valuable applicants (and proprietary candidate evaluation tool) for YCombinator. Not to mention the needs-to-be-secret voting-ring detection algos that surely exist by now, this site will likely never be a community project.
- mcantelon 14y ago>instead i'm proposing that building _this_ site becomes an community effort, with open feature discussions and people committing code to the HN code base. Lamer News is similar to HN and community driven, so if you have energy to spare that's as good a place as any to put it. If pg wanted HN to evolve, it would evolve. Most people are happy with it as-is, tech-wise.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- unimpressive 14y agoIt's written in an experimental language, as an experimental side project[0], on a single machine in...I like to think it's PG's basement. Considering this, it's probably not a service that can be "open sourced" as the number of people who can actually work on it appears to be PG. And PG is probably too busy to even act as the project lead. [0]: It's not so experimental anymore...
- philip1209 14y agoYCombinator is listed as in the Rackspace Startup Program [0] - I'm on my phone so I haven't had a chance to do due diligence, but is HN hosted on a Rackspace server? [0]http://www.rackspacestartups.com/ http://www.rackspacestartups.com/
- harshreality 14y agoHN is hosted at SoftLayer in Houston, TX. The IP block and reverse DNS indicate hosting by ThePlanet; ThePlanet merged into SoftLayer.
- jff 14y agoIt's simple but effective. The pages load quickly and look pretty decent in many different browsers. I'm really happy that HN isn't your typical constantly-mutating, constantly growing news site, adding a new social share button and 2KB of new Javascript every week. Please, pg, don't start taking pull requests or anything like that, it's great the way it is. Edit: look at the current top story. A pretty but not especially functional Facebook redesign, proposed as the latest in a long line of changes that the users pretty much always disliked. There's my point.
- ramblerman 14y agoIt's fine. It does what it's supposed to that's true. There are a few items however, that should really have been tackled in the many years this site has now been running imo. - You can't take away an upvote. Misclick is just bad luck - user settings have some really obscure settings that aren't explained like showdead / noprocrast / maxvisit / minaway - The "Unknown or expired link" is just a bad solution, either redirect me to the front page when that happens, or find an alternative way to deal with it.
- alexanderh 14y agoThat last one always gets me... Cant believe its been that way for so long, considering the type of people who visit this site.... There's "not having time to work on it" and then theres "complete abandonment." I do sort of agree with OP that at least adding a few more people onto a team would be good, if not full on opensourcing it. But hey, Reddit is always open source. And someone could always open their own site out of its source code and try to one-up HackerNews. Competition breads innovation.
- kn0thing 14y agoI was hoping someone would mention it: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki thanks!
- 14y ago
- jaddison 14y agoI'd hazard that opening the source makes it easier to game the algorithm; so with that in mind, keeping it closed means one less vector for people to play. I'm certainly not against open source - just trying to provide a possible answer.
- tptacek 14y agoTwo big reasons people miss: (a) HN is the front-end and back-end of a bunch of YC business processes. (b) The voting ring and antispam features rely on obscurity; they are game-able. The code for older versions of HN is available, but you'd be better off with the code for lobste.rs.
- ceol 14y agoThe voting-ring/anti-spam features don't have to be included in the repository. It might be a big hassle to detangle them from the rest of the codebase, though.
- ntaylor 14y agoThis is what reddit does
- zmitri 14y agoNot only that, there's a variety of mechanisms built in to boost/identify YC users to other YCers to provide mechanisms of boosting their submitted stories. HN in itself is like a giant voter ring in that way.
- wglb 14y agoDo you have specific evidence of that?
- codewright 14y agoIt's pretty well known. Don't know that I'd use the term voter ring though. It's just that if you're in a YC batch or an alum you get posts, especially job posts, boosted. I wouldn't pay much mind to this talk of mechanisms and gaming systems, sounds like post-hoc reasoning by outsiders.
- tptacek 14y agoThere is more than that going on.
- sivanmz 14y agoPlease have mercy on iPhone users' eyes and specify font-sizes in em
- hendry 14y agoUse a different front end for IOS: http://hackerwebapp.com/ http://hackerwebapp.com/
- ronnier 14y agoI made a mobile version sometime ago. http://ihackernews.com http://ihackernews.com
- klausjensen 14y agoAnd a great one that is, I use it on my mobile devices.
- kaolinite 14y agohttp://newsyc.me/ http://newsyc.me/ is the best iPhone app I've found for Hacker News, highly recommend it over just using Safari.
- aw3c2 14y agojust use a different browser that let's you set your own font size.
- agopaul 14y agoThere are plenty on iOS Apps for that, like: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hackernode/id473882597?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hackernode/id473882597?mt=8
- wyuenho 14y agoIt is open sourced. https://github.com/wting/hackernews https://github.com/wting/hackernews
- TallboyOne 14y agoI've always wondered how one goes about building a voting ring.
- the_real_pg 14y agoBecause I hate Linus Torvalds.
- deanclatworthy 14y agoThe biggest annoyance for me is that this design isn't responsive. It's incredibly hard to read on my iPhone. At the very least let someone commit a dozen or so lines of CSS which includes a media query to make the design look better on mobile!
- joepour 14y agoI use news:yc on my iPhone. It works great and has an Instapaper "Read later" option which is exactly what I was looking for!
- Felix21 14y agoWhen I first saw this, I was excited thinking this will be something about making the code base of HN available so we can use it to deploy similar sites on other topics with relative ease. But to have the hacker news itself the product of an open source project, HELL NO. I can't even think of one way that would be a good thing. Hacker news is perfect the way it is.
- Zak 14y agoAs mentioned elsewhere in the thread, HN is already open source in that sense. See http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/ - it's the example app (news.arc). A git mirror is here: https://github.com/wting/hackernews https://github.com/wting/hackernews
- jonchris 14y agosorry I don't know what is PG do u mean Proctor & Gamble?
- piotr_krzyzek 14y agoCall me wrong on this one, but if you really are interested in the code for HN why not create your own? From what I've seen so far, HN is great n' all but the logic behind it seems pretty trivial (excluding the whole anti-spam module & related stuff). The HTML for HN is ultra simple so, there you already have a front-send pretty much done. This reply box is pretty simple as well: a input box and a submit button. Add some filters/sorts and other misc features and you have your own version of HN. Not saying it's 'easy', but it's not that difficult.
- gedrap 14y ago> I bet you have a long wishlist of features yourself. I think that's the main reason why it's not. It's fine as it is. The minimal features list and quirky HTML is part of HN identity.
- soapdog 14y agoIsn't HN just racket + arc + news.arc?
- sgdesign 14y agoMight I mention that I'm building an open-source HN clone with Meteor? It's a great starting point if you want to build your own HN-style community, and it's also the only real-time HN clone as far as I know: http://telesc.pe http://telesc.pe
- chrishan 14y agoIt will be more interesting if the years' data on HN can be made available to public.
- CommitPull 14y agoWhy don't you just hire 2 devs that implement your features, Paul? You should know some good ones. :) The biggest annoyance for me is that every page takes 15 seconds to load, it feels like the 90s.
- 090178 14y agoNon coder speaking. I have tried the plug in "answers" from wpmu. Org running on wordpress. Ok, nothing sexy. Themesforest also has plug in for sale. My 2 cents
- j45 14y agoI'm not sure why anyone couldn't reasonably build their own pretty quickly. reddit publishes their source code.
- codex 14y agoOpen source gives away value (in effect, destroying it for the previous owner), sometimes for very little benefit. Why would pg open source the site and open HN up to a myriad of competitors? HN needs a large user base so that YC companies can promote themselves here. HN is not like the Linux kernel. The code is not complex. It doesn't need thousands of contributors nor would the benefits of extra features be worth the business cost.
- Mz 14y agoI started to reply last night when there were only two comments, but then decided to stfu and leave the discussion to real hackers. After skimming what real hackers have said, I think my observation is still relevant: A) There are plenty of people already tweaking hn in the form of "add ons" like hnnotify.com. That piece already exists and without being the kind of problem that this approach would become. B) People seem to routinely miss that hn is part of the yc business process. (I honestly don't get how anyone can miss that but posts like this one clearly do. I was a homemaker for eons and I get it.) You know, that is just slightly relevant to how and why things get done the way they are (aka central to the decision making process). This doesn't make good business sense, for reasons other more informed members have already covered.
- AlexRa 14y agoI didn't come into this with an opinion, but I have to admit it looks like the pro-open source argument is making a much stronger case and has countered almost every objection.
- muellerwolfram 14y agoas the OP I'm obviously biased, but I feel so too. At the same time it looks like more people seemed to be against it though. I would still like to hear pg thoughts on this...
- pg 14y agoI don't have time to manage such a project. I don't think it's necessary anyway. The reason HN lacks x cool feature is not that I expend no energy on the site, but that I expend all my energy on what users actually care about, which is not features but the content.