HN Explorer

HN is getting too big

24 points by eli_s ↗ HN
Sorry for the link bait title ;) HN is maintaining its quality very nicely for a site that's growing so quickly.

Just wondering if it might be time for HN to get sub HNs (like sub reddits).

Stories are getting buried v.quickly. I was trying to find a link I saw at work yesterday and ended up having to dig through 6 or 7 pages worth of posts.

28 comments

[ 8.0 ms ] story [ 91.4 ms ] thread
blasdel
http://searchyc.com is the solution to your particular problem, not sharded communities.

It's unfortunate that pg petulantly refuses to acknowledge its existence. Even talking about in person, he'd only engage with me on the subject when I referred to the useless HNSearch Firefox extension that's linked in the footer because it's from WebMynd (YC W08).

Confounding things is the fact that HNSearch actually redirects to searchyc SERPs on some user actions!

eli_s
search only works when you know what you're searching for :)

I only had a vague idea of what I was looking for.

blasdel
Though since it searches the comments too (with links to the parent + story), and commenters often also have vague ideas of what the story is, it works extremely well in practice.
eli_s
not as effective as categories for stories.
jacquesm
I wonder what the deal is there.

He has to be aware of the fact that we all understand that he's rooting for the companies that YC has funded, but clearly webmynd is dysfunctional when it comes to effectively searching HN, and the HN audience deserves the best it can get.

If he would just so much as place a link to searchyc or a form that submits there that would make life a bit easier and save endless newcomer questions.

In any other community such a feature would have been implemented long ago, the searchyc guys seem to do it for free so why not recognize their efforts and make it official? Or is there bad blood between searchyc and PG?

amirnathoo
I'm a founder of WebMynd, and I feel a need to clarify what we do since comments like this have been raised several times. For the record, I think searchyc is great and we've never tried to pretend that we have created an HN-specific search engine as they have.

We have created a custom version of our product for HN which, like several other YC-funded companies who's products PG thought relevant, are linked to in the HN footer. Perhaps the fact our icon says 'HNSearch' is a problem - maybe we need to change this to 'HNSidebar'?

To clarify - we make browser addons that allow you to personalize the right-hand side of the Google search results page with sources that you value. When you search on Google (and others) we open up a sidebar on the right of the page where you can see more results from sources that you can select, some of which Google cannot, or does not, show you - e.g. searches across your Facebook or LinkedIn profiles, or Gmail, or your own Delicious bookmarks.

Hacker News is one of the sources that you can select in our sidebar and we've created a specific version of our addon that shows results from HN, by default, in a larger widget than normal. That's powered by Bing site search and if you click on the title of the widget, it'll take you to searchyc to try your search there. Some other sources are also powered by Bing site search where we think that's the best way of showing the results. For many other sources we use their own search APIs, like Digg or OneRiot which put a big emphasis on recency and explicit user inputs.

Our product lets you tell Google: "A lot of the time I want to see New York Times and Hacker News search results when I search, so show me what they've got on the right-hand side."

I hope that helps and we'd love comments on our actual product and how we can make it work for you.

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jacquesm
> Perhaps the fact our icon says 'HNSearch' is a problem - maybe we need to change this to 'HNSidebar'?

It would at least be more descriptive, and it would also reduce 'bounce' from people that install it and then are totally confused and remove it again.

Thanks for the explanation, I've actually installed webmynd in the past and we had some email exchange long ago (September last year or so), it's neat to see you're sticking around and explaining so clearly what webmynd is and what it is not.

billswift
I've tried using searchyc; google with keyword or title and site:news.ycombinator.com is faster and the output is easier to work with.
jacquesm
That's already happening, since a few weeks HN now has an 'ask' section, which is effectively a first split.
pedalpete
I don't use the 'ask' section link, but regularly click on them from the 'new' or main view.

What categories would you suggest? Business, technology, environment, programming, apple, facebook? Ok, probably not apple and facebook though those do get an inordinate amount of links.

Personally I wouldn't use them, and my concern would be that people who come only to read articles tagged in that column wouldn't cross-polinate their expertise into cross-over areas.

Just a thought.

eli_s
My personal favourite would be to have 10 or so official sub HNs and not to allow people to create their own.

My list would include Entrepreneurship, Tech Web, Tech Other

_delirium
I'd be happy with a minimalist two-way split: one category for mainly technical articles (new languages, language tutorials, code releases, review-my-app requests, in-depth articles on the state of some technology, etc.), and a second category for mainly business, startup, political, or meta-type news (X got bought, tips on productivity, VC term sheets, management styles, etc.).
jasonlbaptiste
That's what she said.
ellyagg
I wonder how many people laugh at inappropriate comments here and then vote them down.
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savant
How does one downvote something? Is there a karma level a user should be at to be able to downvote?
kgermino
Yes, the minimum is at 200pts currently
YuriNiyazov
I usually do exactly that (although in this case someone else got to the parent comment before me). The immediate laugh at the cheap joke is half-involuntary, but it takes a significant effort to maintain the quality of the discussions on HN in the long-term.
10ren
eli_s, not an answer, but if you upvote that article, it's in your saved stories: http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=eli_s

(from your homepage, 3rd link from the bottom)

eli_s
nice - thanks for the heads up :)

now why is news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=eli_s a magic link that can't be found on the main nav?

oops... just found it in my profile page. not the best spot to put it :S

younata
The problem with sub HNs is for those of us who use feed readers to read HN and other news sites. I REALLY don't want to have to add ten extra feeds to my feed list, as the idea of sub-HNs implies. I, for one, am fond of the way this is currently set up, it works well with how I have my feed reader set up, and my desire for knowledge at all hours.
mehulkar
I agree. My RSS feed has 100s of articles every day. And I can't keep up :(
jessor
Noticed this, too.

The way I keep up with it is using google reader to star (mark) stories over the day and reading them when i get the chance.

I'm not sure sub HNs are the answer just now since I'd need to subscribe to pretty much all of them to not miss good content.

rms
I miss Nick B.
sesqu
I too have noticed a large increase in volume recently, but I'm not sure that's the problem. Rather, I'd say the site needs less churn - top articles should stay on the front page for at least a day. That just means a different ranking, maybe something like log(votes)*weight, where weight decays over time but gets bumped at each upvote.

If that's not enough churn for some people, I'd prefer a filter that lets them temporarily hide some stories. And ten there's /newest

I know there's also the /best section, but it's not linked to and I don't know how it's ranked.

A reddit-like url filter would help a little in catching reposts, but I'm not sure this is a big problem yet.