Fascinating. Given that HN has so much content nowadays, aggregators/filters like this are proving useful. (I found this link through http://www.skimhn.com/)
Thanks for pointer to http://www.skimhn.com/. It feels like gasp of fresh air. Sifting through list of highly diverse material, which Hacker News is, is a real cognitive load (citation need, I know). Now, this is elegant.
Because the "visited" link color is so close to the body text, the titles may confusingly butt into the site name, i.e. "Why HN was down self"
I understand that adding another delimiter there, e.g. "Why HN was down | self" adds undesirable noise...maybe the visited-link color could be more obviously blue?
The "self" link confused me at first. My eye happened to catch it before I saw any of the other links, so I thought it meant it was linking to my reply in that thread.
I'd like to propose "news.ycombinator.com" instead of self, which would also be consistent with the other domain names listed for each article.
Is there anything around that lets me "ban" domains that I've chosen? I know I personally won't get anything positive out of a link from dcurt.is or 42floors, and I don't like rediscussing links from another discussion site (i.e. stack overflow), so it would be nice to be able to construct my own set of filters.
I wrote a Safari extension a couple years ago when the number of Bitcoin stories on the home page was reaching epidemic levels. There's a link on there to a similar extension for Chrome. You should be able to hack either one to ignore specific domains pretty easily.
At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. That's why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, that's why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already. - Jeff Atwood
Might've been a bit more practical to build it as a story-hiding extension rather than a separate site. And I just happen to have such extension and... oh, look... it's under the BSD license... hint hint :)
Why the privacy on the domain? If yourintent is to build things and get attention it's not to your benefit to hide your identity.
If you're worried about spam use a different email that forwards to your regular email to filter.
That said I'd like to know your reasoning for doing this (you aren't the only person that does this obviously so anyone who wants to chime in please do as always).
Hi, larrys! OP here. Thanks for your question! I just don't know domain registration that well. What information is exposed in case of "public" registration? Is it just my e-mail? Or address, phone number as well? I was scared by possible spam and some recent domain hijacking stories so I chose privacy.
Address and phone (in addition to email) are exposed. You can do a lookup on www.who.is to see what the info looks like for a domain. I'm not sure how hiding your info would have anything to do with domain hijacking concerns, unless you are easily conned by phishing emails.
Thanks for the explanation! I'm not comfortable with sharing my address and phone number yet. This information seems like a good starting point for social engineering attacks. OK, I know, I'm paranoid. Give me some time. :)
Any information you put as far as your contact info. Name, address and phone number, email.
Spam is not an issue and if you feel that's a problem simply use a gmail account that forwards to your real account. People also scrape web pages so you already have your email on your webpage anyway. Personally I own plenty of domains (for many many years) and I don't even get that much spam.
As far as domain hijacking there is nothing about your domain to indicate you have to worry about losing it (who would hijack it and why would they?) If anything if the info isn't public then nobody (but the registrar) even knows that you own it because that ownership is hidden.
And in the event it is hijacked you can get it reversed.
Bottom line is this: privacy for some people might be good in some cases. In general though I think (based on owning a registrar and many years in this business) think it's a bad business idea. Registrars push it because it's good for them (keeps competitors out) and some charge for it or if they don't they make you think you are getting something of value. I've seen cases of real businesses using privacy with business addresses who have no reason to protect anything (which shows how they are being mislead).
Bottom line: You've taken the time to create something make sure people know who you are and how to contact you (should also be on the website) maybe you will get some work or contacts etc.
I'm not the OP, but I can think of an answer to your final question. Pragmatically speaking, there are only so many hours in the day, and attention is a finite resource too, so by automatically filtering things you are likely to find irrelevant, you can save yourself wasted time and attention.
Some may argue that this limits your ability to discover new things, cutting you off from a broader discussion, but if you continually come away from certain sites disappointed, why wouldn't you want to stop cluttering your life with their articles?
"With regards to privacy I always ask the converse question; Why would you not choose privacy?"
Well in general if you want to attract business or benefit from something you have created you don't want privacy.
Now for example I don't want to attract business from HN (for domain registration) so I choose to be private and not offer my contact info other than a gmail account. So I've made a conscious choice to not mix this.
In other cases and in other places though (like a directory or list of registrars) I do the opposite (want to be listed and have customers come to me).
Another case is at our business location we don't have a sign because we don't want people dropping in from the neighborhood (would waste time) and we have customers in maybe 100 countries around the world so that local business isn't important. Also I don't carry a business card I'm not interested in the local business registering with us then it could end up being a time waster. Of course if I was a local attorney I would. All depends on the situation.
"which audience you are catering to through domain registration information"
Sorry meant to answer this below. I have cases where I have to find domains for people that others own. If you have privacy it makes it harder for me to make you an offer on your domain and contact you.
No one said there was anything wrong with that. The contact info is still valid. Domain privacy only means the owner has the option of revealing their contact info once the message is forwarded to them.
This looks great. Honestly, a lot of the stuff on the front page of HN is there simply because of the domain name associated with it. It's nice to have something like this. I'm going to try and use it as a replacement.
At first I thought the joke was that there was nothing on the HN Frontpage that was not also posted to Techmeme. Then I realized the site does not work in IE.
45 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 96.2 ms ] threadI understand that adding another delimiter there, e.g. "Why HN was down | self" adds undesirable noise...maybe the visited-link color could be more obviously blue?
The important thing is the headline. Make that blue. Make the domain grey or black and a smaller size (like on HN).
I'd like to propose "news.ycombinator.com" instead of self, which would also be consistent with the other domain names listed for each article.
https://github.com/aaronbrethorst/NoBitcoin
It's unfortunate, and the SE sites are notorious for being strict to the point of depression, but that's a discussion for another time.
Might've been a bit more practical to build it as a story-hiding extension rather than a separate site. And I just happen to have such extension and... oh, look... it's under the BSD license... hint hint :)
[0] http://swapped.cc/iip
[1] https://github.com/apankrat/internet-improvement-project/tre...
Why the privacy on the domain? If yourintent is to build things and get attention it's not to your benefit to hide your identity.
If you're worried about spam use a different email that forwards to your regular email to filter.
That said I'd like to know your reasoning for doing this (you aren't the only person that does this obviously so anyone who wants to chime in please do as always).
Any information you put as far as your contact info. Name, address and phone number, email.
Spam is not an issue and if you feel that's a problem simply use a gmail account that forwards to your real account. People also scrape web pages so you already have your email on your webpage anyway. Personally I own plenty of domains (for many many years) and I don't even get that much spam.
As far as domain hijacking there is nothing about your domain to indicate you have to worry about losing it (who would hijack it and why would they?) If anything if the info isn't public then nobody (but the registrar) even knows that you own it because that ownership is hidden.
And in the event it is hijacked you can get it reversed.
Bottom line is this: privacy for some people might be good in some cases. In general though I think (based on owning a registrar and many years in this business) think it's a bad business idea. Registrars push it because it's good for them (keeps competitors out) and some charge for it or if they don't they make you think you are getting something of value. I've seen cases of real businesses using privacy with business addresses who have no reason to protect anything (which shows how they are being mislead).
Bottom line: You've taken the time to create something make sure people know who you are and how to contact you (should also be on the website) maybe you will get some work or contacts etc.
Some may argue that this limits your ability to discover new things, cutting you off from a broader discussion, but if you continually come away from certain sites disappointed, why wouldn't you want to stop cluttering your life with their articles?
I don't understand which audience you are catering to through domain registration information.
Well in general if you want to attract business or benefit from something you have created you don't want privacy.
Now for example I don't want to attract business from HN (for domain registration) so I choose to be private and not offer my contact info other than a gmail account. So I've made a conscious choice to not mix this.
In other cases and in other places though (like a directory or list of registrars) I do the opposite (want to be listed and have customers come to me).
Another case is at our business location we don't have a sign because we don't want people dropping in from the neighborhood (would waste time) and we have customers in maybe 100 countries around the world so that local business isn't important. Also I don't carry a business card I'm not interested in the local business registering with us then it could end up being a time waster. Of course if I was a local attorney I would. All depends on the situation.
Sorry meant to answer this below. I have cases where I have to find domains for people that others own. If you have privacy it makes it harder for me to make you an offer on your domain and contact you.