The Unofficial HN FAQ

http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ

by jacquesm • 16 years ago

230 91 16 years ago

devmonk• 16 years ago

'"self" posts, posts that do not link to another website have their own category in the top menu bar, they are all grouped under the 'Ask' entry...'

But that doesn't happen for every "Ask HN" I've posted. A good number move there, but not all, and not immediately.

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

Good call, let me try to figure out what the logic is behind that. Thanks!

edit: re: the not immediately part, that's logical, the ask page is also ranked, try looking at the second or third page if you don't see your question listed.

tsycho3• 16 years ago

I faced the same problem. Since I couldn't find the "Ask HN" rule clearly mentioned anywhere, I even tried prefixing "Ask HN" in my post subject speculating that maybe HN does a string search, but it didn't work.

Is there a minimum karma level for Ask HN posts? Or is this a bug in the system?

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

Which post was that?

huhtenberg• 16 years ago

Polls do not end up in the "Ask" section as well.

By the way, it'd be nice to have a QA for polls. The http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll is not easy to find when one needs it.

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

Anything that is in the official FAQ I left because I don't feel like having the 'unofficial' one usurp the role of the official one.

Conversely if PG wants to crib any part of the unofficial one for inclusion in the official one I'll be happy and I'll remove that entry from the unofficial one.

billdough• 16 years ago

is this how one gets into "Ask HN"? just do a self post?

icey2• 16 years ago

This is a pretty good list, thanks for putting it together. Definitely going to have to bookmark it for the times when new people complain about the way of the world here.

DanielBMarkham• 16 years ago

This is a great article, Jacques.

Somebody should put together a list of meta-HN posts. These guides written by the users have as much or more value than that the stuff pg and the rest put together. I think part of the reason why is that fellow users are more likely to see things from a user's point of view.

yurifury• 16 years ago

You may want to add a section on alternative or mobile interfaces to HN, such as hckrnews.com and icombinator.net.

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

Ok, done that. If there are others please let me know and I'll add them.

thanks!

nuclear_eclipse• 16 years ago

HN Droid is an excellent app on the Market for Android phones that even allows you to login, upvote, and post comments. It's even open source itself: http://github.com/amir/HNdroid

tnorthcutt3• 16 years ago

http://ihackernews.com

edanm• 16 years ago

Great list jacquesm. I had no idea Hacker News was open source! I guess you learn something new every day.

And thanks for mentioning Resourcey. I've added your FAQ to HN's Resourcey.com page (gotta love circular recursion!)

drtse42• 16 years ago

The "Can I post links to my own blog ?", could not be true anymore, or at least reading the ShelfLuv creator's post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1754584 this morning i got that impression (didn't we discuss this in a thread last week?).

steveklabnik• 16 years ago

That shouldn't be true; his domain is probably autodead for a different reason. This own post is submitted from jacquesm's own blog!

drtse42• 16 years ago

I guess you are both right, but considering there seems not to be other links to his blog on HN it still seems a bit weird.

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

You can, but there is a chance if you do that with made-for-adsense or blogspam or other objectionable content that your domain will make it on to the blacklist, which is apparently what happened to this user.

The FAQ actually covers that.

MarkBook• 16 years ago

"Why would you want high karma ?" because I don't have one. Hit me

tnorthcutt3• 16 years ago

"The thresholds at which this happens changes over time, I believe the downvote cap is at 50 right now and the flag cap is at 200."

I may be reading this wrong, but I think what you're saying is that once you reach a karma of 50, you can downvote comments. I'm pretty sure that's incorrect - I have a karma of 89 as of this writing, and (unless I haven't yet figured out how to) am unable to downvote comments. Maybe someone who recently became able to could give a more accurate number.

jeebusroxors• 16 years ago

I'm at 147 and no down vote. I think he has it backwards? I had heard somewhere else 200 was the magic number for comments.

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

Ok, thanks I've updated that. Anybody have a hard number for the 'flag' option?

jessor2• 16 years ago

Yes, you need a karma of 200+ to be able to downvote. Reached that just a few weeks ago. You can only downvote comments which were made after you reached the treshhold.

rwmj• 16 years ago

The FAQ is seemingly contradictory on the subject of downvotes. Does anyone ever seen downvotes on posts? On comments? (I have never seen a "down" button on either). The FAQ says that there are no such things, but also mentions downvotes, which I find confusing.

stingraycharles• 16 years ago

From the article:

"At what karma level can I downvote articles ?

There is no karma level that I know of that will allow you to downvote articles."

and

"What [karma] does give you is that at some point you can downvote other comments and it gives you the ability to flag posts."

In other words, you can't downvote articles, ever, and you can downvote comments after a certain karma threshold has been reached.

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

There are no downvotes on articles, just flags, and the downvote button on comments only appears when you have (apparently) 200 karma.

revorad• 16 years ago

Great list. You might want to edit the title to replace "HN" with the full form "Hacker News".

Another noob FAQ is: "Is HN becoming like Reddit and Digg?". pg has given lots of good answers to that (mainly that people who haven't been around long enough see patterns in randomness).

Edited to add: You might also want to point out that Reddit and Digg are also good communities with a different feel, and there is no need to take a moral high ground.

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

Title changed.

I don't see how I could have missed the reddit/digg one, I've added it.

RiderOfGiraffes2• 16 years ago

You might want to add a question:

+ Why can't I downvote comment?

with the answer

+ You can only downvote comments once you have sufficient karma. The required level rises over time to account for the karma inflation caused by an increasing userbase.

This would enhance the answer about what one can do with one's karma.

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

Ok, thank you! I've added the question and the answer + a bit to it about the ability to downvote comments that are in reply to your own.

anonymous236• 16 years ago

> Why can't I respond to a comment that responded to me ?

Current answer is wrong. Commenting is disabled for old threads. For new, overly active threads only in-thread commenting is disabled, but clicking on the 'link' link still gives an access to the response form.

RiderOfGiraffes2• 16 years ago

The answer is correct, but is (perhaps deliberately) incomplete. Replying to recent comments is not disabled, there is an exponentially increasing timeout. Yes, you can always click on the "link" link and then hit "reply", but in-thread, the "reply" link only appears after a timeout that gets longer as the comments get deeper.

In summary:

+ "reply" on comments in old threads are disabled.

+ "reply" on comments in new threads have a timeout

+ the timeout is very short if the comment is shallow

+ the timeout gets longer as the thread gets deeper

+ the timeout can be circumvented by clicking "link" - then you are offered a "reply" link immediately.

+ PG might put the timeout out the shortcut method, but hasn't yet done so.

chmike2• 16 years ago

Do you mean a delay for the reply link to show up ? Timeout is confusing. I didn't know about this feature.

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

I was kind of in doubt about what to do there, I'm aware of that trick but I think it is in there for a reason, to publicly put a 'workaround' out there would likely be counter productive.

The old thread item duly noted and added. What do you think about the 'link' bit, should that be added or best left as it is?

bambax• 16 years ago

Great post, thanks.

Typos:

For one HN has it's own 'flavor' => its

HN gets it's (more than) fair share of spam => its

Weird HTML:

It seems line-breaks are hard-coded with BRs inside of P elements? In this phrase the BRs are missing and therefore it crosses over to the invisible right side:

The thresholds at which this happens changes over time, the downvote threshold is at 200 right now and the flag cap is at 100. There

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

fixed.

pchristensen• 16 years ago

Another good one:

Q: Why don't people ever email me when I invite them to in a comment?

A: The Email field in your profile is for site administrators only. If you want other users to be able to see it, you need to include it in your About box.

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

Ok, added.

stjarnljuset• 16 years ago

Edit: nevermind, the thing I suggested adding was already on the FAQ.

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

Update: I've added the possibility to link directly to an entry in the FAQ.

po• 16 years ago

A high average score on your comments will give your comments preference in the search order (this is part of the 'secret sauce').

I've wondered about that… I spend a fair amount of time reading through the "newest" and "ask" lists and often comment on articles that don't end up making the front page. This can really drag your average down. The best way to have a high average score is to comment only on top stories where everyone else is reading, which I think is a bit unfortunate.

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

Yes, I fully agree. I remarked as much to PG that this would be an unintended and negative side effect when he implemented this, but I don't care one bit about my 'average karma' so that's just too bad, and I'll keep on answering 1 upvote 'Ask HN' posts anyway.

frossie• 16 years ago

The thing that makes me a bit sad is that is that some people do try and be helpful and respond to Ask HNs that are languishing unresponded... and yet only have one point of karma on their comment.

Which means that even the person who asked the question didn't upvote the commenter who was taking the time to respond to them. I've seen this even in cases where the OP followed up on the comment and said "thanks that's very useful". So click the up-arrow, dude.

(unless upvotes by the OP are filtered out? but I can't imagine why that would be)

gojomo• 16 years ago

A nice summary, but I think a little too casual in recommending 'flags'. The official guidelines mention flags for "spam and offtopic"; this FAQ says to flag when you "think it's not HN material", a looser standard.

How about on-topic but trivial, repetitive, frivolous, flimsily-argued, outside-the-mainstream, etc.? Best to ignore, rather than flag these -- a flag is not a downvote saying 'less attention', it's a judgment 'no attention; against-the-rules'. (It stings far more when your earnestly-offered submission is killed than when it simply never musters many votes.)

I've noticed more people using flags as simple downvotes, and some good submissions have been killed as a result.

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

That's true, let me think about that, that's a thing that will impact quite a few entries actually.

If you want to re-word a specific entry in it's entirety I'd be grateful, this is a hard one to get right.

gasull• 16 years ago

In the digest question you might want to add the RSS feeds from "A cure for Hacker News overload":

http://jmillerinc.com/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-over...

telemachos• 16 years ago

I'm not sure how big of a deal this is, but it might be worth mentioning that many HN users dislike short URLs and will often vote you down if you post one. Just a community norm that some folks are surprised by.

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

Thank you, I added that to the 'downvoted' section.

RK• 16 years ago

And HN currently has no way to remedy accidental down (or up) voting, which is particularly problematic on touch screens.

tptacek4• 16 years ago

Does anyone seriously believe that your chances of getting into YC go up linearly with your karma? If I had to guess, past a certain threshold, your chances of acceptance probably drop.

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

Linearly? Where does it say that?

PG has said quite a few times that if your HN contributions are 'thoughtful' (which is a fairly arbitrary criterion) that that helps. Of course there is no linear relationship, and anybody that believes that is not likely to make it in to YC anyway.

edit: I've added a bit of text there in case someone might interpret it this way, but I think the risk of that happening was fairly low.

tptacek4• 16 years ago

You're not really following me. I'm not suggesting that you thought you could karma-whore your way into YC; I'm suggesting that you and I might have a harder time getting into YC since our karma scores reflect something else besides simply thoughtful comments.

I'd imagine Patrick would have no problems, but that may be in spite of the karma score, not because of it.

SkyMarshal• 16 years ago

I suspect pg is looking for certain traits in your comments - maturity, technical knowledge and/or experience, and some insightfulness into your field. "Thoughtful" can comprise all three, and more.

If you have high karma, but most of your comments are noise, that can't help. Or if you have low karma and rarely post, but your posts are mostly "thoughtful", that probably helps.

I suspect it varies like that.

lotharbot• 16 years ago

pg has stated that YCombinator is looking for good/great people, even if their startup idea is weak. He's also stated that skimming your HN comments provides one way to judge what sort of person you are.

Most high-karma people on HN (like, 5k+) get there by being thoughtful. I'd imagine pretty much everyone in the top 100 would be helped rather than hurt by their HN presence. I suppose it's theoretically possible to amass a lot of karma without making any useful contributions, but I haven't see anybody do it yet.

mortuus• 16 years ago

typo: "otherwise you nobody can see it"

Where did you get the (one boat cruise|two boat race) saying?

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

Thank you, fixed the typo.

> Where did you get the (one boat cruise|two boat race) saying?

Long ago I designed a CAD/CAM system for a sailmaker in the Netherlands, the effect of this is that I spent a ton of time in and around the sailmakery itself (I even spent some time living in the attic above it because I had no house) and the sailing related proverbs flew fast and thick there.

It's really true though, if you're on a boat and having a good time sailing and someone overtakes you the urge to give chase is almost too strong to resist, it's like having a hound spot a deer that is running away.

warwick• 16 years ago

A couple of things you might want to include:

The rule about having to be here for a year before you can even talk about if we're turning into Reddit. It's in the guidelines, but I think it's worth mentioning under "Is HN becoming like Reddit and Digg?".

It's also pretty courteous around here to note any edits you made to your comment with a brief footnote, or by adding the additional content as a footnote itself. The footnote should mention what was edited, not just that the edit occurred. That bit of etiquette might fit under "Someone edited a comment I replied to and now I look like an idiot!"

j_baker• 16 years ago

"Simply flag the post, don't bother bitching about it, that will only get you downvotes."

This isn't always true. I've bitched about submissions and gotten upvoted for it. :-)

Usually, it's something along the lines of "I'm tired of seeing this crap on the front page" though. Usually if it's "this is hacker news" or "N00b, this is a violation of the rules" it will get downvoted.

One other point to make, it's ok to point out that someone is breaking the rules if you're not bitching about it. I think comments saying "You might not realize this, but this will likely get downvoted/flagged because it breaks rule X" comments should be encouraged.

ugh• 16 years ago

I sometimes like to explain exactly why I don't think something should be on HN (if it's not spam or of really bad quality) - simple one liners like "This shouldn't be on HN, flagged." aren't helpful at all. Be constructive!

I think feedback helps at least some submitters tremendously.

mcknz• 16 years ago

"Is there an API for HN / is it ok to scrape HN?"

Comment from PG: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721105

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

Thank you, added that.

bryanlarsen• 16 years ago

Under "alternative ways to read", you're missing some punctuation. Currently, it seems to imply that hckrnews.com is an Android app...

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

I re-organized that section to remove the ambiguity, thank you for the pointer.

duck• 16 years ago

One other search tip - I use Duck Duck Go's bang command to search HN using !hn <search terms>. It takes you to searchyc.com, but is more handy if you are already using DDG.

chmike2• 16 years ago

An information I failed to find is text formatting methods. Sometime I see itallic text, others courrier text. URLs aren't always shown as clickable links. How can we control this ?

nitrogen• 16 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc (linked next to the about box on your account settings page)

A Google search for "link:http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc site:news.ycombinator.com" shows that others have requested more links to the formatting help.

patrickk• 16 years ago

Regarding "What can I do with my karma?" another thing you can do once you reach a certain karma level is to setup a poll, with multiple answers that people can vote on.

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

Ah yes, that's true there is a karma threshold for that too, I'll add that right away. Thanks!

jacquesm29• 16 years ago

I just added this as a stand-alone article:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1759548

How to make the homepage.

The Unofficial HN FAQ

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