A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/master/README.md

by adanhawth • 7 years ago

437 170 7 years ago

cpeterso• 7 years ago

How can we report bugs in the Hacker News site?

My particular bug/request: the story submission form will trim page title suffixes for some popular sites, but the form's "too long" JavaScript check measures the original title length, not the auto-trimmed title length. So I often submit a story and have to manually trim the title suffix that would have been trimmed anyways for a story from the same site with a shorter title.

peterwwillis• 7 years ago

E-mail the mods, hn@ycombinator.com

ndesaulniers• 7 years ago

Mine would be hitting back in Firefox for Android sometimes returns to a stale front page (when returning to the front page of HN).

computerphage• 7 years ago

This is a great list. It took me years to learn most of this stuff and I still learned a few things.

jonbaer• 7 years ago

My only wish is that dupes weren't marked as dupes. It's not like you are submitting with the intention of creating a duplicate link (normally), it should just take you there instead of a [dupe] mark on your submission.

minimaxir3• 7 years ago

I should add a section on dupes to the list, as the policy is a bit inconsistent (for example, a post on a subject that gets a lot of upvotes but is not the original source, might have the original source submission duped to that later submission.)

krapp9• 7 years ago

I'd like to see a "rolling thread" feature where dupe threads (and links) are automatically merged into an existing thread, with older comments and subthreads being deleted over time.

Hacker News doesn't do a good job of avoiding duplicates anyway, might as well make that a feature.

saagarjha8• 7 years ago

with older comments and subthreads being deleted over time

No, don't delete comments! Hide them if you must, but I always like being able to enjoy and send people link to comments from years ago.

Nomentatus• 7 years ago

I'd like it to be easier to get to the search box, so fewer people would post dupes.

dang21• 7 years ago

The software already does that when it can. The [dupe] marks are added by moderators, or in some cases by user flagging. I'm sorry if it feels like a stigma—that's not the intention!—it's rather that otherwise a lot of complaints arise about why the story is buried.

shaunpersad• 7 years ago

I don't believe this is an actual feature, but I've noticed a trend that I've been calling "twos", where, at any given moment, a particular subject (present as a word or phrase in the article's title) will show up twice on the front page.

Funnily enough, currently the "twos" subject is "Hacker News", with this article and "What I've Learned from Hacker News" both being present in the front page at the same time.

jacques_chester• 7 years ago

Very often this is readers following some link, seeing other links from that page and submitting them.

Deimorz2• 7 years ago

Also often links that get mentioned in the comments of the original one.

spectre256• 7 years ago

That's how I interpret it as well. I also think interesting articles on a topic jog people's memory and cause them to re-submit interesting articles from the past on that topic.

TrainedMonkey• 7 years ago

I call birthday paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

Number of all possible topics is N, number of news on FP is 30. For example if N is 365, you would expect 70% chance that two separate items on FP mention the same topic.

Although, HN recurrence probably a bigger contributor. When a person gets reminded of some previous highly upvoted link and re-submits it. The highly upvoted link gets upvoted again and now you have two items on FP with similar keywords.

saagarjha8• 7 years ago

This only works if your sample space is small, whereas I'd argue the range of topics that can show up on Hacker News is nothing but ;)

dang21• 7 years ago

We call those copycat or follow-up posts and mostly downweight them, on the grounds that predictability makes HN less interesting.

forgotmypw3• 7 years ago

If it's just the same theme, and not just another page on the same thing, why not encourage it instead?

Example: reddit.com/r/redditDayOf

Zecar2• 7 years ago

How do I turn off echo chamber mode where well-written posts that go against the mob thinking turn grey?

UweSchmidt• 7 years ago

Got any examples for well-written grey posts? Most downvoted posts are not that amazing.

Noumenon722• 7 years ago

I have almost a conditioned reflex for upvoting grey posts at this point. The people who downvote are a weird crew that don't seem to judge by Reddit's "contributes to the discussion" standard.

Aardwolf• 7 years ago

If the comment desaturation makes Hacker News difficult to read, you can click on the comment's timestamp to go to its page where the comment will no longer be faded, or you can install the CSS extension discussed here.

Or, you can select its text to see it in (typically) black on blue.

jolmg• 7 years ago

I get white on blue, but yeah, I also do this and it's very readable.

lanius• 7 years ago

HN should update its color scheme. I use a quality IPS monitor with color calibration, and those comments are still hard to read.

Wowfunhappy• 7 years ago

This doesn't work for me in Safari on a Mac. The text remains gray and is still quite hard to read against the blue background.

dooglius• 7 years ago

If a user has 251 Karma, they can set the color of the top bar in their profile settings

Why on earth is there a karma requirement for this, let alone such a high one?

segfaultbuserr2• 7 years ago

Think of it like a video game, which often gives people surprises by unlocking the hidden feature based on unclear conditions. I was really impressed was I discovered it for the first time. This feature is more of a Easter egg than a practical option.

If you really NEED to change the color, you can simply load a custom CSS in your web browser.

dang21• 7 years ago

Maybe we should add another. Any ideas?

neurotrace• 7 years ago

I was kind of disappointed when I found out about this because I had already written a Userscript to do it for me

mereel2• 7 years ago

I have exactly 251 karma, this is so exciting

saagarjha8• 7 years ago

user: mereel

created: July 21, 2017

karma: 250

You guys don't have to be mean…

blaze33• 7 years ago

Because gamification?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification

raldi• 7 years ago

Why do you have to collect coins just to change Mario's shirt?

lumens• 7 years ago

If you hit the threshold, enabling the flag for you, then you are downvoted below the threshold, do you lose access to the feature as well?

tptacek6• 7 years ago

It's not meant to be taken seriously.

krapp9• 7 years ago

But this is Hacker News, we have to take everything seriously.

dang21• 7 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97573

https://web.archive.org/web/20080115223854/http://ycombinato...

snazz• 7 years ago

Small correction: the “web” link under a story now takes you to DuckDuckGo instead of Google.

minimaxir3• 7 years ago

Wait, what? When did this change?

Added it to the doc!

jedberg2• 7 years ago

Very recently. Not a great change in my opinion. The google search always had the article in position one. The ddg so far has failed me every time. :(

jedberg2• 7 years ago

A new account posting a very old and famous post... almost looks like karma farming...

recursive• 7 years ago

I've never seen it before, and I've been reading HN for years. A new user might naturally be interested in undocumented features and stumble upon.

I can't help but notice that it's still missing `noprocrast` and related settings.

minimaxir3• 7 years ago

noprocrast is documented in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

keithnz• 7 years ago

I maintain a list of resources here https://github.com/keithn/HackerNewsCommunity I'd actually added this list a year ago, but forgot about it, then just added it again, and had to remove it again as I realized it was dupe :)

adamrezich• 7 years ago

Looks like /topcolors is getting hugged to death

hannasanarion• 7 years ago

I was hoping to learn about why sometimes comments can't be replied to, especially if they're deep in a thread. Can somebody fill me in?

TheSpiceIsLife• 7 years ago

Try clicking the time stamp link of the comment, you should be able to reply from there.

I don’t know if there’s a limit to thread depth?

mamon• 7 years ago

Some kind of anti-flamewar feature. if there are multiple responses added in a very short time HN will temporarily hide "Reply" link.

ehsankia• 7 years ago

One issue I've noticed which I'm surprised still exists is, on really large threads with 1000+ comments, collapsing threads becomes noticeably slow (multiple seconds long).

I was looking at the source code, and it seemed like collapsing recursively collapses all comments below it too?

0xbadcafebee• 7 years ago

Here's some features I wish we had:

- Overhauled voting system. Comment votes are effectively "like/dislike" buttons, and some people use them to help promote/discourage comments central to the discussion. If you get downvoted or upvoted you do not know why, and that helps no one. Slashdot implemented a useful feature for this over 20 years ago.

- Tags on submissions, which would enable very simple filtering by topics.

- New hidden sections to let us dig into dead or controversial stories (maybe /dead and /deadnew?). If you watch /newest, you'll sometimes notice information that is interesting or meaningful, but it's auto-killed. There's no way to only show dead info except to page back through /newest. It would also be neat if we could actually vote on these, even if they remain dead. I don't even need comments to work on them, I'd just like to occasionally look at content that either a bot or overzealous human deems 'inappropriate'.

On the last one, here's an example: I just found this dead article in /newest (https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/The...) talking about the world's largest battery being built in Texas. It was submitted by protomyth, number 55 on the HN leaderboard. Of their past 30 submissions, 5 are dead, 1 has >100 votes, and 1 has >200 votes.

You can't easily find articles like this, because you have to keep paging back and paging back to find 30 or more dead articles. And you can't see the highest voted dead articles, so ones that might be interesting but were killed for some reason are also hard to find.

cm21874• 7 years ago

One feature I’d like to see is the split between upvotes and downvotes on a comment. It’s a measure of controversiality which I would find more interesting than the net score.

theli0nheart2• 7 years ago

Yes. I’d much rather read comments with a high number of votes and net zero score than the two other extremes.

cm21874• 7 years ago

Well you don't get to see other people's comment scores anyway. What I meant is for your own comments, seeing a score of +1 doesn't carry the same information than +15/-14.

ghayes• 7 years ago

StackOverflow does this well. They allow you to click the sum total of votes to see the breakdown of upvotes versus downvotes.

iscrewyou• 7 years ago

But I think that would lead to people preferring vote manipulation. If I agree with a title but I see it close to 50% upvotes/downvoted, I’m more prone to upvote it. Whereas I’m reality I might not upvote it anyways.

cm21874• 7 years ago

Not submissions which you can't downvote anyway. I meant comments, for which you can only see the score of your own anyway.

tabtab4• 7 years ago

While we are on the subject of downvotes, I'd love to have it require a comment (reason) to downvote. Not knowing why something gets downvoted is super frustrating. The comment doesn't have to be visible in the default listing; it perhaps can be a side option/listing or pop-up.

consumer451• 7 years ago

I'd love to have it require a comment (reason) to downvote

This has been something I’ve wanted to see in Reddit for a while now. I just recently learned that lobste.rs has this feature, and some other interesting stuff like a public mod-log.

https://lobste.rs/about

I’d like to add a disclaimer that there may be very good reasons not to do this on Reddit or HN, of which I am not aware.

tptacek6• 7 years ago

It's not going to happen; it's part of the ethos of the site to downvote in lieu of writing insubstantial criticisms, a policy Paul Graham actually wrote out once long ago.

It's the right policy, I think. The last thing we need are dozens more one-line "why this sucks" comments on each thread.

inopinatus5• 7 years ago

There's a potential downside; some commentators may attenuate a strongly held opinion if they discover it is more polarising than they believed. Watering down debate isn't (usually) healthy.

(Rationally speaking, none of us will lie on our deathbeds wishing we'd collected more points in the internet popularity contest, but it's only human to change behaviour in response to external measures)

ptruesdell• 7 years ago

It's interesting that you need at least 501 karma to be able to downvote comments and posts, but only 31 to flag submissions. Kind of surprising considering that they say a flag is essentially a "super" downvote.

cm21874• 7 years ago

Out of curiosity, how do comments get flagged?

saagarjha8• 7 years ago

Users with enough karma (I think it's 30?) flag them. You need to click on the actual link to the comment, which is where you can flag (or vouch!) for comments that you think break the guidelines (or were wrongly flagged).

DanBC• 7 years ago

You click the timestamp of the comment, which takes you to a page with more menu options. One of those is [flag]. I don't know how many flags it takes to convert a comment from normal to [flagged], or to dead.

FPGAhacker• 7 years ago

I always thought newbie names were red. Color deficiency sucks.

davidw• 7 years ago

That's pretty well done and thorough. The wayback feature was one I hadn't noticed before, and it caused me to look at the account creation date - 12 years and 1 day ago! Wow...

sotojuan• 7 years ago

Pretty cool report. Personally all I want is to be able to change my username, even if it means emailing and waiting a few days.

mises• 7 years ago

Agreed, this would be nice to add. However, it would have been easier if everyone's primary identifier was a number, and a name was just an associated field. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that it was set up this way. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Anybody known if emailing the mods will let this happen?

saagarjha8• 7 years ago

Emailing the mods seems like a great way to know the answer to your question :)

PavlovsCat• 7 years ago

Maybe add a displayname "on top" that gets displayed in discussions, while still showing the username in the profile so people don't impersonate each other, add a button to "flag displayname" on the profile so that can be reset if abused or even the privilege to set it revoked -- done?

dang21• 7 years ago

We do that! Email hn@ycombinator.com and ask.

slg3• 7 years ago

The ranking algorithm also isn't some simple votes/time metric. The flame war detector for posts is an example that is mentioned, but there are also some undocumented complexities on the comment side too.

An obvious one is brand new comments get a huge boost in the rankings compared to older comments. It is pretty common to see a few minute old comment at the top of a lot of comment threads. It also seems user reputation is a factor in this. A user with a good average karma score (a metric that used to be displayed publicly but is now hidden) seems to have their comments stay near the top longer than other users.

inopinatus5• 7 years ago

Re. comments lingering high based on account karma, I've suggested the same but dang says not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16441687

Perhaps such remarks are retaining position by their own merit. An experienced or high quality commentator may simply produce remarks that are better received.

slg3• 7 years ago

I don't know what to say other than there is something going on behinds the scenes that can be seen in play in this thread. My comment is 1 minute newer than another comment in this thread. My comment currently hasn't been upvoted yet is several spots higher in the thread. I tried upvoting the other comment and mine was still higher. My account has almost twice the karma and is older than the author of the other comment. It might not be 100% or even 1% karma related, but there seems to be some sort of user reputation effect.

saagarjha8• 7 years ago

Experienced or high quality commentators are significantly more likely to create comments that other Hacker News users are willing to upvote–I'm not sure that this translates to higher quality material, though.

inopinatus5• 7 years ago

Remark ordering also appears to incorporate freshness (new remarks get a moment at/near the top), and I may possibly have also observed a penalty box: hidden downweighting, or reduction in effective comment score, imposed by moderators upon troublesome users that weren't egregious enough to ban/shadowban.

NeedMoreTea2• 7 years ago

Just one comment about vouch, which seems to have have changed behaviour fairly recently.

Used to be that if a shadowbanned user posted a clearly substantive comment a vouch would always (nearly always?) restore it. Now it never does - I guess vouch is now just a vote that needs x votes.

Suspect that's going to unintentionally have even more people talking to themselves, because they've not yet noticed the shadowban.

krapp9• 7 years ago

It is possible to lose vouching privileges if the mods feel the comments you're vouching for are uncivil or do more harm than good.

NeedMoreTea2• 7 years ago

That's also possible. Don't think I have vouched for something that shouldn't, but I would say that, wouldn't I? :)

So have others noticed a change, or did I accidentally flag my own account somehow?

gjs2782• 7 years ago

they notify you when you get banned. i’m currently one of them. I didn’t notice for a few days though because the site doesn’t have an obvious way of notifying you when you get a reply.

saagarjha8• 7 years ago

I've found https://www.hnreplies.com to be pretty useful.

arnonejoe• 7 years ago

Not sure if this applies but new functionality will show up in your profile if you make it far enough in the YC application process. Our team landed an interview for the S2014 batch. There is a whole part of the site that you would only see during this process. I had questions in my profile during the application process (which normally does not appear) and when we were invited to interview there was scheduling tool where you could see the open slots over the four days of interviews. In our batch, they interviewed four teams at a time in 15-minute intervals and you could pick your time in this scheduling grid.

https://github.com/joseph-adam/YCombinator-Application-S14

gjs2782• 7 years ago

go into your profile and mark the ability to see [dead] comments. a lot of them are useful.

ggm4• 7 years ago

This isn't the best place to do feature requests and I also strongly believe the more features HN gets the worserer it will become. But. anyway, my current top fave is this:

implement some kind of keystroke scheme to to basic page steerage in emacs/vi mode respecting ways, and ? to show what the keystrokes are

nyx_• 7 years ago

I really like cVim[0] for this. Think there's a couple of extensions for Firefox that accomplish the same thing.

[0] https://github.com/1995eaton/chromium-vim

ggm4• 7 years ago

Thank you. TIL. Given about 5-10 web pages I badly miss the google default steerage choices for gmail/photos &c, this may well fill a hole in my life.

So .. thank you kind HN reader.

dang21• 7 years ago

That may actually happen someday, because I wrote an HN client to help with moderation and it has all kinds of keyboard shortcuts for navigation. It's on my list to publish the navigation parts.

ggm4• 7 years ago

This would make me very happy.

rob• 7 years ago

I think I was one of the first to join HN when I was only a teenager. I think 18. I miss the simple days! Went by so fast.

russellbeattie• 7 years ago

Interesting... this post caused me to finally look up what "delay" in the user settings does. As you might assume, it delays visibility of your comment for that number of minutes. I wrote this 2 minutes ago, see you in the future!

pelario• 7 years ago

Flame-war detector remind me of the following short story by Scott Alexander

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/

_ps6d2• 7 years ago

Lots of people posting random feature requests in here, but is HN even developed any more? The last significant changes I remember were two and a half years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675) and I think even those were the first ones in a long time.

NicoJuicy2• 7 years ago

Web changed from Google to DuckDuckGo.

But which features are missing?

_ps6d2• 7 years ago

There's quite a bit that could be added, without even touching the site's overall mechanics at all.

The markdown support is extremely minimal and doesn't support a lot of basics like quotes (which causes many people to "quote" by using a code block, which has issues).

A basic private messaging system would be really helpful in a lot of cases. Right now people always have to post email addresses publicly.

It would be nice to have some built-in visibility into things like title changes, link changes, etc. that mods do, instead of needing them to comment manually about everything they do.

They could implement some scraping to automatically add the year to older stories, instead of users needing to flag it and get the mods to do it manually all the time.

And so on.

dang21• 7 years ago

It's interesting to see that question show up, because we work so hard on the code. It makes sense that you'd ask it, though, because most of the changes are either not visible (like anti-spam or anti-voting-ring features), or are subtle. For example, you may have noticed more capitalized titles on the front page in the last couple days—but this is an experiment we're going to roll back.

One reason we don't do a lot of visible changes is that HN's minimalism is one of its biggest assets. Another is that users don't like things to change, and the internal pressures that cause companies to do arbitrary redesigns are thankfully not in play here.

Deimorz2• 7 years ago

Would it be possible to add a public changelog?

I wasn't trying to diminish the work being done, but I couldn't find a more recent official update announcement than the one I linked from 2016.

sambroner2• 7 years ago

What kind of changes to the internals do you all do? And would you do a post on the architecture?

I assume there's been lots of work to make the site more efficient/reduce cost. "No [few] internal pressures" sounds like a great recipe for an interesting design.

m_fayer3• 7 years ago

A well designed official API would go a long way toward letting a thousand flowers bloom. I know there's web and mobile apps already out there, but IMO the average quality is not great. Which is not surprising, given the awkwardness of the existing firebase API, which probably keeps many developers away and eats too much of the efforts of those devs that do try their hand.

kyleblarson• 7 years ago

You left out orange usernames

Someone1234• 7 years ago

Unfortunately the site still has no way of doing bullet lists. If you try this is the result:

- One - Two - Three - Four

You can do this but it isn't clear that it is even a bulleted list (particularly with real content):

- One

- Two

- Three

- Four

It does support code blocks but that has strange boxing behavior making them hard to read even for actual code. For example:

      - Super long line that will box strangely for some reason... ! Long Line Long Line.    
      - One   
      - Two    
      - Three    
      - Four

As you move further down a reply thread the box around code blocks shrinks and scrolling increases. If you access the comments with increased font size, a mobile device, or a smaller browser window it also gets worse/happens sooner.

There's also now anti-hammering protection on the site (posting/replying/voting too fast) but it is far too easy to trigger. Just voting for a comment and hitting reply to that same comment can easily trigger it.

2038AD• 7 years ago

I think this should work

• one

• two

• three

• four

mariojv• 7 years ago

Interesting post, I didn't know about some things like "/noobstories" or the karma needed for downvoting.

One feature I've been wanting lately is the ability to see only new comments since my last visit to the thread. I've thought about writing some sort of reader application for this or perhaps a browser plugin.

Even nicer would be something that takes into account comments I've actually read by using what my viewport has had open, but that may be less useful.

greglindahl2• 7 years ago

The inability to see new comments since your last visit is a feature. :-)

bharrison• 7 years ago

I'm as surprised to see this posted by a green username as I am glad to know what a green username means after having read your submission.

Tomte• 7 years ago

but the minimum score is -4 points.

Is that true? I may misremember, but I thought I had comments in the minus a dozen or so.

Beskz• 7 years ago

I just turned 24, I’ve been a software developer since I was 18-19,and it’s so interesting to go back in time and see what was going on in the HN universe on specific days in the past, way before I even got interested in tech (I was in 6th or 7th grade when HN started). I really wish I would’ve discovered my passion for tech earlier.

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

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