News.YC faster (plus new traffic stats)

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#9jan09

by pg • 18 years ago

117 82 18 years ago

ycombinator.com

pclark7• 18 years ago

awesome.

News.YC is still my primary source for most news, it's an amazing community.

unalone3• 18 years ago

Two months ago I was worried that with the Obama surge things would break apart and collapse and become generic as a site like Reddit's become. To my surprise, it's managed to hold together incredibly well. And I love it: this is absolutely the best community I know of on the Internet.

allenbrunson• 18 years ago

"it" didn't magically hold together. that was the work of the editors! if you read the site with showdead turned on in your profile, you'll see that a record number of users and submissions are getting killed.

just to be clear, that's not me screaming censorship. it's rare for me to see a dead comment or submission that i wouldn't have killed myself, if i had the power to do it.

yters6• 18 years ago

Besides the excellent moderation, another huge contributor is that instead of being a generic medium for posting articles and discussion, like slashdot, HN is founded on pg, in a sense. His ethos is the site's ethos.

DavidPP2• 18 years ago

I've been reading News.YC for last few months and it's now my primary source of IT news/discussion. While I restrain myself from posting sometime because I'm not perfectly fluent in english, I have deep admiration for the community and it's insight on the "hacker" world.

Thanks alot!

mixmax3• 18 years ago

I think that around here it's more about what you have to say than about being able to do so in perfect english. Besides it's a great way to learn...

So if you have something to add the conversation do so. Even if it isn't perfect english :-)

simonista• 18 years ago

I agree, and what's more, It feels "livelier" to me lately, which could be the feel of the growing population. I'm not worried though, the discussions have continued to be excellent.

yan• 18 years ago

This is great.

Are the events that brought in the largest spikes in traffic known? Do page views correlate to new accounts?

pclark7• 18 years ago

I belive the huge spike was techcrunch

pclark7• 18 years ago

hmm, that spike was before techcrunch covered YC (they covered it in December) ... no idea, then :)

pmjordan4• 18 years ago

I'm wondering whether the huge page view spikes that have no corresponding unique IP spike are actually caused by crawler traffic.

robg5• 18 years ago

Usually crawler traffic.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=390965

ed• 18 years ago

The largest spike looks like decision day. (That's the day YC sends out emails notifying the people they'll fund.)

jskopek• 18 years ago

Long time reader, first time poster. Just wanted to say that the quality of submissions and comments is what always keeps me coming back to HN, and it's great to see active interest in maintaining the quality.

You'd never hear something like "Growth can't keep going at this rate forever without ruining the site, though. Between those two alternatives, we prefer growth to slow down. We hope it will happen naturally—that we'll simply run out of new people the site appeals to." coming from a profit-driven site

ionfish• 18 years ago

> "[W]ith sufficient caching you can write popular apps in arbitrarily slow languages."

Somehow I doubt this pronouncement will stem the tide of statements along the lines of "x is written in a slow language and therefore won't scale", although they have been mercifully less frequent around here of late.

Alex3917• 18 years ago

Maybe it would be helpful if there were a way to see a user's 100 highest rated comments. I'm thinking it would help both in socializing the influx of new users, and also in getting an idea of what a given person like.

pc• 18 years ago

Good idea.

mnemonik• 18 years ago

Don't downmod this guy(gal) in to oblivion just because (s)he didn't say too much or you don't agree... Especially in this thread. This should be reserved for trolls. I think a nice 0 or -1 (to discourage pointless comments) would be fine but (s)he's already at -3 when this is still a pretty new submission. Don't hop on the bandwagon just because.

davi• 18 years ago

Currently, just clicking on a username and then clicking on the comments link in the user profile gives me a pretty good sense of what that user is like.

My highest rated comment so far occurred yesterday, when I got 30 points for saying something reasonably good early on in a popular post. I think other people agreed with what I said, and so (appropriately) just upvoted the comment rather than repeating it.

If your proposed feature just ended up displaying lots of comments like these, it might not be that great.

A somewhat related idea might be to let longstanding/high karma users add a 'top N favorite comments' list to their profile. When you looked at a user's profile, you could click through to see their favorites, and the comments by them favorited by others. (Users could add their own comments to their favorites list, if they wanted to.)

I can think of several users right now whose favorites would be interesting to me.

wensing• 18 years ago

This is why some indication of a user's median karma per comment would be at least as insightful as his or her total.

spydez• 18 years ago

SearchYC.com can do some sorting of user's comments.

e.g. http://searchyc.com/user/Alex3917

dkasper• 18 years ago

Yikes, link appears to be broken!

robg5• 18 years ago

On a slow satellite connection I definitely noticed the new zippiness. No other site I visit loads as quickly - not even a google search.

pclark7• 18 years ago

I'm curious about a satellite connection. I spend a lot of time in southern Spain where we don't have landlines. We do have GSM so we get _slow_ internet.

Can you shed some light on satellite internet? Who are you hosted with? Hows the speed & reliability?

robg5• 18 years ago

We're with HughesNet. It's bad (200 kbps) at peak times, better at moderate volume (500 kbps), and pretty good at off-hours - 5am (1.5 mbps). We pay about $80 month but it's our only choice besides dial-up. It seems they now have faster connections if you're willing to pay more (http://go.gethughesnet.com/plans.cfm)

Reliability is really good. It's hardly ever down, even during major snowstorms (just have to clean off the dish). I'd say we lose connectivity maybe a few hours a month.

The worst part is the low daily bandwidth limits (425 MB in 24 hour periods) and then they throttle the service (<20 kbps) until you're into the next 24 hour period. They don't tell you when you're getting close. Since we started using a bandwidth tracker to monitor ourselves we haven't had any problems but the first few months were painful and frustrating. They do have three non-monitored hours (4am to 7am local time) so you can schedule downloads accordingly.

Not sure if they're international though. Be careful of on-line reviews. They're almost all negative because I don't think folks realize the technology is always going to seem more limited than DSL or cable. Coming from either of those (or a T1 etc.), you just have to reset your expectations.

vaksel2• 18 years ago

would be interesting to see what kind of hardware HN is hosted on

tedroden2• 18 years ago

Also, somewhat related to this, does anyone know if newmogul.com runs on the same code or does it just look identical?

pclark7• 18 years ago

probably the same code - it's open source.

cchooper2• 18 years ago

I'd say yes. The HTML is identical right down to the missing XML declaration.

ivankirigin• 18 years ago

Last I heard, a single box.

vaksel2• 18 years ago

A single box can range from an old 286 to something that powers plenty of fish.

robg5• 18 years ago

But we're hoping that, as in past influxes, the new arrivals will with some prodding from the existing inhabitants learn the local customs.

I'm absolutely smitten with this form of social hacking. To me, this seems to be the most revolutionary part of the site. That controlling "free" speech is not an impediment to open speech and that community members can be taught, through participation, to behave according to some simple constraints.

My apologies if this is an inane realization. It just doesn't seem to be said often enough in on-line communities. Lassez faire doesn't work and it's possible to also encourage the worst, trollish, impulses. This is the first clearly positive example I've seen. If there are others please let me know!

bd2• 18 years ago

MetaFilter also works this way. Self-policing is a big part of the community [1][2].

There is a even a whole section of the site devoted to discussing internal stuff (called appropriately MetaTalk [3]).

Sometimes I miss something like this on HN - a separate space for meta stuff.

BTW MetaFilter is the only other online community I'm aware of that has quality on the level of HN (despite being even larger - over 56,000 registered people).

[1] http://mssv.net/wiki.cgi?SelfPolicing

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaFilter#Moderation

[3] http://metatalk.metafilter.com

jballanc• 18 years ago

Actually, I kind of like that HN is self-meta (i.e. the ability to ask questions as well as post links). There were a few good discussions about how to make a good post a while back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419539

maximilian• 18 years ago

Metafilter seems pretty cool, but it could desperately use some formatting to help its readability. Basically copy the HN/reddit styling to differentiate posts and comments from each other.

wheels• 18 years ago

> open speech and that community members can be taught, through participation, to behave according to some simple constraints

That's the bread and butter of most open source communities, and part of why they tend to work: open source, in my opinion, is primarily a social phenomenon and the forces for social cohesion, whether in terms of coding standards or ideologies quickly produces communities that work well together online.

jhancock• 18 years ago

yeah, group think ROCKS!!

nah, I know what you mean ;), it is mostly good for now.

trickjarrett• 18 years ago

Does anyone else feel like HN is actually ahead of the zeitgeist than other sites like Reddit and Digg? Obviously the focus is closer with technology/entrepreneur articles but I keep finding stories I've already seen on HN hitting Reddit and Digg up to a day later.

tokenadult2• 18 years ago

HN is beating some of the specialty discussion sites I like best in timeliness for certain specialized topics, so it appears that people who find cool links are defaulting to posting to HN first (which is also becoming my default behavior).

mdasen• 18 years ago

prove that with sufficient caching you can serve arbitrarily large numbers of requests with arbitrarily slow languages

I love the way that's worded, but I do have a serious question: how do you do the caching in a way that keeps content fresh? For example, you couldn't just cache this page with the comments because then I'd think mine didn't show up. Or do you add it to a comments cache in memcached or some similar mechanism as well as saving it to the database? Or simply expire the cache on save assuming that there will be more reads than writes?

It's always seemed hard to do good caching for a site whose content is constantly changing as people comment and vote on items and it'd be nice to see how complex the model used here was. The latest source I know of is at http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc2.tar. Will there be an update with new source?

Oh, and congratulations on an awesome site!

staunch• 18 years ago

1) Any idea how many page views per month?

2) Is all the HN data (comments, submissions, users) backed up and stored off the machine it's running on?

asmosoinio• 18 years ago

1) Looking at the graph from the article:

http://ycombinator.com/images/traffic-8dec08.png

For December the average page views per day averages about 200K => 6M page views.

aristus• 18 years ago

"...with sufficient caching you can serve arbitrarily large numbers of requests with arbitrarily slow languages."

Only if the dataset is small relative to the traffic rate, and if the data mutation rate is relatively small to the size of the dataset. There are plenty of systems that do not have these properties.

I agree the speed of the language does not matter as much as people used to think... but the shape of the data matters a lot more than people think.

pmjordan4• 18 years ago

The shape of the data matters particularly when you want to scale beyond that initial single server, which is especially relevant if performance is weak.

JoelSutherland• 18 years ago

I'd like to see increased moderation to balance the new users.

Xichekolas• 18 years ago

If you watch the site with showdead turned on, you'll notice that moderation has increased as the userbase has increased. There are more dead items than ever, but such is life when trying to maintain quality.

So in short, you are seeing it.

fallentimes• 18 years ago

...and there has been a slight uptick in comments that are insulting or inane.

Is there a way to measure this? I know someone mentioned a filter for Youtube comments before...

tokenadult2• 18 years ago

Oddly, just now my access failed to HN using either of two different browsers, several times, even though other sites that occasionally have traffic hiccups responded just fine.

gommm• 18 years ago

One feature I would love news.yc is a page to list only the Ask HN submissions... I like reading articles and seeing the reactions to articles but the Ask HN submission usually end up having higher quality content on average IMHO.

bd2• 18 years ago

http://ask.searchyc.com

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

Courtesy of chengmi, alaskamiller and epi0Bauqu

medianama• 18 years ago

Why is the alexa rank so low for the kind of traffic this site gets?

unalone3• 18 years ago

I don't know if this is because of the new fix, but for me submission pages won't load. Any user's submission page just freezes. Safari 4, OS X 10.5.6.

Edit: never mind, working now. Possibly an Internet malfunction.

prakash• 18 years ago

So we just finished a new round of optimizations as part of our ongoing quest to prove that with sufficient caching you can .....

PG, can you please list the various optimizations? Thanks!

ced• 18 years ago

I realized today that caching breaks one of Lisp's cardinal rules (as quoted from OnLisp):

The convention in Lisp seems to be that an invocation owns objects it receives as return values, but not objects passed to it as arguments.

How do experienced Lispers deal with this? Just being careful?

News.YC faster (plus new traffic stats)

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