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    Ask PG: Why don’t you open source HN?

    114 points muellerwolfram | 19 comments | 04 Jan 13 02:58 UTC | HN request time: 1.04s | source | bottom

    I hope it didn’t get asked before, I couldn’t find anything.

    There was a question recently, about why you don’t improve the HTML of HN, where you said "When the HTML is the most important thing to work on."(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4927231)

    I agree that the markup is relatively unimportant compared to features that I think could really improve the functionality and quality of the site, and I bet you have a long wishlist of features yourself.

    But between the lines I interpreted that that list might be way longer, than the time that is available to you, allows you to work on it.

    So why don’t you open source HN? I get that with a project that is important to someone, it’s hard to give away control. But you can still be the project lead, you could still have the last call and I feel to open up the project will lead to great feature discussions and ultimately a better hn.

    Have you ever considered open sourcing it? And what’s the thought process on your decision?

    Show context
    jff ◴[04 Jan 13 04:59 UTC] No.5006342[source]▶
    It's simple but effective. The pages load quickly and look pretty decent in many different browsers.

    I'm really happy that HN isn't your typical constantly-mutating, constantly growing news site, adding a new social share button and 2KB of new Javascript every week. Please, pg, don't start taking pull requests or anything like that, it's great the way it is.

    Edit: look at the current top story. A pretty but not especially functional Facebook redesign, proposed as the latest in a long line of changes that the users pretty much always disliked. There's my point.

    replies(7): >>5006376 #>>5006377 #>>5006405 #>>5006514 #>>5006644 #>>5006645 #>>5006873 #
    1. ramblerman ◴[04 Jan 13 05:13 UTC] No.5006376[source]▶
    It's fine. It does what it's supposed to that's true. There are a few items however, that should really have been tackled in the many years this site has now been running imo.

    - You can't take away an upvote. Misclick is just bad luck

    - user settings have some really obscure settings that aren't explained like showdead / noprocrast / maxvisit / minaway

    - The "Unknown or expired link" is just a bad solution, either redirect me to the front page when that happens, or find an alternative way to deal with it.

    replies(8): >>5006386 #>>5006398 #>>5006400 #>>5006481 #>>5006814 #>>5006825 #>>5006826 #>>5032859 #
    2. alexanderh ◴[04 Jan 13 05:21 UTC] No.5006386[source]▶
    That last one always gets me... Cant believe its been that way for so long, considering the type of people who visit this site....

    There's "not having time to work on it" and then theres "complete abandonment."

    I do sort of agree with OP that at least adding a few more people onto a team would be good, if not full on opensourcing it.

    But hey, Reddit is always open source. And someone could always open their own site out of its source code and try to one-up HackerNews. Competition breads innovation.

    replies(2): >>5006469 #>>5006587 #
    3. philip1209 ◴[04 Jan 13 05:29 UTC] No.5006398[source]▶
    Also: After voting on a comment, you cannot see whether it was an upvote or downvote. While on a touchscreen, I always hesitate while clicking the small arrows.

    That being said, I'd prefer no change to the HN system.

    4. artursapek ◴[04 Jan 13 05:30 UTC] No.5006400[source]▶
    I always liked the obscure settings. I like that HN doesn't try to pamper me.
    replies(2): >>5006468 #>>5006982 #
    5. pyre ◴[04 Jan 13 06:01 UTC] No.5006468[source]▶
    You feel special because you're in an 'elite' club of people that know what the noprocrast setting does?
    replies(1): >>5007260 #
    6. kn0thing ◴[04 Jan 13 06:02 UTC] No.5006469[source]▶
    I was hoping someone would mention it: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki

    thanks!

    replies(1): >>5007229 #
    7. donniezazen ◴[04 Jan 13 06:06 UTC] No.5006481[source]▶
    showdead / noprocrast / maxvisit / minaway are explained in FAQs and are must use features of HN.

    http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

    8. olivier1664 ◴[04 Jan 13 06:54 UTC] No.5006587[source]▶
    I use http://hckrnews.com/ to avoid the expired-link error
    replies(3): >>5007031 #>>5007654 #>>5018119 #
    9. zem ◴[04 Jan 13 08:38 UTC] No.5006814[source]▶
    using hn with a small touchscreen (phone or tablet) makes you really appreciate the magnitude of the irrevocable misclick problem.
    replies(1): >>5007041 #
    10. ashazar ◴[04 Jan 13 08:43 UTC] No.5006825[source]▶
    Just because of this "Unknown or expired link" thing, i fill up my browser with lots of tabs.

    When i open HN, i open the links that interests me in new tabs. And immediately click on "More" to see the next page.

    11. ◴[04 Jan 13 08:44 UTC] No.5006826[source]▶
    12. StavrosK ◴[04 Jan 13 10:01 UTC] No.5006982[source]▶
    Are you also browsing the web by issuing HTTP commands directly in a telnet session?
    13. chandru89new ◴[04 Jan 13 10:19 UTC] No.5007031{3}[source]▶
    I just recently stumbled on it and boy oh boy, that's much better than HN itself. Not complaining about HN but I'm from the time of the web when things got a little better than the table-like structure of HN. I do feel comfortable when there's a better interface/design.

    On a slightly off-topic talk, I think the whole thing basically boils down to the crux. People aren't too bothered to change the looks of HN because it just works good as it is and that's most important. Now, ages from now Apple's design philosophy might look pretty old but may be people will be okay with that because it's a brand. I tend to think of HN like that.

    14. killerpopiller ◴[04 Jan 13 10:24 UTC] No.5007041[source]▶
    the UX on tablets is sometimes just absurd, isn't it? I thought it is a practical joke. Thousands of tech savy folks driving the internet use an interface from the nineties.

    how often I missed this upvote button or saw expired session..

    15. TeMPOraL ◴[04 Jan 13 11:51 UTC] No.5007229{3}[source]▶
    Except it's impossible to set up without AWS and IndexTank. We tried that in our local Hackerspace and failed miserably.

    By the way, our Hackerspace is looking for a sane, reddit-line threaded discussion engine. I'd use HN engine, but it doesn't support "subreddits". Anyone knows something that could work? We had hard time finding anything.

    16. kaybe ◴[04 Jan 13 12:01 UTC] No.5007260{3}[source]▶
    It's easy to find out by searching hn.

    Still, an explanation would be nice, for example on the guideline page.

    17. rehack ◴[04 Jan 13 14:12 UTC] No.5007654{3}[source]▶
    I also use hckrnews.com, its a much better interface for HN.

    Particularly its useful, if I have not used HN for some days, and come back to see 'what great items have I missed?'.

    edit: minor rephrase

    18. skeletonjelly ◴[06 Jan 13 22:58 UTC] No.5018119{3}[source]▶
    Excellent! Just what I was after having been on holidays and wanting to see what I missed. Also, is there a list of HN interfaces and related sites somewhere? HNSearch etc?
    19. thenonsequitur ◴[09 Jan 13 19:11 UTC] No.5032859[source]▶
    Wow. The "Unknown or expired link" is a horrible solution. How bad is it? So bad that even though I've been browsing hacker news for over a year, only just now after reading this did I realize that the "More" link was inaccessible only because of a timeout. It occurs to me that every single time I clicked More in the past, it was after reading comments on the first page for a while, and so it always timed out for me. But the error page made me just assumed it was a bug and that the next page of results would not be possible to retrieve. Was always surprised when I periodically checked the second page and found that this "bug" was never fixed. Why not just show page two of the results, as they are at the time the more link is clicked? Seems pointless to have an expiration for this. So what if the pagination gets a little off-sync and I either miss a post or re-read something? That's much better than getting an error page.