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Ask PG: Why don’t you open source HN?

114 points muellerwolfram | 1 comments | 04 Jan 13 02:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source

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?

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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.

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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.

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1. 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.