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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: 0.236s | 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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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.

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olivier1664 ◴[04 Jan 13 06:54 UTC] No.5006587[source]▶
I use http://hckrnews.com/ to avoid the expired-link error
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1. rehack ◴[04 Jan 13 14:12 UTC] No.5007654[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