Ask PG: Why don’t you open source HN?

114 points by muellerwolfram 13 years ago | 86 comments

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?

pg 13 years ago |

I don't have time to manage such a project. I don't think it's necessary anyway. The reason HN lacks x cool feature is not that I expend no energy on the site, but that I expend all my energy on what users actually care about, which is not features but the content.

jff 13 years ago |

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.

ramblerman 13 years ago | |

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.

alexanderh 13 years ago | | |

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.

ashazar 13 years ago | | |

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.

thenonsequitur 13 years ago | | |

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.

donniezazen 13 years ago | | |

showdead / noprocrast / maxvisit / minaway are explained in FAQs and are must use features of HN.

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

artursapek 13 years ago | | |

I always liked the obscure settings. I like that HN doesn't try to pamper me.

philip1209 13 years ago | | |

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.

zem 13 years ago | | |

using hn with a small touchscreen (phone or tablet) makes you really appreciate the magnitude of the irrevocable misclick problem.

markdown 13 years ago | |

That's a red herring, and a silly reason to choose not to free code.

pg could open source HN and then never ever accept a pull request, and he would still have made a positive change in the world.

chj 13 years ago | |

A big problem is: Comments are too deep for mobile devices.

aw3c2 13 years ago | | |

works well enough with opera mobile. it reflows them so they fit the screen.

martinp 13 years ago | | |

Agreed, the site isn't all that usable from mobile devices. I use the Hacker News Reader app [0] for Android, it has a very nice interface and it's open source. [1]

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.manuelmaly...

[1] https://github.com/manmal/hn-android

muellerwolfram 13 years ago | |

i agree the site is simple and effective as it is. but it's not perfect. there is always something that can be improved. this probably doesn't include adding social share buttons and 2KB of new JavaScript every week. Like you said. And I agree, so would many people, so would pg, and this would also be the conclusion of an open feature discussion and wouldn't result in a successful pull request.

but think about it from a different perspective: there is a feature that many people agree would make the site better. e.g. a new job board for non-YC-companies, like discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4993571. lets assume that after openly discussing the problem, pg and the majority of the community agrees upon a solution. now lets assume that there are more features like this, and that pg hasn't the time to implement them all. wouldn't it be nice if the community could help out?

tptacek 13 years ago | | |

Job posts on HN are a perk for YC companies. Adding job posts for non-YC companies essentially kills that perk.

logical42 13 years ago | |

People probably said the same about the horse and buggy when the car was invented. Not that I'd personally like a shit ton of social media buttons, just sayin'

tptacek 13 years ago |

Two big reasons people miss:

(a) HN is the front-end and back-end of a bunch of YC business processes.

(b) The voting ring and antispam features rely on obscurity; they are game-able.

The code for older versions of HN is available, but you'd be better off with the code for lobste.rs.

zmitri 13 years ago | |

Not only that, there's a variety of mechanisms built in to boost/identify YC users to other YCers to provide mechanisms of boosting their submitted stories. HN in itself is like a giant voter ring in that way.

pg 13 years ago | | |

No there aren't. YC founders' userids show up in orange to one another, and there is a page where they can see one anothers' submissions. There are no mechanisms to "boost" stories submitted by YC founders, nor does the voting ring detector discriminate.

wglb 13 years ago | | |

Do you have specific evidence of that?

ceol 13 years ago | |

The voting-ring/anti-spam features don't have to be included in the repository. It might be a big hassle to detangle them from the rest of the codebase, though.

ntaylor 13 years ago | | |

This is what reddit does

brudgers 13 years ago | |

The third big reason:

There's a message in that.

It is, "Ship."

subsystem 13 years ago | | |

I would say the look and name of HN do impact growth in certain "demographics". That might even be the idea.

wmf 13 years ago |

The source is called news.arc and you can find old versions on the Web, e.g. https://github.com/nex3/arc/ https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/lib/how-to-run-news

muellerwolfram 13 years ago | |

thanks, but to clarify: I'm not proposing to open source it for the purpose of looking at the code or forking my own HN-version.

instead i'm proposing that building _this_ site becomes an community effort, with open feature discussions and people committing code to the HN code base.

there is an army of people who deeply care about HN, and are very skilled to help out. i think it would be smart to use that asset.

mcantelon 13 years ago | | |

>instead i'm proposing that building _this_ site becomes an community effort, with open feature discussions and people committing code to the HN code base.

Lamer News is similar to HN and community driven, so if you have energy to spare that's as good a place as any to put it. If pg wanted HN to evolve, it would evolve. Most people are happy with it as-is, tech-wise.

colechristensen 13 years ago | | |

I think any improvements would make this site worse.

It is so very common for projects to inflate with new features until they become useless piles of filth. The fact that HN is a bit clunky is a feature not a bug. It will only attract and retain a certain type.

wmf 13 years ago | | |

For whatever reason pg just doesn't want to do that. Perhaps he doesn't want building HN itself to become a distraction (for other people) from building more useful stuff like startups. There may be a sort of contradiction where ninja rockstar programmers are too valuable to waste on improving HN, but HN is simultaneously too important to be put in the hands of mediocre programmers.

HN is kind of a double-edged sword because while it is educational it's also distracting and addictive. If making HN better also makes it more of a time-suck, the exercise could be a net negative for the community.

jaekwon 13 years ago | | |

Eh, _this_ site is a funnel of valuable applicants (and proprietary candidate evaluation tool) for YCombinator. Not to mention the needs-to-be-secret voting-ring detection algos that surely exist by now, this site will likely never be a community project.

atomical 13 years ago | | |

As far as features go, diminishing returns at this point.

wyuenho 13 years ago |

It is open sourced.

https://github.com/wting/hackernews

unimpressive 13 years ago |

It's written in an experimental language, as an experimental side project[0], on a single machine in...I like to think it's PG's basement.

Considering this, it's probably not a service that can be "open sourced" as the number of people who can actually work on it appears to be PG. And PG is probably too busy to even act as the project lead.

[0]: It's not so experimental anymore...

philip1209 13 years ago | |

YCombinator is listed as in the Rackspace Startup Program [0] - I'm on my phone so I haven't had a chance to do due diligence, but is HN hosted on a Rackspace server?

[0]http://www.rackspacestartups.com/

harshreality 13 years ago | | |

HN is hosted at SoftLayer in Houston, TX. The IP block and reverse DNS indicate hosting by ThePlanet; ThePlanet merged into SoftLayer.

sgdesign 13 years ago |

Might I mention that I'm building an open-source HN clone with Meteor? It's a great starting point if you want to build your own HN-style community, and it's also the only real-time HN clone as far as I know:

http://telesc.pe

Mz 13 years ago |

I started to reply last night when there were only two comments, but then decided to stfu and leave the discussion to real hackers. After skimming what real hackers have said, I think my observation is still relevant:

A) There are plenty of people already tweaking hn in the form of "add ons" like hnnotify.com. That piece already exists and without being the kind of problem that this approach would become.

B) People seem to routinely miss that hn is part of the yc business process. (I honestly don't get how anyone can miss that but posts like this one clearly do. I was a homemaker for eons and I get it.) You know, that is just slightly relevant to how and why things get done the way they are (aka central to the decision making process). This doesn't make good business sense, for reasons other more informed members have already covered.

deanclatworthy 13 years ago |

The biggest annoyance for me is that this design isn't responsive. It's incredibly hard to read on my iPhone. At the very least let someone commit a dozen or so lines of CSS which includes a media query to make the design look better on mobile!

joepour 13 years ago | |

I use news:yc on my iPhone. It works great and has an Instapaper "Read later" option which is exactly what I was looking for!

jaddison 13 years ago |

I'd hazard that opening the source makes it easier to game the algorithm; so with that in mind, keeping it closed means one less vector for people to play.

I'm certainly not against open source - just trying to provide a possible answer.

piotr_krzyzek 13 years ago |

Call me wrong on this one, but if you really are interested in the code for HN why not create your own? From what I've seen so far, HN is great n' all but the logic behind it seems pretty trivial (excluding the whole anti-spam module & related stuff).

The HTML for HN is ultra simple so, there you already have a front-send pretty much done.

This reply box is pretty simple as well: a input box and a submit button.

Add some filters/sorts and other misc features and you have your own version of HN.

Not saying it's 'easy', but it's not that difficult.

AlexRa 13 years ago |

I didn't come into this with an opinion, but I have to admit it looks like the pro-open source argument is making a much stronger case and has countered almost every objection.

muellerwolfram 13 years ago | |

as the OP I'm obviously biased, but I feel so too. At the same time it looks like more people seemed to be against it though. I would still like to hear pg thoughts on this...

codex 13 years ago |

Open source gives away value (in effect, destroying it for the previous owner), sometimes for very little benefit. Why would pg open source the site and open HN up to a myriad of competitors? HN needs a large user base so that YC companies can promote themselves here. HN is not like the Linux kernel. The code is not complex. It doesn't need thousands of contributors nor would the benefits of extra features be worth the business cost.

Felix21 13 years ago |

When I first saw this, I was excited thinking this will be something about making the code base of HN available so we can use it to deploy similar sites on other topics with relative ease.

But to have the hacker news itself the product of an open source project, HELL NO. I can't even think of one way that would be a good thing.

Hacker news is perfect the way it is.

Zak 13 years ago | |

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, HN is already open source in that sense. See http://arclanguage.org/ - it's the example app (news.arc). A git mirror is here: https://github.com/wting/hackernews

gedrap 13 years ago |

> I bet you have a long wishlist of features yourself.

I think that's the main reason why it's not. It's fine as it is. The minimal features list and quirky HTML is part of HN identity.

090178 13 years ago |

Non coder speaking. I have tried the plug in "answers" from wpmu. Org running on wordpress. Ok, nothing sexy. Themesforest also has plug in for sale. My 2 cents

j45 13 years ago |

I'm not sure why anyone couldn't reasonably build their own pretty quickly. reddit publishes their source code.

soapdog 13 years ago |

Isn't HN just racket + arc + news.arc?

chrishan 13 years ago |

It will be more interesting if the years' data on HN can be made available to public.

sivanmz 13 years ago |

Please have mercy on iPhone users' eyes and specify font-sizes in em

ronnier 13 years ago | |

I made a mobile version sometime ago. http://ihackernews.com

klausjensen 13 years ago | | |

And a great one that is, I use it on my mobile devices.

agopaul 13 years ago | |

There are plenty on iOS Apps for that, like: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hackernode/id473882597?mt=8

kaolinite 13 years ago | |

http://newsyc.me/ is the best iPhone app I've found for Hacker News, highly recommend it over just using Safari.

hendry 13 years ago | |

Use a different front end for IOS: http://hackerwebapp.com/

aw3c2 13 years ago | |

just use a different browser that let's you set your own font size.

TallboyOne 13 years ago |

I've always wondered how one goes about building a voting ring.