Ask PG: Why don’t you open source HN?

[muellerwolfram]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[markdown]

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]

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

[muellerwolfram]

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?

[logical42]

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]

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]

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.

[ceol]

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.

[brudgers]

The third big reason:

(c) The standard complaints don't matter because they don't impact growth.

There's a message in that.

It is, "Ship."

[wmf]

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]

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.

[wyuenho]

It is open sourced.

https://github.com/wting/hackernews

[unimpressive]

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]

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/

[sgdesign]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

> 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]

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]

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

[soapdog]

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

[chrishan]

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

[sivanmz]

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

[ronnier]

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

[agopaul]

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

[kaolinite]

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

[hendry]

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

[aw3c2]

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