Thank you so much, that's gratifying to hear! At this point we're evaluating 300-400 submitted stories every month when our submission window is open, so creating a single issue takes a decent number of person-hours. I'm happy that you're enjoying the result.
I just did the same, after reading two very compelling stories. It was tempting to first read one more (and one more after that...), but it's already clear to me that this is scifi worth supporting.
I just read them in order, last one so far was The Little Gods. And .. I don't know, it didn't click for me.
But I'm really confused about the last line. If it's a quote, I don't know it. I don't speak that language. Google Translate makes this even _more_ confusing.
Given the prominent position (final line of the story) I assume this is important and I feel like everyone is laughing but I don't get the punchline.
extremely looking forward to read a few stories. The principles of this project are just great: solid and plausible, hard science fiction. Well done guys!
Thanks! I'd start at the beginning of the issue with "They Breed Like Flies". It's the longest of the stories but it feels quick and sets a good mood for the rest of the stories.
I disagree: better an informative signal than a quick proxy of one. If HN's ranking algorithm does make informed upvotes less useful, then it's the algorithm that needs changing.
But that leads to the problem GP addressed: upvotes received too late won't help the submission rise (because "gravity" pulls a story down over time).
Of course you're right that voting post-read is better than pre-read, but my response was addressing your suggestion to change the algorithm. Without gravity (a bias for newness), it's not a news site, and gravity has been tweaked a lot to make it work well. So instead, I ask how can the algorithm take into account whether a user has read the content?
It's only partially rhetorical. For example, there could be a delay before voting is allowed; a check that the link was clicked; cooperation with a website to check that users scrolled all the way (like EULAs); or a checkbox "I read it" that makes the vote count more. These all have problems; but a site that managed it would be great.
Yes, if I had improvements I was confident about, I'd list them. (Maybe don't think of this as mainly a news site? Older stories are popular.) The first idea to come to mind was to slow down the aging and make the front page into a sample of the stories with upvote support over this newly longer interval -- but I have no experience managing a site like this.
But "quick, upvote before it's gone" seems clearly the wrong policy to encourage in people.
Non-news: historically, hackernews was startup news, which then expanded to "gratifying intellectual curiosity." I'd like to split the "new" and the "interesting", rather like how newspapers have a magazine-like section on weekends. Some of the most popular articles are quite old as you note. eg Feynmann stuff. Your idea would work well for this.
But I doubt anything so drastic will be trialled... though dang seems a lot more willing to experiment than pg was, so maybe it's possible, if we can think of an effective yet low-cost way to test it?
BTW there is a hidden lower-gravity version, https://news.ycombinator.com/best (but of course most votes aren't made using it, so it doesn't test the idea).
I agree blind upvoting is a bad idea, though I read the plea as "if you are already a fan of our work, please upvote early". In practice, the super-short story commented ("the little gods") is probably the best way to go - a quick way to evaluate the offering (which incidentally is what I did before upvoting).
Making the front page change on reloading or for different readers (making it a random sample) would indeed be really disruptive, but it could have a kind of second-order benefit, that new experiments would become easier to introduce, because we'd stop expecting it to look the same for everyone. Not that I'm seriously advocating this for HN -- maybe for a new site?
Geez, I forgot about /best. I tend to visit here to shirk work, and I'm not even shirking most effectively.
That's a great suggestion, pointing out the short story. I enjoyed it too.
