from Hacker News

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

by JonathanBuchh on 2/24/22, 7:44 PM with 64 comments

  • by grzm on 2/24/22, 9:38 PM

    From 10 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482

    over 200 comments

    (Arguably a dupe, as it's been less than a year)

  • by JonathanBuchh on 2/24/22, 7:46 PM

  • by tentacleuno on 2/24/22, 9:33 PM

    > Accounts which are less than 2 weeks old will appear with a green username.

    I believe this is actually calculated using the date of the submission they have posted / commented on, instead of the current date. I've seen posts from 2010 where some people's comments have green usernames.

  • by causi on 2/24/22, 8:34 PM

    Every time this is posted I wonder why it doesn't cover shadow muting, where you're blocked from commenting for a while but only a see a "posting too fast" error. I thought it was automated but it's been claimed to be a manual decision.

    There are other behaviors I've observed but haven't confirmed. For example, highly controversial comments seem to sometimes be manually set to a point value of 1, even when they have dozens of replies making the real vote tally very unlikely to center on 1.

  • by Leftium on 2/24/22, 11:42 PM

    I've noticed some "Show HN" posts have both text and a URL like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30446960

    Is this an undocumented feature? Do the mods just turn the OP's first comment into text manually?

  • by codeptualize on 2/24/22, 8:16 PM

    Wow! I didn't even realize I unlocked the custom top bar color, exciting! I'm going for a light grey haha.
  • by adamrezich on 2/24/22, 9:53 PM

    it's worth noting that the "second-chance pool" doesn't have any kind of hard timeout on it–two days ago I got an email invitation to repost a link from five months ago (reposted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30438015), and when I asked why, dang explained it was because he was looking to send a second-chance resubmission invite for another, unrelated submission, chose another duplicate of something I submitted, and then went on a rabbit-hole that ended up with him coming across a different submission (the one linked above) from my account. I think that's pretty cool, and I had no idea it worked like that.
  • by wing-_-nuts on 2/24/22, 9:05 PM

    I use RES on reddit, and I really miss having the ability to navigate through comments with j/k, nav to parent with p, enter to collapse, etc. I wish they'd add that on this site!
  • by minimaxir on 2/24/22, 10:41 PM

    List maintainer here, I'll work on adding the suggestions dang noted here.
  • by dankwizard on 2/24/22, 9:56 PM

    They talk about the second chance pool but don't include a link - Here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
  • by dorianmariefr on 2/24/22, 10:08 PM

    Reminder that it's a GitHub repository so anybody can post pull requests (I did so for the list of URLs of user-generated content when I was working on an HN scrapper)
  • by hammock on 2/24/22, 10:10 PM

    The "web" button is gone for me. Anyone else?
  • by ipsin on 2/24/22, 9:36 PM

    "topics around diversity and inclusion in tech ... tend to be flagged to death by users"

    Ouch. Any readers have favorite HN-like forums where this doesn't happen?

  • by jaywalk on 2/24/22, 8:44 PM

    I had seen the black bar before, but didn't know what it was about.