Anyone else feel the site is getting too self referential? I noticed the lag as well, but is this worthy of a devoted thread taking up space on the first page?
The recent surge in self referential threads has felt Reddit-esque.
I completely agree. It's been getting that way for too long, and it's half the reason I check the site less frequently lately. I don't need to see a Happy New Year post here. It's cliche and unnecessary.
Polls about which text editor people use are the same, because they're just going to be repeated by newbies every few months.
My opinion is that self-posts should be on a separate page, by themselves.
I think the reason you get so many repeated posts from newbies, is that HN does not have a search feature. I think simplly adding a google search to HN would likely cut down on this issue.
SearchYC is often really slow, at least for me. The page loading times are on the order of tens of seconds. HN needs its own minimalist search engine designed to search for submissions.
I'm working on a solution for this, but ultimately it comes down to hosting costs. SearchYC is currently hosted on a cheap-ish virtual server whose costs come out of my pocket each month. I can't justify spending more money on this project, given my personal financial constraints.
Traffic has been steadily increasing, and quite simply, the system can't handle the load at peak usage. I am, however, working to resolve some of these issues, but it may still be awhile before you see any improvements.
Indeed. Unfortunately, though I know about searchyc (because I've been around here forever), it's not very discoverable, so newbies haven't a chance. There is not, as far as I can tell, a single link to it in the HN menus.
Incidentally, Paul was working on search around this time last year. I wonder what happened to that.
Agreed. Please make a separate page for the 'Ask HN' posts and keep the main page just for relevant news stories. Right now too many 'Ask HN' posts keep popping up.
Also, for what it's worth, I've been flagging most of these posts as they aren't intellectually stimulating and are almost as meta as this comment thread. :-) (Doesn't bother me in comments, but 4 out of 5 top stories being about Hacker News is dumb.)
There's been a sort of strange convergence of a lot of "Ask HN" threads today. I don't really like it, but I honestly think it could be a coincidence, or more likely, the self-referential nature of the orange-related threads have made everyone think about the quality of the karma system and the community as a whole.
In general I agree - but for this specific issue I think it is valid. The performance of late has been terribly, about 40% of the time in my 20 minute window I have to access it are failed responses - so I am not checking back less and less.
I am not sure what else we are supposed to to - email pg and complain about its slowness ?? ;)
The recent surge in self referential threads has felt Reddit-esque.