Evan Sangaline

I find that typing on a phone (iPhone or Android) these days is substantially easier than typing on an iPad because of swipe. It's still nowhere as efficient as a keyboard in the hands of a skilled typist, but I can often produce text fast enough that it isn't worth getting out my laptop. On an iPad it's far worse, because I actually do have to use the bad QWERTY touchscreen key-by-key. What I keep hoping for as far as input methods go is a swipe keyboard layout that is optimized for swipe, because QWERTY has a few groupings that make for ambiguities. Someone calculated one a few years ago that puts the vowels as far apart as possible [0]. [0] https://sangaline.com/post/finding-an-optimal-keyboard-layout-for-swyp…

What are peoples' thoughts on the marketing effectiveness of quality relative to quantity in blogging? We have recently started publishing what we consider to be very high quality material (the majority of them have front-paged on HN if that's any indication). Most of these have been published on [1] so far but we're in the process of transitioning to a more official company blog [2]. A close friend who really knows his way around marketing has been advising us to write more fluff pieces. We're really torn over this because we strongly dislike vapid content as consumers. I would be really curious to hear any anecdotes on the relative merits of the different strategies. [1] - http://sangaline.com [2] - https://intoli.com/blog/

The mod's can choose to "bump" a story off the front page as a form of moderation. http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-removes-from-th… They do it constantly to stories deemed "not worthy".

Does it matter? The author seems representative of exactly the type of users you want in a community like this. Long standing user account, high karma, produces decent comments and great content (the visualizations in the Swype article is another example [0]) and even puts HN comments on the blog. Whatever mechanism that ends up discouraging people like this in favor of trigger happy flaggers is broken. Fortunately for the community the author didn't go "fuck it", but instead wrote another sensible blog post which makes them an even better community member. [0] http://sangaline.com/post/finding-an-optimal-keyboard-layout-for-swype…

That really depends on your project and tech stack. If you're into Python and are going to deal with relatively static HTML, then the Python modules Scrapy [1], BeautifulSoup [2] and the whole Python data crunching ecosystem are at your disposal. There's lots of great posts about getting such a stack off the ground and using it in the wild [3]. It can get you pretty darn far, the architecture is solid and there are lots of services and plugins which probably do everything you need. Here's where I hit the limit with that setup: dynamic websites. If you're looking at something like discourse-powered communities or similar, and don't feel a bit too lazy to dig into all the ways requests are expected to look, it's no fun anymore. Luckily, there's lots of js-goodness which can handle dynamic website, inject your javascript for convenience and more [4]. The recently published Headless Chrome [5] and puppeteer [6] (a Node API for it), are really promising for many kinds of tasks - scraping among them. You can get a first impression in this article [7]. The ecosystem does not seem to be as mature yet, but I think this will be foundation of the next go-to scraping tech stack. If you want to try it yourself, I've written a brief intro [8] and published a simple dockerized development environment [9], so you can give it a go without cluttering your machine or find out what dependencies you need and how the libraries are called. [1] https://scrapy.org/ [2]…

The content of a news post is the most powerful source for predicting its popularity. I would like to believe this is true, and I would guess that it's probably more true on HN than elsewhere, but I would really like to see them dive more into how they came to this conclusion. I think the moderator led title editing makes this comparison more difficult (not bad necessarily) but it would be worth comparing popularity:content to popularity:title to have a more rigorous understanding. Overall I applaud the approach they took. It seems however that the conclusion/output doesn't give better insight into the parameters which drive post popularity on HN, over previous approaches which seek to understand the underlying voting mechanism [1]. While different they are trying to basically understand the question "what makes for a popular post on HN." Modeling the sentiment of a community under a formal mechanism (vote algo) is incredibly difficult to do correctly, so again kudos for the work and it seems like it's something that could be built on. [1]http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-news-ranking-…

That minimizes distance traveled. https://sangaline.com/post/finding-an-optimal-keyboard-layout-for-swyp… minimizes errors.

This is asked very regularly. HN has an official policy which you can google. Here is one interesting (maybe too long) answer: http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-news-ranking-…

Sure, but that's not all. Or maybe it is -- who knows. Certainly not you or I, because the only information that is public is the score and the date. The problem is the opaqueness of it Which leaves a lot of room for the appearance of capriciousness, and sometimes even (though not so much in this case, this is not nearly that consequential a story) malice. http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-removes-from-th…

> The stories that Hacker News removes from the front page (sangaline.com) is : http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-news-ranking-…

The complexity of gesture typing opens the door to a lot of interesting questions that aren't relevant for "normal" typing. I really enjoyed reading through this notebook, it's very clear and presented well. What's more impressive is that most of the questions were answered with less than ~150 lines of code! In regards to the 6th question (one left only partially answered), some of you might find this blog post (posted to HN by my collegue a few months ago) that attempts to answer this question in a lot more detail (and with a lot more computing power) [1]. An aside: we made a python library (specifically intended for use in iPython) to help facilitate answering the exact types of questions posed in this article. A bit more time was spent on performance efficiency and visualization but there were some interesting functions in this notebook that would be a welcomed addition to the library [2]. Although the main point of our work was to determine the least confusing keyboard layout for gesture typing, we designed the library to make it quick and easy to answer all types of questions relating to keyboard input. As an example, at the request of an HN commenter on our previous post, we took a quick look at how the average path length on a random keyboard layout compares to the FITALY keyboard. Shameless plug: the question only took 5-10 minutes to code up and answer using iPython with the library mentioned above ([2]). In case anyone is interested you can find that…

Previous discussions, all from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13867739 (349 points, 49 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13857086 (1274 points, 317 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13838399 (70 points, 8 comments) -- As a tangential slightly OT bonus, I also found an informative article+discussion from the same author: Web Scraping: Bypassing “403 Forbidden,” captchas, and more http://sangaline.com/post/advanced-web-scraping-tutorial/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13884357 (564 points, 227 comments)