What I've Learned from Hacker News

February 2009 Hacker News was two years old last week.

2009 年 2 月 上周，《黑客新闻》诞生两周年了。

Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combinator founders to exchange news.

最初，它被认为是一个业余项目——一个增强 Arc 的应用程序，以及当前和未来 Y Combinator 创始人交流新闻的地方。

It's grown bigger and taken up more time than I expected, but I don't regret that because I've learned so much from working on it.

它变得越来越大，占用的时间比我预期的要多，但我并不后悔，因为我从它的工作中学到了很多东西。

Growth When we launched in February 2007, weekday traffic was around 1600

增长 当我们于 2007 年 2 月推出时，工作日流量约为 1600

daily uniques.

每日独特。

It's since grown to around 22,000.

此后已增至约 22,000 个。

This growth rate is a bit higher than I'd like.

这个增长率比我想要的要高一些。

I'd like the site to grow, since a site that isn't growing at least slowly is probably dead.

我希望该网站能够增长，因为一个至少不缓慢增长的网站可能已经死了。

But I wouldn't want it to grow as large as Digg or Reddit—mainly because that would dilute the character of the site, but also because I don't want to spend all my time dealing with scaling.

但我不希望它发展得像 Digg 或 Reddit 一样大，主要是因为这会淡化网站的特色，但也因为我不想把所有时间都花在处理扩展上。

I already have problems enough with that.

我已经有足够多的问题了。

Remember, the original

记住，原来的

motivation for HN was to test a new programming language, and moreover one that's focused on experimenting with language design, not performance.

HN 的动机是测试一种新的编程语言，而且这种语言的重点是试验语言设计，而不是性能。

Every time the site gets slow, I fortify myself by recalling McIlroy and Bentley's famous quote The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.

每当网站变慢时，我都会通过回忆麦克罗伊和本特利的名言来增强自己：性能的关键是优雅，而不是大量的特殊情况。

and look for the bottleneck I can remove with least code.

并寻找我可以用最少的代码消除的瓶颈。

So far I've been able to keep up, in the sense that performance has remained

到目前为止，我已经能够跟上，从某种意义上说，性能仍然存在

consistently mediocre despite 14x growth.

尽管增长了 14 倍，但始终表现平平。

I don't know what I'll do next, but I'll probably think of something.

我不知道接下来要做什么，但我可能会想到一些事情。

This is my attitude to the site generally.

这是我对网站的总体态度。

Hacker News is an experiment, and an experiment in a very young field.

《黑客新闻》是一项实验，而且是在一个非常年轻的领域进行的实验。

Sites of this type are only a few years old.

此类网站只有几年的历史。

Internet conversation generally is only a few decades old.

互联网对话一般只有几十年的历史。

So we've probably only discovered a fraction of what we eventually will.

所以我们可能只发现了我们最终发现的一小部分。

That's why I'm so optimistic about HN.

这就是为什么我对HN如此乐观。

When a technology is this young, the existing solutions are usually terrible; which means it must be possible to do much better; which means many problems that seem insoluble aren't.

当一项技术如此年轻时，现有的解决方案通常很糟糕；这意味着一定有可能做得更好；这意味着许多看似无法解决的问题其实并非如此。

Including, I hope, the problem that has afflicted so many previous communities: being ruined by growth.

我希望包括困扰许多以前社区的问题：被增长毁掉。

Dilution Users have worried about that since the site was a few months old.

稀释 由于该网站成立几个月，用户就一直担心这一点。

So far these alarms have been false, but they may not always be.

到目前为止，这些警报都是假的，但也可能并非总是如此。

Dilution is a hard problem.

稀释是一个难题。

But probably soluble; it doesn't mean much that open conversations have "always" been destroyed by growth when "always" equals 20 instances.

但可能是可溶的；当“总是”等于 20 个实例时，开放对话“总是”被增长所破坏并没有多大意义。

But it's important to remember we're trying to solve a new problem, because that means we're going to have to try new things, most of which probably won't work.

但重要的是要记住我们正在尝试解决一个新问题，因为这意味着我们将不得不尝试新事物，其中大多数可能行不通。

A couple weeks ago I tried displaying

几周前我尝试展示

the names of users with the highest average comment scores in orange.

平均评论得分最高的用户姓名以橙色显示。

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