Agree - excellent site! Been lurking, first post. (Too busy coding to post, not too busy to read.) I work 12 48-minute bursts every day using an egg timer. The last 12 minutes of every hour: bathroom, snack, email, reddit, news.ycombinator.com, pet cat, back to work. My project keeps me busy; you guys keep me motivated. Thank you! (Oops, it's 4:02 already, I guess I'll have to work until 4:50.)
I think the reason that I like to check it a lot is to see what intelligent people think about the things that I say. So the first important component, in my mind, is that the majority of the members are smart. Secondly, by allowing people to reply to replies and assign karma points (admittedly not a novel idea), smart people can reinforce the parts of my replies that they find smart and ignore the parts that don't interest them.
I think the inability to vote topics down avoids some of the problems that Reddit has encountered, where people camp out and vote submissions down in order to make their own appear higher. I think a more mature (on average) user base helps to accomplish that as well.
Finally, I think that most people must have heard of YC news through either pg's site or through YCombinator itself. Anyone interested in those two things are cool in my book, and should produce good discussions.
i have to agree, I find my self checking in many times throughout the day. I never really got into Digg or Reddit because there was so much irrelevancy to the submissions and with so many users it never felt like your posts got much face time with readers. YCom News is focused, comments are honest and not to long, and you get the feeling that the people on the other end are smart and doing really cool things.
The absence of spam and drastically off topic material is a huge plus for the site. We've pretty much stayed on topic, and I think Paul has said they have human moderators whacking bad submissions or comments. The voting helps with that also of course.
The amount of spam they've been killing has actually been substantial for the past week. (Mostly the same couple spammers; I don't know why they haven't banned their IPs yet). I've been keeping showdead turned on because I'm curious about seeing how the situation evolves, but once spam reaches about double its current volume I'm going to turn it off because it'll be too annoying.
Edit: Maybe they've banned them now; the new queue is currently clean.
I wish the Reddits had been doing this. We ran into some bizarre impeachment behavior a few weeks ago. I think they're proud of running an open and market-driven site, but sometimes that can go wrong. Shirky's essay at http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html sort of describes this.
I used to check YC News every time I exported a new .swf with the Flash IDE (because it's so horrendously slow and sometimes even crashes the IDE--I figured I'd make use of those 10-20 seconds [which unfortunately often turned into 5-10 minutes of web browsing--AAAA!]).
Now that I've removed that step from my workflow, I check much less often. :-)
I think its because its so dynamic. I am always on here seeing whats new or what changed. It also helps that I am really interested in the content on the site
The site has great value for the entrepreneur with both the content and the people posting - a winning combination. (I also admit to checking multiple times a day - usually between hard coding or architecture problems)
I agree. It already seems like more people are adding stories creating more noise. When news.ycombinator.com started, I could read all the stories in the list. Now its seems like there are too many.
The intellectual feeling I get here is something I really miss from Reddit's early days. Granted, YC News doesn't cover everything I care about, but like startupguy said, the signal to noise ratio is amazing. I just dropped Reddit from my bookmarks bar because I only have so much time and the S/R ratio is falling for me.
I am also loving YC News - very focused, top-notch content. Hopefully it wont get too popular to the point where we see digg-type spam. I like it just the way it is.
i have to agree as well, which is why i thought it was kinda like the new digg, course i dont really read digg any more.
what i find in yc news: inspiration, fresh, new, professional development, stuff to think about, its almost a good excuse for browsing vs say drudgereport,
i see alot more 2.0 newness mentions as well, i usually go to emilys hub for that
it feels more fresh, and i feel like it matters more than random dude check this out digg like stuff
I don't think it will. PG has no reason to let news.yc devolve into the current reddit situation, so presumably if it starts to then it will be corrected.
