I know that tags are supposed to be constraining what can be talked about here, and that’s good! But there are so few that it’s really constraining. For example, a language-agnostic story about APIs; the best tag is ‘software,’ which is sorta awkward.
Is there any open-ness to making a few more tags, maybe?
Proposed tag: apis
I think “api” would be better—but I support this one in spirit.
The “api” tag has been created.
proposed tag: project
Added
Proposed tag: web
Nothing for general web related things yet!
The “web” tag has been created.
Thanks!
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I’ll second this one – I think it would be a good addition.
something for esoteric or non language specific things would be nice – for weird languages and language design issues.
perhaps allowing software.* style tags might help.
There is a “compsci” tag that should encompass language design. For articles about specific languages that don’t have tags, maybe flaviusb’s “otherprog” or whatever it becomes will work for those.
I think areas of Computer Science like programming languages (especially language design) are broad enough to be considered outside of the scope of software engineering, so I would support an entirely separate “programming languages” tag, but I think the software. style tags would be nice, like software.agile or software.tdd. Then, if you followed software, you would also follow everything in software.
I just posted a story (https://lobste.rs/s/wymtvw/why_do_successful_tech_companies_fail_so_often) about the business of tech companies. Other than “news” I saw no other worthwhile tag. Would a “business” tag be useful?
I feel like lobsters will be better if we stick to news just for hackers, which should help keep content quality high. Not having a business tag will probably help keep people who aren’t interested in new for hackers away.
Fair enough. So news about businesses that hackers may be running falls outside the scope of the site?
I feel like it’s a slippery slope. Some businesses are clearly of interest to hackers, like Red Hat. But is news about Hipster or Sonar of the same importance? Not sure. That might be something it’s best to leave to TechCrunch, but of course I’m sure I’m not the only person with an opinion on this.
I actually think this comment right here sums up the way that lobste.rs can actually become more useful than HN for a pretty big subset of HN readers; that is, those of us that aren’t really interested in the world of startups (at least, not as it pertains to home page stories). HN’s roots in Y Combinator mean that we get a lot of stuff about working with VCs, angel investment, and, of course, updates on the companies that have gone through YC. Some of it’s interesting, some of it’s not; but to many of us it’s not particularly useful.
I’d really love to keep it focused on technical / scientific topics; I suppose it’s up to us early adopters to set the tone.
I’m generally not even all that interested in stories about specific companies, but about broader ideas and principles in starting or running certain kinds of companies. There are already many sites that will serve up details of this or that company’s latest events and offerings, and usually the information offers little to say beyond, “Gee, that’s cool.”
I agree. I run a small business and appreciate reading things related to it, including how others run their business (even those self-congratulatory articles that 37signals posts would be acceptable even if no one reads or upvotes them). But “how I run my business” does not mean “let TechCrunch tell you what my business does”.
What about “smallbiz” or something? Or just “business” with the description set to something that says all of this in a few words.
Maybe there’s some way of writing a tag name and suggests that the link/post will be about those broader ideas. Maybe “hacker business” or something along those lines.
Would it be helpful to include this guideline somewhere? I realize that the lack of a business tag is a good deterrent but I think this might be a common mistake.
It would help get newcomers going in the right direction (however defined). It might also help if there was something to guide when to apply certain tags.
For example, there was a post that was basically about best practices in coding that was labeled “compsci”. Perhaps a tag of “programming” would apply there. (To me. a “compsci” tag would be more for something about, say, implementing the Lambda Calculus, or irreducible complexity.)
Now, maybe I’m right, and the post was wrong, or the reverse. Or something else. But something that helps clarify when certain tags are appropriate might help make sure they are at least applied consistently, and people aren’t surprised when they get down-voted for inappropriate labels.
Proposed tag: rant, or manifesto. Primarily to allow them to be posted here (I do enjoy a good rant/manifesto) while also allowing people to be able to easily filter them out. Several thoughts against:
I like it because it gives people a filter point. If you don’t like reading complaints, you can just filter the “rant” tag out. Added.
Proposed tag: performance
For any performance related topic.
It would be really helpful if links to PDF documents were automatically tagged PDF so users wouldn’t need to remember do it themselves.
Proposed tag: haskell
Not sure if there’s enough interest but that’s what the voting is for =)
concurrency debugging multithreading
Sure, name some as separate comments and if people want them, upvote them and I’ll add them. I don’t want to get too specific with them or posts will start getting tons of tags.
Makes sense. Thanks!
I suggested ‘virtualization’ but perhaps that’s too broad. Any thoughts?
I already created that one
Thank you!
I posted an article that was about physics, but also about ways of knowing. I would like to see a philosophy tag.
philosophy would be great, and this exposes a bigger question: is lobste.rs just for tech, or branching out to other things?
I kinda sorta like the idea of sites keeping a particular focus, but I am also interested in seeing what other things generally bright people are interested in.
I suppose this could be a matter of letting votes decide what posts live or die.
OTOH, I’m interested in, among other things, fashion but I really don’t expect to see a “fashion” tag here.
Proposed tag: systems!
It’s like my favorite part of CS, how could I forget it?
proposed tag: algorithms proposed tag: data structures
Proposed tag: other programming language. For programming language specific posts that do not have their own tags (like javascript, lua, c, go etc have, and scala, haskell, ats etc lack). This saves adding tons of tags for more programming languages.
What would the (short) tag be? “otherprog”?
I would suggest ‘otherlang’, though that is getting long for a short tag.
I’m not a big fan of negation categories. It’d be better to have a “PL” tag for programming languages and then an additional tag for the specific PL if it’s available.
Okay, how about ‘PL’ for stuff about programming language design, and ‘lang’ about stuff specific to a programming language that is otherwise not in the list of languages?
Typography: Design and typography can probably coexist for a long time, but it’s a huge topic all on its own, so a tag for it could invite a lot of interesting discussion.
Ludology: Discourages participation by the kind of people I can’t stand on most gaming forums, and doesn’t limit it to video games.
Art: There’s a lot to talk about in the development of digital art tools, and classic mediums have some discussion left in them.
I added a “games” tag since most probably don’t know what ludology is (I’ve never even heard of it). I made the tag description “game design and study” so hopefully it can stay on-topic and not just “here’s a review of a new game”.
I added “art” too. I’ll leave typography out for now since it can probably be covered by design.
I seeded it with some links I’ve been holding on to.
Proposed tag: erlang
proposed tag: longread
Conundrum time: The sort of people who use a site like Lobsters could get a lot out of a catch-all tag for marketing, promotion, advertising, etc. But that would draw spammers in droves if registrations were ever open to the public.
The only solution that comes to mind is a way to set certain tags so that you need to meet some criteria before submitting articles in them. For example: If you’re under a certain karma, a user in the invite tree has to vouch for you.
Proposed: R, Julia
Proposed tag: Mathematics
Some tags I’m missing: rust, haskell, git, svn, cvs, mercurial, darcs, bazaar, vcs (version control in general), racket, c#, f#, erlang, d, ocaml, sml
Some architecture-specific tags: x86, arm, ppc, ia64, mips (mostly relevant for low-level hackery and assembly)
Some OS-specific tags: linux, solaris, aix
Some random tags: parallelism, concurrency, debugging, build (for build systems and such), osdev (operating system development)
Also, I strongly urge you to create c++ and obj-c tags. Trust me, most C programmers are not interested in C++ and vice versa.
Also, it is unclear whether the design tag is about software design, UI design, web design, …
Would be nice to have a “shell” tag added, and/or maybe “cli” ?
mercurial
git
scala
java
proposed tag: math and/or analytics
Basically I think this article is cool. I’d like to share it and other similar articles on analytics.