"other - stuff that probably needs to be flagged unless enough people like the topic"

Except that things in the "other" category are not off topic, and shouldn't be flagged even if only a few people upvote them.

Per the guidelines, what's on topic is:

  "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than
  hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might
  be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Personally, I am opposed to limiting tagging to only a handful of pre-determined tags. But if that must be done, I'd prefer a much wider range of tags. The tags you list are far too limiting.

For instance, I am interested in Lisp, but not in Java. "Hacking" just doesn't do a very good job of filtering these.

I am interested in "gadgets", but don't want to see another iPhone or iPad story for as long as I live.

HN should allow a wide range of tags (ideally completely determined by the users or story submitters).

What about a sort of tag hierarchy in which the first level the tags would remain fixed, and in lower levels user-selected? Every post would only display the leaf tags of the branches to which it pertained, or something along that line. Well, I guess this would make search a bit harder to implement. Dunno, something that came up and I had to verbalize :)

Well, yeah, the exact tags would have to be chosen by pg or something. Main reason for fixing them is so that we don't end up with tablet,iPad,ipad2 as separate tags

I understand your concern, but I am not sure that having separate tags for tablet, iPad, and ipad2 would necessarily be a problem.

Someone might be interested in tablets in general, but wouldn't want to see stories on the ipad.

On the other hand, ipad2 is clearly a subcategory of ipad. And someone who is interested in the ipad will probably be interested in stories about the ipad2, even though he may not have explicitly looked for ipad2 tags but only for ipad tags.

Since "ipad" is actually a substring of "ipad2", this could be easily solved with a simple substring search in the tag.

A more problematic example is someone missing a story tagged "java" but not "programming" when searching for stories tagged "programming".

The solution to this problem is to have a tag hierarchy. Thus, the "java" tag would be explicitly made a subtag of the "programming" tag. Unfortunately, the problem with this solution is that it's not easily automatable (though I'm sure there's been a lot of research done in this area), so the hierarchy would probably have to be built by hand. And this, in turn, means that it probably won't be done for a lot of tags.

Perhaps a good compromise would be to require each story to be tagged with at least one predefined tag (from a wide selection of predefined tags that are already organized in to a tag hierarchy), and allow an arbitrary number of user-defined tags.

That way there'll be at least some minimal organization to the submitted stories.

An exploding mess of tags can be mitigated in practice by: (1) normalizing tag capitalization, (2) auto completing/suggesting as you type, (3) providing a dynamic list of tag suggestions for tags that are likely to occur together, (4) suggesting tags based on post content.

In your example what you really don't want is for people to create distinct tags for ipad, ipad2, iOs, etc on accident. Making it easy for people to select from relevant existing tags means people will only add an ipad2 tag over using an existing ipad tag if that distinction is important and particularly relevant for their post.

Done right tags can be super useful without creating a mess or being overly difficult to implement. StackOverflow does a nice job on this front.

Thanks for suggesting this, as it points out that people come to HN with different mental taxonomies. My fixed-tag system would subsume three of your tags into "startup business advice and paypal alternatives", whereas "hacking" would have enough sub-categories to distinguish "new ways of making drop-shadow gradients in CSS3" from articles about versioning tools and clever exploits for security holes.

The power of tags is that they're user-defined.

Look at Digg and its naïvely broad topics: they're nowhere near as useful as user-defined tags. A story on a TCP bug is in completely different interest areas to a story on Apple's Smart Cover, yet both are filed under "technology" in Digg.

Or make tag creation a karma threshold.

13000 should do it ;-)

Why not 1300?

karmaism

>Might work as long as tags are not user defined

== Categories and even there i doubt the "might work"

This is basically what subreddits are. I would like to see this implemented.