Hacker News – the Good Parts
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The post 'Hacker News – The Good Parts' praises the platform for its intellectual discussions and lack of noise, while the comments discuss various aspects of HN, including its strengths, weaknesses, and potential improvements.
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- 01Story posted
Oct 16, 2025 at 5:02 PM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Oct 16, 2025 at 5:14 PM EDT
13m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
124 comments in 0-12h
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Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Oct 22, 2025 at 8:10 PM EDT
2 months ago
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But I wasn't saying it was "turning into reddit", just saying how to explain it to an outsider.
Looks like your guy over here is gonna build a bear blog with the monospace web theme[1] now
I have several accounts on mataroa and one of my posts on it somehow even got indexed which I needed to pull as it was relevant in some discord discussion and I just searched it on duckduckgo and I was so proud of it lol.
I might try bear blog as well! I also really like the upvote feature at the bottom, that plus HN could be some great way to have both comments and a basic feedback without let's say setting up a blog myself although that could be a good learning experience as well but let's just say not right now :)
[1]: https://owickstrom.github.io/the-monospace-web/
* The ability to save comments, as well as posts
* Ideally a separate 'favorites' and 'read later' category
* Some kind of [tags] on posts, ideally something individuals can contribute to. It would be easy to add from an existing set of tags, adding a unique new tag would be harder and require maybe an older account or more 'points' or whatever.
* Maybe some kind of 'bump' system when linking to things that have already been posted? It feels a bit silly for there to be like 10 duplicates of a post from different time periods. But maybe that's better than the alternative, not sure.
You can view your favourited comments from your profile page.
Good to know though, thank you!
I kind of enjoy it. Some posts have become like a yearly/bi-yearly occurrence, and if I enjoyed the discussions the previous times, I'll most likely enjoy the discussions this time too.
As long as it's not the same stuff every day, I'm fine with things being re-posted once a year or so, long enough for me to forget I read the previous one.
Unfortunately sometimes I'd choose to sort by "drama", and get my rant on about the latest Ruby shitfight, or whatever Matt/Automattic or Elon/Grok/X are doing. And me giving in to that temptation would probably make the site objectivity worse, so perhaps it's better the way it is?
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hack-for-hacker-news-yc-reader...
Click on a comment’s timestamp and then 'favorite' at the top.
There is no shortage of comments and posts heavily critical of people associated with YC, though. Search comments for 'Gary Tan' and you'll see what I mean.
Why do you think they're not at least tied to help eachother?
The board of Ycombinator may not be here moderating but do you think they're independent?
Well yes. They have 2 brilliant guys running an incredibly popular site with a business model of replacing recruiters for their companies, most of which are of interest to an average HN reader.
Let's be conservative and imagine that YC gets them both for a fully loaded total of only half a million per year. (Could be half that, could easily be twice that.) These two run the site and moderate it both. That's already damn impressive. Let's imagine hosting costs YC nothing, somehow. (Apparently it's only run on one machine.)
For the low low price of free you and I are getting a high performance site with astonishingly good moderation and relatively few ads, certainly none that beg for an ad blocker. Of course I expect it to comply with YC's needs but in fact there's an immense amount of criticism of YN and its cohorts.
Now tell me where there's another site with quality this high that's free and keeps its prejudices to a minimum (I say that as a person with politics that probably run afoul of most HN readers).
Even with your tinfoil hat on I'm pretty sure you'll find nothing else remotely close to this good on the web for free.
Well that's not the reality thankfully.
> Now tell me where there's another site with quality this high that's free and keeps its prejudices to a minimum
I agree with you, but I'm biased towards this type of community where there is a real discussion, I've been proven wrong many times here and it never felt personal.
I only put my tinfoil hat o because when something is free these days, it's usually you as the product. I'd never want to lose the community but back in my day there was IRC servers with packed channels, there was Usenet. These days it's a rarity instead of the norm. Maybe I'm just getting too old.
All these problems are writ much larger now because the net is like a million times as popular as back then. No social media site can survive on free moderators and without membership fees unless the rent gets paid somehow.
I assert HN requires less "rent" from us users than any other equally successful social media site.
Sometimes, but that's not the case. I think most Open source is an example of that.
There are also many mastodon /lemmy / matrix instances and so many other niche things which run on donations and I guess some of them don't mind chipping in some of their money for the idea of a better internet if that interests them as well.
Sorry if it got off topic but just because something is free doesn't mean you are the product, you can be usually right, but I don't think HN is nearly close to this (it depends) and I feel so thankful to such products/services for existing in a world of making me the product. I just want to say thanks to those services where its free and you aren't the product and they run on donations, we people really need to chip in more in those donations as well for a better more decentralized internet
Stories can be popular because people agree with an agenda the story espouses/supports/furthers without the story being intellectually interesting in and of itself, deviating from well known presumptions or shedding new light. And even an intellectually interesting story can create more heat than light in the comments.
Everyone loves a dumpster fire a little bit now and there but unfortunately the internet standard is a tire fire.
Emojis, Images and GIF posts, Profile Pictures, Followers/Following, Sponsored posts
…if you wanted to destroy hackernews
This describes Wikipedia more than HN.
I am not a weightlifter, but I'd occasionally visit that sub just because of how welcoming and supportive it was.
http://139.177.194.177/worst.date.ever.jpg
HN actually is a social network.
You upvote stories on Hacker News and Reddit, as opposed to following people
Maybe we should all stop trying to narrowly class what's allowed to be a social network?
"Earlier" could be anything from Usenet to forums etc that were based around topics. Your view of content was based around the topics you selected. You followed topics.
A social network was where you connected with other people, and your view of content was based around who those people were and their activity. You followed people not topics.
That's definition I'm sticking to, and why I don't regard reddit or HN as a social network. Although on HN doesn't really have topic following functionality, you just select topics on the fly.
https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/soci...
"Services including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X and YouTube meet many of the conditions the legislation uses to define an ‘age-restricted social media platform’.
[snip...blah blah]
Over the coming weeks, eSafety will have more to say about the platforms it considers must comply with the minimum age obligations."
So they are going to start with the big obvious ones and then keep trying to follow the trail of where teens flee to online.
'Tis a silly thing.
Its not an age-restricted social media platform, under the legislation, because its introducing age restrictions on its social media platform.
I just...
Like, its not following exactly per se but it was a discussion outside of the post itself which was about python. And it was great.
I feel like this could be an example for the parent comment as well as how I personally feel like HN is more social networky than say wikipedia but not at twitter or trad social media level I guess.
Does it? Modern Wikipedia is OK, I suppose, but I feel its glory days are far behind it. It's so gated. And any time I try to participate, it's like walking through waist deep mud. I almost feel it forces you to shrink to participate.
Maybe I keep trying to edit long-standing articles, which have custodians that feel ownership over the content? And you're editing articles with less gatekeeping?
I frankly don't even try any more. I've heard the same from others.
Facebook was a social network even when the barrier to entry was “must have gotten in to an elite school”.
I was specifically addressing the conjoined "intellectual growth + participation" claim, by saying the 'growth' wasn't there. I even joked that it feels you're shrinking intellectually, to participate.
For me, a touch more Markdown like for text links [text](url) would be nice, not asking for image support or anything like that, though. As cool as the [0] is, the <a href=> tag and its predecessors were invented early on for a reason.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Href?useskin=vector
At the moment the only way this type of discussion really works is that people post on their own sites and we sometimes see that more detailed response. The risk of images descending into meme exchanges I think is quite low given the participants. Not sure to the extent more formatting would be good but I can definitely see its value and I use it on Reddit sometimes.
[0] or whatever the recommended alternative is nowadays
Boy what incredibly different universes we live in.
If anyone already has the infrastructure set up for this already, I really, really, wish for something where the top X HN stories can be input to AI sentiment analysis and graphs automatically created which shows, per time period, the % of submissions it classifies as "political" and the % classified as "mainstream news".
In the top 100 posts on any given day it has to be a significant percentage. I flag all political posts I see and I'm constantly flagging. The AI analysis wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least be fairly impartial, and automated. Why not collect the data?
Not surprisingly, various groups often grant those with greater tenure and more connection leniency. I just despise the lies.
If you don't want to post names publicly, you'd be welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com.
I can spot a few shallow comments that he's made in the last few days alone:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610226#45612377
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45580981#45596209
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45590900#45595784
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45595919
Like as I understand it the system here works because the users moderate each other in a way that will trigger automated action and eventually action from yourself or Tom. Shit post and people will flag your comment. Get flagged too much and you get throttled.
But if that first step doesn't happen because the user base has a parasocial relationship with another user and they consider them a celebrity then they're going to hold that user to a different standard than they do other users.
Which means they won't moderate them the same way and then the algorithmic escalation and moderator actions won't be triggered.
I agree that these aren't the kind of comments that would trigger a moderation comment, but then again, I didn't look too deeply at this particular user's comment list before I found some pretty meh ones.
It's not an issue that keeps me up at night either, I just started noticing it after enjoying reading certain comments from this user and finding other kinds of comments to be pretty sub-par and started pondering the strong difference between them.
The dichotomy between comments they'll make regarding something like aircraft linkages and control surfaces or whatever that I recall them making a few months ago which other uses wanted to nominate as a high quality comment and the all caps old man yelling at clouds type comments that I linked to is problematic for a site like HN but I also agree that there isn't an optimal solution for it.
There was a discussion here where a professor with a specialty on the underlying subject was 'corrected'/crowded out by very detailed comments that sounded cogent, had buzzwords in them but ultimately were incorrect.
Seeing that makes me wonder about the discussion here on topics I know nothing about. Vetted flair for subject matter expertise for users would help. I'm still interested in what a chip designer has to say about astronomy but it would make it easier to weigh the contribution.
Remember, HN isn't exactly checking anyone's CV at the door. All it takes to post here is knowing how to fill out a web form. The culture here tends to believe the simplistic design somehow draws deep technical intellects like moths to a flame but it really doesn't.
I guess it's better to view HN as entertainment than expertise overall.
Three thoughts...
1. I really enjoy seeing what the extremely technically accomplished users think about non-technical topics.
2. I like that only my accumulated knowledge of their usernames allows me to easily connect the dots for thought #1.
3. It is fun when you come to appreciate someone's thinking on many non-technical topics then later, on a technical thread, realize that user is the person behind $SOMETHING_BIG. But that fun relies on accumulating #2.
No, they don't.
This is a link aggregator. By definition stories posted here have already been posted (and broken) elsewhere.
1. nested/indented comments are confusing. Perhaps it's connected to how I don't like programming languages that rely on indents for defining blocks of script instead of curly brackets, but I think that the reasons are unrelated. When you have a large tree of comments, it's simply hard to keep track which comment replies to which. It's easy when you have a couple comments, but I simply can't process a large tree of, say, 20 comments, I'll forget the context of the parent by the time I read the 5th one. Also sometimes it's hard to recognize if the next comment is indented 1 or 2 times to the left. I don't know why is this design so popular, someone even wrote a frontpage for 4chan that displayed its posts in this manner. I'd love to have a frontpage for hackernews that displayed its posts like on an imageboard! if you know such, please let me know. At least HN provides the next/prev/parent buttons, but they lack the onhover rendering of the post like on 4chan. These buttons also don't exist on hckrnws.com frontend which I tend to use, but it's a minor nitpick.
2. upvotes. I really like the 4chan way of bumping and making comments with a lot of replies the ones that stand out instead of those that a lot of people agree with. I think it encourages more diverse opinions. But on the other hand, perhaps the upvote system is somehow key to the pretty high level of discussion on HN, can't really tell.
Let me mention my recent app for an alternative view of the HN comments (Hackeray) [1][2]. I'm sure this is not for everyone, but for me this view really helped to read the comments more clearly and basically absorb any big discussion here.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45571963
[2] https://hackeray.vercel.app
Chan-style upvotes are never going to happen, though. Hacker News' entire thing is aggressive moderation and curation, and high signal-to-noise ratio, even at the cost of freedom of speech and diversity of opinion. Popularity is not a filter for intellectual quality, often it's the opposite, which is why high velocity threads tend to just set off the flamewar detector.
Of course, karma isn't much of a filter for intellectual quality either but what are you going to do?
(In my experience, the ones dunking on it are the ones spending most time on it…)
That weirdly rhymes with the criticism of everything else here, like firefox, debian, android, ...
The system rewards intellectual curiosity until you direct it at HN itself. If you start asking questions about how moderation works or challenge the culture here, you'll find that dissent gets quietly penalized, and transparency only goes so far.
The other issue with HN is they seem to decide how you curate your own inputs into the site. Even deleting your own comments is not allowed after a time limit. I don't understand what benefit this brings, and it's certainly not communicated in the HN guidelines.
If a platform claims to foster intellectual curiosity, it should be able to tolerate that curiosity being directed at its own moderation choices. Otherwise, it's just managing its image, not building trust.
Maybe requiring a comment to downvote, or at least if you are the first to down vote a comment would go a long way.
- "Downvoted you because I found your comment rude to OP."
- "How is calling them a cheese-hole-lover rude?! They said they love Swiss cheese and the more Swiss cheese you have, the more cheese holes you have, so they obviously love cheese holes!!"
Edit: I guess the topic is downvotes, sure, but I feel like your comment would be better made somewhere further up the comment chain where it's actually relevant.
I think your downvotes mainly come on some of your political comments. Political threads are not great to begin with, and I think you're giving yourself some undue credit as to your participation to them. I commonly hear that HN leans liberal and whatnot, and that's probably true, but I wouldn't say that non-liberal (for severe lack of a better term) comments are necessarily dogpiled. I think many non-liberal comments that are downvoted here are done so for being in bad faith, because they may have a point but overextend their argument to other targets. I make it a point to not take sides and be critical of all opinions (of course I don't implement it perfectly), and I think I have been treated more or less fairly. I linked some political threads I participated in to demonstrate non-downvoted non-liberal comments. If some of my opinions are "liberal" and others are "conservative", I'll just say that I try to be fair and reasonable.
I only downvote people who I think are degrading the conversation who seem outlandishly wrong or off-topic. If I just disagree with someone, I may reply or not. It's reasonable to disagree on the basis of holding different values or beliefs.>I think many non-liberal comments that are downvoted here are done so for being in bad faith, because they may have a point but overextend their argument to other targets.
Liberal comments are often in bad faith. The top/only political posts that get upvoted are entire bad-faith liberal propaganda hit pieces. The liberal commenters find a way to wedge politics into anything remotely political, spewing Trump Derangement Syndrome or climate hysteria narratives. These comments get upvoted. Trying to talk sense into these people gets consistently downvoted unless you're willing to do a lot of waffling and phrase your objection in the most milquetoast way you can think of.
>I commonly hear that HN leans liberal and whatnot, and that's probably true, but I wouldn't say that non-liberal (for severe lack of a better term) comments are necessarily dogpiled.
The audience (that comments, anyway) is mostly a liberal hivemind. There is a lot of dog-piling here. You shouldn't be downvoted for simply disagreeing or presenting a reductio ad absurdum argument but it happens here all the time. It's not as bad as Reddit but still not so good. The rate limit sucks too because you can be spammed by like 5 people and not be able to respond to them quick enough.
I might do better if I pretended to be more on the fence than I am, but I am very opinionated. Some of these comments I respond to are SO stupid that I think shock therapy is the appropriate approach. I try not to be personal. I just point out the absurdity of what they are saying and hope they just snap out of it or say something interesting to prove me wrong.
That's actually pretty consistent with a lot of the other comments I see where the author claims their opinion is being downvoted when they're actually just being a jerk.
> and hope they just snap out of it
Is this something you do a lot? Someone talks down to you online and you go "huh! They're right!" and change your mind?
https://paulgraham.com/identity.html
> at least if you are the first to down vote a comment
This is actually a clever idea (that would avoid endless repetitions of the downvote reason) - I like it!
Consider making article submissions.
What are some examples of this?
If you ever find yourself encountering the message "you're posting too fast, please slow down, thanks" your account has been deemed "problematic" by the mods and rate limited. You won't be warned beforehand or told why, and the limit is permanent until they decide otherwise. They used to slowban as well - have page loading be extremely slow so the site is almost impossible to use. The intended effect is to frustrate you enough that you eventually leave. They also shadowban but at least they warn you now, they didn't always. People would keep posting completely unaware that their comments were going unseen, for months or sometimes years.
The filter on my account appears to require a two hour cooldown after every five comments. I have no idea when I got it or what for, and I'm reasonably certain it used to just be one hour but they bumped it up at some point.
I've removed the rate limit from your account now. You're right that the limit is permanent in the sense that it needs to be removed manually, and that's unfair in some cases. The counterargument though is that most accounts just don't change that much, so this ends up being globally the right call even though it fails in specific cases.
(and no, we didn't bump it up)
SNפIƎɹ SO∀HƆ
I mean thank you. I know I complain a lot but that's because I care, and I think I've mellowed out over time anyway. I think my greatest sin is just spending too much time here posting.
>The counterargument though is that most accounts just don't change that much, so this ends up being globally the right call even though it fails in specific cases.
If so, it seems to make more sense to apply it by thread rather than by account. Maybe to threads that trip the flamewar detector. For serial trolls the effect would be the same, but it wouldn't interfere with honest participation.
>and no, we didn't bump it up
Fair enough, it can be difficult to tell from the comment timestamps. As long as you're prompting the user anyway maybe add a cooldown timer?
I don't envy you or the other mods your jobs but I do think you put more effort into tone-policing than you need to.
> If you start asking questions about how moderation works or challenge the culture here
- the flag button needs a confirmation modal. It's way too easy to hit it by mistake when trying to hide a story.
- Support for autoformatting markdown style tables. I'm not asking for full markdown since I know people would just abuse headings, etc.
But holy* I have so may flagged posts that the list doesn't fit on one page. The latest one is from 2024/03 and oldest one is from 2020/06 (maybe that's when I started owning an iPhone, but not sure). And I don't see any reason why I'd flag any of those submissions.
I think it's very likely that the order of the text/link below the story title (on the frontpage) is to blame. For example:
> nn points by xxxxx n hours ago | flag | hide | nnn comments
The fact that links 'n hours ago' and 'flag' are right next to each other makes it very easy to click on the 'flag' accidentally.
So a +1 from me to do something to fix this problem.
That said, it's possible this is all accounted for in the system. Maybe the mods only get notified above some threshold and that threshold has been tuned to ignore the background noise of accidental flags. Adding a confirmation would lower the noise level, but perhaps not translate into any real benefit.
The experience is more like "I clicked on a link to an article, but instead of loading the article, the HN page just reloaded. Now I have to scroll down to find it again... Hmm.. Where is it? Maybe it's moved to a different page...? What was I even looking for again? Oh well"
news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter:invert(100%) hue-rotate(180deg)) news.ycombinator.com##body:style(background: white) news.ycombinator.com##div.toptext:style(color: black) news.ycombinator.com###hnmain td[bgcolor="#000000"]
Not my idea, I took it from a comment on HN a few weeks ago.
https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news
While we're at it - I also would favor a strict subset of markdown, but it would be really nice to have a strict subset of markdown instead of the homebrew thing we have now. The biggest one that regularly catches people out is that
formats as* foo * bar
instead of a bullet-point list. And on that note, I'd really like ``` to do code blocks instead of needing 2+ space indentation as the way to make a code block.
The other thing I appreciate about HN is it helps me practice writing.
Once graduating from University, there aren’t many built in ways to get regular writing practice and HN comments are it for me.
Also, I haven't really started a blog, or atleast I haven't stick to one (I make multiple mataroa accounts etc.) but its just that HN comments feel easier to me to type into and they are also generally more preferable to me atleast right now.
I’ve learned a lot from watching constructive disagreements between other people. Regardless of whether they’re “right” or not, healthy disagreements sharpen our perspectives.
Only true if your general argument is still in line with the HN zeitgeist. You are allowed to disagree so long as you dont disagree on core topics. HN has the same problem reddit does in that a voting system in general necessarily introduces censorship and lack of diversity of discussion. While people here don't karma farm (or karma guard) as aggressively it takes almost nothing to end up shadowbanned/instant-flagged/etc for having a disagreeable standpoint.
In other words, as long as you aren't right of center you can disagree all you want. Even a trivially libertarian viewpoint is met with significant ire.
Voting systems in general are a massive problem in social media. They don't stop the truly bad actors but they drive away the exact thing that prevents you from being caught in an echo chamber (of which HN is an example of).
The alternative is to be like 4chan, though. I'll begrudgingly admit that there are pros, but the cons definitely outweigh them.
False. The alternative might be something like spacebattles.
4chan's problem isn't the lack of a voting system, the problem comes from the complete anonymity of its users, the lack of friction to post, and the near complete lack of moderation standards.
The very best online online communities I've ever been a part of - and continue to participate in - tend to have two major things in common. First, there has to be some sort of friction to join the conversation. Second, there are moderation standards, and these standards are only enforced with active and engaged moderators, and not by easily-gamed populism-driven systems.
Eh. It’s garbage in, garbage out, mostly like any other platform. It’s still easy to degrade the site if the users are determined enough.
How you choose to use it dictates your takeaway more than most social media platforms I suppose, which is actually the best thing about it IMO. That much is worth contrasting with the other options out there, no question.
Looking forward to The Bad Parts.
The first part is correct, the second part is correct in theory, but any place that has "upvotes" (like HN or reddit) ends up with the community putting straight up incorrect stuff as the "top comment".
So while "far up in the comment thread" can signal quality, accuracy and truth, you'd be mistaken to automatically assume so. HN is, after all, just another community on the website filled with humans who can be wrong.
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