8 ms·
Ask HN: What is your favorite HN post?
Recent, old, perhaps anything that is interesting to read.
- bemmu 8y agoAll the criticism in the Dropbox post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sokoloff 8y ago@cperciva in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
- stefan_ 8y agoThe whole thread is a goldmine. The founder of Dropbox offering him a job when they were just starting out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35095
- twtw 8y agoThose two comments come up frequently, but it's worth noting that in the whole preceding thread 'cperciva was being a pretty massively arrogant jerk. That thread is a classic example of why the most capable people aren't necessarily the ones you should want to work with.
- cperciva 8y agoI like to think that was my lowest point on HN and I've been less of a jerk ever since. I considered deleting my comments, but decided instead to keep them to remind myself to behave better.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dorukce 8y agoThese are from my notes (the quotes below may be boring but related discussions are good imo): "My working theory is something like “romanticism/emotionalism vs. abstract rationalism”; if you’re writing something that benefits from immediate experience and emotional input (e.g. Kafka writing about nightmarish bureaucracy after working all day in an insurance firm) then it is better to write at night, after the events of the day have happened and your mind has been operating for 12+ hours." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18369337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18369337 "Classes get in the way between the programmer and the problem. They force you to reify your thinking into "things" (classes) that demand names and citizenship rights, so to speak, in the system. These "things" don't really exist, but we act like they do, and so increasingly see the problem in terms of the classes we've defined." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3717715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3717715 "One thing that I find sorely missing in many teams is onboarding documentation. So when you come in, document everything that you need to do (required permissions, development environment setup, mailinglists, subscriptions) and how to do it." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17353854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17353854 "The real value of Flask is that it makes you appreciate what Django does by default. When I first started learning Python / web frameworks, I went with Flask because it was smaller and "simpler". As my project grew however, I had to organize it. I was basically imitating what Django gives you by default, though less cleanly." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16935441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16935441
- uptown 8y agoI’m not sure if this is #1 but this is one of my favorites. “What're the best-designed things you've ever used?” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682949
- kgwxd 8y agoI read that as "You're the best-designed thing you've ever used", which sounds like a inspirational poster in a church office, so I expected a bunch of rants about intelligent design :)
- fghtr 8y agoThis question was already answered several times here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1487605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1487605 (2010) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3996652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3996652 (2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12496558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12496558 (2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16846229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16846229 (2018) (possibly more)
- bausshf 8y agoWhile correct. New posts happen all the time.
- mortivore 8y agoAlso, new people frequent here all the time, and opinions can change.
- rndgermandude 8y agoRelated: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- bausshf 8y agoThe end of the comic was great.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- yitchelle 8y agoShould HN allow one's favourites to be shared?
- danso 8y agoYour favorites are publically shared: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=yitchelle https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=yitchelle It’s upvotes that are private to each user.
- sureaboutthis 8y agoNext up: What's your favorite color?
- skilled 8y agoBlue, thanks for asking.
- ainiriand 8y agoWhat do you mean, like mine? What are the odds!
- sureaboutthis 8y agoI was positive people would come along and not catch the meaning of my comment.
- quickthrower2 8y agoSame as my favourite drink #C0FFEE
- stevenkovar 8y agoProducer vs. Consumer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3555237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3555237
- jpdb 8y agoI really enjoy the, "what's your stack?" threads that pop up every now and then. It's always interesting to see what people are using, how they're using it, and why they made the decisions they did.
- PascLeRasc 8y agoI think about this "tech has it so much better" take often: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370776
- scott_s 8y agoSome of my actually favorited posts: jjoonathan on Oct 6, 2014 on: Glut of postdoc researchers stirs quiet crisis in ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8416875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8416875, "For most people it's not, but some people subscribe to the notion that choice implies consent/endorsement/approval ..." scardine 12 months ago on: Ask HN: My company plans an ICO despite my opposit... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16126082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16126082, "Like almost all problems in life you have only 4 options: ..." graycat on Mar 28, 2015 on: The FedEx Problem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9282104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9282104, "Yes, at FedEx, we considered that problem for about three seconds before we noticed that we also needed: ..." Animats on Nov 21, 2015 on: How a little bit of TCP knowledge is essential https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10608356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10608356, "That still irks me. The real problem is not tinygram prevention. It's ACK delays, and that stupid fixed timer. ..."
- ainar-g 8y agoThat #4 option hit too close to home. Thanks for bringing it up.
- veddox 8y agoJust learnt something new about TCP, thank you :-) (See also this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9048947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9048947) And discovered that Animats is in fact John Nagle...
- apeace 8y ago“I have a slight fascination with sweeteners.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440566
- dlkf 8y agoLets say you were just hired as the President of a furniture company. The owner says he knows it's good furniture but even despite huge investments they can't seem to sell any furniture. Your job is to turn things around... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18022154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18022154
- fb03 8y agoI really enjoy this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18853966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18853966
- nkurz 8y agoI'd like to ask a parallel meta-question: How can we make better use of HN's existing 'favorite' feature? Currently, we have the option to click on 'favorite' to add submissions or comments to a publicly visible list. Occasionally (a couple times a month?) I do this for comments that I think are excellent: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=nkurz&comments=t https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=nkurz&comments=t Some other users do the same, but I don't really know how many, because there isn't really an interface to explore this. It looks like about half the top of the "leaders" list make use of this feature, although in some cases these might just be accidental clicks. Anyway, it would seem like there should be some great way to make use of this information, but I don't know what it would be. A simple list of recently favorited comments? Marking on the comments that have been favorited? Just more prominence to what a user's favorites are? Probably there is some even better way: How can we make better use of HN's 'favorite' feature?
- NikolaNovak 8y agoGood point; personally, I'd like: 1. Ability to rename and/or annotate my favourite 2. Ability to put them in folders / hierarchical structure (Mind you, easily fixed on personal level by simply bookmarking them in browser itself instead, but doesn't help HN)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- akkartik 8y agoI use this feature a lot. I've also tried to 'hack' discoverability in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12098525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12098525
- raihansaputra 8y agoI've compiled mine (which are mostly comments) on my blog: https://raihansaputra.com/hn-wisdom https://raihansaputra.com/hn-wisdom. It's hard to say that I am following those advice though. The gap between knowing and action is hard to cross, somehow.
- gitgud 8y agoNice work!
- theSealedTanker 8y agoReally good
- JunaidBhai 8y agoThis looks great. Will save it somewhere.
- m-i-l 8y agoSee also the YC curated selection of HN highlights[0] and also an algorithmically generated list of (recent) best comments[1]. [0] https://blog.ycombinator.com/category/hacker-news/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/category/hacker-news/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
- chatmasta 8y ago"The 4-color map theory is bunk," [0] a comment in which a user boldly refutes modern mathematics and, when faced with contradictory evidence, continues to double down on his assertions. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16862553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16862553
- tptacek 8y agoSometimes I feel like the colored version of that map should be the official logo of all Internet message boards.
- po 8y ago…more like the un-colored one. :-D
- xiii1408 8y agoQuality entertainment. Unfortunately, the original post is flagged.
- umanwizard 8y agoYou can change your user settings to see dead posts.
- pbnjay 8y agoThis was definitely my favorite from the past year at least.
- danso 8y agoThat is an amazing and amazingly amusing comment thread that I’m going to add to my favorites. It shouldn’t have been flag-killed IMHO. The user attempted to produce a counter-proof — it’s just that he was hilariously wrong.
- nkurz 8y agoSince you bring it up, and since I was just looking at your favorited comments, I wonder if you could clarify: Should we attach any significance to the fact that your 3 most recent saved favorites are all [dead]? It makes me think that your opinion of what a good comment is may not agree with the official position, and that you might have suggestions for how the moderation could be improved.
- barry-cotter 8y agoYudkowsky Ambition Scale https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4509934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4509934 How Do I Start Being a Consultant? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4245960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4245960 Bane's rule, you don't understand a distributed computing problem until you can get it to fit on a single machine first. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739 Edit: Thanks detaro for telling me how to link to individual comments.
- WAthrowaway 8y agoI wonder which startup PG is referring to in the first link... Also, wow, all those comments of people plugging their level 3 and above startups did NOT age well
- pjc50 8y agoThe first is an amazing hubris detector. The "going deep" post reminds me of the "programmer-archaeologist" role from the Vernor Vinge novels, where a long-running spacefaring civilisation has built up a very large amount of code on which their magic nanotech runs. This provides opportunities to dig for long-forgotten things .. or exploits.
- barry-cotter 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4511950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4511950 > That reminds me of Peter Thiel's Venn diagram of 'Sounds like a bad idea' and 'Is a good idea'. It's a pretty slim area in the middle and the 'Sounds like' part means it's hard to know until you do it.
- detaro 8y ago> Also, how do I link to individual comments Click on the timestamp next to the username
- mike_io 8y agoDirect link to Bane's rule post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739
- centering 8y agoThe ballooning one
- gfisher 8y agoI have really enjoyed reading peoples recommendations on what they have learned and how they have grown, this post on "What has the past 12 months taught you?" is really interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17316120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17316120
- danielecook 8y agoI like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18853966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18853966
- noodles_ftw 8y agoThis is a great one
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoparticularly, this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18856271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18856271
- scott_s 8y agoAnother favorite of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18861388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18861388
- LinuxBender 8y agoYou can view everyone's favorites in their profiles. [1] [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=JunaidBhai https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=JunaidBhai
- mitchtbaum 8y agoI can't find it anymore, but from it I learned for the first time that functional programming can be understood simply as programming using component-oriented design - from then on, my favorite programming concept. I have a huge interest in software composition, so here's at least something I could find that explains it well: https://alvinalexander.com/scala/fp-book/how-functional-programming-is-like-unix-pipelines https://alvinalexander.com/scala/fp-book/how-functional-prog...
- mcny 8y agoThis is an all-time gold: "Did you win the Putnam?" Yes, I did. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
- GauntletWizard 8y agoHere's my favorite comment, which I believe deserves status as a law of the internet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082
- blancheneige 8y agomy favorite by far was the very first thread on the Snowden revelations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5830633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5830633 comment by comment you could sense the earth shattering awareness slowly setting in, or how the HN crowd suddenly went from unquestionable faith in big government to "oh lord what have we done".
- veddox 8y agoOn the whole, this is one of the more edifying political threads I've read around here...
- herewulf 8y agoPosted a mere three hours before this thread, regarding writing code in a language more reliable than Bash. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18852855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18852855
- jraph 8y agory_ry imagines a possible future for the kernel after Linus is gone. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18281465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18281465 Funny and very well written. Edit: pasted a wrong link, fixed the context
- anonyppppp 8y agoI've always loved the posts where people share their side projects that are making them $xxx / month.
- saghm 8y agoThis one, about the "medicinal benefits" of Cinnabon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15615654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15615654
- diggernet 8y agox0x0 on: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16495504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16495504 > Humans are very good at holding lots of exceptions in our heads and, in the absence of clear rules, doing reasonable things. Computers are shit at both of the above.