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Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News

282 points by firexcy 1y ago

ipnon 1y ago
The best comments are at the bottom. I’ve been twaddling here long enough to know what the most upvoted take will be, so unless it’s a personal anecdote it’s not worth reading. The real juicers are usually buried near the bottom of the page, a few comments above where the apathy and sarcasm start bleeding into grey.
- liotier 1y ago
  I imagine the author of the parent comment despairing of being upvoted.
- causal 1y ago
  This comment ironically at the top
  - qwertytyyuu 1y ago
    Not anymore haha
- lapcat 1y ago
  > The best comments are at the bottom. You clearly don't have the showdead option enabled. ;-)
  - maxbond 1y ago
    That was my first reaction but they did address it in their comment. > The real juicers are usually buried near the bottom of the page, a few comments above where the apathy and sarcasm start bleeding into grey. Emphasis added.
    - lapcat 1y ago
      > a few comments above where the apathy and sarcasm start bleeding into grey. I wouldn't call the dead comments apathetic and sarcastic. They're typically vile and humorless.
      - cindyllm 1y ago
        [dead]
- instagib 1y ago
  There is also a place to find posts which are down-weighted, admin putting their finger on the scale in one way or another. Show dead in settings here also can have a few gems if you feel like digging for them.
jmclnx 1y ago
>the servers that run HN are surprisingly modest: just two machines with quad-core Intel Xeon E5-2637 v4 CPUs, running FreeBSD Very nice. I used FreeBSD on my server until Version 9, I think I left for 2 reasons. The server experience heat death (my fault) and its Laptop support. I heard v15 became alpha + its Laptop support has improved a lot. I will keep an eye on v15 and give it a try when released. FWIW, I had to replace the power supply on the server and I forgot to plug in the CPU fan, doh. The machine was over 10 years old at the time.
- drob518 1y ago
  I wonder what the uptime numbers are on the HN machines.
rdmuser 1y ago
I've always been curious what the front page of hn would look like if you filtered out all the tech posts. I'd love a rss feed for that. Maybe make it top weekly or monthly instead since that would cull a large % of posts? One site I've been really enjoying for filtering through feeds including all hn submissions is https://scour.ing/about https://scour.ing/about. You input interests and it filters rss based on that. You can even follow your profile using an external rss reader. It's inspired by sites like bear blog and seems to be trying to do everything right re treating users well. I'm a long time rss user and rarely find new rss projects interesting enough to use but scour instantly hooked me because it works and is trying to do everything right by its users.
- emschwartz 1y ago
  Developer of Scour here. Really glad to hear you're enjoying it! Comments like these are very motivating, so thank you!
  - rdmuser 1y ago
    Tbh I've been working on a big feedback list since early this year after finding scour through /r/rss. This year got busy etc so I haven't sent it in yet but I'd like to soon once I polish it up. Being able to apply custom interests to all feeds globally has been a wonderful way to run into new stuff online. I was genuinely surprised how great of addition scour was to my rss setup since I'm already a longterm experienced user with a well curated follow list of a several hundred feeds.
    - emschwartz 1y ago
      Hearing this makes my day :) Feedback is extremely welcome! Feel free to email ideas to me (in any state of polish) or post them on https://feedback.scour.ing https://feedback.scour.ing. Looking forward to hearing your suggestions!
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
lapcat 1y ago
> There were many large forums that hit a tipping point where low-effort posting and polarization drag everything down. How does HN resist the slide? It doesn't. Admittedly, HN discussion is generally of higher "quality" than Reddit, at least for large subreddits, but that's a very low bar to hurdle. > The HN welcome page lays out two cardinal rules: don’t post or upvote crap links, and don’t be rude or dumb in comment threads. These cardinal rules are routinely violated. A rational person would just read the linked articles and ignore the comment section. HN is still the best link aggregator, I think. Unfortunately, I'm irrational and prone to pointless argumentation, which is why I sometimes show up in the comments. (Duty calls.) I usually regret it, though.
- nilamo 1y ago
  I find myself going to the comments before the article. There's so many times where one of the first comments are something like "I work in the industry, and the base assumptions of this article are incorrect", and I feel that that's a valuable thing to keep in mind before digging into the meat.
  - lapcat 1y ago
    > There's so many times where one of the first comments are something like "I work in the industry, and the base assumptions of this article are incorrect" There are so many times where the top comments are totally full of crap, including and especially from people who work in the industry. It's a large industry with countless subspecialties. What reason do you have to trust a comment over an article? If you're going to be skeptical, be skeptical of both, but be especially skeptical of some cursory dismissal of a work that obviously took significant time, effort, and expertise. I'd love for these commenters to write their own articles and see what's it like to be commented on.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- matheusmoreira 1y ago
  Discussion here is generally of higher quality because of the people who come here. Lots of developers of all kinds, tech company employees, insiders, people who invented the algorithms you read about in the books, people who invented the programming languages we use. I for one ignore the articles and go straight for the comments. I care a lot more about what smart people think than the articles themselves. The news that get posted here are just provocation to get them to post their opinions. Chances are any truly important information will be directly quoted by HN comments anyway.
_fat_santa 1y ago
IMO one of the things that makes HN so special is the "culture" here. Having been on here since 2018, most folks here are acutely aware of the issues that other sites like Reddit have and we all collectively work to preserve this space so it doesn't become like the other places. If I see a meme on Reddit I would probably upvote it, but if I see that exact same meme on here I would downvote and probably report it too. That decision comes from a place of wanting to preserve this space and I'm sure many other folks on here would very much agree.
- causal 1y ago
  I wonder how much of the difference is just because HN doesn't allow you to post / display images inline like Reddit does, forcing users to engage with the content (written or video) rather than just reflexively upvote low-effort content.
  - matheusmoreira 1y ago
    It's because of the people who come here. You might post about a project and discover that the person who made the thing is replying to you.
    - causal 1y ago
      I think that is the bigger difference, I agree, but I think the format and media involved still have an effect on the type of discussion that takes place
  - pwdisswordfishz 1y ago
    > display images inline like Reddit does That's a relatively new development. The cultural aspects that you're describing were already in place (entrenched) well before Reddit integrated that feature.
- mettamage 1y ago
  Interesting, for me Hacker News is just about being reasonable. Consequently, I find all other online places so far unreasonable. I am on Reddit, but honestly, it’s more of an anthropology thing rather than anything else. Sometimes I see if I can vibe with the subreddits, and I can. The problem is usually I feel awful because a good faith discussion generally can’t be held. To me, vibing in many subreddits just means promoting values that I don’t actually stand behind.
Igrom 1y ago
I think that recently, I've been seeing more snarky and dismissive messages than compared with several months ago. They are always very brief, gotcha-style replies. Is it just me? It sometimes makes me doubt if there isn't a coordinated attempt at destabilizing the otherwise orderly (no doubt after some heroic wrangling by dang & co.) discourse taking place. Those posts get downvoted rather fast, but I feel that there's been a quantitative difference in their occurence.
- ThrowawayR2 1y ago
  No conspiracy is needed. HN is attracting more and more new users who enjoy making low quality posts on hot button topics, which also triggers other previously well-behaved users to make low quality posts in response. This behavior naturally spreads outside of hot button topics to ordinary submissions.
  - reaperducer 1y ago
    HN is attracting more and more new users who enjoy making low quality posts on hot button topics, which also triggers other previously well-behaved users to make low quality posts in response. Posting a "hot take" on HN was unheard of for a very long time. Now people do it regularly with no shame. I've never really understood why people write those, and even less why people read them. It's admitting from the outset that you don't know what you're talking about. Why embarrass yourself? Why waste your own time?
    - dang 1y ago
      I think you guys are succumbing to a nostalgia-filtered view of HN's past.
      - NaOH 1y ago
        An unspoken inference from when you've made posts like this is that HN has largely only changed in terms of scale, that the overall community culture has been relatively static. What are the indicators that would catch your attention to indicate a cultural shift, whether they are improving the site or diminishing it?
vid 1y ago
I don't like the word "karma" because it's often, for better in worse, group affinity (and we are most often trajectories rather than pure insight). I often find minority views and unexplored paths interesting, even when they're obviously wrong. One time I made a negative comment about Lord of the Rings, and I think I lost a thousand points. Does it really make sense that my karma as a complete user drops so much because of one specific comment? Blasphemy, but maybe Reddit's per-subreddit score makes more sense. I can promise I don't craft my comments for karma, though many people deserve their high 'karma' because they offer genuinely great contributions.
- skulk 1y ago
  I thought HN caps negative score at -4?
  - vid 1y ago
    Maybe they do now, but I remember losing a lot more than that for that comment. I recall it was just after I made a comment that received a lot of upvotes, which were more than wiped out by having a critical view of the ultimate morality of LoTR. Then again, my "karma" currently at 1066 after 12 years goes up and down by points at a time, so a few points lost will be felt more than for people who have tens of thousands of points.
    - dang 1y ago
      I assume https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17247823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17247823 is the comment? Barring some catastrophic bug that we never heard about, those posts wouldn't have subtracted more than a few points from your account karma. Your other posts in the thread also got some downvotes, so they would have added a few more. But it couldn't have been a thousand or even a hundred because there were only a few dozen votes on those posts in total, and many were upvotes. I don't think you should have been downvoted for that post though! It was an interesting comment. (Though perhaps it was more provocative before the edit you mention there.)
qwertytyyuu 1y ago
Rfta? Request for tenancy application? Oh waits it’s read the article…
qingcharles 1y ago
The best tool I've found for reading HN is this front page summary: https://hackernews.betacat.io/ https://hackernews.betacat.io/
- marginalia_nu 1y ago
  So it's like HN but with GDPR popovers and interstitial ads.
  - qingcharles 1y ago
    Yikes. I've never seen any of those. I guess uBlock is doing the heavy lifting.
j1elo 1y ago
This is my personal and minimal guide to HN (for whoever might be interested): ! Hacker News ! =========== ! Remove AI-related entries (Top: title / url) news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission span.titleline > a:has-text(/\b(AI|GPT|MCP|LLMs?|Chatbot|Copilot|Gemini)\b/):upward(tr) ! Remove AI-related entries (Bottom: stats / comments) news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission span.titleline > a:has-text(/\b(AI|GPT|MCP|LLMs?|Chatbot|Copilot|Gemini)\b/):upward(tr) + tr to be added as filter in uBlock Origin. (if someone can suggest a way to merge those 2 CSS selectors into one to avoid repetition, I'd be immensely grateful, as i failed while trying to learn about that arcane syntax)
- dpifke 1y ago
  My uBlock Origin rules use almost identical syntax (but there are a lot more of them, since I hide stories from TV news and clickbait sites): https://pifke.org/hn.txt https://pifke.org/hn.txt (I also would love to know if there's a way to consolidate rules.) dang has previously indicated receptiveness to built-in killlist functionality for sites/users/titles, similar to what this list accomplishes. My offer to build this (for free) stands, if anyone at YC was willing to provide access the HN codebase.
- tracker1 1y ago
  I may need to add this myself... I get flagged at work every time I hit an AI website regardless of if it's a blog article or not.
btbuildem 1y ago
> a chronic dilemma for any online community: scale, topical breadth, and discussion quality form an unstable triad I always wonder about the scale part -- why do we want a community to grow? Is it to reach more like-minded people, to enrich the collective knowledge, etc? That would be so great, and not dilute the other two aspects. But so often it seems that "growth" is just for its own sake, a bit like cancer -- consuming the host in the end, and at best reducing what was a vibrant community to a barely palatable sludge that appeals to the common denominator just enough to warrant eyeballs-to-dollars conversion. It's a testament to HN that it has, so far, resisted this (to borrow a term from mr Doctorow) enshittification.
jstrieb 1y ago
This post recommends the Newsit extension to view Hacker News discussion associated with a page. In the same vein, a few years ago, I made a Firefox extension for users who want a privacy-preserving way to see if pages have associated HN discussion: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-discussion-button/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-d... Most other extensions probably hit an external API (such as Algolia) to check submission status, which means they send every page you visit to that API. Instead, my extension uses Bloom filters compiled from every link ever submitted (updated daily from the Hacker News BigQuery dataset) to check the current page's submission status. By using Bloom filters, my extension only hits the API when you click the button to view the discussion. Source code here: https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button Feel free to pull the Bloom filters from the "Releases" section of that repo on GitHub to use in other projects if you'd like!
- rahimnathwani 1y ago
  I use Chrome as my main browser and was going to ask if there was a Chrome version. I was sad to see there's a technical reason you couldn't make it work :( https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button/issues/1 https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button/issues/1
  - jstrieb 1y ago
    Probably worth me revisiting! Web tech has changed a bit since I last investigated this in 2021, and I'm also not sure if I considered options like IndexedDB at the time.
- rdmuser 1y ago
  Personally I use this bookmarklet to check if sites have been submitted since I like to minimize extensions: javascript:void(location.href="https://hn.algolia.com/?query="+location.href)
  - foresto 1y ago
    That sends every page you check to Algolia's API, which is what jstrieb's extension is designed to avoid.
curtisszmania 1y ago
[dead]
hermitcrab 1y ago
I think the main difference between HN and other forums is the moderation. I have been a moderator and I know what difficult and thankless task it can be. Thank you Dang.
- joe_the_user 1y ago
  Other forums are good and have moderators. But moderators absolutely make a difference, disproportionately to the amount of moderation actually done. Aside from overt actions, a moderator imposes a flexible but noticeable ethos on a group's debate.
glimps 1y ago
Love the article. I’m here to register as a “randomly scroll the front page” kind of user. I’m a digg expat from back in the days. HN is the only icon on my phone that is mot an app. It sits on my first page and I keep a tab open until I read the entire article. But HN content is special to me. I have an ArchiveBox instance to keep all very good content from HN. It’s hooked to a vector database and an AI to quizz me on the many topics so I don’t forget. At year’s end I close all my unfinished articles, normally around 200-300 on my safari and the cycle repeats. I don’t much engage with the community but HN is a special place and the only place that can clench my thirst for knowledge and learning. Thanks for the article and thanks HN
ropable 1y ago
For me, HN is distinct and special because (despite its scale) it doesn't reflect the internet. HN, as a discussion forum, has its own distinct norms, "vibe" and specialisations which give it value. Places like Facebook and Reddit are so large that they (kind of) reflect the whole internet, with all of huge variation in expectations and behaviour that represents. It's the narrower scope of subject matter and the ruthlessly-cultivated culture which create the value proposition of HN. It's for this reason I've continued using the site for years after largely abandoning discussion on other social media sites. Long may it flourish.
aucisson_masque 1y ago
> Finally, demographics matter. HN is dominated by American tech professionals. That can tilt discourse toward elitism, rationalism, and a kind of intellectual performance, creating an echo chamber As an European, not working in technology or even with computers, i can relate to. HN comments can sometimes feel out of touch with reality. I’d say it’s more about the way Americans tend to see the world, where the world ends at the border of the USA and not consider that there are other way of life. Although despite its flaws, this forum is still one of the brightest side of the internet.
seruda 1y ago
[dead]
rldjbpin 1y ago
Having RTFA, I am happy to discover the rss feeds options. Sadly, they do not seem to match how I prefer things: checking yesterday’s top posts. While it can still move around despite the passing of the day, it has been quite a stable way to see what made it to the top and stayed. I am just too lazy to automate it myself. About the regional bias in the discourse here, I have come to accept it in public, English-based communities at this point. The content does speak for itself, and despite the noise, one comes out better off. TBH, many articles on the front page are not for everyone, and reading the comments is more fun to figure this out. I don't judge those who comment based on the conversations instead, but it does derail things at times. While I am ways away from getting to downvote, just lurking without being logged in has been quite effective in staving off distractions.

282 points by firexcy 1y ago

The best comments are at the bottom. I’ve been twaddling here long enough to know what the most upvoted take will be, so unless it’s a personal anecdote it’s not worth reading. The real juicers are usually buried near the bottom of the page, a few comments above where the apathy and sarcasm start bleeding into grey.

liotier 1y ago
I imagine the author of the parent comment despairing of being upvoted.
causal 1y ago
This comment ironically at the top
- qwertytyyuu 1y ago
  Not anymore haha
lapcat 1y ago
> The best comments are at the bottom. You clearly don't have the showdead option enabled. ;-)
- maxbond 1y ago
  That was my first reaction but they did address it in their comment. > The real juicers are usually buried near the bottom of the page, a few comments above where the apathy and sarcasm start bleeding into grey. Emphasis added.
  - lapcat 1y ago
    > a few comments above where the apathy and sarcasm start bleeding into grey. I wouldn't call the dead comments apathetic and sarcastic. They're typically vile and humorless.
    - cindyllm 1y ago
      [dead]
instagib 1y ago
There is also a place to find posts which are down-weighted, admin putting their finger on the scale in one way or another. Show dead in settings here also can have a few gems if you feel like digging for them.

jmclnx 1y ago

>the servers that run HN are surprisingly modest: just two machines with quad-core Intel Xeon E5-2637 v4 CPUs, running FreeBSD Very nice. I used FreeBSD on my server until Version 9, I think I left for 2 reasons. The server experience heat death (my fault) and its Laptop support. I heard v15 became alpha + its Laptop support has improved a lot. I will keep an eye on v15 and give it a try when released. FWIW, I had to replace the power supply on the server and I forgot to plug in the CPU fan, doh. The machine was over 10 years old at the time.

drob518 1y ago
I wonder what the uptime numbers are on the HN machines.

rdmuser 1y ago

I've always been curious what the front page of hn would look like if you filtered out all the tech posts. I'd love a rss feed for that. Maybe make it top weekly or monthly instead since that would cull a large % of posts? One site I've been really enjoying for filtering through feeds including all hn submissions is https://scour.ing/about https://scour.ing/about. You input interests and it filters rss based on that. You can even follow your profile using an external rss reader. It's inspired by sites like bear blog and seems to be trying to do everything right re treating users well. I'm a long time rss user and rarely find new rss projects interesting enough to use but scour instantly hooked me because it works and is trying to do everything right by its users.

emschwartz 1y ago
Developer of Scour here. Really glad to hear you're enjoying it! Comments like these are very motivating, so thank you!
- rdmuser 1y ago
  Tbh I've been working on a big feedback list since early this year after finding scour through /r/rss. This year got busy etc so I haven't sent it in yet but I'd like to soon once I polish it up. Being able to apply custom interests to all feeds globally has been a wonderful way to run into new stuff online. I was genuinely surprised how great of addition scour was to my rss setup since I'm already a longterm experienced user with a well curated follow list of a several hundred feeds.
  - emschwartz 1y ago
    Hearing this makes my day :) Feedback is extremely welcome! Feel free to email ideas to me (in any state of polish) or post them on https://feedback.scour.ing https://feedback.scour.ing. Looking forward to hearing your suggestions!
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]

lapcat 1y ago

> There were many large forums that hit a tipping point where low-effort posting and polarization drag everything down. How does HN resist the slide? It doesn't. Admittedly, HN discussion is generally of higher "quality" than Reddit, at least for large subreddits, but that's a very low bar to hurdle. > The HN welcome page lays out two cardinal rules: don’t post or upvote crap links, and don’t be rude or dumb in comment threads. These cardinal rules are routinely violated. A rational person would just read the linked articles and ignore the comment section. HN is still the best link aggregator, I think. Unfortunately, I'm irrational and prone to pointless argumentation, which is why I sometimes show up in the comments. (Duty calls.) I usually regret it, though.

nilamo 1y ago
I find myself going to the comments before the article. There's so many times where one of the first comments are something like "I work in the industry, and the base assumptions of this article are incorrect", and I feel that that's a valuable thing to keep in mind before digging into the meat.
- lapcat 1y ago
  > There's so many times where one of the first comments are something like "I work in the industry, and the base assumptions of this article are incorrect" There are so many times where the top comments are totally full of crap, including and especially from people who work in the industry. It's a large industry with countless subspecialties. What reason do you have to trust a comment over an article? If you're going to be skeptical, be skeptical of both, but be especially skeptical of some cursory dismissal of a work that obviously took significant time, effort, and expertise. I'd love for these commenters to write their own articles and see what's it like to be commented on.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
matheusmoreira 1y ago
Discussion here is generally of higher quality because of the people who come here. Lots of developers of all kinds, tech company employees, insiders, people who invented the algorithms you read about in the books, people who invented the programming languages we use. I for one ignore the articles and go straight for the comments. I care a lot more about what smart people think than the articles themselves. The news that get posted here are just provocation to get them to post their opinions. Chances are any truly important information will be directly quoted by HN comments anyway.

_fat_santa 1y ago

IMO one of the things that makes HN so special is the "culture" here. Having been on here since 2018, most folks here are acutely aware of the issues that other sites like Reddit have and we all collectively work to preserve this space so it doesn't become like the other places. If I see a meme on Reddit I would probably upvote it, but if I see that exact same meme on here I would downvote and probably report it too. That decision comes from a place of wanting to preserve this space and I'm sure many other folks on here would very much agree.

causal 1y ago
I wonder how much of the difference is just because HN doesn't allow you to post / display images inline like Reddit does, forcing users to engage with the content (written or video) rather than just reflexively upvote low-effort content.
- matheusmoreira 1y ago
  It's because of the people who come here. You might post about a project and discover that the person who made the thing is replying to you.
  - causal 1y ago
    I think that is the bigger difference, I agree, but I think the format and media involved still have an effect on the type of discussion that takes place
- pwdisswordfishz 1y ago
  > display images inline like Reddit does That's a relatively new development. The cultural aspects that you're describing were already in place (entrenched) well before Reddit integrated that feature.
mettamage 1y ago
Interesting, for me Hacker News is just about being reasonable. Consequently, I find all other online places so far unreasonable. I am on Reddit, but honestly, it’s more of an anthropology thing rather than anything else. Sometimes I see if I can vibe with the subreddits, and I can. The problem is usually I feel awful because a good faith discussion generally can’t be held. To me, vibing in many subreddits just means promoting values that I don’t actually stand behind.

Igrom 1y ago

I think that recently, I've been seeing more snarky and dismissive messages than compared with several months ago. They are always very brief, gotcha-style replies. Is it just me? It sometimes makes me doubt if there isn't a coordinated attempt at destabilizing the otherwise orderly (no doubt after some heroic wrangling by dang & co.) discourse taking place. Those posts get downvoted rather fast, but I feel that there's been a quantitative difference in their occurence.

ThrowawayR2 1y ago
No conspiracy is needed. HN is attracting more and more new users who enjoy making low quality posts on hot button topics, which also triggers other previously well-behaved users to make low quality posts in response. This behavior naturally spreads outside of hot button topics to ordinary submissions.
- reaperducer 1y ago
  HN is attracting more and more new users who enjoy making low quality posts on hot button topics, which also triggers other previously well-behaved users to make low quality posts in response. Posting a "hot take" on HN was unheard of for a very long time. Now people do it regularly with no shame. I've never really understood why people write those, and even less why people read them. It's admitting from the outset that you don't know what you're talking about. Why embarrass yourself? Why waste your own time?
  - dang 1y ago
    I think you guys are succumbing to a nostalgia-filtered view of HN's past.
    - NaOH 1y ago
      An unspoken inference from when you've made posts like this is that HN has largely only changed in terms of scale, that the overall community culture has been relatively static. What are the indicators that would catch your attention to indicate a cultural shift, whether they are improving the site or diminishing it?

vid 1y ago

I don't like the word "karma" because it's often, for better in worse, group affinity (and we are most often trajectories rather than pure insight). I often find minority views and unexplored paths interesting, even when they're obviously wrong. One time I made a negative comment about Lord of the Rings, and I think I lost a thousand points. Does it really make sense that my karma as a complete user drops so much because of one specific comment? Blasphemy, but maybe Reddit's per-subreddit score makes more sense. I can promise I don't craft my comments for karma, though many people deserve their high 'karma' because they offer genuinely great contributions.

skulk 1y ago
I thought HN caps negative score at -4?
- vid 1y ago
  Maybe they do now, but I remember losing a lot more than that for that comment. I recall it was just after I made a comment that received a lot of upvotes, which were more than wiped out by having a critical view of the ultimate morality of LoTR. Then again, my "karma" currently at 1066 after 12 years goes up and down by points at a time, so a few points lost will be felt more than for people who have tens of thousands of points.
  - dang 1y ago
    I assume https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17247823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17247823 is the comment? Barring some catastrophic bug that we never heard about, those posts wouldn't have subtracted more than a few points from your account karma. Your other posts in the thread also got some downvotes, so they would have added a few more. But it couldn't have been a thousand or even a hundred because there were only a few dozen votes on those posts in total, and many were upvotes. I don't think you should have been downvoted for that post though! It was an interesting comment. (Though perhaps it was more provocative before the edit you mention there.)

qwertytyyuu 1y ago

Rfta? Request for tenancy application? Oh waits it’s read the article…

qingcharles 1y ago

The best tool I've found for reading HN is this front page summary: https://hackernews.betacat.io/ https://hackernews.betacat.io/

marginalia_nu 1y ago
So it's like HN but with GDPR popovers and interstitial ads.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  Yikes. I've never seen any of those. I guess uBlock is doing the heavy lifting.

j1elo 1y ago

This is my personal and minimal guide to HN (for whoever might be interested): ! Hacker News ! =========== ! Remove AI-related entries (Top: title / url) news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission span.titleline > a:has-text(/\b(AI|GPT|MCP|LLMs?|Chatbot|Copilot|Gemini)\b/):upward(tr) ! Remove AI-related entries (Bottom: stats / comments) news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission span.titleline > a:has-text(/\b(AI|GPT|MCP|LLMs?|Chatbot|Copilot|Gemini)\b/):upward(tr) + tr to be added as filter in uBlock Origin. (if someone can suggest a way to merge those 2 CSS selectors into one to avoid repetition, I'd be immensely grateful, as i failed while trying to learn about that arcane syntax)

dpifke 1y ago
My uBlock Origin rules use almost identical syntax (but there are a lot more of them, since I hide stories from TV news and clickbait sites): https://pifke.org/hn.txt https://pifke.org/hn.txt (I also would love to know if there's a way to consolidate rules.) dang has previously indicated receptiveness to built-in killlist functionality for sites/users/titles, similar to what this list accomplishes. My offer to build this (for free) stands, if anyone at YC was willing to provide access the HN codebase.
tracker1 1y ago
I may need to add this myself... I get flagged at work every time I hit an AI website regardless of if it's a blog article or not.

btbuildem 1y ago

> a chronic dilemma for any online community: scale, topical breadth, and discussion quality form an unstable triad I always wonder about the scale part -- why do we want a community to grow? Is it to reach more like-minded people, to enrich the collective knowledge, etc? That would be so great, and not dilute the other two aspects. But so often it seems that "growth" is just for its own sake, a bit like cancer -- consuming the host in the end, and at best reducing what was a vibrant community to a barely palatable sludge that appeals to the common denominator just enough to warrant eyeballs-to-dollars conversion. It's a testament to HN that it has, so far, resisted this (to borrow a term from mr Doctorow) enshittification.

jstrieb 1y ago

This post recommends the Newsit extension to view Hacker News discussion associated with a page. In the same vein, a few years ago, I made a Firefox extension for users who want a privacy-preserving way to see if pages have associated HN discussion: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-discussion-button/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-d... Most other extensions probably hit an external API (such as Algolia) to check submission status, which means they send every page you visit to that API. Instead, my extension uses Bloom filters compiled from every link ever submitted (updated daily from the Hacker News BigQuery dataset) to check the current page's submission status. By using Bloom filters, my extension only hits the API when you click the button to view the discussion. Source code here: https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button Feel free to pull the Bloom filters from the "Releases" section of that repo on GitHub to use in other projects if you'd like!

rahimnathwani 1y ago
I use Chrome as my main browser and was going to ask if there was a Chrome version. I was sad to see there's a technical reason you couldn't make it work :( https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button/issues/1 https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button/issues/1
- jstrieb 1y ago
  Probably worth me revisiting! Web tech has changed a bit since I last investigated this in 2021, and I'm also not sure if I considered options like IndexedDB at the time.
rdmuser 1y ago
Personally I use this bookmarklet to check if sites have been submitted since I like to minimize extensions: javascript:void(location.href="https://hn.algolia.com/?query="+location.href)
- foresto 1y ago
  That sends every page you check to Algolia's API, which is what jstrieb's extension is designed to avoid.

curtisszmania 1y ago

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hermitcrab 1y ago

I think the main difference between HN and other forums is the moderation. I have been a moderator and I know what difficult and thankless task it can be. Thank you Dang.

joe_the_user 1y ago
Other forums are good and have moderators. But moderators absolutely make a difference, disproportionately to the amount of moderation actually done. Aside from overt actions, a moderator imposes a flexible but noticeable ethos on a group's debate.

glimps 1y ago

Love the article. I’m here to register as a “randomly scroll the front page” kind of user. I’m a digg expat from back in the days. HN is the only icon on my phone that is mot an app. It sits on my first page and I keep a tab open until I read the entire article. But HN content is special to me. I have an ArchiveBox instance to keep all very good content from HN. It’s hooked to a vector database and an AI to quizz me on the many topics so I don’t forget. At year’s end I close all my unfinished articles, normally around 200-300 on my safari and the cycle repeats. I don’t much engage with the community but HN is a special place and the only place that can clench my thirst for knowledge and learning. Thanks for the article and thanks HN

ropable 1y ago

For me, HN is distinct and special because (despite its scale) it doesn't reflect the internet. HN, as a discussion forum, has its own distinct norms, "vibe" and specialisations which give it value. Places like Facebook and Reddit are so large that they (kind of) reflect the whole internet, with all of huge variation in expectations and behaviour that represents. It's the narrower scope of subject matter and the ruthlessly-cultivated culture which create the value proposition of HN. It's for this reason I've continued using the site for years after largely abandoning discussion on other social media sites. Long may it flourish.

aucisson_masque 1y ago

> Finally, demographics matter. HN is dominated by American tech professionals. That can tilt discourse toward elitism, rationalism, and a kind of intellectual performance, creating an echo chamber As an European, not working in technology or even with computers, i can relate to. HN comments can sometimes feel out of touch with reality. I’d say it’s more about the way Americans tend to see the world, where the world ends at the border of the USA and not consider that there are other way of life. Although despite its flaws, this forum is still one of the brightest side of the internet.

seruda 1y ago

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rldjbpin 1y ago

Having RTFA, I am happy to discover the rss feeds options. Sadly, they do not seem to match how I prefer things: checking yesterday’s top posts. While it can still move around despite the passing of the day, it has been quite a stable way to see what made it to the top and stayed. I am just too lazy to automate it myself. About the regional bias in the discourse here, I have come to accept it in public, English-based communities at this point. The content does speak for itself, and despite the noise, one comes out better off. TBH, many articles on the front page are not for everyone, and reading the comments is more fun to figure this out. I don't judge those who comment based on the conversations instead, but it does derail things at times. While I am ways away from getting to downvote, just lurking without being logged in has been quite effective in staving off distractions.