[HN Gopher] Hacker News - The Good Parts
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Hacker News - The Good Parts
Author : smartmic
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-10-16 21:02 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (smartmic.bearblog.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (smartmic.bearblog.dev)
| pedalpete wrote:
| I've always just described HN as a more focused version of a sub-
| reddit with a start-up/technology/engineering angle.
| dingnuts wrote:
| careful comparing the orange site to Reddit; you'll anger the
| natives
| tech234a wrote:
| See also: the last paragraph of
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| fishmicrowaver wrote:
| it's basically what digg should've been
| ayaros wrote:
| Good post. Also, Bear Blog is great. I just set up one myself.
| It's nice and minimal, and I can add as much or as little as I
| want to the CSS.
| validatori wrote:
| One thing I really miss in HN is having a tagging system to
| filter content better. Sometimes, the things I want to follow or
| ignore don't have any clear hints in their titles. Having tags
| would really help customize the content for each user.
| tptacek wrote:
| That's an anti-goal of HN; everybody shares the same front page
| here.
| veqq wrote:
| https://lobste.rs/ has a tag system. I asked some months ago
| why HN doesn't. The answer was that it adds complexity and is
| hard to remove if not worth it. They want to protect HN's
| minimalism.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I like HN generally, but there are a handful of things I wish it
| had:
|
| * 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.
| n4r9 wrote:
| To favourite a comment, click its timestamp and then click
| "favourite" just after "flag".
|
| You can view your favourited comments from your profile page.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Wow. That is very not intuitive. It's like an anti-pattern.
|
| Good to know though, thank you!
| vavooom wrote:
| I appreciate it, as it helps me to not 'favorite' many
| comments, but only those that actually strike me as worth
| saving when they are so detailed as to be a post of their
| own!
| krapp wrote:
| In a lot of ways, HN's intentionally aescetic design works
| against itself. People can be here for years and not notice
| features because the grey on grey layout encourages
| feature-blindness.
| flobosg wrote:
| > The ability to save comments
|
| Click on a comment's timestamp and then 'favorite' at the top.
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| > * 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.
|
| 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.
| tempestn wrote:
| And it actually does avoid duplicates in the short term, as
| long as the submitted url is identical. I'm not sure what the
| time threshold is exactly, but I know if you resubmit
| something that has been submitted in the past few days, it
| will count it as a vote on the original instead.
| tonymet wrote:
| * sort by controversial
| bigiain wrote:
| Most of the time I'd choose to hide posts tagged AI. (No
| disrespect to people posting/discussing AI, it's just not a
| topic that I have much intellectual curiosity for.)
|
| 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?
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| > When a post is down-voted or flagged, a self-cleaning procedure
| is triggered by other users, so quality posts and comments tend
| to float to the top.
|
| 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.
| bilekas wrote:
| If the shareholders of ycombinator like your sentiment, you'll
| flourish. Ycombinator is a business don't forget. We're all here
| to discuss, usually in good faith. But I can't help but get the
| impression that submissions that are made popular are reviewed
| and measured, that's just my tinfoil hat maybe.
| nadermx wrote:
| Yeah, but you can also browse /new with dead unhidden. I'd say
| they doing a favor moderating more often than not. But there is
| of course an intuitive bias. They are a business after all.
| kylecazar wrote:
| I personally don't think YC _the company_ has much to do with
| the dynamics of this site at all -- but many users here are
| likely fans of or aspiring participants in the program.
|
| 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.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Agree. What I think the parent is observing is more the
| userbase collectively becoming an avatar for Silicon Valley
| talking points sometimes. It isn't always overt; it's more of
| a sense of disproportionately rewarding discussion points
| that mesh with the current zeitgeist (e.g. pro-AI posts doing
| better overall).
| tptacek wrote:
| Only a minority of the userbase is in SFBA. There is no one
| consistent HN attitude towards any specific policy (I think
| it would be fair to say that there are HN _styles of
| argumentation_ , though, not all of them good.)
| xg15 wrote:
| Not involved with YC at all, but I wonder if they might
| promote the site to the applicants of their accelerator
| program and encourage them to sign up here.
| tomcam wrote:
| > Ycombinator is a business don't forget.
|
| 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.
| bilekas wrote:
| > They have 2 brilliant guys running an incredibly popular
| site
|
| 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.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Things to add to hackernews:
|
| Emojis, Images and GIF posts, Profile Pictures,
| Followers/Following, Sponsored posts
|
| ...if you wanted to destroy hackernews
| hshdhdhehd wrote:
| Anything you'd do on Reddit don't do here :). Occasionally a
| Reddit like humour is allowed though.
| namuol wrote:
| > As far as I know, it is the only "social network" that allows
| you to grow intellectually through participation. This is
| probably the highest compliment an internet platform can receive
| in 2025.
|
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| _As far as I know, it is the only "social network" that allows
| you to grow intellectually through participation._
|
| This describes Wikipedia more than HN.
| abuani wrote:
| There are still a select few subreddits where this is true as
| well. I genuinely miss 10 years ago getting into random shit
| like double edge razors, home brewing and woodworking and how
| supportive those communities were to get into. Some communities
| _do_ exist, but once they get past a certain size it becomes
| worthless
| tptacek wrote:
| AskHistorians is still pretty great too.
| culll_kuprey wrote:
| Turns out gatekeeping works
| tptacek wrote:
| Absolutely. Why wouldn't it? All the useful forums are
| "gatekept" in some fashion; AskHistorians just has an
| especially legible set of gates.
| bigiain wrote:
| What was that weightlifting sub that worshiped "Brodin" and
| "The Church Of (Something? Maybe Iron?)"
|
| I am not a weightlifter, but I'd occasionally visit that sub
| just because of how welcoming and supportive it was.
| oncallthrow wrote:
| Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with a kinda-social-network-ish-
| in-the-broadest-possible-definition attached.
|
| HN actually is a social network.
| molticrystal wrote:
| I've used Reddit since before subreddits, and I would never want
| this place to go down that route. But it seems like there is a
| desire for some of those features Reddit had in its early years.
|
| For me, a touch more Markdown like for text links would be nice,
| but no 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
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Just occasionally I do really want to respond with an image
| because it explains a comment a lot better than text might. The
| same problem exists on Reddit and I think the potential for
| misuse is potentially too high but it feels to me to support
| the idea of high quality comments. At a certain point a high
| quality argument requires a graph or diagram to explain a more
| complex thing.
|
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| Linking to Imgur [0] when needed should be sufficient. HN
| allowing direct image inclusion would likely end up being
| quite a mess. HN being text-only (and emoji-free) is one of
| the things I appreciate about it.
|
| [0] or whatever the recommended alternative is nowadays
| thegrim33 wrote:
| >> The best part? No politics, trivia, or spam. Mainstream media
| news is rare
|
| 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?
| wilg wrote:
| > I flag all political posts I see and I'm constantly flagging.
|
| I think your ability to flag should be immediately taken away
| for this reason.
| defrost wrote:
| Flagging ability is scaled - it takes multiple "regular
| users" with flag privileges to raise a [flag] and further
| more to tip posts to [dead] (there are other paths to
| [dead]).
|
| Some users are granted 'instant' [flag] -> [dead] privileges
| (if they _consistently_ only flag obvious spam), their work
| is looked at, if they start showing a bias that ability is
| degraded.
|
| Part of the moderation task at HN is weighting user feedback
| by looking at individual behaviour.
| Blackarea wrote:
| Do you have any examples. I don't think I would classify more
| than a handful posts as political myself
| culll_kuprey wrote:
| A big problem is high karma accounts are allowed to constantly
| politically flamebait But the nobodies get snuffed out pretty
| quickly, often for much less.
|
| Not surprisingly, various groups often grant those with greater
| tenure and more connection leniency. I just despise the lies.
| bunabhucan wrote:
| The thing that's hard about the intellectual curiosity part is
| knowing what comments are from actual experts and what are very
| smart people opining outside the edges of their circle of
| competence - while still sounding smart.
|
| 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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Odd to say there isn't mainstream news media. All major news
| stories break here. And with the tight approach to maintaining
| the ship and fast moving nature it is one of the best places to
| keep abreast of everything.
| krapp wrote:
| >All major news stories break here.
|
| No, they don't.
|
| This is a link aggregator. By definition stories posted here
| have already been posted (and broken) elsewhere.
| keyboardJones wrote:
| Just want to pop in to agree with the author. Thanks for making
| this a great virtual space, everyone!
| dismalaf wrote:
| HN was better 15 years ago. There was actual diversity of
| opinion. Founders who made it big used to post here still.
| There's the odd interesting thing here still but now it's a major
| echo chamber.
| vid wrote:
| It's interesting how much Slashdot has receded, but I really like
| its predicate scoring system, as well as the ability for people
| to post anonymously.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| ...and there was the A.I. posts.
| pelzatessa wrote:
| What I wish for would be some kind of frontend for viewing hacker
| news (specifically the comment section) in a way that imageboards
| behave. I've never adapted to the reddit-style comment system for
| two reasons:
|
| 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.
| AaronAPU wrote:
| I find it easy to use by going depth first and collapsing each
| nested level as it's completed. Each time you collapse, you can
| reread the parent context if needed.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Cool. I don't disagree.
|
| Looking forward to The Bad Parts.
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