
Ask HN: Favorite HN threads of all time - cellis
Have any Hacker News threads ever truly changed your perspective on life, or technology? Post them please.
======
jacquesm
This should be a good starting point:

<http://remembersaurus.com/askhn.html>

There are boatloads of good content in there, plenty of which have the
potential of changing your perspective on life, tech or just about anything
else that is covered.

~~~
gits1225
I was so looking for that post frantically for the past couple of days but it
just kept eluding me. Thanks a lot for posting it.

It makes me wonder how effective a well implemented human powered search
engine could be. Its kinda overwhelming just thinking about it.

~~~
joshmlewis
It's interested when you task reddit with finding something. It's like
crowdsourced searching, with a few really resourceful people.

------
idoh
This is the best HN comeback of all time:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079>

~~~
temphn
Dunno. 5 years later and this pair of comments in that thread seems more
interesting:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35095>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35103>

Dropbox is a huge business, with real revenue, which has helped millions of
people. Tarsnap, despite cperciva's obvious talents, has not achieved anything
like that level of success. dhouston wasn't flaming people in the thread,
cperciva was.

Part of a really good comeback is substance. cperciva had the snappy retort.
He really had won the Putnam. And on a much smaller scale, he won a comments
thread on Hacker News. But the 20 posts there didn't create real world value.
dhouston did. Maybe that's the real lesson of Hacker News. The best thread is
the one you don't participate in, because you're working.

~~~
philwelch
Tarsnap offers better security, and functions as more of a backup and less of
a synchronization service. It's not really a head-on competitor to Dropbox,
and doesn't especially favor non-technical users the way Dropbox does.

~~~
cperciva
_more of a backup and less of a synchronization service_

I would say _entirely_ a backup and _not at all_ a synchronization service. If
you're using Tarsnap for file synchronization, you're probably doing something
wrong.

Tarsnap aims to be "good unix software" in the truest sense of the phrase:
Pick _one_ thing and do it well.

~~~
6ren
Is another difference that dhouston is building a huge corporation (with many
employees etc), while you're building something you can run yourself? (Not a
criticism - it's my aim too.)

~~~
cperciva
No, I don't want Tarsnap to be something I run by myself. I want Tarsnap to be
something which _runs itself_. I just spent two weeks at conferences and
didn't log into any of the Tarsnap servers even once -- and when I spent 36
hours travelling from one to the other (Ottawa to Brisbane -- 23 hours in the
air!) I was worried about whether my suitcase would make all the connections,
not whether Tarsnap would break while I lacking internet connectivity.

But getting to what I think you were really trying to ask: Yes, Tarsnap is
much smaller than Dropbox, and I'm happy that I haven't taken money from VCs
(or any investors for that matter) who would push for faster growth. I'd
rather have _better_ product than _more_ product; I will probably hire other
people to help with Tarsnap at some point, but the question I'll have to
answer is not "can this person do useful work" or even "can this person do
task X better than I'm currently doing it"; rather, the question will be "can
this person do task X sufficiently better to overcome the cost of my no longer
understanding it".

Tarsnap is first and foremost about security. Security is about getting
details right. And getting details right... well, that requires a level of
understanding of how all the different pieces fit together which simply
wouldn't be possible if I were hiring dozens of people and throwing them into
teams to churn out new features every week.

------
spacemanaki
This is one of my favorite comments of all time, from mahmud. I've had it
bookmarked for a while. The context isn't really important, because I think it
was slightly OT comment. It's basically a suggested curriculum for studying
Lisp implementation:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=835020>

~~~
mahmud
I have received more thank yous and mentions for that post than it got
upvotes. It got 19 upvotes, but people still mention it.

(interesting to note that 2.5 years later, my opinion would be exactly the
same, though now I would probably mention a few type-theoretic works; more
foundational stuff, less petty bit-fiddling)

~~~
spacemanaki
I've barely scratched the surface of that list, but I'd still be curious what
you'd add to it. What type-theoretic work would you add? Pierce's TAPL, or is
there something else that's more applicable to type systems in dynamic
languages? What more foundational material would you recommend?

I would actually be interested in the foundational stuff if it might act as a
primer for the heavier papers and books you listed there. I've read SICP and
EOPL, but I found the chapter in Lisp in Small Pieces on denotational
semantics almost incomprehensible, even though the later chapters on
compilation were tremendous fun. I did take a stab at Semantics with
Applications but couldn't quite get through it, although I probably didn't go
after it with the gusto I should have.

Since then I've been getting into some more traditional compiler stuff
(Appel's Modern Compiler Impl in ML) but have gotten hung up on trying to
really understand parsing, which I have always skipped over like a smug Lisp
weenie.

~~~
mahmud
I am not ignoring this. I'm getting around to answering you. Perhaps out of
band ..

~~~
spacemanaki
Thanks, my email address is in my profile, but there's no rush of course. Your
original comment provided quite a lot to indulge in.

------
cypherpunks01
Ask HN: What is your preferred Python stack for high traffic webservices?
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2910953>

Introduced me to a lot of webapp stack pieces that were highly worth looking
into.

------
bmelton
It took me a long time to find this thread as I couldn't remember exactly what
the discussion was about and parsing old emails and chats _finally_ revealed
it.

This remark by codyrobbins - discussing the 'I could care less' idiom - is
perhaps my favorite HN comment of all time.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=854042>

This thread (a couple parents up from that one) provides the appropriate
context. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=853100>

------
look_lookatme
This is my go to for inspiration:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2354765>

------
stanleydrew
This one, about hacking hacker news, is pretty epic:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976>

------
astrofinch
Ask HN: Is there something like HN for successful entrepreneurs?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2934103>

See nirvana's second comment in the thread, especially:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2934526>

------
PhearTheCeal
What is your favorite programming language?
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3746692>

This had some really neat discussion about the finer points of some languages.

------
bburky
I've used this thread as an example of who the members of the HN community
are, and what startups they make:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772224>

------
jarcoal
I saw this one when I first started visiting HN:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1924909>

------
olalonde
Highest voted stories:
[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&sortb...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&sortby=points+desc&q=+&start=0)

Highest voted comments:
[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&sortby=p...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&sortby=points+desc&q=+&start=0)

------
lkozma
Why does time go faster as we grow older:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713339>

What's your favorite HN thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2158116>

------
sparknlaunch12
A good place to look is at the HN lists page. Not exactly a curated list but
you can usually find some of the more popular and 'hot' discussions here
rather than the frontpage. Wadding through the top contributors usually lets
you find some quality threads.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/lists>

leaders Users with most karma.

best Highest voted recent links.

active Most active current discussions.

bestcomments Highest voted recent comments.

noobstories Submissions from new accounts.

noobcomments Comments from new accounts.

------
mansoor-s
This one: <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3996652>

------
stevenj
My least favorite, but the one that has probably influenced me the most:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078128>

------
guruz
I don't want to sound negative, but.. there is so much content produced every
day on sites like HN that I feel a bit like the past discussions don't matter
anymore at all.

~~~
spacemanaki
I disagree strongly; there's a lot of gold in HN's archives. Some things don't
change, or don't change that quickly, and there are some topics (even in the
young field of CS) that are classic, and some great discussion has already
taken place on HN about them. Why do you think that doesn't matter? HN isn't
even that old.

~~~
wyclif
What is the best way to find the gold? Looking for an efficient way to find
the good content from days of yore.

EDIT: Other than Ask HN Archive, mentioned above.

~~~
spacemanaki
I don't have a silver bullet, but if you have a topic you're interested in,
the search provided by Octopart is very good (bottom of the page), and it's
not that time consuming to dig through the results. That's how I found
mahmud's comment on Lisp compilers, because I was looking for discussion on HN
about it.

Obviously some topics are harder to search for (for instance if you wanted to
read about what HNers have said about Techcrunch over the years) but for the
good and classic stuff (programming, math, etc) I think this works reasonably
well.

It would actually be really cool to see what HN threads are linked to the most
_from HN_. I bet that would be a decent way to find gold, especially on stuff
you weren't specifically looking for.

------
jflatow
Go here and sort by 'points': <http://jflatow.github.com/popdots/>

------
adrianwaj
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=354539> (Mark Cuban is bullish on
America)

The day after President Obama won the election and I lost over 60 points in
that thread for calling him out, or rather the people for getting suckered
into the race card. (I am not a US citizen and feel vindicated now, what a con
job ... oops politics not good on HN)

~~~
SkyMarshal
Why do you feel vindicated now?

~~~
adrianwaj
Will only discuss offsite.. not going to martyr myself again pointing out the
obvious.

add: for starters, read the top comment on that thread, then you tell me if it
was justified being top: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=354589>

~~~
jrockway
Martyr yourself? Your comment basically says "Obama isn't black enough, and
he's a Muslim, but not enough of one." It's so far removed from reality that
it's hard to even think of a response other than "flag for craziness". You
didn't get downvoted for saying something controversial, you got downvoted for
stringing a bunch of incoherent half-thoughts together.

And yeah, the top comment is pretty good.

You seem very bitter about something that would not make any normal person
bitter. It's been several years since that comment. Move on.

~~~
adrianwaj
I'm getting good lulz right now, and we'll see who has the last laugh in all
of this. I have moved on.. just that the OP asked about favorite threads.

